October 19, 2015 — Not many 91-year-olds still come to work, especially at a combination agricultural/industrial production business. But Dick Jennings is not like many people. In 1968, Jennings dropped out of engineering school at Yale to return to his grandfather’s homeland in western North Carolina and start up Jennings Trout Farm in the mountain town of Cashiers. Primarily providing fish to recreational fishermen along the Eastern seaboard who would stock their private streams and lakes with trout, Jennings enabled these sportsmen to literally shoot fish in a barrel, if they so desired.

Eventually his business expanded to selling larger volumes of live fish to grocery chains to the point where Jennings was shipping in truckload quantities. He further diversified his business by starting up a processing facility so that he could ship fillets instead of just whole fish. In 1963, Jennings moved his operations to Canton, North Carolina, at the base of Lake Logan in the Pisgah National Forest, high in the Appalachian Mountains. Since a dam was in the process of being constructed at Lake Logan, Jennings was able to negotiate water-usage rights to the flow, a development that has made a tremendous difference in the success of his company.

Because the renamed Sunburst Trout Farms is able to pull water directly from Lake Logan, the operation benefits from the pristine purity of the stream, which has had almost no human contact other than the occasional fisherman in the federally designated wilderness area. Additionally, the extreme 6,000-gallon-per-minute flow rate into the 25 concrete runs where the trout is held allows Sunburst to simulate very natural growing conditions for its fish.

This water volume creates a flow velocity that is twice as high as most other trout farms. The increased flow provides a continuous and vital stream of oxygen across the gills of the fish, while also encouraging healthy metabolic activity and promoting natural development through exercise.

Read the full story at Food Republic