(30 Jan 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Auburn, New York – 24 January 2025
1. Overhead of salmon being netted from tank
2. Person grabbing net
3. Salmon dumped on to icy bath
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Adam Kramarsyck, LocalCoho farm manager:
“When we knew we were closing and we had about 45,000 pounds worth of fish swimming in the tanks at the time of closing. That’s a lot of fish to do something with, right? We didn’t want it to go to waste, go to a dumpster or something like that when it’s great to eat, right? So we reached out to the food bank and talk to them to see if we could try to figure out the logistics, the tons and tons of logistics and extra labor force we would need to get the job done, to get all the fish out of the tanks, right? And to get them donated to them.”
5. Underwater shot of fish
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Brian McManus, Food Bank of Central New York:
“This is a collaborative effort between staff with LocalCoho and our volunteer group, and they are pulling fish from the tanks and getting it ready to go to the processor."
7. Person taking up nets
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Brian McManus, Food Bank of Central New York:
“The fact that we only had weeks to execute this really ratcheted up the intensity and the anxiety a little bit. I knew that we had the will. I knew we had the expertise.”
9. Fish underwater
10. SOUNDBITE (English) Brian McManus, Food Bank of Central New York:
“A few things make this unusual. The first is the incredible high grade of the product. I mean, this is premium, premium salmon, which is very exciting. The second is the volume of it in the form that it was in. I mean, very rarely, perhaps almost never, does a food donation offer come in still as livestock, basically.”
11. Fish swimming in tank
12. SOUNDBITE (English) Bradley Bednarski, LocalCoho:
“Your best bet is to kind of corral them into a corner. And then once they’re there you scoop deep and pull them up to the top.”
13. Various of person netting fish
14. SOUNDBITE (English) Brian McManus, Food Bank of Central New York:
“Protein, meat protein, animal protein is very, very desirable. We know that people need it for nourishment and it’s difficult to get. And so this is going to make a very large impact across this community.”
15. Forklift loaded with fish backs up
16. Wide forklift drives out of building
STORYLINE:
A New York food bank was offered a huge donation of fresh fish this month — but it came with a catch.
LocalCoho, a soon-to-close salmon farm in the small upstate city of Auburn, wanted to give 40,000 pounds (18,100 kilograms) of coho salmon to the Food Bank of Central New York, a motherlode of high-quality protein that could feed thousands of families.
But the fish were still alive and swimming in the farm’s giant indoor tanks. The organizations would need to figure out how to get some 13,000 salmon from the water and then have them processed into frozen fillets for distribution to regional food pantries.
And they’d need to do it fast, before the business closed for good. LocalCoho is ceasing operations this Friday.
Thanks to dozens of food pantry volunteers willing to wade in and help staffers scoop up the salmon, the team was able to empty the tanks in a matter of weeks and cold pack tons of fish for shipment to a processor.
“The fact that we only had weeks to execute this really ratcheted up the intensity and the anxiety a little bit,” said Brian McManus, the food bank’s chief operations officer. “I knew that we had the will. I knew we had the expertise.”
Enter the food bank.
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