Spot on. Saving this one.
Couldn't have said it better.

Th state tried to release steelhead at all sorts of times and sizes. What worked was age-1 large smolts in the spring. I think May release. That is what brought back fishable numbers of adults.

Krijack,

The Department has cost information for each hatchery, so total costs per hatchery can be calculated. Each hatchery records the number of pounds of fish produced. From that, the cost per pound is calculated. Juvenile steelhead are usually raised to about six per pound, so divide the cost per pound by six and we have the cost per smolt.

Hatchery costs per unit production are usually lower at the largest hatcheries. It's that economy of scale thing. Hatchery capacity is determined by the volume of water flow available, measured either as gallons per minute or CFS (cubic feet per second) and by the number of cubic feet of rearing pond space that is available.

As C'man pointed out, releasing pre-smolt hatchery steelhead is pretty much a waste of money due to the near zero survival. There is an exception that has been tried for restoring or enhancing some wild steelhead populations. The juvenile fish are reared to a size of roughly 400 per pound and then released in unseeded habitat. But you can't just dump a truckload of fed fry into the stream and have this work. You have to dip fry into buckets and have technicians and biologists literally scatter the fry, 10 to 20 at a time, into small units of suitable habitat, or niches. I can tell you that stocking 20,000 fry this way is a hella' lotta' work and therefore, very expensive. From an effort like this, about the highest survival to smolt stage is 3%. No one has figured out how to make this an economically or biologically effective program.

The one, and maybe only one, think a hatchery is good at is producing more fish per unit of water can than the wild. Some is obviously management, but the Hood Canal hatcheries produced was more chum, for example, than the whole Skagit. You can and do crowd the fish in a hatchery, make sure they have food, medicate them, protect them form predators, and so on. If bare numbers are all that is important to you, or developing the heck out of watersheds, then a hatchery works.

Like Salmo said, successfully planting fry requires vacant water and lots of handwork. Been there, done that, and even with hand scatter planting the production was close to zip.

Nobody said a fish in the hatchery cost $30, they said bringing an adult fish to the table cost $30, or 40 or whatever it was - and they aren't close to meaning the same thing.

You tried, though.

Funny thing is. I would now gladly pay $300 for an opportunity tag a season, to swing a fly a couple of weeks CnR, on a couple of my local PS rivers, Feb. through April. Lots cheaper than travelling to Russia for a fix. Oh wait! The tribes won't let us even consider that!

Salmo g hits ANOTHER one outta the park.... J F C !

Funding hatchery programs that operate only for the sake of continuing operations... with ZERO benefit accruing to the user group for which they were intended. Sorry, but that's just dummer'N'hell. Is that just a blue state thing?

Fish Doc - You know better than most folks on this BB that isn’t the way it works. There are zero hatcheries that operate where there is consistently zero benefit to the target audience (commercial, recreation, tribal).

As you know, the benefits are highly variable. In some years, the benefit is close to zero due to factors outside the purview of the hatchery, such as weather conditions or poor ocean survival. In other years, there are plenty of benefits when everything lines up perfectly. We can’t turn hatchery ‘on and off’ just because the ocean conditions are poor or on the chance that we might get a major flood just when the adults are returning (as we did for late-run coho in 2021).

Hatcheries need to operate thru ‘thick and thin’. And sometimes things are really thin, as they have been for the past 4-5 years. With the recent up-tick in ocean conditions, I expect those hatcheries that have produced few, if any, harvest benefits will suddenly become quite productive again.

We all wish that hatcheries would provide better benefits to all of us (i.e., more and bigger salmon), but we ought not suggest we eliminate them when they don’t.