 Just some key points to, you know, why is local fish important? Why is our Wisconsin local fish important? First of all, it supports our local economy. Our local producers live here in Wisconsin. They're employing Wisconsin people. So when we buy, when we purchase Wisconsin fish, we're supporting those local businesses in our state. Local protection as well. Our fish in both the Great Lakes and our Wisconsin fish farms are regulated by both the federal government and our own state government. So we have a stake in that protection of those water resources. It's much, much different than the fish that's coming from abroad. That's a whole different story. But the fish from here in the U.S. and in our state are regulated by our laws. And I would also say that eating local fish also gives people kind of that connection that I was talking about to their local water resources. And I think that's an important thing for all of us. Wisconsin water resources belong to all of us. So when you connect to those local resources, if you go fishing, if you go swimming, if you eat the fish that comes from that water, that gives you a connection that's really difficult to get any other way. So I would just throw out those three key points there about our local fish. Emily talked a little bit about our Wisconsin farm raised fish. A lot of people have questions about, well, what are our local fish eating? Wisconsin farm raised fish, she said, are eating feeds that are regulated by the FDA. Those feeds are being tested. Fish as a protein source has a little different thing going on than cattle or poultry. Fish live in water. And water is a different sort of chemical environment than land-based protein sources. So Megan Williams from Wisconsin DNR is going to be here talking next to talk about contaminants and Great Lakes fish. It's something that we wish we didn't have to talk about, but she's going to let us know why we are talking about it. It's a legacy for Great Lakes, a legacy that we're hoping to put in the past, and things are getting better, but I will let our expert Megan talk about Great Lakes fish. Before I get started with my presentation, I'm going to pass out some booklets that are called Choose Wisely. Oh, Kathy will do it for me. Sure. This is available online too, so if you don't want to take it with you, that's fine. I'll just collect them so that they don't go into trash or the recycling. But we'll be looking through this book in a minute. So like Kathy said, my name is Megan Williams, and I'm an environmental toxicologist in fisheries at the DNR. So today I'm going to talk about the benefits of fishing in Wisconsin and eating Wisconsin fish. Then I'll talk about what types of contaminants we find in Wisconsin fish, what they are, where they come from, how they get into the fish, what they might do to you. Talk about some efforts that we have to monitor and reduce the contaminants that are found in the Great Lakes, including our very own fish contaminant monitoring program that I help with at the DNR. And then I'm going to give you a lot of information to help you safely eat your catch or the catch that you're providing to your consumers, including choosing which fish to eat, from which locations, and then some tips on how to cook, clean, and eat your fish sort of in a safe way. So as everyone here knows, fishing is a really great Wisconsin tradition. It's accessible to lots of people. You can do it pretty much anywhere in the state because we're so rich in a lot of resources. It's a great way to spend time with your family or spend time by yourself, which I know is a way that a lot of people prefer to fish. And also eating Wisconsin fish is another great tradition. Whether it's a fish boil, a fish fry, or some smoked white fish, it's pretty much in the DNA of people who live here. So there are a lot of benefits to eating Wisconsin fish, aside from supporting the local economy. As Kathy was mentioning earlier, it's a really great source of lean protein. And it's also a really good source of Omega-3 fatty acids. So one thing you might not actually know about Omega-3s is that humans or vertebrates in general, actually we can't produce those naturally in our bodies. We have to get them from our diet. And there are a couple different types of Omega-3 fatty acids. There are short chain fatty acids, which you might see as called ALA. And those are the ones that are found in different types of oils, nuts, and you might see them on some containers of eggs that you get at the store. And then we have our long chain Omega-3 fatty acids, which are the super beneficial ones. And those are mainly just found in seafood. Long chain Omega-3s are often known as EPA and DHA. And they're really good for reducing inflammation in the body, which is really helpful for heart health. And they are absolutely vital to brain and eye development, particularly in babies and young children. So this figure is kind of crazy. I'm aware of that. It basically shows the amount of EPA and DHA that we've measured in an 8-ounce uncooked serving of all these different types of fish that we caught from the Great Lakes. And what I really want you to focus on here is this orange line. This is what's known as the acceptable intake level of EPA and DHA. It's the minimum recommended daily amount for healthy adults. And as you can see, which is awesome news, an 8-ounce serving of almost every fish that we have caught so far from the Great Lakes will provide you or your consumers with at least 250 milligrams of EPA and DHA. So this is really good news. Of course, with many things in life, whether it's having a beer or having a fish meal, there are risks and benefits to consider. So in the 70s, people started to notice that there was a lot of mercury in the fish and started to be kind of concerned about this. Mercury is actually a naturally occurring element in the world. It can be sort of dispersed into the air when volcanoes erupt or when there are forest fires. But it also is released into the air in much larger quantities when there's industrial processes like coal-fired tower plants or mining operations. And because it's released into the air, it can actually travel a really long distance from its original source. So even if there's not a lot of emissions right around your water body, it still means that there might be mercury in the lake because it came there on the air. When mercury goes into a water body, it goes into the sediments and bacteria that live in the sediment sort of munch on it and naturally convert it into its toxic form, which is known as methylmercury. And mercury is actually found in all fish, no matter where you get it from. It's just a natural sort of natural part of fish. But in Wisconsin, mercury is found in the highest concentrations in some northern lakes. So another thing about mercury is that it bioaccumulates, which means it travels up the food chain in higher and higher concentrations. So we see in this little figure we have mercury, methylmercury. It goes into the water. Low concentrations are found in invertebrates, panfish, inland trout, things that eat those invertebrates. Then medium amounts are found in smaller or younger predator fish species. And then higher concentrations are found in larger or older predator fish species like walleye, pike, and muskie. Mercury is found in the muscle tissue of fish. So keep that in mind, and we'll come back to it. Something that is possibly more relevant to today is a class of chemicals called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCVs. These are a group of man-made compounds, and they are engineered to be resistant to breakdown, which means that they last for a really long time in the environment. A lot of production happened from the 1920s to the late 1970s when they were banned. And they were used in a lot of manufacturing processes, including carbon-less copy paper, which is relevant to Wisconsin in particular. And unlike mercury, which is found pretty much across the whole state, in Wisconsin, PCVs are most often associated with industrialized river systems and the Great Lakes. And this is because PCV-containing fluids were sometimes, so this is not happening now, but in the past, sometimes just discharged right into the water body, like right from a pipe. But sometimes there was a storm, and then stormwater runoff would sort of wash these PCVs into the water, and they would accumulate in the sediments. So compared to mercury, PCVs actually accumulate in the fat of fish, so that means that fattier species tend to have higher concentrations than leaner species. And then fish that live near the bottom of the water bodies have more than those that live higher in the water column because they're closer to that source. So you might wonder, what's the big deal? Mercury is actually what's known as a neurodevelopmental toxin. So if you have too high of that in your body, you'll have some problems with memory, learning, and your coordination. More recently, it has been linked to heart disease in older men, but really the highest risk we feel is to women who currently are or plan to become pregnant, and also young children. Because this is a neurodevelopmental toxin, it affects the way the brain is growing. PCVs, on the other hand, are a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors, and this means that they can kind of mess up your reproductive systems and give you problems with your thyroid, which controls a lot of different things in your body. And so a high concentration of PCVs in your body is linked to an increased risk of cancer and diabetes or some immune system problems. And compared to mercury, PCVs are a risk for everyone, regardless of your gender or how old you are. So I told you all this bad stuff. You're kind of wondering, like, what are people doing about this? As you may imagine, there are a lot of collaborative efforts, internationally, federally, locally, to monitor and reduce contamination in Great Lakes fish. So it started with the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1978. More recently, we've got the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and Department of Health Services are part of this Great Lakes Consortium for Fish Consumption Advisories. It's a collaboration with all these people down here, I should say, people from all these organizations down here. Natural Resources professionals, Water Quality professionals, Public Health professionals. We get together, share information on contaminants or lack of contaminants that we're measuring in the fish from the Great Lakes. We evaluate what the effects might be on people who are eating these fish. And then we use that information to develop standardized advice for eating fish from all the Great Lakes. So if you go fishing in Lake Michigan and you come home to Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana or Michigan, you'll be receiving the same information about eating those fish regardless of where you go. So we're really trying to reduce the amount of confusion that's going on. So you might wonder is this working? Well, Environment Canada and the US EPA have been measuring levels of PCBs in Lake Chow since the mid-1970s and they have seen significant decreases in the concentrations that they've seen through time. So this is really good news. In terms of Wisconsin DNR's Fish Contaminant Monitoring Program we've also been looking at contaminants in fish since the 1970s. Our program focuses on popular lakes and rivers that get a lot of fishing pressure as well as waters that are near industrial centers to try to capture the whole picture. So this little map shows water bodies where we've collected fish for testing. So we've gotten over 1,700 sites in Wisconsin so far. And the really good news is we have 15,000 lakes, 84,000 river miles and of all those water resources in Wisconsin we only have less than 150 waters that have exceptions to our general advice because there's elevated mercury or PCBs. So that's really good news. So in this graph or map we have the green waters are ones where we see higher amounts of PCBs so you see a lot of our industrialized river systems in the Great Lakes. Mercury where we have special advice is up here mostly with the northern lakes but you can also see there's a ton of light blue on this nice map which represents waters where we don't have special regulations or advice. So it's really good news and it's reduced every year or it has reduced through time I shouldn't say every single year. But we also have been doing some data analysis on PCBs and fish from the Great Lakes. These show Chinook and Coho from Lake Michigan. We have looked we have seen that there was a pretty sharp decrease in PCB concentrations between the mid 1970s and mid 1980s and there's still a decrease from the mid 1980s until now but it's just a little less and we think that's because you know there's less PCBs there to begin with so it's decreasing at a low rate. So this is all good news. I don't want to forget to mention the Department of Health Services. They're a really important part of our program and they focus sort of on the other side of the filet. So they're looking at fish consumers so they're monitoring and assessing fish consumption patterns how people are being affected or not affected by contaminants that may or may not be in the fish they're eating. I would be really happy to talk to anyone about these studies that I have sort of detailed here later but I don't have time to get into them now but I just wanted to give a shout out to Department of Health Services because they're really important. So after all this information you might be wondering how can I eat fish? What can I do? It's obviously not as easy as this if it was that would be great I would also be out of a job but it would be great. One of the big things that you can do is use the publications that we have put out. So what I passed out or Kathy passed out was this Choose Wisely booklet we put this out every single year. We also have a cookbook where we solicited recipes from the general public so what people in Wisconsin how they eat their fish. It covers everything from bourbon to walleye. We really do have a lot there's a recipe in there that suggests taking your sturgeon to a self car wash it off first. It's really a very unique cookbook. I have a couple copies of that. It's also available online so if you'd like a paper copy you can come talk to me. And then we also have this Wisconsin Wildcard which just has our general statewide advice for most inland waters. So if you open up your Choose Wisely book on page 5 at the very beginning we have a guide for purchased fish and this is basically we took this directly from the FDA and EPA. We want to be able to provide people with information for eating fish that they might get at a store or restaurant but more importantly for today if you go to pages 8 and 9 we have advice for eating fish from Green Bay Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. So you'll notice for these tables our guidelines are for everyone because the concern the contaminant of concern in the Great Lakes is PCBs. You'll also notice for some species they fall into a different advice category based on their size but for some it's just all sizes. So I have a little table here that shows advice that we have for commercially caught fish species. Notice there are a lot of different options so you could eat up to one meal a week and up to one meal a month of a lot of different fish species that are commercially caught in Wisconsin. We even have some fish that have such low contaminants and high fatty acids from Lake Superior that you can eat them sort of on an unrestricted basis. So it's good news there's the silver lining. Another really important thing that you can do to reduce the amount of contaminants that are in your fish is clean and cook sort of in a smart way. So like I was saying before mercury is found in the muscle tissue of fish and PCBs are found in the fat. So heat and cooking don't in themselves get rid of any of the contaminants but it's the way that you prepare the fish before you cook it and how frequently you eat it that really helps reduce the risk. So to get rid of the fat you want to remove the skin and the fatty parts so these sort of dark areas along the belly and sides and top of the fish and then use a cooking method which will allow the excess fat to drip away like grilling or broiling and then it goes without saying to not use those drippings to prepare the sauces or gravy. And mercury since it's in the fish muscle tissue you really can't clean the fish in a way that gets rid of it but if you eat sort of low mercury fish or space out your fish meals your body will actually naturally rid itself of mercury. So you can you can still eat the fish but just at a reduced frequency and then you don't have as much mercury. For people here who will be providing information to your customers you know when someone comes into your restaurant or fish market they're an adult they can make their own decisions it's not your responsibility to tell them what they should and shouldn't be eating but the big thing to do is really know your fish what species it is where it came from and for those that we have advice based on the size know what the size of the fish is if people want more information so we have at the DNR we have a really nice website that's mobile friendly so people can use their phone it's called Eating Your Catch. The FDA and EPA have really good resources for seafood and when I was preparing for this talk I found this Seafood Watch app from the Monterey Bay Aquarium I don't know if there are other apps like that but it would be useful you know to just look on the internet and see if there are other resources out there and then of course prepare the fish that you're providing to reduce the contaminants whenever it's possible so if you want more information you can go to our website and do a search for Eating Your Catch and it will have a lot of links to our publications reports that we've put out frequently asked questions we also have a mobile friendly interactive query tool so you can use the drop down menu or the map you basically just click anywhere on the map any water on the state and it will give you fish consumption advice based on that water body so if it's a water body you click on that doesn't have elevated we haven't measured elevated levels of contaminants in those fish it will just sort of give you our general guidelines for eating fish so it's really useful if you are going fishing somewhere you've never been before or whatever so in summary like I said before most things in life there are benefits and risks to consider including when you're eating fish including when you're eating Wisconsin fish Department of Health Services and Department of Natural Resources our goal in all of this is to help people keep eating Wisconsin fish so we provide a lot of resources for people to make informed decisions about eating Wisconsin fish and you know you can safely incorporate them into your diet by following the advisories cooking and cleaning smartly so it's good news in the end so I want to say thanks for letting me come up here and talk to you about all of this stuff my contact information is at the bottom of the screen and I think I have a couple minutes to answer questions if any of you have them or you can come find me later so thank you not everybody doesn't realize that all seafood worldwide does have some amount of mercury in it that's just a fact of life so I always tell people especially women of trial bearing age or worrying about their kids or something the fish in Wisconsin you know we just learned it's been checked and studied fairly a whole lot since the 1970s so I feel very confident eating Wisconsin fish because we've been keeping a close eye on it for several, several decades compared to the fish that we might be purchasing from Thailand that people just aren't keeping an eye on that fish coming from abroad as closely as our Great Lakes fish have been monitored so I think that you can feel very confident if you're worried about contaminants following the advice by the DNR and the Department of Health Services you really don't have anything to worry about because they've been, those are very, very restrictive they're looking out for children and women of child bearing age so that's what I always like to point out so we're talking about Wisconsin fish today but we did decide to invite somebody from Michigan thank you I'm a Packer fan I attended the Michigan Seafood Summit last year so it was the first annual Michigan Seafood Summit so we're coming to this a little late but we've invited Ron Kinnen from Michigan Sea Grant to come talk to us about Ron's been working on whitefish marketing for I mean decades career, whole career we're not the first ones to jump on the local fish bandwagon and Michigan's been doing quite a bit they're our neighbor we're sharing some water with them so we want to hear what's been going on in Michigan they're actually going to be hosting there next summit in April right April 8th in Traverse City yep yep so take it away Ron okay thanks Kathy okay I'm going to talk to you about a marketing project we did with Great Lakes Whitefish we had funding through the National Sea Grant program and these are some of the colleagues from Michigan Sea Grant that worked with me on the project this was several years back and again everybody I think Titus covered a lot of this thing it's a very important cold water fish species in the Great Lakes it's one of our most caught fish in the Upper Great Lakes you can see here if you look at the yield from the Great Lakes and again this is some data I put together just before we got our marketing study put together and you can see that at that time Lake Huron is by far the biggest producer of Lake Whitefish followed by Lake Michigan and Lake Superior a lot of people think Lake Superior is our biggest it's a big lake but it's not it's not a very productive lake so we don't get to catch as we see in these Lake Lake Michigan and Lake Huron and again just to show you some perspective here you can see that there were some large harvests like back in 1988 25 million pounds dockside value of 20 million dollars again at that time the highest price was about 90 cents per pound dockside value and that's why we started this project because a lot of the fish members are concerned about low prices on the dockside value and in recent years that dockside values have actually sometimes exceeded 2 dollars almost 3 dollars depending on the demand for that fish so the value has actually gone up in recent years since we've been involved and you can see we have both you can see the values here and also the catches the yield in U.S. value the U.S. basically harvested in 1996 which is a peak then it was 13 million pounds dollar value of a dollar 4 per pound that was in 2000 Canadian harvest was 12 million pounds that was in 98, 2000 peak value of 84 cents per pound in 2003 and Titus showed some of this in recent years that there has actually been some decline in harvest and Titus covered that and there have been a lot of issues with invasive species especially the zebra and quagga muscle which actually has hurt the food supply for whitefish the disappearance of a major food source diaprias almost disappeared in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron so that has affected whitefish even growth at age has decreased so there's been a lot of issues with the growth of that fish and again you can look at the harvest it's about half and half between the U.S. and Canada and again I don't have to go into this Titus covered it very well these are trap nets and then we also have gill nets these are the major fisheries we have in the Great Lakes for harvesting whitefish some of the marketing needs that we looked at when we got into this project is increase product identification and consumer awareness and we've been talking about people want to buy local foods they want to know where their food comes from we want to improve quality control consistency so there's a lot of moving parts in this project we actually even had a guy come down from Alaska that did a lot of work with the Alaska industry and we looked at a lot of stuff he's written books on freezer freezer how to freeze these fish a lot of stuff we didn't even think about how fish go through rigor rigor mortis when do you freeze that fish a lot of people don't even think about this people have written books on this stuff so it's very important when you get into this stuff about fresh fish we wanted to expand the value added product development and then minimize impacts from low cost imports I'm going to show you some of the issues with some of these imports that compete directly against our Great Lakes whitefish we look at product form the restaurants in the north central region typically purchase frozen rather than fresh fish or fresh seafood products if we look at it frozen seafood products we offer about 80% of the north central region restaurant seafood purchase in contrast if you look at the east coast 75% is actually in the fresh food it's not frozen so there's a lot of differences when we look at these markets this was a north central regional aquaculture a project that was conducted years ago and again you can see the way this is broken down here where again frozen is very important in our region we look at changes in consumer preference and the trends favor major distributors there's an increase in demand for processed ready-to-eat products there's also an aging population that is becoming more health conscious and you can see Kathy's talks even some of the new guidelines are telling to eat at least a couple of fish meals per week more people are getting in tune to that again we look at the structural changes in the industry there's been a lot of changes small operations or just ship a lot of our whole product out we didn't do a lot of additional processing we just accepted the low price didn't do any value added and boom it went out this is a big corporation up in Manitoba Lake Winnipeg area the fresh water marketing board up there it's a crown corporation so we compete against that a lot of people don't realize how much fish comes from just north of us for some of the same fish species we take out of the Great Lakes or grow here on a commercial scale again everybody's heard about NAFTA there's expanding development in these third world cultures we heard about aquaculture earlier with Emma's talk with what's happening overseas there's greater consumer selection when you go into a store go into Walmart you can see all these fish coming from all over parts of the world there's more fish and seafood imports and there's growth in domestic and international aquaculture if we look historically on whitefish prices we're dictated by supply markets with the majority of fish going into basically New York Fulton Fish Market and also Chicago so you can see that again whitefish a lot of it goes into these New York markets Fulton Fish Market there's a lot of demand at certain holidays especially in the Jewish communities out there for this Lake Whitefish a lot of it goes into Acme they're probably one of the biggest smokers out on the east coast where this whitefish moves into those markets Fulton Fish Market is a big player here ship fishing from all over the world played a primary role in setting prices for many fish throughout the country there's a lot of issues how it was controlled there was under world control I know when Mayor Giuliana there he tried to clean up the Fulton Fish Market there's a lot of issues there's a lot of price fixing going on so there are a lot of issues there then we had 9-11 this is the Fulton Fish Market right here you can see what happened what happened when the biggest part of our fishery goes into the Fulton Fish Market during the Jewish holidays that thing came down just down the block from the Fulton Fish Market and it affected our industry during that time in 2001 I mean just crashed everything because we couldn't be moved we couldn't move fish out there so there's a lot of issues you can look at what's happened with Russia with Crimea this past spring our price fell just dropped down because a lot of the stuff that used to go into Russia the Russians kind of shut us down for whitefish imports into their country because of this issue going on with trade and stuff so a lot of these world events even affect our local fish and where they're going when Russia says no we're not taking anymore your whitefish you know then it turns around goes back in New York the prices fall so there's a lot of issues all these are interrelated of course we have large distributors are capturing every increasing market share you can look at things like Cisco, Gordon's a lot of restaurants a lot of retail stores they like to buy everything off one truck it's easier they got a lot of variety and so a lot of our fish end up going in that direction this is Canada's fresh water marketing corporation it's one of North Americans leading fish processors and exporters this is to the north of us and they produce a lot of fresh water fish that comes moving down into our markets and again if you look at this it was created in 1969 it's a crown corporation meaning it gets a lot of federal support from the Canadian government and so again you can see how it's controlled there but a lot of their stuff you can go in there and look this up it's all on the web you can look at their finances how this fish is moving around so we got a lot of data off their website so it's all out there in the open so we can take a look at it and again this is what you're a lot of our local I show this to our local processors this is what you're competing against and so it's a big corporation and what happens here is you have almost 3,000 fishers harvest fish from 400 lakes in Manitoba, Saskatchewan Alberta Northwest Territories and part of Northwestern Ontario so again a lot of these big lakes up here where you have white fish there's a lot of harvests and this feeds into this big plant that's located up in Winnipeg and you can look at this corporation some of the pounds that they produce you can look here during this time frame almost over 50 million pounds of fish coming out of that area I mean this rivals our great lakes when you're looking at competition a lot of people don't look at that and again you can look at the sales here almost 40 million in 1994 and it actually increased to over 65 million in 2003 so and again if we look at this compared to how does it compare to our Great Lakes harvest and stuff like that if we look at white fish alone you can see here if we look at the Great Lakes white fish harvest in blue you can see that in the red there this is the freshwater marketing market for white fish and almost rivals our Great Lakes commercial fishery and this competes against us and we see a lot of this fish come floating into the United States here a lot of our stores like Myers in Michigan our big chain stores they always talk how they want to buy local well you go into their store it's not local it's all coming from that freshwater marketing board and they buy for three reasons price, price, price that's what they look at they look at getting a lower price let me go back to that you can see that these aboriginal fishermen up in Canada you can see the high price they get compared to our Great Lakes fishers they don't get paid very much and a lot of this is very low prices for what they move into that operation again this is interesting we heard about how our fishes moved around this is again another good example here you can see here that this is actually they call it a product of China it came from Canada it was shipped to China this white fish processed there so it had been frozen on the way over five processed shipped these fleas on the way back frozen again this actually appeared in Jim Thana from the Great Lakes Indian Fish Indian Fish Wildlife Commission he bought this in Ashland, Wisconsin I seen this in Marquette, Michigan and they were still undercutting our prices it was at that time it was 2.99 he's still under all this movement of this fish well traveled fish traveled all over the world and it comes back here and beats our price so you can see there's a lot of you know subsidies that go into this stuff when you're dealing with a crown corporation they seen what we were doing in Michigan we started the flea market in Michigan pinball and fleas they said well that's a good thing to do we're gonna do this now too and that's what they got into and they tried to slip right in underneath us so this is interesting we do have a regulation it's by the U.S. U.S. Department of Agriculture called the Great Originating Labeling cool and country of origination and they have to actually put on there how it was produced whether it was wild caught or aquaculture and then where it was produced or where it was processed so and I don't see it's enforced a lot but it is $10,000 per violation if it's in a retail store that doesn't have that label on there and these are they have a list of these these are special they call them pack of stores how much produce they sell in these stores and these are required only for the big retailers across the United States like your big stores like Kroger's Myers I don't know what you have here Cubs stuff like that these are the big retail stores they have to have those labels on these packages and it is subject to a $10,000 fine violation if they don't have it on there some of the initiatives at this freshwater marketing board doing they again they had these whitefish fleas they were watching what they were doing again they did a lot of market development they did customer focused workshops market research was undertaken in key markets they were coming down into the twin cities they were inviting chefs from this region up to their areas they were trying to increase these chefs to buy their product even though we had a lot of Great Lakes product so they were doing a lot of education they created new point of sale materials and again they developed this process and capacity for this pinbow and whitefish you can see some of the stuff they developed and I think your omega-3's are a lot higher than you have in your chart with your fish you got to check that out I think you can double it I mean this matches what we have in Michigan some of the data we have in actually you should actually double it because you have a more omega-3's in your fish than you have on your eat Wisconsin so you might as well hype it some more because you have twice as much I think in reality and again this is about the same numbers we have used in our Michigan promotion too and again this is some of the promo but they do this with every species they have coming out of those lakes up there whether it's walleye pike they have a unique fact sheets they educate chefs they get into how much it's going to cost how much you can make in the restaurant so they break everything down how much money you're going to make off their fish for these restaurants and stuff and again you can see where a lot of this goes this fish you can see US is a big where they small part stays in Canada you can see other countries that are buying this fish is France and Finland some goes into Germany Poland what we did when we had this project we actually had a a kickoff meeting program with the commercial fisheries representatives we actually used our we also have a center at Michigan State that we worked with and we also worked with a consulting firm Newhall Klein and these were the people dealing with Newhall Klein these are marketing experts they do a lot of marketing around the country so we had funds to actually pay to them to come and what we did we had participants what we did with these consultants we built a knowledge map you can see a lot of the different fisheries that were represented and Mike Parkinson came over to some of our meetings he's out at Green Bay he buys fish here in Wisconsin from Michigan we also had adding knowledge again other people involved with us on the second day we had even regulators that were involved from the tribes different governments the DNR so we had a lot of different mixes that were involved with with this project as we kicked it off and what we did here is we met over a lot of issues these marketing people kind of took over the meeting we actually pulled a lot of information out of the main players that were involved with the whitefish industry and what we did is a lot of discussion that happened a lot of information was put up on the board a lot of it was rated and that's where we got into this knowledge map it was all grouped up what was the industry looking for what are the main things that we should be looking at when we moved ahead with this marketing project and again this knowledge map was developed by the industry itself and government representatives and it represents basically what this group of people knows to be true and current with the industry today and that's where we wanted to get this information and again you can see a lot of the different segments that came out of this knowledge map and again a lot of different areas dealing with the different things that we wanted to take a look at and we found out that there's what needs to be done there's roles for fisheries there's roles for processors distributors retailers and what we did with some of this is we got into some sensory analysis for Lake Whitefish and we used our we have a sensory analysis lab at Michigan State in our food science department it's a pretty good food science lab it's pretty renowned in the United States and what we want to do is compare Great Lakes Whitefish to Canadian in the lake we want to see what our competitors are doing how does that line up to our fish how does it compare then we wanted to compare Great Lakes Whitefish both fresh and frozen a lot of people say I don't eat frozen fish I don't like frozen fish we work with our industry where we produce a nice product with this frozen if it's done right I've done some quality control quality assurance programs with our people that get into this stuff how they do it it's a very good product and then we also wanted to compare Great Lakes Whitefish to other popular fish species especially aquaculture fish how does that compare to aquaculture fish we see a big movement in that area so those are three things our industry wanted to take a look at we moved these projects into our lab we did some different experiments again this is the lab this is my colleague Chuck Pistis him and I worked in the lab with the food science experts these are blind test areas where we run the product into these windows here people scored on computers how do they like it and again we did when we did the sensory analysis for the fresh fish we used Lake Winnipeg Whitefish against our northern lake Huron Whitefish you can see this label here Lake freshwater marketing board Lake Winnipeg area when we looked at the fresh and frozen we used fresh fish again from Lake Northern Lake Huron we used frozen one month from Lake Superior we used frozen four months from Lake Superior so we did these comparisons and then we looked at other popular fish we looked at one month vacuum packed Great Lakes Fish and we compared it against frozen farm raised US catfish Chilean Atlantic salmon and also Chinese Tilapia and again you can see the samples we did we didn't add any batters or anything it was just straight fish microwaved at a certain time a certain amount of grams we used and again the way we did the top species is if you you looked at that time when we started putting this together they rate these ever you can go to the Nazmine fisheries this is the top fish species consumed in the US the shrimp or that but you can see salmon catfish Tilapia were in these top categories if we look at the retail value actually salmon tilapia catfish they kind of fall in there almost every year those are the most popular if we look at the retail how much valuable and again you can see the way we did this the frozen samples were in 3mm vacuum sealed bags these are the standard Flays we use they use them in the restaurant industry in Michigan our industry basically packs it like this it's good for our industry it's pretty standard in Michigan where we have 30 pound boxes they're in freezers right now they can meter it into the restaurant industry or retail stores throughout the winter and it's a very nice product the way it's developed here and during the freezing process all the vacuum packed Flays were spread out on racks the freezers were kept at minus 10 to minus 20 Fahrenheit again you can see we had 15g samples cooked in a microwave without any additional seasoning again we had for the different things we had 113 panelists for fresh 115 for frozen 113 for the species comparison again you can see what this looks like the products fed to them through this window and then they answer a series of questions they taste it they rate it again some of the genders of the panelists you can see male to female you can see the ethnicity of the different people that were involved and again you can see that most of them like to eat fish that's probably why they showed up for the panel they didn't really get a big fish meal by just 15 grams of sample but you can see that most of them people that probably don't like fish aren't going to show up for this event you know and then you can see they are fish purchases you know over the last one month past week or once a week so you can see they purchase fish they're serious purchasers you can see again they're purchasing fresh product frozen product by far and then restaurants a big part of it too and you can see where they purchase usually supermarkets or a restaurant which falls into what we see here then if we looked at the Cook Lake whitefish whitefish appearance you can see for the great lakes again our panel over half thought that we were better than the inland lakes from Canada some people thought there was no difference but you can see again we rated pretty well against that we look at texture preference again you can see great lakes rated higher than the Canadian product and if you look at overall acceptability again we can see that we were beating this inland lake product and these inland lake products if you look at them this whitefish that come into the lakes there's a lot of things that can happen in these inland lakes you get algae growth you get off flavors in the fish the way it's handled it's got to come back into the United States the way they process it is it frozen properly some of the product we were even trying to work for the testing a lot of the flays are actually falling apart you can see the myotones in the fish so I didn't hold together as well as our product so again if we look at we get into the frozen product now and you can see that when we look at the overall appearance you can see that actually the frozen in the frozen four month whitefish actually beat the fresh this was statistically significant I don't know why but that's the way it showed up they were frozen over our fresh and even in the texture they rated the frozen over the fresh this fish was fresh I mean this came out of the lake here and within 24 hours we had a FedEx down into that lab and that was a very fresh fish but I cannot answer this but if this frozen fish is done properly you can see a high quality product that's produced and again you can see as far as the flavor no difference in this frozen for four months one month or fresh so they couldn't tell the difference so it's a high quality product so don't let people say if you don't if you have a frozen fish if it's handled properly it can be it can do well in the marketplace and then if we look at again the overall acceptability again they rated overall again the frozen in the one month and four months rated higher if we looked at the species comparisons if we looked at cooked appearance you can see the white fish here was kind of falling right with the tilapia and so you can see that with the cooked appearance you can see the salmon was a little bit higher and again there was a lot of stuff with color I think people just see the color of that fish in the automatic and say well I like that color instead of that white colored fish you know I think that had a lot to do with it actually the texture again you can see our texture on white fish tilapia and salmon are pretty much the same we actually rank better than the catfish you can see the cooked flavor again the white fish does with these popular fish like tilapia and catfish the salmon was a little bit they rated a little bit higher than the cooked flavor than those other three species overall acceptability again the salmon a little bit higher but again you can see that our white fish it does just as well as our popular fish that are on the top market anywhere in the United States every year so it does quite well again this is some statistical stuff we looked at consumer labels to how they preference and we actually found that wild caught great lakes rated the highest China tilapia was low we rated higher than the farm raised catfish and the farm salmon so you can see that they like that wild great lakes on the label so our rates pretty high so if you want to look at putting that on the label I think it gives a little extra boost to your product for anything coming out of the great lakes some of the conclusions the great lakes white fish commercial fish using the results to position its product against other competing fisheries like in the lake canada compared to great lakes you can use this information for your own white fish here in Wisconsin it will rank out the same and then the retail stores and restaurants that use in the lake canadian white fish based solely on price are being informed of the results we let them know about it so again they should be making these decisions based on the quality of our great lakes fish compared to the inland lake canada fish other things is the statement that frozen great lakes white fish is inferior to fresh product is dispelled it actually ranks higher in a lot of these attributes great lakes white fish compare favorably to top selling retail fish in the marketplace we do well with these top ranked ones across the united states and then those who want to see how their fishery product companies in the marketplace can use the type of study presented here to assist with their marketing efforts so you can use a lot of this stuff not only in Michigan, Wisconsin, any of the great lakes so we also formed a new cooperative it's called the legends of the lakes we had four businesses that were involved with that again we put together a pretty rigorous quality quality control quality assurance program and again they do these frozen products and they go to higher value retail stores especially in the Lansing area where they pay a higher price and those fleas sell probably for maybe ten bucks a pound in those stores and these are you know customers that like these smaller stores they go in there it's kind of a niche market so that product has been moved into there and basically what we did is again these were eight to ten ounce pin bone fleas selected by the process to optimize quality and freshness again some other promotion materials we had for restaurants we also developed a great lakes white fish website which promote a lot of fishing families people get to see where their fish comes from they see families on there the pictures there where they're located where they can buy the fish we also used this guy this guy was a popular chef a lot on our PBS station in Michigan Emmy award winning television program Eric the Lagas he did a couple programs for us on Lake Whitefish promoted our product again we did a lot of these stuff we did the product objectives we did the market assessment management plan again new handling processing techniques value added market acceptance brand labeling value added and then also diversifying the harvest these are some of the things we looked at with that I'll take any questions I might tie this up but we also took the fishermen and the processors into a big show in Schomburg Illinois where 300 chefs from the region get together and we actually brought the product down there not only the fresh flays we had hosted a dinner we had smoked products we had smoked whitefish sausage we had whitefish livers which are a delicacy you go to Maggie's restaurant up in Ashton Wisconsin they sell that for I don't know probably $20 a plate a lot of people don't realize that whitefish livers are a delicacy the caviar on a whitefish I think is number 5 in the world for caviar a lot of our product from the eggs that are shipped over into the Scandinavian countries so there's a lot of things we did with this project which actually increased our doxide value of the fish so it's been a pretty good project with that any questions yes the FDA has you know I teach seafood asset programs in the Great Lakes the FDA goes to a lot of these bigger firms that do that but they can't probably they only look at 1 to 3 percent of the product so a lot of it ships through but they do they're supposed to do some spot checks I can't say they ever spot check this fish at all but they do send people and they look at those concentrated zone but China is a hub for world fish processing so they are there they're into these big plants like you know Starchis tuna or any of these plants whether they're in Thailand or over in Africa that are doing this stuff but again a lot of it it's not all looked at very closely sausage that's a niche market for our folks in Michigan you go to any of our processors in Michigan do you sell it Dennis up in we call it back you can buy it for me actually so you get it from our Michigan folks I go there every week and we call it back from Bell's Fishery in saving this mission and everybody's got their own things you go to the fishery down the road from where he buys it like Big Stone Bay they have more of a spicy Cajun one everybody's got fills in market to me it's more mild everybody's got their own little secret recipes putting your wish list we go to all we also developed a Great Lakes Whitefish Cookbook too which has chefs from all over the Great Lakes from the chef from Mackinac Island at the Grand Hotel we have a famous chef from the Twin Cities we even have local fishermen with their recipes and it was actually written up in the New York Times even this fish book that we have and that's available too Michigan Sea Grant website it's a great you can do a Whitefish recipe every week have a different recipe for Whitefish every week and go through the whole book try them all out it's a great book so again all these things working together help move a lot of our Whitefish and in recent years we've seen a lot of our people even going into these farmers markets now and these people go into these towns that have again that are pretty well to do communities and we have people hauling our Whitefish Flays down in these places that are getting like $12-$14 a pound for Flays and people don't even blink an eye on these women come with their poodles there and they load up on the Flays and they're down in these rich communities like around Detroit Bluefield Hills Birmingham prices no object to them and they think it's great that a tribal fisherman comes down from the lakes oh man I'm buying this right here there's kind of an image when they see that you know they're getting this fresh fish right off the lakes and so there's really big markets that have opened up in these farmers markets too and there's so many of these farmer markets that are taking off now the only ages that we had there I think we're in that demographic we did just the sensory analysis but no we haven't looked into that lately so right it is yeah and I think younger people want to eat healthier too that's why you see a lot that's why McDonald's is in trouble right now if you look at the business channel I watch a lot of that stuff where McDonald's corporation their stock is plummeted they're trying I think they think they're going to cure it by serving breakfast all day but it's the younger people are going to these other restaurants that they're more health conscious I think they're going to Chipotle's a couple months ago and now that's following through the bottom so but there is there is this consumer awareness that these young people want to eat at they have this healthier attitude too but that's a good question yeah I think that's something we should really take a look at