If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’ em.
That’s what a group of Metro East investors and a world-famous chef hope to do with the invasive Asian carp, which has taken over the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers and eaten so much plankton, it’s decimating the populations of native game fish.
The big-headed carp, which can grow up to 100 pounds, was brought here 30 years ago from China to help Kansas catfish farmers clean algae from their ponds. But flooding in the 1990s caused the Asian carp to spread from the ponds to rivers and now the epidemic is the worst in Illinois.
Childhood friends and business partners, Gray “Butch” Magee, former owner of a Memphis alloy company, and attorney Ben Allen, an associate at Lakin Law Firm, wanted to do something about it. The owners of the Loading Dock Bar and Grill in Grafton saw the huge fish jump from the waters near another project of theirs, the WindRivers luxury condominium complex at the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: St. Louis Business Journal.