Keo Fish Farms Celebrates 50 Years with Record Profits & Sustainable Growth

One of Keo Fish Farms’ 100 different fish ponds. The farm produces mostly hybrid striped bass and triploid grass carp, as well as smaller numbers of other breeds like catfish and crappie. (Photo provided)

Keo Fish Farms may be turning 50 this year, but the family-owned and operated business is still swimming forward with sustainability measures and business growth.

Officially founded in 1975, Keo Fish Farms is the largest producer of hybrid striped bass fry and fingerlings in the world. It’s also one of the top three largest producers of triploid grass carp in the United States.

And for the past three years, the business has seen record-breaking profit and sales reached by October of each year. The farm has also already had its biggest crop ever this year.

Cleo and Martha Melkovitz actually started Keo Fish Farms in the 1950s with large minnow ponds. The operation was officially incorporated in 1975 — hence the 50th anniversary — and in 1986, Mike Freeze joined Martha Melkovitz as a co-owner.

Melkovitz is now a partner in the farm. Freeze leads operations with Seth Summerside, the farm’s general manager. Summerside is Freeze’s son-in-law.

The farm produces 100 million to 120 million hybrid striped bass fry annually. Fry are young, newly hatched bass that are still in the stage of having a yolk sac for nourishment. In total, the farm produces 130 million to 150 million fish per year.

Freeze told Arkansas Business that 80% of the farm’s business is in food fish production, and 20% is in pond stocking or similar projects. The hybrid striped bass can cost anywhere from 25 cents to $2.50 each, based on size. The triploid grass carp, or the sterile version of grass carp used for controlling aquatic vegetation, range from $3.25 to $15.75 each, depending on size.

The farm ships to around 45 states, but also internationally. It shipped to Spain and Barbados for the first time last year, and has business in Israel, Taiwan, Korea, China, Italy and Hungary.

Freeze said a lot of the farm’s success is due to adaptability. Even though Keo had never shipped internationally until the late 1990s, “we were willing to take that risk,” Freeze said.

“When I started, there were hundreds of small fish farms. There’s not hardly any of those left,” Freeze said. “You’ve got to be willing to adapt and change. If you keep doing things the same old way, people are going to leave you behind.”

The business is still adapting, too. Summerside helped move the business from 100% paper to complete digital operations during the last three years. The company also introduced a capital budget with a focus on sustainability and innovation. And the farm’s location has seen significant renovations in recent years.

“I want to make sure that the business hopefully continues another 50 years,” Freeze said. “It was a lot of hard work, a lot of sacrifice.”

Solar Initiative

One of the main ways Keo Fish Farms is adapting is through a series of sustainability initiatives, including a $1.5 million investment in a solar project in partnership with Delta Solar of Little Rock.

The 856-kilowatt solar array will cover approximately 4 acres near the farm’s substation. Freeze was initially skeptical, but said Summerside convinced him the benefits were worth the upfront investment.

“I’m like sandpaper,” Summerside said. “I gradually keep bringing it up.”

Completion for the array was initially estimated for November, but the federal freeze on obligated funds — specifically, a $751,842 grant the farm was awarded under the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) — has caused disruption.

The funding was appropriated by Congress, and legally committed through a signed contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help finance the solar project, but for now, the farm had to put all aspects of the project on hold.

This halts a “critical” step in reducing energy costs and ensuring long-term sustainability, Summerside said.

“Business moves at the speed of trust and when you’re unable to trust a signed contract from the USDA, it obviously causes disruption that ripples across all aspects of the business,” Summerside said.

But once the array is up, the benefits will be visible. It has a projected year-one savings of $110,726 and $4.1 million in savings during the next 30 years.

Keo Fish Farms is one of the largest energy consumers in Lonoke County, and losing power is extremely costly for the business. Summerside said the array will help take away some of the stress from a variable that “fluctuates.”

More Sustainability

Keo Fish Farms has also dedicated 25% of its property to hardwood trees, with more than 50,000 trees planted. These trees will produce about 58 million pounds of oxygen during the next 30 years.

The farm has partnered with First Mile Development on the Lone Oak Wind Project, part of a 650-megawatt renewable energy initiative in Lonoke County. “Our involvement in this project aligns with our belief that renewable energy is a vital revenue source for farmers,” Summerside said.

The wind farm project plans to use existing transmission infrastructure from the coal-fired plant at Redfield that is scheduled to be shut down by the end of 2028.

“We plan to begin planting wildflowers in the fall along the outside of our levees to support bees and other pollinators,” Summerside said of another sustainability project.

The farm is also rotating in new cattle to graze the levees, an approach that reduces mowing, improves soil health and keeps the ecosystem in balance. The farm already uses some cattle for “mowing.”

But what may be the most important sustainability initiatives for the farm are its water conservation efforts. As an aquaculture company, water is the “foundation of everything we do,” Summerside said.

The farm has 37 vats for fish, each holding 4,000 gallons of water. It has 100 different fish ponds.

The water projects are especially important because the county’s aquifer is being depleted faster than replenished, Summerside said.

As part of the capital budget, the farm built a new water filtration house, where solids, harmful substances and pathogens are removed from the water to create a suitable environment for fish growth, with phase one of the project completed in March. The new house aims to create significant water savings over multiple years.

Aiming to advance water conservation and treatment systems, Keo Fish Farms is partnering with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to improve water filtration techniques. The project will focus on optimizing water filtration, particularly in the removal of iron and organic matter without the use of chemicals.

The research will explore innovative filtration methods, material selection and system design, specific to Keo Fish Farms’ environmental and operational conditions. The project work will begin in June with completion targeted before World Water Day in March 2026.

Another aspect of business sustainability is employee retention. Keo has “basically zero turnover,” Summerside said. And that’s because the company has a “work to live, not live to work mentality.”

The farm offers profit-sharing, 25 days of paid time off and a set work schedule, which is uncommon in agriculture, Summerside said. The farm has about 21 employees.

Looking forward, Freeze said he wants the farm to “continue to prosper,” and believes that with Summerside, “it will.”

“Anyone I think that’s put their sweat and tears into something, they hope that it continues, even if it changes,” Freeze said. “Seth is an innovator.”

Summerside said everything he is planning from 2025 to 2075 is “to honor Mike and Martha and what they’ve built.”

“We might not know what it’s going to look like, but we want it to be as successful as it is today in 50 years from now,” Summerside said. “That’s really my only goal.”