Land based salmon farms
- Thread starter Peyton00
- Start date
HauntedByWaters
Life of the Party
Not until you can feed those farmed fish garbage.
DoesItFloat
Life of the Party
It's not like these will be the first 2 land-based salmon farms. I'm all for it. Folks can choose to continue to buy farmed salmon and be happy with this option, or they can choose to continue to buy "wild" or "wild caught" salmon and continue to pay an arm for a pound as wild salmon numbers continue to take a dump. If I eat salmon or steelhead, it's eaten my fly first.
SilverFly
Legend
Maybe not necessarily for salmon, and no, not new. And yes, there are huge issues with traditional land-based aquaculture.
OTOH, there's absolutely a future for land-based, integrated aquaculture/agriculture systems. These are almost entirely closed-loop recirculating systems that use hydroponics to "filter" the water. Not surprisingly, fish shit can grow vegetables like nobody's business, at the same time purifying the water before it's pumped back into the fish (or shrimp) side. The whole thing can be done inside a controlled facility, isolated from the environment.
Of course there are inputs to any system to get something out. Feed and energy being the major inputs. However, depending on the nutritional needs of the aquatic species being raised, plants grown on the hydroponic side can be used to supplement fish/shrimp feed. Nutrient recovery can further augmented using waste water to grow algae, duckweed, brine shrimp, (converted to high protein feed), and even composting with worm beds. The latter being a great way to convert fish processing waste.
In theory, the only things coming out of the facility should be beautiful veggies and packaged fillets. The reality is some water input, effluent discharge, and highly energy consumptive - which may be the major drawback. Personally, I find this fascinating as hell and think something like this will be needed to prevent crashing natural fish stocks. If interested, the University of AZ has done some very interesting work along these lines.
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