Fish Farming Of The Future

Atlantic salmon is threaten in the wild. Photo by: imgur.com

Fish is one of the important protein sources but badly affected by many issues from pollution, over-fishing, unsafe even for farmed fish and caused threats to environment. While stopping fish farming will never stop the other threats for the wild fish and we still need fish as part of our foods. Luckily some of us never stop to find better ways to raise farm fish with better condition.

Farming fish is not an easy job especially salmon that requires both between salt water and fresh water. This fish is bigger in size with carnivorous appetite. Farming salmon in the net-pens over the rivers and lakes been practiced for so long and proven caused many problems for the fish itself and for the environment. Using other fishes as their food also another reason salmon farming will not solve the over-fishing problem.

Atlantic salmon swimming in the wild. Photo by: imgur.com

Cleaner water and easier to control (land farming). Photo by: seacoreseafood.com

With more people come forward and pressure from the consumers, fish farmers find another solution – to raise salmon in land away from natural water supply. With enclosed environment all factors are control properly from the quality of water, oxygen content in the water, salinity to food supplies. These lead to easier manage conditions; even though the cost of building the facilities far higher than traditional net-pens farming.

One of the pioneering company in this technology is KUTERRA that raising Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) on their farm at Northern Vancouver Island, Canada.

The land farming allows farmers to control many other threats to their fish such as predators, pollution from the water, diseases and water from the farm also never goes into the river/sea. With high circulation of water, low fish feed, controlled temperature and oxygen, the growth of fish are much faster with no diseases. In case of diseases they can change all the water and sanitized all the facilities again.

Damage net in net-pens farming: Photo by: KUOWPHOTO/MEGAN FARMER

More and more land farm will be build. Photo by: undercurrentnews.com

Even though the cost to build land farm are far higher, but it can produce higher yield with good quality of fish. Not to mention they never caused any harm to nature (other than the land they need to use to build the farm). This technology is still in its early stage and there are more improvement in the process and management that will bring better result.

In fact salmon farming is not the only technology that got a facelift in recent years. All other fishes with high demands and threaten in the wild such as tuna, grouper, cobia, puffer fish, and few other shellfish/crustaceans also had been upgraded. This upgrade not only to produce more production but also to make sure that the produce will be safe for human consumption with less impact to the environment.

Salmon produced by KUTERRA. Photo by: kuterra.com

Deep sea farming also will be part of future fish farming. Photo by: innovasea.com 

With more people work together to improve the quality of fish farming industries, it will benefits both the consumers and the farmers. While at the same time we hope that will allow the restoring amount of the fish in the wild from over fishing – but still threatens by pollutions of many kinds.