SAN DIEGO – Some 90 percent of seafood consumed by Americans is imported – a fact that the Obama administration vowed to start turning around by expanding fish and shellfish farms into federal waters.
Yet nearly two years since the first permit was issued, the United States still has no offshore farms.
The pioneers of offshore aquaculture say their plans have stalled or been abandoned because of the long and expensive federal permitting process that requires extensive environmental monitoring and data collection.
The applicant given the first permit for federal waters in 2014 has spent $1million and not seeded any mussels off Southern California. Another pioneer in Hawaii said there is too much red tape and plans to start his fish farm off Mexico and export to the U.S.
Meanwhile, investors are leery to jump on board with no offshore farms in the water.
“Those jobs could have been in the U.S., the investment could have been in the U.S., but there was no way I could talk to my board of investors when there are no clear regulations set up and the monitoring burden is so ridiculous,” said Neil Sims, CEO of Kampachi Farms.
“I’m now practicing my Spanish,” said Sims, who received his permit for pens off Hawaii. He had hoped to develop a commercial operation to raise sashimi-grade Kampachi fish but plans instead to put his farm off Mexico’s Baja California peninsula next year.
He said the Mexican process was rigorous but streamlined.
Federal officials say the red tape is partly because it’s a new frontier. There is no regulatory framework for federal waters. They say the process needs to be streamlined while maintaining environmental standards.
Nearly half of the imported seafood Americans eat comes from foreign farms, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
A draft of NOAA’s five-year strategic plan calls for marine aquaculture production to jump 50 percent by 2020, and expanding into federal waters is key. Crowded coastlines with recreational boats and shipping routes are limiting growth in state waters.
https://cunadelmar.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/OCRnewspaper.jpg189300Cuna del Mar/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CunaDelMarLogo.pngCuna del Mar2015-12-08 11:48:412016-09-13 10:44:13Red Tape is Tying up U.S. push for Fish Farms, Entrepreneurs Say
On January 1, 2015, Ocean Farm Technologies and OceanSpar merged to form InnovaSea Systems, Inc., a new company committed to developing the next wave of innovative, open-ocean products and services to support the growing mariculture industry.
“It’s going to take considerable design and engineering talent to create the next generation of products for open-ocean mariculture. The combined resources of OceanSpar and Ocean Farm Technologies give InnovaSea the horsepower to get the job done,” said Steve Page, the founder of Ocean Farm Technologies. “I’m delighted that our companies have joined forces.”
The newly merged company champions, among other things, environmental and financial sustainability and innovation. Its commitment to producing innovative products and services is reflected in the significant investment InnovaSea is making in an accelerated research and development program.
“While both companies made good progress in the past, this merger allows us to move faster and on a larger scale,” said Gary Loverich, OceanSpar’s co-founder. “We are investing a considerable amount of time and money in hiring the right people and acquiring complex computer technology because we believe in the future of open-ocean mariculture.” Both Loverich and Page, veterans in product design, will assume advisory roles at InnovaSea.
InnovaSea’s strong foundation comes from the expertise of two respected companies in the mariculture industry. Founded in 2005, Ocean Farm Technologies developed the Aquapod, a unique containment system that handles rugged ocean conditions and a variety of species. OceanSpar has produced quality products, like the SeaStation and AquaSpar Fish Pens, since 1988. They share an excellent reputation for producing cost-effective goods and services, and a commitment to supporting sustainable fish farming in the open ocean.
“InnovaSea will continue offering the same high-quality products, operating equipment, and support. That won’t change,” said InnovaSea’s new president, Langley Gace. “We are taking a more holistic approach by turning our attention to creating fully integrated farming platforms. Our customers told us that they need support through the grow-out cycle—from the moment juvenile fish leave the dock until they are on the harvest vessel heading to the processing plant— and we listened.”
To learn more about InnovaSea Systems, Inc. visit InnovaSea.com.
https://cunadelmar.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/NewsPost.jpg504800Cuna del Mar/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CunaDelMarLogo.pngCuna del Mar2015-02-08 12:32:562015-02-10 13:26:56Ocean Farm Technologies and OceanSpar Join Forces. New Company to Develop Innovative, Open-Ocean Products
Giant cages float off the shores of Hawaii, housing hundreds of thousands of yellowtail snapper in the deep waters of the Pacific.The so-called Hawaiian Kampachi spend about one year in their net pens before they’re put on ice and sold to restaurants and wholesalers in the United States and abroad. They are a rare breed: the product of one of the few open-water fish farms in the United States.They may not keep that status for long. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is on the verge of setting a regulatory system and allowing as many as 20 permits for farms in the Gulf of Mexico, in what supporters hope is the seed of a nationwide industry.”I hope that inside of a year that we will have filed an application for a commercial permit for the Gulf,” Neil Sims, founder of Kampachi Farms, said in a recent interview. “That is a fervent hope, but I don’t think it’s an irrational hope.”
If finalized, NOAA’s proposed rules will open up federal waters to finfish aquaculture for the first time. To proponents like Sims, it represents the success of reason over fear. But to some environmentalists, it is a rash decision that could damage a Gulf already suffering from a spate of misfortunes, from hurricane damage to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.
In part, the debate stems from perspective. Should the ocean be farmed like the land, with fish instead of livestock? And if so, how sustainable is sustainable enough?
Officials at NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service said the growing U.S. population forces action. The vast majority of seafood Americans eat comes from other countries — and as often as not, it’s farmed.
“The question we have in the U.S. and the question we’ve had for a while is: Do we continue to import more and more seafood, or do we try to grow more?” said David O’Brien, deputy director of aquaculture for NMFS. “As an administration and NOAA, specifically, we have said, ‘Let’s find a way to make sustainable aquaculture happen.'”
It’s an uphill battle. The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council first approved an aquaculture plan in 2009 and sent it to NOAA to implement and create regulations. Amid lawsuits and congressional opposition, the policy languished.
NOAA finally proposed regulations to implement the plan earlier this year and recently reopened the comment period through Nov. 28. This time, opposition — while still present — is noticeably more subdued. Some environmental organizations have moved on to other priorities; others have tempered their opinions.
The Ocean Conservancy, which once sued NOAA over the Gulf plans, is not “actively” working on the issue, said George Leonard, the group’s chief scientist. But it is still opposed to the Gulf plan “on principle.”
“Our approach has always been framed as a ‘right from the start’ approach,” he said in a recent interview. “If we get the framework right and we get the laws right, then aquaculture can be and should be part of our seafood future.”
Fishing or agriculture?
Beyond the ideological debate is a legal one. Does NMFS have the statutory authority to oversee aquaculture?
NMFS sees it as a form of fishing, consequently falling under the nation’s top fisheries law, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.
In its proposed rule to implement the Gulf plan, the agency cites the Magnuson definition of fishing as “the catching, taking or harvesting of fish.” Then it turns to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to back up its assertion that aquaculture qualifies as harvesting — “the act or process of gathering a crop” — and thus is fishing.
Environmentalists and food safety groups don’t see it that way. They argue that Magnuson was set up for wild fisheries and does not apply to what is essentially agriculture on the sea.
“I think it’s completely illegal,” said Marianne Cufone, executive director of the Recirculating Farms Coalition. “Magnuson does not control aquaculture.”
Cufone, who once worked for Food and Water Watch, pointed to a list of risks, including fish escapes and pollution. The Center for Food Safety is on the same side of the debate, releasing a report last month that tallies up the problems in aquaculture around the globe, including farms losing more than 24 million fish (Greenwire, Oct. 21).
Their view is partly one of food safety: Finfish aquaculture, the groups contend, is not good for consumers. The industry cannot completely control the inputs in farms open to the sea, for one. Farmed fish are also currently fed wild fish, which threatens wild populations.
But the Ocean Conservancy takes a more nuanced view. Though NOAA shouldn’t be moving forward with a piecemeal plan in the Gulf, Leonard said, the United States should develop a nationwide plan for how the country will implement aquaculture. Such a framework could map out farm locations, set environmental safeguards and lay out industry expectations.
The problem: Congress, so far, has shown little interest. Bills to establish a regulatory system have failed to gain any real momentum in the past.
“We spent four years or so trying to articulate the national standards we thought were appropriate,” Leonard said. “We couldn’t get the political support to pass that, and part of that is because it’s just not high on Congress’ priorities list, and the other part is there’s quite a lot of disagreement” among stakeholders.
Don Kent, president of Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, said he has become “cynical” about the prospect of a national framework, particularly before a U.S. industry exists.
“These people who say we need a grand plan, what they’re really saying is, ‘Let’s just put this onerous thing out there that has to be done first,'” Kent said.
In Kent’s view, NOAA’s Gulf plan is a good, albeit imperfect, first step. But he also acknowledged that it was a “little cumbersome” because of the agency’s adherence to a fisheries law designed to manage wild stocks of fish.
“I think what should happen is, we should move forward, taking opportunities like the Gulf plan as a necessary first step in the Gulf and then learn what we can from that,” he said. “There’s been so much rhetoric about aquaculture, good or bad, I think it’s time for people to see a real model for it.”
Broadly, the Gulf’s Fishery Management Plan for Regulating Offshore Aquaculture would set up a permitting system for aquaculture, effective for 10 years and then renewable in five-year increments. Permit holders would be allowed to maintain an offshore facility, as well as a hatchery.
Species would be limited to those that are native to the Gulf and managed by the region’s fishery management council — a requirement designed to limit the effect of potential escapes.
Farms also would be prohibited in protected areas and required to be no closer than 1.6 nautical miles from another farm. The proposed rule also sets standards for when farms have to report everything from fish escapes to marine mammal entanglements.
Cufone said such restrictions don’t eliminate the inherent danger in fish farms.
“Ocean aquaculture has been problematic globally for many years. There have been numerous issues with fish escapes and pollutions and chemicals in the process,” she said. “To even contemplate doing that in the Gulf of Mexico is ridiculous. There’s been enough trauma there in recent years.”
‘Let’s move forward’
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Kampachi Farms’ Sims. With an Aussie accent and enthusiasm that reaches across phone lines, he is a fitting spokesman for the finfish aquaculture movement.
Sims began raising yellowtail off Kona, Hawaii, in 2005, aiming to prove the industry could be environmentally friendly. He sold the farm in 2009, during an unprofitable year. Today, he co-owns a farm in Mexican waters — drawn, he said, by a more supportive government.
But he contends that the Hawaiian farm, now owned by Blue Ocean Mariculture, demonstrated that fish farms can be sustainable. The Gulf, he said, is another opportunity to showcase the industry’s potential.
“Let’s move forward,” he said. “We desperately need the seafood, we desperately need the jobs, we desperately need to be able to show consumers and coastal communities that we can do this in a responsible and scalable fashion.”
Sims has continued testing out fish farm technologies in federal waters off Hawaii, getting one-year federal permits for a small-scale cage that houses about 2,000 fish. The Velella Project has tried unanchored cages, towed by a 65-foot schooner.
The aim was to try out a way to minimize the effect of such free-drifting farms on the environment, with the mass of fish constantly moving in deep waters. Sims asserts that biologically it was successful, with more fish surviving and less impact. Now his research team is testing ways to automate feeding in order to lessen the at-sea footprint.
But Sims also argues that deep-ocean fish farms have already proved their environmental safety. He and other supporters point to a 2013 technical memorandum from NOAA that puts deepwater aquaculture in a mostly positive light. Citing data on fish farms, the paper provides guidelines for minimizing negative effects.
With more than 100,000 fish in a cage, for example, nitrogen and phosphorus can build up. But the NOAA paper concludes that there are “no measurable effects 30 meters beyond the cages when farms are sited in well-flushed waters.” In other words, farms in deep waters with a current are better than those near shore.
The paper also addresses concerns over chemicals, citing data that show marine fish farms have drastically reduced their use of antibiotics, therapeutants and anti-foulants in favor of vaccines and better management.
But some environmentalists — who contend that such pollution is still a concern — said finfish aquaculture is also not a solution to ramping up the world’s seafood supply.
That’s because farmed fish are fed wild fish. One kilogram of the yellowtail farmed by Blue Ocean Mariculture, for example, takes 2.3 kilograms of wild fish meal and fish oil.
“It’s a system set up for collapse,” said Lisa Bunin, the Center for Food Safety’s organic policy director. “What we really need is to think for the long term.”
Fish farmers said technology is still advancing on fish feed, pointing to soy as a potential replacement. Sims said he has been testing out a diet based on soy that eliminates fish meal from the diet of yellowtail snapper. The quality of the resulting fillets is indistinguishable — at least according to him and his employees, who do their own taste tests.
“If we’re going to grow the aquaculture industry,” he said, “we can’t do it on Peruvian anchovies.”
The Center for Food Safety’s October report — co-written by Bunin — declares soy “unsuitable fish feed.” Not only is it not natural to the marine environment, Bunin said, but it is also not easily digestible for fish.
“There isn’t really alternative types of feed,” she said. “The soy industry tried to rise to the occasion, and it couldn’t.”
Regulatory loophole
So what’s the solution to the United States’ well-known “seafood deficit”?
Americans import as much as 90 percent of their seafood. While some of that is re-imported American seafood, thanks to a convoluted trade, most admit that as the country’s population grows, wild seafood cannot support its appetite.
NOAA’s solution is testing out the possibility of sustainable open ocean aquaculture. But Cufone of the Recirculating Farms Coalition argues that land-based, closed-system aquaculture is the answer, at least in part.
Her group advocates for “recirculating” aquaculture, where fish are raised in tanks and their waste is used to fertilize crops. Such systems can run on renewable energy, like solar, and be built in urban environments.
“We farm everything else,” she said. “We farm vegetables and fruit and other animals. But we really have a lot of challenges with fish. A part of that is people have this image of the fishermen going out there and catching their dinner.”
Whether the United States embraces that approach, ocean aquaculture or another future technique remains to be seen. But even if NOAA fails to expand federal waters aquaculture under its watch, the industry may move forward without it.
Thanks to a quirk in federal laws, commercial aquaculture farms can bypass NOAA and obtain permits from the Army Corps of Engineers if they farm fish that aren’t federally managed. O’Brien said two commercial operations recently went through that process to receive the first-ever permits for aquaculture in federal waters, albeit for shellfish, which are less controversial than finfish.
Kent of Hubbs-SeaWorld has also begun going through that process. He plans to raise yellowtail snapper off California, in federal waters, using the regulations that exist today.
“If I wanted to build an oil rig offshore, it’d be a defined process,” he said. “For this, it’s sort of a regulatory blank state. We’re trying to lay out a process that’s very visible and very transparent so people can see it.”
/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CunaDelMarLogo.png00Cuna del Mar/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CunaDelMarLogo.pngCuna del Mar2014-11-20 12:39:012015-02-08 12:44:41OCEANS: Debate churns as NOAA is set to open U.S. waters to aquaculture
Photo courtesy of Hubbs-Sea World Research Institute
BY: CLARE LESCHIN-HOARCONNECT | OCTOBER 8, 2014 Voices of San Diego | voiceofsandiego.org
America’s running a deep seafood deficit.
We control more ocean than any nation in the world – a whopping 2.8 billion acres – yet we import 91 percent of the seafood we eat.
But if Don Kent, president and CEO of Hubbs-Sea World Research Institute, gets his way, a big part of the solution will be floating four and a half miles off the sands of Mission Beach, and it will mark a significant milestone in the nation’s efforts to cultivate seafood.
Dubbed the Rose Canyon Fisheries Sustainable Aquaculture Project, a partnership between Hubbs and private equity firm Cuna Del Mar, it will be the first commercial offshore fish operation in the United States. The term “offshore” means the farm will sit beyond the three-mile mark typically regulated by the state, but still within federal waters.
The sheer size of the project – 29,000 square meters, or about six football fields — means it will be the first and most ambitious offshore operation of its kind. The project will start with half-a-million yellowtail the first year, with the ability to scale up to 10 million fish per year (5,000 metric tons) at full capacity.
The vision for Rose Canyon has been in the works for at least a decade. In 2004, Kent explored the idea of placing an aquaculture site near a decommissioned oil rig. But the rig didn’t stay decommissioned for long. Later, in 2009, Kent tried to secure permits to place a cage system off of La Jolla, but that project eventually floundered too.
Others have experimented with offshore farming in the U.S. In 2012, aquaculture pioneer Neil Sims tested an “aquapod” of kampachi off the coast of Hawaii. And in January, the California Coastal Commission OK’d the first offshore commercial shellfish ranch near Long Beach.
But so far, obstacles have thwarted offshore farming from taking off in America.
Efforts to develop strong federal regulations to guide and develop offshore aquaculture have been slow to non-existent. And then there are the technical challenges: pen designs that can withstand constant ocean beating, plus the logistics of getting farm staff, fish feed and fish themselves to and from the site without breaking the bank.
Kent says the technical problems have been resolved.
“We’ve got the technologies. We know how to do these things. It really comes down to the regulatory climate and the uncertainty that comes with it.”
Michael Rubio, who heads aquaculture efforts for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says offshore is the new frontier in aquaculture, which makes Kent, the son of a Utah sugar beet farmer who fell in love with the ocean, a sort of aquacowboy.
“Technology for offshore aquaculture is going from pilot projects to implementation around the world,” Rubino told me. “So from a regulatory perspective, we’re working to get ready in the United States. For state waters, several states like Maine, Hawaii, and Washington State have a fairly well-defined permit programs for fish farming. But for federal waters (3 to 200 miles offshore), we have not yet clarified what federal permits are needed for fish farms.”
Under current U.S. fisheries laws, aquaculture has mostly been interpreted as fishing, even though farming fish uses different techniques than catching fish.
But California has no state regulations in place for fish farming, and because Kent will be cultivating yellowtail, a species that does not fall under federal management, he doesn’t need a special permit to raise the fish.
The project requires plenty of other permits, though. Hubbs submitted project permit requests this week to a half-dozen regulatory agencies, including the Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, the California Coastal Commission and NOAA, which will review the Rose Canyon Aquaculture proposal. The process is expected to take 12-18 months, and if it gets a green light, will take an another two years to produce its first harvest.
♦ ♦ ♦
Kent, 63, has spent his entire career at Hubbs, joining the staff in 1980. The Rose Canyon project could very well be his career capstone.
He’s been actively engaged in conversations with commercial and recreational fishermen, and even shifted the farm’s proposed location so it wouldn’t get in their way.
He’s been in talks with local San Diego businesses, including Chesapeake Fish Company, about the idea of using the scraps they generate as feed; and Acacia Pacific Aquaculture about using cultivated algae. He’s reached out to UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, hoping to get them to breathe new life into their existing aquaculture program. Kent says the academic infrastructure that supports California animal husbandry for cattle and poultry is less robust for aquaculture. There’s not a lot of incentive to develop a career as a fish nutritionist, or to focus on species that have cultivation potential, nor for engineers to design better technology for the aquaculture industry, when there’s no booming industry to support them. Kent says academic support to provide strong job candidates will be important.
“When I was in graduate school in the 1970s, aquaculture was the hot thing. UC Davis built the Bodega Laboratory. UC Santa Barbara was working heavily on it; there was a lot going on in Humboldt, the Sea Grant program was very oriented around aquaculture. A lot of people were working on a lot of species. It was an exciting time,” Kent said. “Then it went to the wayside. And now what happens is the guy who is the viral expert at UC Davis retires, and they say, ‘You know, I’m not sure we’re going to get another new fish virologist.’”
Kent is also addressing the environmental concerns that have dogged aquaculture’s reputation as a whole. He has solid and compelling answers to all the typical questions about pollution, escapes and the sustainability of the feed.
California yellowtail are native to the region, so should they escape, it’s less of a concern than if Kent were growing a non-native species. And, said Kent, production won’t eat into local fishermen’s hauls.
“Fishermen don’t like aquaculture interfering with their market. The salmon guys are always uptight about salmon farmers. Yellowtail for the hamachi trade is all farmed, and it’s all farmed somewhere else. So we’re not displacing a commercial catch — we’re displacing a commercially imported fish that’s farmed,” he said.
And because juveniles will not be taken from the wild and raised – that’s the controversial way bluefin tuna is farmed – recreational fishermen who cast for yellowfin won’t be impacted.
For San Diego, the project could mean as many as 40 new jobs when you factor in some of the non-farm jobs like processing the fish and making fish food.
There’s no getting around the fact that a farm growing 10 million fish a year will produce an impressive amount of effluent (we’re talking fish-poo here), but Kent said the project’s location over the ocean’s sandy bottom should mean currents can take care of that. That’s important because a fish farm can impact whatever it’s located over – a sensitive habitat, coral reefs, etc. And the plans for Rose Canyon show cages will be placed away from marine vessel traffic — another perpetual concern.
That’s not likely to dissuade environmental groups like Food and Water Watch that warn “commercial, scale open ocean aquaculture will neither ease pressure on collapsing wild marine fish populations, nor eliminate our seafood trade deficit.” Plus, there’s the looming taint of Hubbs’ connection to SeaWorld and its highly publicized killer whale controversy.
But there has been a noticeable shift in attitudes about aquaculture. The “all farmed seafood is bad” mantra is waning, and many believe industry players who are farming seafood responsibly and transparently should be rewarded for those efforts.
Dr. George Leonard, chief scientist for Ocean Conservancy, opposed Kent’s 2009 attempt, but he said there appears to be proactive engagement happening with Rose Canyon. Still, regulations will be crucial to protecting the environment, Leonard said.
“This is a single, relatively large farm in federal waters where there’s still not a comprehensive regulatory framework in place, so the policy concerns that Ocean Conservancy had in 2009 still remain,” he said. “We have yet to chart a nationwide path for a sustainable offshore farming industry, but that larger issue is outside of Hubbs’ control. … In the absence of such a framework, we ought to make sure the Hubbs project embraces the strongest conservation principles possible so it contributes positively to our future seafood supply.”
https://cunadelmar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/NewsPost2.jpg455756Cuna del Mar/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CunaDelMarLogo.pngCuna del Mar2014-10-10 09:59:162014-10-10 09:59:16Meet San Diego’s ‘Aquacowboy’
Ever heard of cobia? Meet tomorrow’s fish—and a new way to farm that one man wants to bring to a coast near you.
Daniel Stone
Photographs and videos by Spencer Millsap
PUBLISHED APRIL 30, 2014
Brian O’Hanlon has asked to leave the doors off our helicopter. He wants our pilot to fly low over the rain forest of Panama and out over the ocean. But once we get to the other coast of this country that seems barely wider than someone’s finger, the pilot is nearly lost. He turns around, terrifyingly, and asks through our headsets where he should go next. O’Hanlon is sitting in the backseat and keeps saying the same thing while jutting his arm forward. “Todo derecho,” he says, in Spanish. He is telling the pilot to go straight.
Even in the air, O’Hanlon knows the way by heart to a farm that he built from nothing, out in the middle of nowhere. Eight miles off the coast of Panama on the Caribbean side (most people visit the Pacific coast) we start to see net domes peeking out of the water. They’re like icebergs—most of their mass is underwater. Inside the domes are some 600,000 fish living out their days in the warm Caribbean, eating real food, drinking real water, and nudged by real currents. O’Hanlon is next to me, pointing down and grinning. Later that day he will tell me three times that unlike conventional aquaculture farms where fish swim in their own you-know-what, his fish never see the same water twice.
Off the Caribbean coast of Panama, fish farmer Brian O’Hanlon is building a large-scale hatchery to support a new type of offshore aquaculture.
Below us happens to be the largest open-ocean fish farm in the world. Aquaculture isn’t new. Since the days of the Chinese Shang dynasty humans have raised fish to supplement the unpredictable yield of the sea. The idea has always been to corral fish in tanks or pools. At some point, people just got tired of taking a boat out right before dinner.
O’Hanlon’s farm, which is part of a company he founded called Open Blue, wants to buck 4,000 years of human innovation and farm fish back in the ocean. He says that raising an animal in its natural habitat means it will be healthier and taste better and, with the right technology, grow far more efficiently. Some have said he’s pioneering a new form of aquaculture. O’Hanlon is on his way to shipping 250 tons of fish each month, a respectable haul for a midsize company under ten years old. Every few days, planes take what once swam in his underwater cages off to Asia, Europe, and North America. He started the operation in Panama in 2009, and last year, for the first time, demand exceeded supply.
NG MAPS
Brian O’Hanlon, founder of Open Blue Sea Farms, visits his fish cages eight miles north of Panama. Every day, divers swim in the cages to monitor the health and growth of the cobia.
Panama might seem a strange place to hatch a global idea. The country is smaller than New Jersey and reliant on the United States government to keep its currency stable. But Panama’s unique geography with easy access to two oceans makes it cheap and convenient to move feed in and fish out. The government of Panama also welcomed O’Hanlon in a way the U.S. wouldn’t. Harsh regulations, stiff environmental opposition, and “not in my backyard” complaints from coastal communities made his idea unworkable off the coast of Florida or South Carolina, both of which are home to large American ports. The U.S. would give him a permit, but only for a few years. Then he’d have to invest in boats, processing facilities, and distribution infrastructure. “What we’re trying to do takes a lot of capital and commitment,” he said. “You need to be able to think long term about this, at least 20 years into the future.”
The other reason he chose Panama is the real hero of the story: cobia, the fish he’s farming. The first time I heard of cobia was in Josh Schonwald’s book The Taste of Tomorrow. Schonwald spent a few years asking people what new ingredients chefs might demand in the future and how farmers would experiment with new crops. Fish we eat now, like salmon and Chilean sea bass, are largely inefficient to produce. With fewer and more expensive resources, Schonwald concluded, farmers would turn to other species that could convert feed to protein faster. Consumers, in turn, would change their tastes.
Pods that float in the open ocean are designed to hold an average of 35,000 fish each. A full-grown fish can command $50 to $60 wholesale.
JASON TREAT AND MATTHEW TWOMBLY, NGM STAFF; SHELLEY SPERRY. SOURCE: BRIAN O’HANLON, OPEN BLUE
He arrived at cobia as the holy grail. Unlike salmon, it goes from egg to 11-pound (5-kilogram) fish in about a year (salmon takes three). Unlike tilapia, it is sashimi-grade fish that can be used for high-end sushi. Unlike carp, it doesn’t taste fishy.
Salmon, tilapia, and carp are the world’s top farmed fish. Most aquaculture occurs in Asia, where overfished oceans have pushed fish farming inland, into concrete pools and tanks pumped with oxygen. The feed used is finely crafted to maximize nutrition. The measure of aquaculture efficiency is the feed-conversion ratio, or FCR: How many pounds of food does it take to yield one pound of meat? For tilapia and most carp species, the ratio is 1.6 to 1. Salmon are among the sleekest, coming in at 1.2 to 1.
Cobia has a way to go. Over the past ten years, cobia’s FCR has dropped to around 2 to 1. O’Hanlon is confident it can one day rival salmon’s. But what makes cobia prime for farming now is that it doesn’t mind population density. Confining fish often stunts growth. In a tank the size of a Jacuzzi, Open Blue can raise 15,000 fish, each the size of a paper clip. In three days they’ll double in size. Eventually they’ll be moved to the ocean pens. A year from now each will cover the entire rack of someone’s barbecue.
“This is how I look for sharks,” O’Hanlon says. We’re on the deck of his boat, floating a few feet from one of the cobia cages. O’Hanlon drops to his knees, then lies flat on his stomach and dunks his face in the water. He pushes his head deeper and deeper until it looks as though he’ll fall overboard. Then he does. When he comes up, he wipes the water from his eyes. “Yeah, there’s a pretty big bull shark down there,” he announces to the boat. I ask him if he’s serious. He looks at me wondering if I’m serious. He raises his eyebrows as if to say, dude, it’s the open ocean, and there are half a million fatty fish down there. Of course I’m serious.
O’Hanlon’s favorite part of running his aquaculture farm is swimming with the fish. He believes that open-ocean farming leads to healthier, stronger, and faster-growing fish.
But we dive anyway. Some 30 feet below the surface we swim through a small zipper in the nets. The opening is big enough for a human but small enough to avoid a mass jailbreak. In the cage, the fish swim in circles around a giant pole, day and night. They’re confined in the sphere, but the current of the water gives the effect of a huge treadmill. Compared with egg-laying hens that remain sedentary their whole lives, this form of protein has to keep moving just to stay still.
Underwater, the fish just inches from my eyes were nearly two feet long—enough to command around $50 wholesale. But O’Hanlon’s scientists want the fish slightly bigger, which will take just a few more months. They’ll eventually reach a size of diminishing return, where new food doesn’t yield much new weight.
Down at the bottom of the net, O’Hanlon is lying on his back, 80 feet deep, staring up through the water column. He looks almost as if he’s fallen asleep underwater, at peace with what he’s created, basking in the silhouettes of his moneymakers. O’Hanlon describes diving with his fish as “my church.” It’s quiet and peaceful, like a luxury swimming pool rather than the open ocean. The water is almost 80 degrees. It’s exactly what someone saw when naming the color Caribbean blue.
From millions of eggs, only a few thousand fish survive. Juvenile cobia are raised in indoor tanks until they are large enough to be transferred to the open ocean.
One night over beers, O’Hanlon explained to me the mechanics of fish death. The way fishing boats kill fish—letting them flop around in a cooler—is actually the worst way to end a salmon. When a fish is stressed (and what could be more stressful than suffocating with a hook in your mouth?), it releases lactic acid, the same stuff that makes your muscles tight after a hard workout. It makes meat pungent and stiff.
You want to kill the fish without warning. So O’Hanlon’s farm uses a relatively new technique in which—“and I realize this sounds crude,” he says, “but it’s not”—giant pipes suck the fish from the water and a hammer immediately knocks the fish on the head. Then a blade cuts a main artery under its chin. From happy life to oblivious death in about three seconds.
Cobia brood stock produce the eggs for all of Open Blue’s fish. Scientists monitor the offspring to ensure genetic diversity.
In fact, fish can be too fresh. Most animals go through rigor mortis immediately after they die, which makes their muscles tighten. It takes several hours or even days for tissue to relax again. When the cobia arrives in Miami the day after it was stunned, and then at a grocery store the day after that, the muscles have begun to loosen. By the time you get around to cooking the fish four days after it died, it’s just reaching its prime.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization recorded rising demand for cobia back in 2006. But by 2008, numbers had bottomed out. A high-quality fish wasn’t suited to a global recession. Several years later, in 2012, I started looking for cobia at restaurants and supermarkets. Asking a chef sometimes felt like holding a secret key, as if the name was proof I was discerning about seafood. Cobia’s main problem has been marketing. Few people have heard of the fish, let alone stocked it. This was supposed to be the fish of the future, not the fish of hipsters and elites.
O’Hanlon sees cobia as a sustainable fish that grows quickly and has a mild flavor. Despite the fish’s large size, it can thrive in dense populations.
Even if growing methods are sound, cobia’s struggle comes down to market share. The acclaimed International Boston Seafood Show—where business deals are inked in squid blood—is jokingly called the Boston Salmon Show. If fish had a monarchy, salmon would be king. The annual salmon-industrial complex is worth just under $10 billion. The fish has the widest portfolio of ways it’s produced: caught in oceans and rivers, farmed on land, and farmed in the wild. Wild salmon has become the most elusive kind. Farmed salmon produced through selective breeding or by tweaking its genes accounts for two-thirds of the salmon the world eats. A cobia trying to squeeze into the salmon market is like a 12-year-old trying out for the Boston Red Sox. A few years ago marketers had the idea to nickname cobia “black salmon.” Why they came up with black—the fish is mostly silver, and the meat is white—no one seems to know.
“It’s a chef’s dream to find something that’s reliably sourced year-round and grows quickly and sustainably.”—FISHMONGER MJ GIMBAR
Finally one day in February I found a restaurant not far from my house in Washington, D.C., that occasionally served cobia. Like any other restaurant, it depended on the catch and whether the restaurant could stock the fish. So I waited. Finally one day I called; it had just gotten a shipment of cobia—by sheer coincidence, from O’Hanlon’s farm in Panama. I went with my colleague Spencer for lunch. I ordered pan-seared cobia with gnocchi, pine nuts, and roasted cauliflower. Spencer had cobia fish tacos. The meat was thick, almost like cutting through beef. It was lean but juicy and took on the flavor of an accompanying cream sauce. I asked Spencer if he’d order it again. He paused and said yes.
Although cobia is a little-known species native to mid-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific waters, aquaculture may hold the key to producing it in larger quantities and selling it worldwide.
The restaurant’s fishmonger, a man dressed in black and named MJ Gimbar, described cobia as a “good eating fish” that has potential for market growth. “It’s a chef’s dream to find something that’s reliably sourced year-round and grows quickly and sustainably,” he said. “The only thing now is to get people to eat it.” The bigger questions may be whether cobia can overcome people’s emotional attachment to salmon and Chilean sea bass, even if those fish are more costly and environmentally demanding to produce.
Our final night in Panama, O’Hanlon offered another opportunity to try cobia, this time cooked on a barbecue on the beach. Someone brought a bucket with two fish, each the length of a man’s torso. We laid one down on a picnic table and stared at it together. I asked O’Hanlon if he could ever imagine these guys swimming in suspended cages off the coast of California.
“That’s the dream, man,” he said, nodding. He said he had to show that the model worked before he’d be able to scale up with cobia and other fish. Success would also invite competition. “You work and work at something, and then one day, somehow it’ll happen.” Then he looked up and asked no one in particular how to say “knife” in Spanish.
https://cunadelmar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/TheOtherWhiteMeat.jpg13652048Cuna del Mar/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CunaDelMarLogo.pngCuna del Mar2014-05-06 17:30:072014-05-06 17:30:07The Other Other White Meat
January 3, 2014 – 4:26pm BRUCE ERSKINE BUSINESS REPORTER
THE CHRONICLE HERALD
N.S. exec: Open Blue cages deeper than usual fish farms, process more eco-friendly
Open Blue Global Services (Canada) Inc. president Mike Magnus. (FILE)
Mike Magnus says his latest business venture will revolutionize the global seafood industry.
“It’s the new paradigm when it comes to seafood,” he said in an interview Friday from his Bedford office.
Magnus, former executive vice-president of sales and marketing with Clearwater Fine Foods and former president and CEO with Shear Wind Inc., is a partner as well as president and CEO ofOpen Blue Global Services (Canada) Inc.
Open Blue Global is a partnership with California’s Cuna del Mar, a major investor in Open Blue, the world’s largest offshore fish farm.
Ocean Blue raises cobia, also known as black kingfish and black salmon, in submerged cages 11 kilometres off the Atlantic coast of Panama. Magnus said Open Blue Global was established to market the fish internationally.
“We’re dealing with all the sales and marketing around the world for Open Blue,” he said.
Magnus said aquaculture will account for 60 per cent of seafood production by 2030, up from 40 per cent today, as global demand grows.
“Aquaculture really is the future.”
Magnus said traditional near-shore shallow water aquaculture, which has encountered vocal criticism in Nova Scotia, poses environmental challenges.
“It’s a challenge raising production in (12 to 15 metres) of water.”
Magnus said offshore deep-water aquaculture as practised by Ocean Blue, which submerges its cages to depths of 70 metres in a 1,000-hectare control area subject to steady ocean currents, is more eco-friendly and produces a healthier, tastier fish.
“There’s no buildup of impurities.”
Magnus said open ocean aquaculture has challenges of its own, including the costs associated with working in an open sea environment.
He said Open Blue has created a workable harvesting model that protects the environment but it needs to be done to increase public awareness about the benefits of raising fish offshore.
“Awareness is extremely low,” he said, adding that he sees the situation as an opportunity.
Magnus said cobia, raw and cooked, has outperformed other whitefish species in focus group comparisons.
“I’ve eaten a lot of seafood,” he said.
“It’s one of the best around.”
He said Open Blue, which has been raising cobia “seriously” for the past two years, plans to raise 20 million tonnes of the fish in the next four to five years.
Open Blue cobia was featured in Sobeys stores before Christmas. Magnus said he plans to launch the fish in Europe, Japan and China this year.
/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CunaDelMarLogo.png00Cuna del Mar/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CunaDelMarLogo.pngCuna del Mar2014-01-06 14:35:462014-01-06 14:35:46Taking Aquaculture to New Depths