State's Biggest Trout Hatchery in Line for $40-million Rebuild

The extensive renovation of the hatchery, a 67-year-old landmark in Pisgah National Forest, will allow it to maintain its crucial role in the state's billion-dollar trout fishery.

Adam Moticak, superintendent of the Bobby N. Seltzer State Fish Hatchery in Pisgah National Forest, raises a screen that protects the fish from herons

PISGAH NATIONAL FOREST — Kick-starting production at the million-fish hatchery at the heart of North Carolina’s billion-dollar trout-fishing industry is about as complicated as squeezing toothpaste from a tube.

“You can feel their stomachs; they get mushy,” Adam Moticak, superintendent of the Bobby N. Setzer State Fish Hatchery in Pisgah National Forest, said of its female brood fish.

Demonstrating the action of fingers running down the length of swollen midsections, he said, “You strip eggs into a pan. You add the milt (semen from brood males). You add water. And, voila, you have fertilization.”

From such humble origins, Setzer produces more trout than any hatchery in North Carolina, stocking about 650,000 brook, brown and rainbow directly into mountain rivers and streams every year.

Add the numbers of mature fish, fertilized eggs and fry distributed to other hatcheries, and Setzer’s total annual output comes to far more than a million, Moticak said.

The 67-year-old facility in the shadow of John Rock is a cherished local landmark, enough so that the miles-long lane on which it lies is called Fish Hatchery Road.

“It has some sort of aura about it,” he said. “People love this place.”

Still, Moticak said, “a lot of people don’t understand how big it is. It’s one of the biggest trout hatcheries on the East Coast . . . It’s a monster.”

And it’s in line for a big renovation. Or, more like it, reconstruction. The hatchery’s main building and 36 concrete raceways — 200-foot long sections of channelized stream that contain the growing trout — will be demolished and replaced with a cleaner, cooler and more flood-resistant facility.

Which may lead some Transylvania County residents to ask: Why spend $40 million on a project that is all about recreation in a county with so many unmet and vital capital needs?

One answer: local governments aren’t paying for it, and about half the state funds earmarked for the project will come from the people most likely to benefit — outdoor enthusiasts who pay for hunting and fishing licenses and the excise taxes on their gear.

Also Setzer, plagued by crumbling infrastructure, is every bit as decrepit as the county’s notoriously degraded school buildings.

There’s trout fishing’s central role as a driver of Western North Carolina’s tourism industry, with an annual economic impact estimated at $1.38 billion, according to a recent study from the the state Wildlife Resources Commission, which runs the hatchery.

Then there’s Setzer’s central role in that industry. Non-anglers may not realize how thoroughly fishing on waterways such as the lower Davidson and French Broad rivers is propped up by stocking from the hatchery, might not know that as a natural activity, angling in those rivers is to the pursuit of wild trout in high mountain streams what golf is to hiking.

Kevin Howell, the owner of Davidson River Outfitters in Pisgah Forest, fully expects his clients to see fewer fish in these rivers during the hatchery’s planned two-year reconstruction, due to start in early 2025.

But it has to be done, he said.

“If they don’t,” he said, referring to the commissioners, “we have no fishery.”

The Wild and the Stocked

Hatchery worker feeding young trout in the early morning to lessen the stress caused by activity during warm afternoons

To understand Setzer’s role in supporting trout fishing — and to understand the dizzying array of regulations applied to different streams — the public needs to understand the “very strong demarcation” between wild and stocked trout in North Carolina, said Doug Besler, the Commission’s mountain region fisheries supervisor.

Also, a brief history is helpful.

The population of North Carolina’s only native trout species, brook trout, developed and spread on a cooler planet, in a more densely shaded region, said Besler, who joined Moticak and Fish Production Supervisor David Deaton on a tour of Setzer last week.

“In an ideal trout stream, you would want the canopy to be closed,” Besler said. “You would not be able to see blue sky.”

Commercial logging began to kill fish and strip away vegetation in the late 1800s, he said, while the railroads built to export timber soon began to import trout. First brook trout from northern states, then larger exotics — rainbows from the West and browns from Europe.

While wild trout once lived and spawned in the French Broad as far downriver as Asheville, Besler said, that was before logging, before the wooly adelgid began to kill creekside hemlock trees, before the advent of climate change.

Now natives are rarely seen in water below elevations of 3,000 feet, he said. And though that hardly means they have been crowded out of existence — the Commission has identified 750 distinct populations of native brook trout in about 7,000 miles of mountain streams, Besler said — it does mean the remaining 1,000 miles of larger, lower-elevation rivers in Western North Carolina are the almost exclusive domain of regularly replenished, hatchery-raised fish.

“We stock over a million trout a year, and we don’t expect a single one of those fish to survive and reproduce,” Besler said.

As much as 85 percent of them are harvested within two weeks of stocking, while many of the remaining trout die off from the combination of the stress created by summer crowds and water temperatures soaring above 70 degrees.

And because of a process that Deaton developed more than a decade ago — exposing newly fertilized eggs to water pressure that causes them to retain a third set of chromosomes — all stocked trout are sterile.

“It is very important, as an agency, to protect wild trout populations, especially the ones that have unique genetics, by not having fish stocked on top of them,” Besler said.

Trout for Sport and Dinner

Fish culterist Seth Roy lifts a load of fish from a raceway for stocking

Different populations of fish attract different populations of anglers.

On one end of the spectrum are purists willing to hike to, for example, the high reaches of Avery Creek or the headwaters of the North Fork of the French Broad, fully intending to release the generally smaller fish they catch in these waters.

Howell said many of his clients fall into this category. So does Shea Tuberty, a biology professor at Appalachian State University in Boone and an avid fly fisher.

“I’m all over it dude,” he said. “I’ve got three trout rods on my car at all times, just in case.” 

To pursue wild brook trout and rainbows naturalized before sterilization, he hikes not only to high elevations, but to stretches of waterways upstream from waterfalls and other barriers to migration.

“I don’t want to see another human being and I work really hard to get to those places,” he said.

Somewhat less ambitious are anglers who ply “delayed harvest” streams such as the East Fork of the French Broad.

From October through May, fishers can hook larger stocked trout in these waterways as long as they release them, Besler said. Then, after the first Saturday in June, he said, the state “allows anglers to harvest those fish from rivers where they are going to die from the warm water.”

Finally, there are anglers who care about little more than securing their daily limit of seven trout (or, illegally, many more) from “hatchery supported waters” such as the lower Davidson.

They may use spin-casting lures or hooks baited with worms or even corn, Besler said. Some of them are so keen on getting the first crack at plump hatchery trout, they follow the Commission’s trucks to their stocking destinations, said Anna Gurney, the Commission’s public relations manager.

“To me, it’s as far away from sportsmanship as you can get. Their goal is to get dinner,” said Tuberty, though he added that this aim is understandable.

“There’s hardly anything better than a trout dinner, so I don’t blame them.”

From Eggs to “Big Fish”

Moticak showed how Setzer satisfies this public appetite for fish and fishing.

Fertilized eggs are stored in 160 trays resting on aluminum racks in a concrete-floored back room of the hatchery building.

They remain in these trays for about six weeks amid circulating, cool water from nearby Grogan Creek, first developing into “eyed eggs” containing, as the name suggests, embryos with visible eyes, the stage at which they can be transported to other hatcheries.

The embryos then emerge as tiny, worm-like beings perched above large, nourishing yoke sacs. Once these yokes are consumed, the young fish “develop true stomachs,” Moticak said, and are called “buttoned-up fry.”

After several more weeks in a neighboring room filled end-to-end with 16 “troughs,” in which water temperatures and rates of feed can be precisely controlled, they move on to the outdoor raceways, the hatchery’s most recognizable feature.

These are the concrete pens — effectively artificial sections of creek fed by the flow from the Grogan and the Davidson — arranged in a grid more than 100 feet wide and 1,000 feet long.

This is surrounded by chain-link fencing to deter human and animal predators, including river otters. Each raceway is covered by plastic mesh mounted on PVC frames to discourage herons, scores of which once lingered on the hatchery’s periphery to feast on cultivated trout.

The fish grow at a rate of about one inch a month until they reach the catchable length of 10 inches. Each stocking load contains a variety of species that, because of their varying degrees of elusiveness, extends the harvest period. Brooks are generally the first to go; browns the last.

They are also mixed with a complement of older specimens up to 20 inches long.

“That’s one thing North Carolina is known for,” Moticak said, “its big fish program.”

In the spring, the busiest stocking season, the hatchery stocks about three truckloads of fish per day. On Wednesday morning, it was scheduled for just one delivery of 760.

Culterist Seth Roy scooped ten-inch trout from the end of one raceway, weighing each load of his wide-mouth net to determine the number of fish it contained, before passing it up to technician Marshall Caldwell, who poured the netfuls of slithering bodies into the top of the top of the truck-mounted tank.

The crew planned to distribute the fish to more than a half-dozen locations on the lower Davidson, including the Sycamore Flats Picnic Area.

No, expectant anglers will probably not be following the truck, Caldwell said, but they will be waiting for its arrival.

“You’d be amazed by how many people are at Sycamore Flats,” he said, “usually there’s one area where there’s about ten people sitting on rocks.”

The Rebuild

Crumbling wall of a raceway at the hatchery

If the hatchery is so productive as is, why does it need replacement?

Because the plumbing is ancient, because large underground cavities beneath the troughs make them susceptible to future collapse, because many sections of raceway have been covered with visible patches of lighter-colored concrete and many more sections need patching.

“It’s hard to actually keep water in some of the raceways because they leak so bad,” Moticak said. 

Droppings from the roughly million trout now flow directly from the hatchery into the Davidson, which is also steadily warming.

In July, hatchery workers recorded the highest monthly average water temperature in the river since 1999 — 67.6 degrees.

Such temperatures lead to increased mortality rate despite the usual seasonal precautions, especially completing jobs such as feeding — which creates temporary, frenzied eruptions — in the early morning when the water is slightly cooler.

The new raceways will, of course, be watertight. They will be fitted with features that allow waste to be collected and used as fertilizer. The raceways will be covered to provide shade, and the new construction will take measures to protect the facility from another consequence of climate change, the increased likelihood of severe floods.

The deluge spawned by the remnants of Tropical Storm Fred in 2021, to cite the most notable recent example, inundated the hatchery building and washed away about 750,000 trout.

The new raceways will be protected with flood-control barriers and the foundation of the building will be raised by 18 inches. And, though Moticak said he does not know precisely how many fish the new hatchery will be able to produce, it will almost certainly be greater than current totals.

The project “will essentially allow us to continue our current trout program,” he said, “and possibly provide additional angling opportunities for folks for the next 60 or 70 years.”

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