Made in Missouri

Water Hazards

Posted at May 28, 2008 12:42

By Kevin Crowe

BY THE TIME golfers tee off in the morning
at Sycamore Creek Golf Course at Osage
Beach, Steven and Pete Kahrs have been working
for hours on the water hazards. They turn
on oxygen and water pumps, adjust water
levels, and collect some of the golf balls that
end up in the drink. While many golf courses
make a few modest bucks off the resale of the
balls that come out of water hazards, the Kahrs
have perfected the art of cashing in on
lakes and ponds on golf courses.

What golfers view as water hazards
are the breeding grounds for a business
on the brink of an explosion.
In private lakes and ponds across
Missouri and also Kansas, an unwitting
crop of gentle giants quickly and
quietly grows fat with buttery eggs
that will never hatch.

Every week, Steven and Pete Kahrs, the
owners of Osage Catfisheries at Osage Beach,
deal with another set of orders for a product
they have not yet started to harvest in bulk—
paddlefish caviar.

This past spring, the Kahrs harvested only
about one hundred pounds of paddlefish roe,
scraping a minimal profit. They’ll harvest a bit
more for the holiday season, but they are looking
to plunge into the business in late 2008.

“Production could reach two to three tons
if demand for our product continues and we
are able to retain more bodies of water into the
program,” Steven says.

The caviar label, Osage Catfisheries, L’Osage,
reaped a slim ten thousand dollars in sales in
2005. Steven thinks sales could be between
five hundred thousand and one million dollars
within a few years of mass production.

Osage Catfisheries is a family business. The
late Jim Kahrs, Steven and Pete’s dad, opened

Osage Catfisheries in 1953
and started selling paddlefish, a cousin of the
sturgeon and named for its long snout, about
thirty years ago, mainly to aquariums. But an
unanticipated shift in global politics catapulted
Kahrs’ company into new territory: ranching.

Historically, the world’s best caviar has come
from the Caspian Sea and other homes of the
beluga sturgeon. Lack of government regulation
and over-fishing in the Caspian region led
to a 2005 U.S. ban on imported beluga caviar.
The prices of imported caviar soared, and dealers
clamored for domestic caviar.

In the mid-1980s, the Kahrs started a paddlefish
ranching program, through which they
place paddlefish in private lakes and ponds. The
fish grow to maturity over a period of seven to
ten years. In the late fall and early spring, the
Kahrs harvest the females for their eggs; each
fish yields between eight and nine pounds.

The Kahrs didn’t have enough space on
their Ozark farms to house the project, so Jim
Kahrs enlisted private landowners and golf
courses, such as Tan-Tar-A resort at Osage
Beach, in the ranching program, paying them
per pound for fish at harvest time. Pete Kahrs
says that, thanks to his father’s smooth talking,
there are about forty-four thousand paddlefish
in the ranching program.

But Jim Kahrs’ notion of ranching wasn’t
embraced as genius at its outset.

“Everyone thought they were crazy,” says
Rachel Collins, co-owner of Collins Caviar in
Michigan City, Indiana. She has known the Kahrs
for years as they brushed elbows in the growing
circle of domestic caviar dealers. And, according
to Rachel, the Kahrs have put themselves in an
enviable position in the caviar market and have
reason to expect a flood of orders, and cash.

Visit www.osagecatfisheries.com for more
information.

October 2007

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