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Even prior to President Trump’s 2020 executive order expanding offshore fish farming in the U.S., aquaculture was being touted as the future of sustainable fishing. As global fish stocks continue to shrink due to overfishing, fish and shellfish farming seems like an obvious move. It’s a far more efficient way to raise meat for protein than farming chickens, pigs, and cows, which currently occupy more than 37% of the earth’s habitable land. Done right, aquaculture can help maintain healthy waterways and boost jobs and economies in the areas that serve aquacultural regions.

The history of aquaculture stretches back thousands of years. In North America, indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest region historically farmed herring eggs, octopus, clams, and salmon, while indigenous Hawaiians developed freshwater and intertidal fish ponds. Chinese fish farmers domesticated carp around 3500 BCE. Yet, if aquaculture is the past and the future, it’s also the present: Currently, half of the world’s fish and seafood is raised through aquaculture and, according to a 2023 whitepaper from the World Economic Forum, the global demand for those foods is expected to double by 2050.

Following President Trump’s executive order and a bipartisan bill supporting offshore fish farming in the House of Representatives, many American companies have been willing to bet on, and invest in, fish farming. In 2017, 90% of the seafood eaten by Americans came from other countries, and many feel it’s time for American consumers to eat fish and seafood produced and farmed here. Following the 2020 executive order, the Army Corps of Engineers issued permits for aquaculture structures in federal waters.

While the field of fish and seafood farming may be ancient, food safety experts agree that it must be held to exacting modern standards and regulation.

Aquaculture Systems

There are dozens of different approaches to aquaculture. For many, “fish farming” calls to mind offshore net pens—net-cages floating in open water—however, this is only one type of aquacultural technology.

Rome, Italy-based Matthias Halwart, PhD, is the sustainable aquaculture team leader for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He says that, given the wide variety of aquaculture possibilities, the choice of system and approach must be decided according to, among other things, the species being grown, the local environment, and the investment available to farmers. “Finfish can be grown in floating cages [net pens] in freshwater lakes and rivers, brackish estuaries, or in marine coastal or offshore areas,” he says. “Mussels are grown attached to long ropes in the sea connected to floating buoys. Seaweed is also grown on long lines. Pond culture is the most widely practiced method of aquaculture, and ranges from low-intensity green water ponds with low stocking density, using fertilizer to encourage algae and plankton to grow as feed for fish, to highly intensive with formulated feed and aeration using paddle wheels or air blowers.”

Additionally, there are more technical set-ups known as recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS). “With these highly technical systems,” Dr. Halwart says, “the operators are able to manage the water temperature, water quality, and filtration, and control the chemical properties of the water through monitoring. [They] can achieve very intensive levels of production. A version of RAS can be connected to hydroponic vegetable production, called aquaponics, in which the waste water from the fish can serve as fertilizer for the plants, while, at the same time, the plants filter the water for the fish.” Dr. Halwart adds that each of these farming systems has benefits and disadvantages, and that a good system matches the needs of the farmer and the realities of the local conditions.

Approaches to aquaculture, Dr. Halwart says, break down into water-based systems (such as cages and pens), land-based systems (such as rain-fed ponds, irrigated systems, tanks, and raceways), recycling systems (designed to recirculate water in large, closed vessels), and integrated farming systems that pair aquaculture with livestock or crop farming. Different seafood and fish require different aquaculture approaches. Fish are raised in ponds, molluscs are grown in a variety of styles both on and off the seafloor, crustaceans are raised in ponds and concrete raceways, and seaweeds and minor invertebrates are farmed across a variety of systems.

Aquaculture expert Carole Engle, PhD, former executive editor of the Journal of the World Aquaculture Society and adjunct faculty at Virginia Tech’s Virginia Agricultural Research and Extension Centers in Hampton, Va., says that in the United States, aquaculture styles are determined by the popularity of the fish that’s cultivated. “Aquaculture is incredibly diverse and every aquatic animal or plant has to be raised in a different way because the biology is so different,” she adds (see “Top 5 Most-Frequently Farmed and Fished Seafood in the U.S.,”  below).

Aquaculture and Food Safety

Michael Ciaramella, PhD, is Seafood Safety and Technology Specialist at the Sea Grant organization’s Cornell Cooperative Extension in Stony Brook, NY. Due to the breadth of approaches to aquaculture, he finds it hard to generalize about food safety across the sector.

He does note one potential hazard that separates aquaculture from wild fish: pharmaceuticals. “There are only a few drugs approved for use in food fish,” he says. “Strict protocols for their use are in place to ensure they do not impact the safety of the fish as food. Seafood processors must address this potential hazard in their food safety plans and assure that, if aquaculture drugs are used, they are used in accordance with current requirements and best practices.”

Beyond that, Dr. Ciaramella says that food safety concerns in aquaculture are similar to food safety challenges facing open-water fisheries. He adds that environmental contaminants (e.g., heavy metals, herbicides, and pesticides) and natural toxins (those produced by harmful algal blooms) can be an issue for both farmed and wild fish; however, he says that both contaminants and natural toxins can be controlled at the farm level by knowing the potential hazards associated with the various water bodies, and only growing food fish in water bodies with little to no known contamination, or sourcing waters suitable for aquaculture production in land-based systems.

But, this is more complicated than it may sound. Dr. Ciaramella specifies that contaminants pass into species through the things they eat, including fish meal composed of smaller bait fish. Consequently, he says, it’s integral that farmed fish receive high-quality feed that has been tested for contamination. The same wild bait fish used for fish meal are also consumed by wild-caught fish, meaning that contamination in bait fish threatens wild-caught and farmed fish.

One risk particular to fish-farming feeds, he says, is contamination by terrestrial ingredients. “If there are non-marine alternative proteins and plant-based components to the feeds, these could contribute additional contaminants and be a potential hazard unique to farmed species when pelleted feeds are used.”

American Aquaculture

The good news about American aquaculture, says Dr. Engle, is that its systems are set up to present fewer food safety challenges than in other parts of the world. While regulations vary from state to state, aquaculture is overseen by FDA—and, in the case of catfish, by USDA. Catfish is such a big business, Dr. Engle says, that the industry approached congress to request that their production facilities be overseen by USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, rather than just by FDA. This means that each catfish processing plant has an in-house inspector.

The same is not true of other aquacultures, though Dr. Engle stresses that because earthen ponds, raceways, and above-ground tanks work with captive water from well-tested groundwater aquifers they reuse for 10 to 15 years, food safety concerns associated with open-water farming are not present. In particular, fish raised in ponds and sold live face few of the food safety challenges associated with processed fish.

Additionally, adds Dr. Halwart, aquatic animals feeding low in the food chain, such as carp or tilapia, typically have fewer problems with accumulation of toxins. “Disease outbreak is usually associated with intensity of farming; the more intensively you produce, the more careful you have to be with health management,” he adds.

Shellfish food safety, however, is both easier to control in some ways, and harder in others. Bill Walton, PhD, is the Acuff Professor of Marine Science and Shellfish Aquaculture and program coordinator at William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point. “You don’t feed [shellfish],” he says, “which also has the implication you don’t medicate them. You are relying on the food in that environment, which also means when you think about sustainability, I can’t grow more shellfish in an acre than that acre naturally supports.”

The bad news about shellfish is that, because they’re sometimes not cooked, any pathogen that gets into an oyster may be passed directly to the consumer. In many cases, shellfish producers have been able to mitigate those risks through close scrutiny of water. “The areas available to harvest have to be regularly sampled,” Dr. Walton says. “Typically they’re okay to harvest from unless something happens—something as simple as a certain number of inches of rainfall—then we close. We don’t wait for the lab; we don’t wait for somebody to go collect samples. You can just look at the rain gauge and say, preemptively, ‘We no longer meet the conditions to be open right now, so we’re going to close.’ The model has been that it’s easy to close, and the burden of proof is on reopening, and that’s worked pretty well.”

In that sense, Dr. Walton says that regulation has solved the challenge of pollution in shellfish. Unfortunately, bacterial contamination is not as easy. “If it were associated with pollution, we would’ve solved it,” he says. But it’s not; bacterial contamination simply occurs in the water, the same water people might enjoy playing in at the beach.

The Cold Chain

Dr. Walton says that the solution for shellfish food safety has been the cold chain, “Having a clear process where everybody along the cold chain has to document this, there are tags that go from harvest all the way to the final consumer that demonstrate who has it, and there’s a time–temperature log that has to be kept. We’ve found if you harvest shellfish, and you get them cold right away, and you keep them cold, that dramatically limits the risks.”

Dr. Halwart agrees—and not just for shellfish, but for aquaculture products generally. He notes, “A strong cold chain—meaning the product is immediately chilled after harvest and remains chilled until consumption—is key for many aquaculture products as well. Value addition activities, such as smoking, drying, curing, fermenting, or salting (and good practices associated with these processes) are also good options and traditionally used when cold chain is not available or doesn’t match the market and culinary traditions of the consumer.”

Sustainability

The sustainability of aquaculture—particularly when compared with meat animals raised on land—is a feature fish-farming advocates often highlight. NOAA lists a number of benefits associated with aquaculture—specifically, marine aquaculture operations typically have smaller carbon footprints and require less land and fresh water. Further, they tend to be more effective at converting feed into protein for human consumption than beef, pork, and poultry.

Yet, in 2020, the journal Global Environmental Change published a report from a team of researchers from universities in Norway, Australia, and Chile that targeted aquaculture certification schemes (doi: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.102025). Their research found that the leading challenge to aquaculture sustainability was the certification under which aquaculture was defined as “sustainable.” In general, the researchers found that aquaculture sustainability certification systems tended to reflect mainly “environmental and governance indicators, and only display scattered attempts at addressing cultural and economic issues. […] The strong bias implies that these certification schemes predominantly focus on the environmental domain and do not address sustainability as a whole, nor do they complement each other. Sustainability is by definition and by necessity a comprehensive concept, but if the cultural and economic issues are to be addressed in aquaculture, the scope of certification schemes must be expanded.”

Dr. Ciaramella agrees that a truly sustainable operation must be environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable. “Most tend to focus on the environmental aspects of sustainability and neglect the social and economic components,” he says. He also stresses that a closer sustainability challenge to the fish farm itself is sourcing protein for farmed fish. “The main protein source for farmed carnivorous fish has historically been fish meal, which relies heavily on the wild capture of small species of fish to produce fish meal and, ultimately, pelleted feeds. There have been many advances in alternative protein technologies moving toward more sustainable feed production. This includes the use of plant- and insect-based proteins.”

These advances have been paired with new production technology systems such as water filtration tools and an aquaculture technique called integrated multitrophic systems, which Dr. Ciaramella says rely on growing multiple species of different trophic levels together to feed off of one another and limit the overall impact on the surrounding ecosystem.

While aquaculture is not completely without food safety concerns, the method offers a valuable source of seafood and supports global food security

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