When biologists first imported Southeast Asian carp into the waterways of America’s South in the 1970s, they thought they’d hit upon an ideal method to keep wastewater treatment ponds clean and aquaculture systems healthy. But no one foresaw the havoc those hardy fish would wreak on the Mississippi River Basin.
The voracious eaters can devour up to 20 percent of their body weight in plankton and algae per day, virtually wiping out key knots in local food webs as they grow to as heavy as 110 pounds. Their expansion through the Midwest has sent fishery managers scrambling to stem their spread and protect critical habitats, especially in the Great Lakes region.
That search for solutions to a man-made problem led some fishery experts to a small company in Vancouver. Here, the little-known fisheries technology company Smith-Root devised a technological solution in an electric barrier that keeps the carp and other invasive species out of critical habitats and deters their entry into lake systems.
“The way it’s been with the barriers is we’d go out and talk to the locals in Minnesota and typically we don’t hear anything back for two, three, four, five years because they have to budget for it and go out looking for cheaper methods,” said company CEO Jeff Smith. “Then they come around and say ‘Damn it, this is the only way we can go.’ ”
As international trade brings nations closer together, it’s had the unintended consequence of introducing foreign species into new territories, with sometimes devastating results. Global climate change adds to the challenge of supporting and protecting native fish populations.
Smith-Root, operating out of an office building and research lab near Washington State University Vancouver, is well-positioned to help find solutions to a wide range of challenges facing fisheries worldwide.
In the Northwest, the company’s technology keeps sea lions from overwhelming fishing docks at the mouth of the Columbia River. In Minnesota, fish and wildlife managers control invasive Asian carp in some places with Smith-Root electric fish barriers. The barriers are installed at lake outlets that prevent the fish from swimming into the lake body.
Smith, brother of the company’s co-founder and CEO since 2006, says those environmental challenges mean the company will have work for a very long time. The company has found a niche in a field of expertise in which it faces little competition, and it has built expertise with a skilled and loyal staff of experts who are rewarded for their work though an unusual employee-owned business model that Smith put into place in 2007.
The working climate Smith created since becoming CEO means most of Smith-Root’s employees will be around, as well. While many bottom line-focused organizations see labor as an expense, Smith-Root sees its employees as an investment. Together, they’ve built a symbiotic relationship, which the CEO says is the reason why Smith-Root is so successful and employee tenure is so long.
Launched in 1964
Smith-Root started in 1964 in Seattle as a partnership between Dave Smith (Jeff Smith’s older brother) and his partner, Lee Root. Together, they designed and produced a portable electrofisher for researchers at the University of Washington.
Using electricity to catch fish — which is now illegal for the general public — wasn’t a new technology at that point, but every device before Smith-Root’s product had to be plugged into a wall outlet. Using car batteries, the men were able to harness the power of direct current electricity to turn UW biologists into the Pied Pipers of salmonids.
The machine operated by creating an electrical field in the water around a submerged anode wand. The electricity triggered galvanotaxis, which causes muscle spasms in any nearby fish and makes them swim straight to the positive electrical field. It allowed researchers to spend less time catching fish and more time studying them.
When word got around in the scientific community, Smith and Root found themselves in business.
“Then, it built upon itself, which is really interesting,” Jeff Smith said. “They got drug into the electrofishing market, not by design, not by creativity; it just happened.”
The electrofisher remains the company’s biggest seller, but it’s now available in sizes ranging from a 26-pound device that fits in a backpack to a model that can be mounted on a Smith-Root custom aluminum boat.
While the electrofisher sounds like the ideal way for any angler to hit their catch limit, the device can only be used for conducting research and fisheries management, or by fish farmers.
Smith-Root also offers electrosedation systems that are used by laboratories and hatcheries around the world, including locally on the Cowlitz River, to render fish temporarily unconscious without using chemicals or causing too much stress to the fish.
The thread that unites most Smith-Root products is direct current. Alternating current periodically reverses directions and can cause significant damage to animal cells. With direct current, the electricity flows in one direction and is comparably much gentler on cells.
Carl Burger, a Smith-Root senior scientist, said it’s hard to kill anything with direct-current electricity, save a high-voltage line or the right amount of alternating current. He boasts that although more than 60 of their electric fish barriers are in use around the world, so far they’ve had no human injuries or fatalities around them.
“People have fallen into these things, and it’s not an environment you’d like,” Burger said. “There was a story a few years ago in Michigan where a couple of inebriants tipped a canoe and drifted through one. They described it as a ‘very stiffening experience.’ ”
Smith describes Smith-Root’s business model as working in vacuums. The company’s team of engineers and scientists use electricity and acoustics to solve a variety of fishery-conservation issues and help scientists better understand and protect the animals with which they’re working.
The invasive species tools are some of the latest evolutions in their products, but they’ve used it to control alligators in Louisiana, and sea lions around oil rigs and harbors. The technology used in those systems was first designed for keeping fish out of places they didn’t belong around dams and guiding them toward fish ladders or hatcheries.
“We probably know more from the last 10 years than we had in the last 40 years,” Smith said.
Recently, the company has been working with the physics department at the University of Notre Dame. Scientists can detect what kind of fish are living in a given waterway by doing a DNA analysis of a small water sample. But the test typically costs thousands of dollars, and it often can take several weeks to get lab results. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana have figured out how to get results in minutes, and they’ve asked Smith-Root to take it to the market.
“They approached us, asking, ‘Would this be a good market for our product? Secondly, would (Smith-Root) take the product, and reduce it down to field size and produced so it could be in a boat for pennies on the dollar?’ ” Smith said.
Employee-owned
When Smith became CEO about 10 years ago, he brought with him a new vision for the company and a rare business philosophy. It started with hiring biologists who brought firsthand knowledge of the species and ecosystems for which Smith-Root was designing products.
“Many years ago, Smith-Root was a bunch of what I call ‘solder geeks’ — we built stuff — then, we needed to know what we were doing and what we could do better,” Smith said. “Since then, our knowledge of big-picture stuff has been much, much better.”
Smith’s predecessor — his brother Dave — acted more like a typical employer. He kept the profits and owned all the stock. When Smith replaced him, he converted the company to an employee-owned model.
“I decided I wanted to change that model and make everybody who makes money for the company part owner. We owed it to them,” Smith said.
Now, as he puts it, every employee “owns a piece of the rock.” He said up until that time, employees worked for a modest wage and retired with little more from the company than a handshake. Smith said the company had a hard time getting employees to work a full 40-hour week. Since becoming employee-owned, people are in the office constantly, even on weekends.
Burger, the company’s senior scientist, said Smith-Root now is a great place to work.
“Jeff has great business acumen and great family-first business model everybody loves,” Burger said.
The company doesn’t pay dividends, and it invests all of its profits into research and development. But as the company invests in itself, the value of its stock increases. Smith said stock values jumped last year by 55 percent. When employees retire, they’re paid a small lump of cash immediately, and the rest of their stock value is paid out over 10 years.
Smith-Root employs about 60 people who have an average tenure of around 15 years. It gets lots of applicants for every job opening. For employees who have been with the company long enough but want to grow their skills, Smith-Root will pay for their tuition. Smith can point to several employees who started out sweeping floors but have since moved onto IT, graphic design and engineering.
By helping employees attain higher education, “you’ve got employees for life, I think,” he said.
For its future, Smith-Root is looking at introducing faster, more humane ways to kill farmed fish into the American market. It’s planning to install a testing facility with a water tank and video monitoring system. And it is looking to make its sea lion-deterrence products more affordable.
Although Smith is of retirement age, he’s not in any hurry to do so. Working, he said, is just too enjoyable right now.
“I’m having more fun now than I’ve ever had in my entire career, with new Ph.D.s, staff, new technology, new computers. It just amazes me,” he said.
