Claus-Peter Lumpp could content himself with being lucky in misfortune, but he can’t bring himself to do it. The three-star chef and head of the gourmet institution “Bareiss” in Baiersbronn will have retired long ago when the global fish stocks collapse around 2050 and edible fish disappear from the menus of all restaurants – as long as we continue to plunder the planet as brainlessly as we have up to now.
But we could also come to our senses, and so that this happens as quickly as possible, Lumpp supports a project that is only six kilometers away from his restaurant and that could become the blueprint for our aquatic nutrition, a model for future-oriented, sustainable, environmentally friendly fish farming in both freshwater and saltwater – and which, incidentally, is also said to deliver fish of such great quality that even a three-star chef is delighted with it.
At first glance, however, the Forellenhof Buhlbach on the edge of the Black Forest National Park does not look like it could save the world and be confident about the future. Two fish ponds full of gold trout, four narrow breeding tanks, each fifty meters long, a “Fischerstüble” in the classic Black Forest style with mullioned windows, wooden shingles and plenty of carvings, a handful of farm buildings with old-fashioned smoke ovens and a brand new hatchery: that’s the whole Forellenhof in Baiersbronn-Obertal, in which fish have been growing for a hundred years and which has now become a peculiar mixture of archaic and high technology. The matter only became future-oriented when the Bareiss family, operators of the gourmet luxury holiday hotel of the same name in the neighboring district of Mitteltal, took it on in 2017.
Fish specialist hired
She hired Peter Schneider, a fisheries scientist from Namibia, as her fish farmer and set about establishing a closed-loop farm using the latest scientific knowledge and state-of-the-art technology. “The best thing is: it works with all types of fish, can be expanded to any size, and recently salmon farmers from Norway came here to see how we do it,” says Schneider.
Fish farming of the future: the Forellenhof Buhlbach in Baiersbrunn
:
Image: Hotel Bareiss
We stand in the hatchery with the landlord and chef and keep trout and char company, which had a long journey to settle in the Black Forest. They came to Baiersbronn from Denmark and Canada as eggs, protected in refrigerated cases like transplant organs, and sterilized naturally so that the fish do not later reach sexual maturity and can thus grow evenly, free from the stress of reproduction.
Some animals are as tiny as pinheads, others as big as matchsticks, and all are allowed six months to develop in the hatchery tanks. Their special feed consists mostly of algae and vegetable oils and only a tenth of the fishmeal from sustainable aquaculture, while their water comes from a virgin spring in the national park. In official German, that’s called “first-time water,” and Claus-Peter Lumpp swears that you can taste it.