Fish Farming in the Open Ocean

From aboard the ship the Meriel B, a plastic tube about the circumference of an apple pie reaches into the water and sucks up fish from below.

One by one fifteen hundred fish drop into icy tanks of water.

Fishermen scoop them up, flop them onto a cutting board, bleed, gut, and pack them ice.

Aside from the vacuuming part, the process is pretty standard for a commercial fishing boat.

But these fish have been living in an underwater cage about six miles off the coast of Portsmouth near the Isles of Shoals.

Langan: This is the most exposed site where anybody’s doing cage culture for fish anywhere in the world.

UNH Professor Rich Langan has led the team of divers, engineers, biologists, and fishermen for the last eight years on a quest to find new real estate for aquaculture.

Langan: And I think what we’re demonstrating here is that you can have a very exposed site and using the right technology you can produce fish. Which is something that 10 years ago people did not think at all possible.

Langan’s team has raised successfully haddock, halibut, and cod in these experimental cages.

Langan: We’re particularly enthusiastic about cod fish. We seem to see better growth than we see with haddock. High quality fish. Some opportunities for a live fish market as well as a fresh market. In terms of building out to a business plan, cod is probably the species we’re going to be concentrating on.

Langan sees fifty years down the road a booming industry able to reduce the current seventy percent dependence on imported seafood.

But until then, there’s one big snag:

Rubino: There’s apparently no mechanism for permitting marine aquaculture in federal waters.

Michael Rubino is the manager of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Aquaculture Program.

State waters go out only six miles from shore, and beyond that is federal.

Rubino’s group is working on getting these waters permit-able for farming through a bill that is currently in Congress.

Rubino: I’d say in the Gulf of Mexico there are a good half a dozen commercial projects at various stages of design waiting for a regulatory environment that will allow them to begin operations. The same thing is true in the Caribbean and off of Hawaii.

Rubino says New England is a step behind these areas because of problems with the technology.

But there is also concern over how much commercial fishermen in the Gulf of Maine will embrace off shore fish farming.

Langan says that reserving space in the ocean for farms makes what has been traditionally a common resource exclusive.

Langan: I think there’s also a sense that they feel a little bit threatened that they lose some market share if we’re producing the same type of product that they are. We just have to make sure that we are not cutting into the market that they put their fish into.

Fishermen aren’t the only ones apprehensive about farming out at sea.

Rebecca Goldburg, a senior scientist for Environmental Defense, says these open ocean farms illicit the same concerns as those near shore, like pollution.

Goldburg: We estimated that a five billion dollar a year open ocean aquaculture industry would produce the same amount nitrogen, which is a key pollutant in ocean waters, as the entire North Carolina hog industry of 10 million hogs or the untreated waste from 17 million people.

Open ocean farms rely on dilution to disperse fecal matter, but Goldburg says that doesn’t make the problem go away.

Goldburg: The solution to air pollution was to build tall smoke stacks because if it went up high in the atmosphere the pollution would spread out we wouldn’t have to worry about it. Similarly while the ocean can absorb a certain amount of waste we shouldn’t treat it as a vast dumping ground.

Goldburg also says that farming carnivorous fish like haddock and cod uses more fish to feed them than are produced.

Her concern with the permitting legislation, she says, is that there is little outside input to make sure the environment is adequately protected.

But Langan’s group is addressing some of these concerns, and he says the industry can be designed with environmental safeguards.

SOQ