Text and photos by Kent Priestley
- Introduction
- 10,000 pounds of rainbows per week
- The caviar
- How to get Sunburst trout
- Download the full article
as a
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Click photos to enlarge and learn more. | |||
The owners of Sunburst Trout Company have long known that their place in Haywood County is a charmed location, and now the world is waking to the quality and purity of their farm-raised trout. What began as a small pond-stocking farm five decades ago has burgeoned into a far-flung retail and wholesale business serving more than 200 buyers – restaurants, supermarkets and seafood brokers – as well as customers in practically every state via the company’s Web site.
It was during his boyhood that company founder Dick Jennings succumbed to the ‘call of the trout.’ The Pennsylvania native had grown up visiting his grandparents’ land near Cashiers in Jackson County, walking the woods and fishing the swift waters that ran through their property. The experience led Jennings in 1948 to establish a commercial trout farm there, and to set about learning how to raise the fish better and more efficiently. In 1965, he moved the business from Cashiers to its present Haywood County location near Canton, where it’s electric service is provided by Haywood EMC. Jennings’ daughter, Sally Eason, and her husband, Steve, joined the operation in 1980.
Cool, pure water is the most critical element in raising healthy trout, and Sunburst has it in abundance. Each minute, 12,000 gallons of fresh water gush into the concrete raceways where the trout are raised, flushing wastes to a settling pond for eventual composting, and recharging the water with oxygen. The water brings with it an acid tang, courtesy of the leaves shed each fall by the hardwood trees that cloak the watershed. The same quality is passed along to the trout, giving Sunburst’s product a longer shelf life.
| top |