State of USA Recirculating Aquaculture Systems 2021 edition

A lot of new interest and money has flowed into US RAS projects over the past couple of years. Companies are aiming for bigger farms and forecasting hundreds of thousands of metric tons of production in the next ten years.

Atlantic Sapphire, Nordic Aquafarms, The Kingfish Company, Whole Oceans, and Pure Salmon are the industry leaders with announced farms ranging from 10,000 to 200,000 MT of annual production. Many of these companies are now publicly traded and Atlantic Sapphire managed to reach an evaluation of over $1 billion.

Atlantic Sapphire is also probably the most mature company with a large operational farm in Florida producing fish. They have not met their production targets but they are producing thousands of tons of fish a year now. They are also working on phase 2 of their farm that will reportedly take what they learned and improve on it in a larger farm. They have had a number of setbacks from a failed cooling system to their pilot farm in Denmark burning to the ground, but they remain the trailblazer.

Other companies are in pursuit but little has changed since my last article was written 3 years ago. They all talk a lot but few have actually broken ground on their farms or received the necessary permits. Small farms in niche markets continue to operate throughout the US. The covid-19 pandemic has brought greater attention to food security and we will see if RAS can be a viable solution for US domestic seafood consumption. It may be another 3 years before we can say if it looks like it will work out.