[acabtp]

this late in the year, i doubt that any other state has many surplus stocker sized trout ready to go; we would have had to put our order in a year ago.

it seems to me that the biggest factor in this problem is our "all the eggs in one basket" approach to rearing the brook, brown and rainbow trout at the pequest hatchery and only at the pequest hatchery.

by comparison, vermont (the other state where i do a lot of trout fishing) also stocks a similar amount of fish to NJ: 600,000 yearling trout and salmon and 15,000 2+ year old trophy trout every year. but they do it with five coldwater fish culture stations instead of just one. this is for a state with a population fifteen times smaller than new jersey (so much much less money from taxes to do it with). they don't do trout stamps up there either, it's included with your license.

if NJ had a second coldwater hatchery, it bears to reason that this furunculosis outbreak at pequest would have had much less of an impact than it did where our one and only trout production center basically lost everything.

i don't blame anybody at pequest, i am sure they were working as hard as they could to make sure this didn't happen. this kind of things just happens when you are raising a lot of animals in high density conditions. nobody notices when a barn full of chickens gets sick and dies because there are so many other barns full of chickens. but when our one and only trout hatchery gets wiped out... well, we are noticing.