5 days ago
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New York|A Fish Farm Offered 40,000 Pounds of Salmon for Free. There Was a Catch.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/nyregion/localcoho-salmon-donations-live-fish.html
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When an upstate New York salmon farm went out of business, nonprofits had days to find a way to catch, refrigerate and clean more than 13,000 fish.
Jan. 30, 2025, 3:00 a.m. ET
The offer was too good for the Food Bank of Central New York to pass up. A local fish farm was going out of business, and it wanted to donate more than 40,000 pounds of sushi-grade salmon.
There was one big hitch: All that free salmon was in the form of 13,312 live fish.
Like any good fish story, the saga of the salmon — from a high-end fish-farm start-up with clients like Nobu and FreshDirect to the plates of needy New Yorkers — soon swelled into an epic tale. It came to involve dozens of volunteer fish-catchers, members of the Onondaga Nation and a guy willing to donate 10,000 bags of ice.
It began with bad news: LocalCoho, a salmon farming operation that was considered exemplary because of its sustainable practices when it opened in 2017, was shutting down on Jan. 31. The company, based in Auburn, N.Y., had drawn praise for aquaculture that raised salmon in tanks on land, sparing the environment from pollutants inherent in ocean-based fish farming. But despite being well-received and seeming to have regular investment, LocalCoho struggled to make a profit, according to an article in Syracuse.com, which first reported the full story of the fish donation.
Early on Jan. 2, Meghan Durso, a manager at TDO, a Syracuse nonprofit, took a frantic phone call from LocalCoho’s owner, Andre Bravo, about what to do with all his fancy fish. He was prepared to give the salmon away, but he didn’t know where to start.
“He said, ‘Hey, we are going to throw these in the dumpster,’” Ms. Durso recalled. “And I said: ‘Hey, wait.’”
But the task facing her team was giant. They found takers for tons of live fish — including the Food Bank of Central New York and the Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance — but that was just the beginning. They would also need people to scoop each of the thousands of salmon from their tanks in Auburn, people to ship them on ice to a processor and people to turn the fish into fillets. And they had only days to do it before LocalCoho closed for good.
