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Meinholz (dpa / lni) - In winter it is the high season for catching salmon trout from aquaculture.
The four-week slaughtering process has come to an end on the Leverenzhof in the little village of Meinholz in the Lüneburg Heath.
800 tons of rainbow trout are sold here every year - only in Germany they are called salmon trout because of their color - and 60 to 70 tons of caviar are sold.
"The market for fish eggs in Germany is essentially covered by the heather fish and the Desietra," says Bernhard Feneis, President of the Association of German Inland Fisheries and Aquaculture.
Heidefisch with its Leverenzhof is the market leader in direct marketing of trout.
Competitor Desietra is based in Fulda, Hesse.
With our own sewage treatment plant, 80 percent of the water required in the large basins is recycled.
Nutrients are filtered out and the purified water is returned to different pools.
The rest is used as fertilizer on the farm fields.
Because sustainable management has its price, the goods are more expensive than most imported fish.
"Germany is a high-price country in terms of wages, construction and energy costs," says Matthias Keller, managing director of the fish information center in Hamburg.
Electricity costs were particularly high in fish farms on land.
For some years now, German consumers have been prepared to spend more money on fish.
While frozen fish was more in demand years ago, consumption has now changed towards fresh fish, which has then become more expensive than frozen fish.
According to the center, around 38,000 tonnes of fish and other products such as mussels came from almost 2,500 aquaculture farms nationwide in 2019.
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