Far More Than Fate: Fisheries Alum Makes His Mark on China, the World

By: Jamie Creamer

Rudy Schmittou is an Auburn alum and professor emeritus in the College of Agriculture's Department of Fisheries and Allied Aquacultures.

Over the course of his remarkable career, he has made major contributions to the development of fish farming, both in the U.S. and abroad, sharing major responsibility for Auburn University's unequaled reputation in international aquacultural development.

He has earned numerous prestigious awards from a diverse host of presenters, ranging from the Philippine and Chinese governments–both for introducing innovative techniques that helped revolutionize and advance the fish farming industries there–to the United Soybean Board here in the U.S., for creating significant export opportunities for American soybeans to be used in fish feed in China.

And for this nation's aquaculture industry, Schmittou played a lead role in getting an aquacultural development act through Congress and a national aquaculture plan for USDA in the late 1970s, and he provided the energy and intellectual guidance for a catfish cage culture initiative in Alabama that permitted small-scale production and productive use of farm ponds in the state.

But if you commend him for his myriad successes and accomplishments, the overly modest Schmittou just shakes his head at the accolades. He attributes it all, more or less, to fate.

“It's amazing how, throughout my life, all of these opportunities that never should have come my way have come at the perfect times,” Schmittou says. “I was destined to be right where I am.”

Colleagues wave off that destiny line, saying that the visionary's work in China alone is worthy of World Food Prize recognition. But even they would have to agree that fate seemingly had a hand in shaping a teen-age Schmittou's future back in the early 1950s. It was fate in the form of football.

An unaspiring student academically, the lightning-fast Schmittou found his place on the gridiron, playing on both sides of the ball for the Isaac Litton High Lions in Nashville. Had it not been for football, Schmittou would have quit school.

“I had eight brothers and sisters–I was the ninth of nine–and none of them finished high school,” Schmittou says. “I wouldn't have, either, if I hadn't wanted to play football so bad. I lived for football. And besides, if you played football, you were popular with the girls, and I didn't mind that at all.”

He was a standout for the Lions, which is how he wound up going to college. Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville offered him an athletic scholarship, and he jumped at the chance to take his football to the next level.

“But somebody could've offered me 10 scholarships, and if they hadn't been to play football, I wouldn't have considered them,” Schmittou says.

As a Tennessee Tech Golden Eagle–one who years later was inducted into the school's Sports Hall of Fame–football came first, then track, and, last, academics. Because he had to declare some kind of major, though, he settled on general biology, without much thought as to what he would do with such a degree.

In fact, he was halfway planning, once he finished college, to head to New Mexico to work with his brother–as a diesel mechanic.

But once again, destiny intervened when a buddy set him up on a blind date with a girl named Nan, who later became Mrs. Rudy Schmittou. He decided that perhaps it was time to aspire to some sort of career.

He settled on fisheries.

“I didn't even know what fisheries was,” he says. “I only knew I wanted to do something that would let me be outside, and fisheries sounded like something where I could do that.”

Actually, though, when he started looking into the fisheries program at Auburn University, he for the first time found something–besides football–that interested him.

He learned how the program began when AU entomology professor Homer S. Swingle and a few of his colleagues, disappointed with the fishing around Lee County, built and started managing a pond specifically for fishing. From there developed the world's foremost fisheries programs.

“The more I learned about it, the more the whole concept of fish farming intrigued me,” Schmittou says.

According to Schmittou, his academic record was far from impressive and, in all honesty, he wasn't a likely grad school candidate. But Swingle apparently saw something he liked in Schmittou.

“There was no way, with my grades, that I would ever have gotten into graduate school, but Dr. Swingle and Dr. (Wayne) Shell did a lot of arguing and went to bat for me, and they got me in,” Schmittou says.

That was in 1962. Schmittou earned his master's in 1964, worked for two years with the state conservation and natural resources department, then returned to AU to pursue his doctorate in aquaculture.

In the two years Schmittou had been gone, Swingle had grown increasingly involved in international aquaculture. So highly was Swingle regarded as the nation's leading authority on fish farming that the U.S. government had begun to send him to developing countries, such as Bangladesh, Thailand and Taiwan, to demonstrate how to produce food fish at a low cost. The government believed the surest way to prevent Third World countries from falling to communism was to teach them how to feed themselves by producing a stable food supply. Swingle was the master teacher.

“When I came back for my doctorate, Dr. Swingle was putting 100 percent into international work–it was almost an obsession–and he wanted me to get involved,” Schmittou says. “So, I started traveling with him.”

And thus, like Swingle, Schmittou began to find international work all-consuming. The two literally went around the world, and more than once, typically for six weeks at a time, visiting developing countries that had been practicing aquaculture for hundreds and, some, even thousands, of years.

“They were going in the wrong direction with minimum-input aquaculture,” Schmittou says. “Our mission was to show them they needed to be intensive, to go to feeds, and to confine and raise fish at high densities, instead of wasting land and water doing things the way they'd always done them.”

The time spent traveling with Swingle was yet another of those amazing opportunities that Schmittou says landed in his lap.

“Dr. Swingle was a teacher, and from the time we would head off somewhere, he'd be teaching–not academics, like chemistry, but his philosophy of farm pond management and of population growth and the environment and social problems,” Schmittou says.

Schmittou soaked up every word. When Swingle died just before his slated 1973 retirement, Schmittou was there to pick up the reins of international aquaculture development and take it to even higher levels.

He, of course, downplays his work abroad, saying once again that it's all just been a matter of opportunities and destiny. But colleagues say otherwise.

“Once Rudy was turned on to international aquaculture development, there was no diverting him,” says David Rouse, interim Department of Fisheries and Allied Aquacultures head. “He was extremely focused and, next to Swingle, probably has had more impact on aquaculture development in the Philippines, Indonesia and China than anyone in the world.”

John Jensen, special assistant for agriculture to AU Interim President Ed Richardson and former head of AU's fisheries department, concurs.

“Rudy has a remarkable understanding of global issues–not just aquaculture but culture, people, the environment,” Jensen says. “His focus is on the ecology, how what we do impacts the world around us and how we can use our resources in ways that leave the environment healthy for future generations.”

Although international aquaculture was his focus while on the faculty at AU, Schmittou left his mark on academics as well, retooling and strengthening the master's fisheries program and serving as an exceptional classroom professor.

“He was such a marvelous teacher,” Jensen says, “that Auburn continues to benefit from relations with his former students”–a group that includes ministers of agriculture, high-level government decision makers in the U.S. and abroad, university professors, directors of research and development institutions and leading private-sector producers.

“His students are all over the world,” Jensen says. “And they believe in Rudy Schmittou. They are his disciples.”

Schmittou retired from the university in 1991 to take on an extremely challenging role as a consultant for the American Soybean Association in China. His mission: to convince China producers to abandon a centuries-old aquaculture production system that depended on pond fertilization with heavy applications of manure–a system that was creating an environmental disaster and was inefficient and wasteful of land and other resources–and to convert to highly efficient feed-based technology using high-protein, soybean-based feed.

It is in that position that Schmittou's contributions have been epic–worthy, Jensen says, of World Food Prize recognition. That prize is the foremost international award recognizing individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.

“His work has improved the bottom line for American soybean farmers, it's given consumers in China a better product, it's provided for a sustainable system of production and it's reduced pollution,” Jensen says. “And to do that almost single-handedly in a country of 1.3 billion people, that's phenomenal.”

Phenomenal, and a whole lot more than fate.

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