Fishing for Gold: The Story of Alabama's Catfish Industry.

Fishing for Gold: The Story of Alabama's Catfish Industry. By Karni R. Perez. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c. 2006. Pp. xvi, 263. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-5344-5.)

The Alabama Black Belt is one of the most economically depressed regions in the nation. It was once the heart of the state's plantation empire, but boll weevil and market pressures forced farmers from cotton into cattle, into row crops, into just about anything to keep food on the table and the mortgage paid. Finally, almost accidentally, some of them found catfish. This is their story.

On one hand, the rise of the catfish industry in Alabama is the tale of how definable conditions--the right soil, the right water, a decent infrastructure, research and production help, and people willing to take risks--combined to make things happen. On the other, it is the story of how a farm pond poisoned by mistake, a chance meeting at a filling station, and a few of the right questions at the right time set a small group of Black Belt farmers on the course covered in this interesting account of agribusiness in the Deep South.

Focusing on the people and the product instead of economic models and statistics, creating the story from interviews and personal recollections, author Karni R. Perez puts life into what might otherwise be a dry business history and offers some suggestions that anyone trying to start a new enterprise in an area like the Black Belt should well consider.

Starting small with fingerlings to stock farm ponds, the entrepreneurs who are at the center of the story found that soon they had saturated their market, so they turned to processing and then to selling to consumers. This introduced a whole new set of characters into the mix--corporations and companies who wanted to turn catfish into the "Fried Chicken of the River" (p. 76). But mass-marketing also meant that the public perception of the product--catfish as a bottom feeder, a scavenger--had to change.

Meanwhile, catfish farmers had to deal with a host of problems that must have made them wish for something as simple as the boll weevil. Oxygen levels, overcrowded ponds, diseases, parasites, predatory birds, and "off-flavor," a musky taste apparently absorbed from the pond, all seemed to conspire against the producers (p. 209). But farmers have always faced natural conspiracies, and in this case they were helped by the researchers from Auburn University, whose fisheries program was instrumental in the industry's success.

All in all, this is a fine, if narrow, account of the rise of catfish farming, one more effort by rural folk in their ongoing struggle to preserve an agricultural way of life in the modern world. Some succeeded. Some failed. But in both cases, there is much to be said for the effort.

HARVEY H. JACKSON

Jacksonville (Ala.) State University