Efforts to establish a human consumption market for some of Port Lincoln's sardines are being hampered by the size of the fish.

"These smaller fish have sort of mucked us up really, because we're just at a stand-still, we can't do a thing with the value adding side of it," said fisherman Peter White.

Most of the locally caught sardines, which are also known as pilchards, are used as farm fodder for fattening tuna, with a much smaller portion processed into recreational fishing bait and pet food.

But the Whites are among three fishing families trying to push the sardines further up the food chain.

"It's very similar to an Australian Herring or Tommy Ruff," said Peter White.

"We fillet it and you can pickle it, you can smoke it, batter, crumb it. You can do all sorts with it and they're beautiful to eat."

The Australian Seafood CRC and the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI) are working with processors to improve the shelf-life and marketing of the delicate fish.

"There's around a $35 million canned sardine market in Australia all of which is being supplied from overseas, so there is a domestic demand," said Bob Fleming from the Seafood CRC.

"And we think with the right product, packaged properly in a convenient offering ... we can develop products for the domestic market as well as the export market."

While processing sardines into human food is more costly and time consuming that turning it into tuna feed, the plate-worthy produce fetches around ten times the price.

The incentive to invest may be there, but without the stock, the returns are not.

"Trying to access good sized fish is our biggest challenge at the moment," said Peter White.

"It's certainly a different year ... we've got maybe a bit colder water than normal. The big fish haven't come in like they normally would."

The South Australian sardine fishery is Australia's biggest fishery by weight, growing from 10 tonnes to 34,000 tonnes over the last twenty years, with most of the fish coming out of the southern Spencer Gulf.

SARDI has been surveying the pilchard population for a decade and says the smaller fish this season does not mean the resource is being overfished.

"We've just done an egg production survey from basically the south-east right through to the head of the (Great Australian) Bight and we found eggs throughout that entire region," said SARDI's Wild Fisheries Program Leader Tim Ward.

"The fishery only operates in about 15 per cent of that area in the southern Spencer Gulf, where there were lots of small fish, but there were big fish through that entire range of the species."

For more on this sardine story, watch Landline this Sunday at noon on ABC1.