“It’s pretty unique for North Dakota, a state that doesn’t have a state hatchery,” said Rob Holm, project manager for the Garrison Dam and Valley City National Fish Hatcheries.

Holm and his staff are employed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. However, the two fish hatcheries receive support from the North Dakota Game and Fish Department. It is Game and Fish crews who do the work in the field, primarily spawning fish and transporting the eggs to the hatcheries, where their growth will be closely monitored by the USFWS.

A few years ago the Garrison Dam hatchery was hoping to surpass a mark that had never before been achieved, the production of 10 million walleyes to be stocked into state waters.

“Last year we broke another record for most walleye produced with 12 million. You are talking about the weight of a few elephants,” laughed Holm. “It seems like every year we are able to push that envelope a little bit.”

Kim Fundingsland/MDN Inside the hatchery’s Salmon Building are raceways for various strains of trout and chinook salmon. Note the feeders that trout learn to activate by bumping into a wire that releases food pellets into the water.

While the biggest production effort at the hatchery each year is for walleye, northern pike are raised at the hatchery and released by Game and Fish into state waters as well. Additionally, trout and salmon are reared at the hatchery every year, helping make the hatchery vitally important to fisheries all across the state.

“There’s so many fisheries across the landscape, a lot of water,” said Holm. “We’ve been here long enough to know that water goes up and water goes down. When it’s down you don’t have a fish population unless you put some in there. That’s a big part of where the hatchery comes in. You wouldn’t have fish without a hatchery.”

The Valley City National Fish Hatchery is one of the oldest facilities in the USFWS system, coming on line in the early 1940s. Located near a railroad line, it draws water from the Sheyenne River. In the early days of the hatchery, fish were transported in cream cans to various locations in the United States.

“In the dam building era, Ashtabula and Baldhill Dam, for mitigation the hatchery was built to provide fish for the reservoirs. That’s how we came to be in existence,” explained Holm. “Even though we still do mitigation stocking, we’ve broadened quite a bit, to endangered species and more.”

Sometime after ice out, as the water temperature warms and walleye begin to “ripen” for the spring spawn, Game and Fish crews will be on the water. They’ll net both male and female walleye, conduct artificial spawning and transport fertilized eggs to the hatchery. There they’ll turn them over to the USFWS for rearing in incubation jars. After hatching, the tiny walleye will be moved to outdoor ponds to continue their growth.

“If we’ve got chironomids in the ponds the walleyes seem to do really well,” said Holm. “Zoo plankton starts them off. After that second week they need something a little bigger to chew on, like blood worms coming up and midges laying eggs. We’ve had good production the last few years.”

Holm is aware of fishermen requests to put certain fish in certain waters, which is done where possible but not in all instances. There’s more to creating a fishery than just stocking any fish into any body of water.

“You have to look at the habitat of a water body and what’s in there currently,” said Holm. “Sometimes a new fish species might not work in there.”