Florida may soon be known as the Salmon State
MIAMI – Forget about the Pacific Northwest or the chilly coast of Maine. Your next piece of salmon could come from the Sunshine State.
Atlantic Sapphire, a Norwegian company that pioneered technology to farm salmon entirely on land, is building a salmon farm near the southernmost edge of the continental U.S., about an hour’s drive south of Miami.
The tropical climate of South Florida may seem like the most unlikely spot to raise the protein-rich, cold-water fish. But the company says Florida’s unique underground geology and the state’s business-friendly environmental regulations ended up being the perfect mix for its plunge into the U.S. market.
CEO Johan Andreassen said he scouted 13 U.S. states for 21⁄ years before
2 he spotted a YouTube video outlining Florida’s underground water system. The naturally occurring water system features the separate layers of fresh and salt water needed to raise salmon. He made a couple of calls, started raising money, and by November, the company expects to drop its first salmon eggs into an above-ground water tank.
“I was giving up,” Andreassen said of his months of searching. “I was just Googling, and I came across this video. I was shocked. We didn’t expect that this was a suitable area.”
Atlantic Sapphire’s new technology represents the latest step toward farmraised fish, a practice mired in controversy but growing worldwide. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, fish farming, known as “aquaculture,” has grown so rapidly that it now provides half the fish consumed by humans each year.
Siwa Msangi, a senior researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute and co-author of a 2013 World Bank study on global fish production, said the image of farmed fish has suffered due to disease outbreaks in Chile, Canada, China and elsewhere. But Msangi said salmon farms, traditionally located in open water and contained only by nets, cannot keep out parasites, bacteria and other contaminants, making them vulnerable to such outbreaks.
What makes Atlantic Sapphire’s technique unique is that the salmon go through their entire life cycle — from egg to ready-to-eat adult — in a contained, above-ground, filtered water system. “That’s the innovation,” said Jose Prado, the company’s CFO.
Msangi said keeping the fish out of the ocean can keep them free of sea lice, microplastics and other toxins that have doomed other fish farms.
“To be honest, this sounds like a great idea,” said Msangi, who was not involved in the Atlantic Sapphire project. “People are still wary of commercially farmed fish compared to what they catch themselves. But given the environmental problems as oceans warm, there are going to be more problems with that method.”
Atlantic Sapphire’s farm will stand on a 20-acre site in a swath of South Florida long dominated by agriculture. The construction site is surrounded by plant nurseries, palm tree farms and fields lined with tomatoes, sweet potatoes, strawberries and papayas.
The company is building a series of water tanks connected by 67 miles of pipes, starting with smaller tanks for salmon eggs and increasing in size to 36 tanks that will hold 450,000 gallons of water each. The water in the tanks will be cooled to 59 degrees and slowly transition from freshwater to saltwater to mimic the salmon’s natural life cycle. The entire site will be covered by a 400,000-square-foot roof designed to keep out the sun and withstand hurricane-force winds.
While all that work is being done above ground, the key to the project lies underneath (see graphic).
If all goes to plan, Atlantic Sapphire will crank out 10,000 metric tons of salmon by 2020. It has purchased 20 neighboring acres of land to expand further and has an option to buy 40 more acres. That would allow the company to produce 90,000 metric tons of salmon a year, about 10% of the U.S. market.
The company already is producing salmon on its first land-based farm in Denmark.