This Man Started a Side Hustle, and Now He Makes $1M a Year Selling Fish and This Is How He Does It

When Ty Walker first looked at an abandoned trout hatchery in southwest Virginia, it did not look like a million-dollar business waiting to happen.

The water was not running. The grass was knee-high. The property appeared neglected, and Walker had no real background in fish farming.

But one phone call about an old hatchery for sale in Newcastle changed the direction of his life.

In an UpFlip conversation with host Paul Bulanov, Walker explained how he and his wife went from raising livestock on his grandparents’ farm to operating a trout business that now brings in about $1.1 million in annual revenue.

The business, called Smoke in Chimneys, supplies trout to high-end restaurants, including Michelin-starred kitchens, while also selling smoked fish and direct-to-consumer boxes.

Walker’s story is not a simple “buy a farm and get rich” story. It took years of cleanup, trial and error, cash shortages, failed attempts, and a grocery-store job just to survive long enough for the business to reach the market.

That is what makes the story interesting. The million-dollar number gets attention, but the harder lesson is how long it took before there was even a product to sell.

An Old Trout Hatchery Becomes a New Opportunity

Walker told Bulanov that the farm sits in Newcastle, Virginia, near the national forest.

The property covers around four acres and includes ponds, hatchery facilities, concrete raceways, and a spring that produces roughly 3,000 gallons of water per minute.

That spring is the heart of the business.

Walker said the cold limestone spring keeps the farm’s water around 52 to 54 degrees, which is ideal for raising trout year-round.

“You’re in southwest Virginia in Newcastle, and we’re a revitalized 1930s trout hatchery,” Walker told Bulanov. “We’re basically raising trout the way they did 100 years ago.”

The hatchery was originally built by the Department of the Interior in the 1930s as a research facility. It was designed to help figure out how trout could be raised in rural environments using fresh, gravity-fed water.

Walker and his wife were not searching for a fish farm when the opportunity appeared.

Before buying the property, they were living on Walker’s grandparents’ farm. His wife operated a raw-milk herd share, while they also raised pastured pork and grass-fed beef.

Then a friend called and suggested that Walker look at the old trout farm.

At first, he was doubtful.

“I got up here and the water wasn’t even on,” Walker said. “There was no visible water running through any of the pipes. The grass was knee-high.”

But a former worker named Jerry showed him enough about the property to get the water flowing and prove that the farm could work.

That was enough for Walker to take the risk.

Three Years Before There Was Anything to Sell

The early years were much harder than the finished farm makes them look.

Walker told Bulanov that the first year was mostly spent cleaning up the abandoned property. The second year was spent learning how to raise fish. The third year involved working with the state to become able to process trout legally.

That meant three full years before the business had a product ready to market.

Walker said the infrastructure itself was not the most expensive part in the beginning. He estimated that the physical cleanup and basic improvements cost around $10,000.

The real cost came from inexperience.

“It was the deficit of what we didn’t know we needed to do,” he said.

Walker had some savings from operating a few Airbnb properties. But over the course of two years, that money disappeared.

He said about $60,000 was gone before the farm was producing enough to support itself.

At one point, he took a job at a grocery store to help keep the lights on and feed his family.

“I literally had $6 in my bank account,” Walker said. “I was like, ‘It’s all over. I’m going to go get a coffee.’”

He spent $5.50 on a latte.

That moment is easy to laugh at now, but it captures what many small-business owners know too well. The early phase of a business can feel less like building a dream and more like trying to keep one small part of life from collapsing.

Walker said that same year, the business made about $120,000 in sales.

He was not finished. He was only at the beginning.

Learning to Raise Trout the Hard Way

Walker had zero experience with fish when he bought the hatchery.

He said there were not many modern resources available for someone trying to operate a century-old trout system. He bought old books on eBay, studied them, talked to other trout farms, and made expensive mistakes.

“We were killing more fish than what we were raising,” he told Bulanov.

The farm now holds between 50,000 and 100,000 fish at any given time, including eggs, fry, smaller fish, and mature trout ready for harvest.

The process starts with eggs, which Walker said are kept cold before being gradually warmed and placed into hatching jars. Water moves through the jars to keep the eggs oxygenated and moving, similar to how eggs would move in a natural stream.

Once the fry hatch, they are moved into troughs. Later, they go into concrete raceways and eventually into earthen ponds where they spend much of their lives.

Walker said the larger trout are often around two years old by the time they are ready to be harvested.

The farm relies heavily on gravity-fed water from the spring. Walker explained that fresh trout are mostly water, so water quality becomes one of the biggest factors in the quality of the final product.

“If you have clean water, you’re going to have a clean product,” he said.

That is also part of how he separates his business from the negative reputation sometimes attached to farm-raised fish.

Walker said he started creating content because many people assume fish farming means crowded pens or poor conditions. He wanted people to see the ponds, the spring water, and the way the fish are raised.

“This is what a fish farm could be and should be,” he said.

The Business Runs on Fish, Feed, and Relationships

Walker’s farm does not rely heavily on paid advertising.

He told Bulanov that most of the marketing comes from organic content, referrals, chef relationships, and in-person outreach.

About 85% of the farm’s fresh trout goes to restaurants. The other 15% is frozen and sold through smaller grocery stores, co-ops, and direct-to-consumer orders.

Walker said the fine-dining community is smaller than people may think, which makes relationships especially valuable.

Instead of relying on a sales pitch, he often showed up in person with a cooler full of fish.

“My pitch was showing up in person with a cooler of fish,” he said. “I wanted the product to speak for itself.”

That approach helped him win over chefs who were willing to try the trout.

Walker described one major breakthrough involving Blue Hill and chef Dan Barber. He wanted the restaurant as a customer, but Barber told him he did not want rainbow trout. He wanted brook trout.

Walker went back, hatched and raised brook trout, and returned two years later with the fish Barber had asked for.

“He said what he wanted and we were able to deliver,” Walker said.

That story may be the clearest example of how the business grew. It was not built on speed. It was built on taking feedback seriously, then doing the difficult work needed to meet a high standard.

The Numbers Behind a $1.1 Million Fish Farm

Walker gave UpFlip a breakdown of the farm’s annual revenue and expenses.

The business brings in about $1.1 million a year in gross revenue.

But that does not mean Walker keeps anything close to $1 million.

According to the numbers he shared, major annual expenses include around $120,000 in labor, $156,000 in shipping, $96,000 in fingerlings, $84,000 in feed, $96,000 in live fish, $66,000 in packaging, $120,000 in processing, and $72,000 tied to marketing-related work and travel.

Walker also pays himself a salary of around $60,000.

The total expenses add up to about $882,000.

That leaves roughly $218,000 in net profit, or a margin of about 19.8%.

Those numbers show why revenue alone can be misleading.

A business can make over $1 million a year and still have a relatively narrow margin after labor, shipping, feed, inventory, processing, and packaging are paid.

Walker said the farm spends around $3,500 a month on feed. Shipping alone can cost about $10,000 a month.

The expenses are not glamorous, but they are the difference between a business that survives and one that slowly runs out of cash.

Raising Prices Saved the Business

Walker said one of the hardest business decisions he made involved raising the price of fresh trout.

For a period of time, the farm sold trout for about $11.50 per pound. But after going through the numbers, Walker realized the fish cost roughly $15 per pound to produce.

The business was losing money on every sale.

“It was a tread-water type of situation,” he said. “We were just going to slowly bleed out.”

Eventually, Walker raised the price to $18 per pound.

He said he worried about losing customers and spent months agonizing over the decision. Some customers did leave, especially smaller stores and consumer-facing buyers who had been used to paying less.

But many customers understood.

Walker recalled advice from the owner of White Oak Pastures, who told him that undercharging could actually hurt customers because it meant the business might not survive long enough to keep serving them.

That idea is worth remembering.

Small businesses often worry that raising prices will make customers angry. Sometimes it does. But a product that is priced below its true cost is not a bargain if the business eventually disappears.

Walker said the smoked trout sells for around $25 per pound because it requires more labor, including filleting, brining, smoking, packing, and shipping.

Building a Business Without Debt

Walker told Bulanov that he wanted to build the business without major debt.

He said staying debt-free gave him more creative freedom and kept the farm from becoming overwhelmed by payments on equipment and vehicles it did not absolutely need.

“We just did it all the hard way,” Walker said.

That meant using personal vehicles for deliveries, growing slowly, and avoiding unnecessary purchases.

The farm is now near capacity at its current location. Walker said a second facility about 45 minutes away could help the business reach around $1.5 million in revenue.

But he does not appear interested in turning Smoke in Chimneys into a massive national operation.

“We’re never going to be able to sell trout to the whole world,” he said. “That’s not our goal anyway.”

His goal is to turn farm-raised trout into a premium product that chefs and customers actively want.

That is a more realistic vision than chasing endless growth. Not every business needs to become huge. Sometimes the strongest version is a profitable operation with a clear identity, steady customers, and a product people trust.

Walker’s story began with an old hatchery, a risky decision, and years of not knowing whether it would work.

Today, he runs a seven-figure trout farm, supplies high-end restaurants, and has built a business around a product most people would never think to sell.

But the real lesson is not that anyone can buy a fish farm and make $1 million.

It is that a business can take far longer than expected, require far more work than expected, and still succeed if the owner keeps learning, fixes mistakes, charges enough to survive, and refuses to quit at the point when most people would assume it is already over.