Moving Fish

Growing up a local department store used a vacuum tube system to send notes around the store. It fascinated me so when I heard that a company was looking at using a version of the vacuum tube to move apples and is experimenting with using it to move fish, I was intrigued. Todd Deligan, VP of Whooshh Innovations in Bellevue, Washington.

DELIGAN: We actually started out with the transport of specialty crops but really kind of rethinking how specialty crops, apples, citrus, stone fruit could be harvested and thinking about the efficient gains that could be made in the harvest of those crops. Now we have really transitioned over to fish. We were testing the harvest system out in eastern Washington right along the Columbia River and one of our guys back then said, “what happens if we put a fish in our fruit tube?”

They found that the fish were transported quite easily using the system. But they also realized that fish are not the same as fruit.

DELIGAN: We really spent quite a bit of time developing a fish-centric tube so we wouldn’t be hurting the eyes, slime, scales, that we could be transporting fish over distance hopefully with no real physiological effects.

Testing showed very little detrimental effects.

DELIGAN: We’re now at the stage where we have developed a fish-centric tube. We have been through some further testing with that tube and we have now got some applications that are heading out into the field and continued testing this fall.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.