TV celebrity chefs like Jacques Pepin and Bobby Flay have stopped by Sally Eason’s Sunburst Trout Farm. Eason says she plans to start testing a trout caviar-based skincare line by the end of the year.by Mackensy Lunsford
photos by Rebecca D’Angelo

Sally Eason’s eyes moisten as she tells the story, and it’s hard to discern what bothers her most—the event itself or that anyone could be so calculatingly cruel. “It destroyed everything,” she says, recalling flames that lit up the sky like an untimely sunrise. On August 10, 2006, she was driving toward her seven-acre trout farm in the pre-dawn darkness. “I thought, wow, those are flames—how could that be?” There were no houses around for miles. As Eason approached her property, she noticed something orange fanned across the highway. “Nothing was computing in my brain,” she says. Suddenly she realized with a sickening jolt that trout caviar was covering the road and the flames that licked the sky were consuming her business at an alarming speed.

Sunburst Trout Farm sits on a meandering and impossibly beautiful hunk of land that sidles up against the verdant expanse of the Pisgah National Forest in Bethel, 12 or so miles outside of Canton. The crystal-clear waters in which the rainbow trout swim course through the pebbles and roots of the Shining Rock Wilderness watershed before they empty into Sunburst’s concrete trout runways.

Sally Eason, a vivacious redhead, inherited this land and the business founded by her father, a World War II veteran who dropped out of engineering school at Yale to pursue a life of aquaculture in the mountains. Eason happened into the trout business by accident, having left her job as a nurse temporarily—or so she thought. Her father pulled her in to do payroll at age 32 when the bookkeeper suddenly stopped coming to work. Before Eason knew it, she was swept up into the current of running Sunburst. “I don’t know how that happened,” she says with a smile, “but I wouldn’t change anything.” Eason now heads a team of 18 employees, including her husband Steve, their sons Wes and Ben and their sons’ wives, Lila and Anna. Eason has expanded the facility to include a professional kitchen that tests recipes for new items like trout dip with sour cream and cream cheese.

A typical “fish day” at Sunburst begins with a daybreak netting by hand of some 500 pounds of thrashing trout. The fish are placed in an ice slurry, where they get colder and colder until they’re still. “It placates them and they go to sleep and die very peacefully,” Eason says. “It’s very humane.” Then the fish are processed through a gauntlet of whirring blades, one swiftly filleting them, another pulling the pin bones. Despite the modernity of it all, the farm adheres to the notion of “doing it by hand with a technological twist.”

Unfortunately, all of this finely engineered equipment was made possible by tragedy. The fire that swept through the farm in August of 2006 had been deliberately set. Emergency vehicles were not far behind Sally’s car early on the morning of August 10—one of her employees had seen the flames and called 911. By the time police and firefighters arrived, however, it was too late. Thieves had liberated Sunburst Trout Farms of 370 pounds of caviar, inferior eggs that Eason had been saving to start a cosmetics line.

After an investigation, detectives knew this much—that the thieves took the caviar by wheelbarrow through the plant and down to the loading dock where they dumped it onto a pickup. The caviar was in big heavy boxes piled high on the truck, and the criminals were likely peeling out of the driveway to make their getaway just minutes before Eason arrived. In their haste, a box toppled over and burst open when it hit the road. Eason imagines that the caviar might have been passed off and sold as a black market luxury item, and not the inferior product it actually was. “I think they got up to Brighton Beach in New York and it was probably overseas within 12 hours. And perhaps dyed black,” she adds.

Detectives also found that the property had been doused liberally with accelerant. Someone had intended for everything to burn, and burn completely. Oddly enough, whoever it was had removed a picture display of Eason’s deceased father and Sunburst founder Dick Jennings and put it out of harm’s way. Sally and Steve Eason were sequestered and questioned for hours that summer but cleared of suspicion. “When they saw how underinsured we were, they thought, ‘Hmm, they wouldn’t have done this.’”

Eason, her family and local detectives are still stumped about the crime. But while the culprits remain unpunished, Sunburst has rebounded with a vengeance. For weeks after the fire, nothing was left of the fish processing area, so the entire staff crammed into one small room and worked at tiny stations divided by shower curtains. A dozen regional chefs and restaurants, including Laurey Masterton of Laurey’s Catering in downtown Asheville, masterminded a “Celebrate Sunburst” fundraiser to aid in the farm’s reconstruction and collected around $5,000. “In the scheme of our loss, [the amount of money] was small, but in what it meant to us, it was huge,” she says. Eventually, the company built a bigger, more modernized fish facility that shortened fish processing time between the pond and the cooler.

Before the fire, according to Eason, Sunburst was profitable for the first time in its history. But the fire put an end to that profit-making trend, and the two years of drought that followed the incident only added to the company’s financial woes. In a drought, what little surface water there is warms up. That’s no good for trout, which like to live in cool, 50- to 60-degree water. When the water is too hot, trout are also more prone to disease, which means their death rates are higher. “At the end of one year of drought, your inventory is diminished at least 50 percent,” Eason says. An agricultural rule of thumb, she says, is that, for every year of drought, it takes a farm seven years to recover.

Sunburst is back on more solid footing in 2009, but the farm is still reeling from the recent loss of its biggest wholesale customer, a loyal buyer for 15 years. “It was a price issue on their part,” she says. “They were 33 percent of our annual income, so it was a big hit.” Still, the company is adding restaurant clients daily and now sends trout to more than 185 high-end restaurants, including the Grove Park Inn and Biltmore Estate. Sunburst also sells trout sausage, trout jerky, trout cakes and trout mousse to grocery stores like Earth Fare and Greenlife.

And it’s clear both Sally and Sunburst have undeniable star appeal. The farm’s trout and golden-orange caviar have graced the pages of food magazines like Gourmet and Bon Appetit, and the Easons have appeared on a handful of TV shows. In 2005, French chef Jacques Pepin showed up to film an episode of Chefs A’Field on PBS, and Bobby Flay stopped by in 2004 with the show FoodNation. Eason says the Food Network’s Alton Brown plans to visit the farm in August.

Later this year, the company will launch a caviar skincare line that’s been on a back burner for seven years. Trout caviar contains omega-3 fatty acids and has other rejuvenating qualities, Eason says. She’s thinking of calling the product line Esther, after the beautiful Persian queen in the Old Testament. Despite caviar’s carrying an aura of a luxury item—not exactly the best selling point in a recession—sales have exceeded Eason’s expectations, accounting for about five percent of Sunburst’s profits year-to-date.

Eason does have some concerns about the long-term future of aquaculture in America. “We’re either going to be catapulted forward into the next two decades and be able to make a difference in world sustenance or we’re all going through the tubes,” she says, explaining that she’s seen many trout farmers struggling with the recent drought, a souring economy and the fact that there are no government subsidies for fish farming. Indeed, proposed aid for aquaculture—to the tune of $50 million—was recently eliminated from the 2009 economic stimulus package. Eason says that, in a year with a more normal weather pattern, Sunburst can raise a quarter of a million pounds of fish on seven acres. Compared to the relatively limited yield of beef and pork, which require more land and resources per pound of meat, that figure is staggering. Eason says selling the idea of farmed trout to the public, though, is both a business proposition and an ongoing education effort.
For now, she’s proud to report the company is keeping its head above water, so to speak. That’s good news for her family and for her 18 employees, all of whom stayed with the business through the 2006 fire. “Living through a disaster with someone creates a very unique bond,” she says. “You know you can count on those people.”  

For more information on Sunburst Trout Company visit www.sunbursttrout.com.