Capitol region caviar: How conservation led to industry in Northern California

This piece is a part of our Fantastic Farms series, looking at the unique agriculture in the Sacramento region. Find out more here.

Just about a 20 minute drive outside of Sacramento there’s a farm that’s a little different from other farms in the area — one that raises fish that can get up to 10 feet long. But, they’re not primarily raised for their meat. 

Their most prized product, caviar, usually pairs best with champagne, and an air of decadence. At Sterling Caviar, their white sturgeon are bred, raised and harvested all right here in captivity in Northern California.

Sterling’s sturgeon start their life at their Elk Grove location. That’s also where the caviar is harvested. However, shortly after they’re hatched, the fish are moved to their other farm location in Elverta, CA where they live out the majority of their life. 

Aaron Olson is the site manager at Sterling Caviar’s Elverta farm. Olson works on the daily to manage their farm, where the sturgeon mature to their full size, complete with whiskers and ridged backbones.

“I like to tell people I wrangle dinosaurs,” Olson said. “Some of our female fish, even our broodstock males, are pushing 250 pounds.”

Sterling’s farm in Elverta consists of a series of above ground pools in warehouses. The pools teem with fish, and get progressively larger as the fish grow. Raising sturgeon takes years before caviar can be harvested.

“You only see a harvestable percentage of caviar at six years old,” Olson said. “Right around four to five years old we can actually sexually identify each fish with an ultrasound.”

Sterling also has to contend with their own version of weeds, like any farm.

“Your corn farmer has weeds, we have snails,” Olson said. “The snails help break down the waste in the pools, but it's a negligible benefit.”

Caviar can be from any of the 27 species of sturgeon, but the ones raised at Sterling are white sturgeon. White sturgeon are native to the Sacramento River, and can also be found in rivers ranging up through Canada into Alaska.

In 1993 the first tank-raised white sturgeon at Sterling Caviar (then called Stolt Sea Farm) produced commercial quantities of caviar. In 1994, the first fully domesticated white sturgeon were hatched and allowed for caviar production to fully separate from the need to catch wild white sturgeon.

Sterling has gone on to become the largest producer of caviar in the United States, and 80% of the country's caviar comes from California.

However, only recently have white sturgeon caviar been able to be harvested as young as six. In the wild, white sturgeon caviar isn’t fully developed until their teens, according to UC Davis aquacultural researcher Jackson Gross. 

The domestication of white sturgeon actually began at UC Davis, Gross said. In 1979, a professor at UC Davis and his team developed the first process for raising white sturgeon and helped develop sturgeon aquaculture worldwide.

‘The father of sturgeon aquaculture’

 Dr. Serge Doroshov with his students attending the 4th International Symposium on Sturgeons in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 2001. (L-R): Javier Linares-Casenave, Frank Chapman, Kevin Kroll, Dr. Doroshov, Joel Van Eenennaam, Molly Webb, and Ken Beer.Courtesy of UC Davis

Dr. Serge Doroshov was born in western Siberia in 1937. His parents died at a very young age, and his sister fled to Moscow where they grew up with relatives. Doroshov excelled academically and professionally, and received his Ph.D. in Biology from the Institute of Oceanology, Academy of Science, Moscow in 1967. While doing research in Cuba in 1975, Doroshov decided to defect to the United States from what was then the Soviet Union.

After living and teaching in Seattle for a couple of years, he accepted a faculty position at UC Davis in 1978. Around this same time, the wild populations of white sturgeon in the area were dropping at alarming rates.

“There was a lot of concerns with the Sacramento River population going extinct,” Gross said. “The United States Fish and Wildlife Service started looking around trying to figure out … how are we going to take these animals and bring them back from the brink of being a threatened and endangered fish.”

They turned to Doroshov. By 1980, the first spawning from wild-caught white sturgeon occurred at UC Davis. Doroshov’s research continued from there to help selectively breed white sturgeon as well as developing reproductive and hatchery techniques for threatened green sturgeon and the endangered Delta smelt.

White sturgeon and its caviar are still being researched, and the reasons for many characteristics, like what makes some sturgeon have different color caviar than others, remain elusive. 

“We raised all the same fish in the same tank and the same feed and everything else, and you open them up and their eggs are different,” Gross said. “They haven’t been able to crack the code.”

Olson said that at Sterling they don’t know what color of caviar they’re going to get before they harvest it.

“We don’t know what size, color, grade they’re going to produce,” Olson said. “Just when we think we know it, they go and change their mind.”

Conservation and caviar 

White sturgeon aquaculture began with conservation, and that effort continues at Sterling through the sturgeon’s diet.

“I want to make sure that any inputs into the feed is coming from a sustainable means,” Olson said. “No land-based proteins — sustainable harvest fish protein, fish oil, krill oil.”

But, wild populations of white sturgeon today are still threatened, with strict catch-and-release rules instituted for recreational fishers. 

“We might be back to where we were in the late 70s, early 80s,” Gross said. “We might have to step in and help these animals recover again because we lost so many of our breeders.”

Gross said that in his research, he’s studied how stressors and contaminants affect aquatic organisms, including white sturgeon. According to him, even though fishing of wild white sturgeon has not had a significant impact on populations with strict regulations in place, climate changes are leading to a decline in sturgeon populations.

“When you have warming oceans and nutrient changes and acidification and everything else, you get harmful algal blooms and the toxins that are associated with those [have] impacted our fish,” Gross said.

According to Gross, there may be efforts to help revitalize the natural populations of white sturgeon again.

“We can do something about it, we learn from the past and we know how to improve on that and not allow these animals to go extinct,” Gross said. “We may be back at that point where we’re working with the farms and the university and the state and the federal government … to actually start a recovery program to get fish back out in the wild and repopulate.”

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