The Future Seafood is on Land

Are land-based salmon growers the next aquaculture unicorns?

Photo by Luc Bercoth on Unsplash

"Every place where Atlantic salmon is raised in net-pens, the wild population has declined by as much as 70 percent,"

Catherine Collin, co-author of "Salmon Wars: The Dark Underbelly of Your Favorite Fish," 

It is easy to only look at the dirty side of aquaculture, lump every different farmed fish and seafood product under one umbrella, and criticize the whole industry.  However, it is essential to understand just how critical this segment of our seafood supply system has become.  

If I've learned one thing from this research, the seafood industry is unbelievably hard to understand.  First, you begin with concepts like seafood, then split it into wild-caught fisheries and aquaculture, then split each by species.  Once you reach that point, you're talking about hundreds of food products, each with its supply/demand dynamics and pricing.  And those supply forces change from season to season or even within seasons.  This data is then used by fisheries scientists around the world to set quotas or even shut down fisheries (like Peru did last year for one of its two annual anchovy seasons). 

The word "aquaculture" also means a lot of things in different contexts.  Those large offshore net pens growing tuna and salmon get all of the press due to their environmental issues, and they should.  However, growing seaweed is also aquaculture, as is farming clams and mussels that require no inputs and actually clean their environment.

Onshore, freshwater fish like tilapia, catfish, and carp are commonly farmed and have been for centuries.  

But, to understand aquaculture's contribution to our food supply, it makes sense to start at the top.  Looking at high-level data, production from wild-caught fisheries has been flat since the late 1980s, even though overall seafood production has more than doubled.  

All of the growth in seafood production for the last 30 years has been from aquaculture. And if you're wondering where this growth in aquaculture production is coming from, get ready for a story that is all too familiar.

In this same period, U.S. seafood fisheries production has mirrored that of the global industry, peaking in 1987, settling into a stable equilibrium, and trending slightly lower ever since.  

Meanwhile, imports of seafood into the U.S. have doubled. 

So, despite the headlines and horror movies, aquaculture is a critically important piece of the global food supply chain. Aquaculture won't just shut down; we don't necessarily want it to be, but it can and must be done better.  

Many small farms are doing things the same way they have for generations. This means the industry has a lot of low-hanging fruit to clean up, and companies like eFishery are getting billion-dollar valuations by tackling them. 

eFishery - An Aquaculture Unicorn

Our U.S. aquaculture industry is so small that there is an opportunity to skip all of these steps, learn from the hard lessons others have learned, and build a high-tech fish farming industry. As a recent NYT article points out, this future fish farming will likely be based on land.

+The Salmon on Your Plate Has a Troubling Cost. These Farms Offer Hope - NYT

The U.S. Aquaculture Industry Today

The U.S. is a laggard in domestic aquaculture production, but this may be a good thing.  After all, strict and complex coastal water regulations are among the reasons that have led to a lack of large-scale fish farms.  

As the NYT article mentions,

"The 2017 escape of at least 250,000 fish from a Cooke Aquaculture farm in Puget Sound led Washington State to join California and Oregon in banning ocean-based aquaculture of nonnative species, like Atlantic salmon."

According to the USDA Aquaculture Census, this is what our aquaculture industry looks like today - and you can forget about fish you might see at a sushi restaurant.  

In our case, a couple of species account for the majority of sales in each segment of food: fish, mollusks, and crustaceans. 

• Catfish sales accounted for 51 percent of all food fish sales. 

• Trout accounted for 16 percent of food fish sales. 

• Oysters accounted for 64 percent of mollusk sales. 

• Clams accounted for 31 percent of mollusk sales. 

• Crawfish raised for food accounted for just over half of crustacean sales.

• Saltwater shrimp accounted for 45 percent of crustacean sales.

[Fun fact: "Alligators accounted for $77.4 million in sales, 55 percent of total miscellaneous aquaculture sales."]

Catfish, Oysters, and Crawdaddies

So, the U.S. aquaculture industry basically sounds like a grocery store run for every fish fry and crawfish boil I went to as a kid growing up in Houston.  I'm sure the Miller Lite brewery is close by to keep the supply chain extra tight.

The report also points out that fish farm acreage is split evenly between freshwater and saltwater acres.  Considering our massive coastlines and other industrial activities in our coastal waters, I thought this was fascinating and showed a clear picture of domestic aquaculture's lack of ocean access.

To put this further into perspective, the report points out that Mississippi is the largest state in aquaculture sales. And if you're also about to Google how much coastline Mississippi has, the number is 62 miles.

(To save you more Googling, Florida has 1,350 miles of coastline and California 840.)

The Chile Example

Common environmental issues with open net aquaculture include sea lice, escapes that can affect wild populations, and degradation of the local environment. There are enough challenges with the health of our coastlines without these, and evidence is emerging that large-scale fish farming might not be such a good deal after all.

This article in The Guardian contrasted Chile's main salmon farming region to one in Argentina, which banned the practice in 2021.

"Everything in the sea has benefited from the ban on industrial salmon farming," says Mendez. "The whole ecosystem was saved, from the crabs to the seaweed; they all depend on a healthy Beagle Channel."

And others are following the lead,

"The Falkland Islands has also banned the farms, while the Canadian province of British Columbia has promised to "transition away" from salmon farming by 2025. The U.S. state of Washington has also banned them."

The Chilean salmon farming industry mirrors that of the global charts above.  It was introduced in the 1980s and grew into a major industry with global players (mainly Norwegian) over the ensuing decades.  But much of that farmed salmon that makes it onto our plates here in the U.S. has come at a cost to the locals.

"They pretty much destroyed the Chiloé area," says Casado. Now, the industry is moving south, threatening some of Chile's last stretches of pristine coastline. This includes Magallanes, a region he describes as the last frontier before Antarctica, and home to the Kawésqar national park.

The park has become the new frontline in the battle against salmon farming due to a quirk in the law that means only its land, not its waters, are protected. Yet ironically, the Kawésqar, an Indigenous people who live in the area, are a nomadic "canoe people", who live on the water, not the land.

+Crabs, kelp and mussels: Argentina's waters teem with life – could a fish farm ban do the same for Chile? - The Guardian

Jumping the Curve

Back in the U.S., considering the bans covering the entire West Coast and the state-by-state nature of legislation (not to mention water temperatures and hurricanes in the Gulf), offshore net-based aquaculture as a significant food source doesn't seem to be in the cards.  

However, there is an opportunity to move further along the technological curve and jump to the latest, most efficient, and environmentally sustainable forms of fish farming.  As the NYT article above points out, that is happening in a couple of instances, and it happens on land.

The article introduces two companies—LocoCoho and Atlantic Sapphire—that are leading the charge in bringing land-based salmon farming to the U.S.  

Land-based aquaculture has distinct advantages when it comes to all three main environmental concerns of farm-raised salmon.  There are no escapes, no degradation of local wild waters, and the sea lice isn't an issue. 

The recirculated water systems filter the water constantly in closed-loop systems.  However, this isn't to say that growing salmon on land is easy. Like other land-based production models, the problem stems from cost and energy use.  And air conditioning…

Atlantic Sapphire had an issue last year when peak temperatures at its South Florida plant got too hot for installed water coolers to keep up. The rising water temperatures were a miniature global warming event, except the fish couldn't migrate to cooler waters. The event led to a write-off of the current batch and more capital expenditure on cooling infrastructure and power—both expensive problems.

Despite the setbacks and natural development curve that comes with new technologies, the one Atlantic Sapphire facility is projected to eventually be able to produce almost half of the U.S. salmon imports based on current levels.  Additionally, the company is already coordinating with its local utility to get 30% of its power from renewable sources.

As they like to point out, "our fish don't fly."

Look, I’m all for the restoration of wild fish stocks, and I prefer to eat wild caught fish whenever possible. My goal here is to put aquaculture in perspective as a necessary and viable part of our food system and point out that there are opportunities to make it better.

But producing our #1 food fish (second only to shrimp by volume) close to large markets using renewable energy and recirculated water, all while removing the most common issues with farming in the wild?  

I’m willing to give it a chance.