A Cleaner Future for Fish Farming

The future of seafood may lie in land-locked Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Researchers there at our Freshwater Institute are pioneers in the field of recirculating aquaculture systems—the fully enclosed, large-scale systems that produce healthy fish in an environment-friendly manner.

As more people eat fish and as natural stocks dwindle worldwide, recirculating aquaculture systems could help raise healthy fish without releasing the manure, chemicals, non-native fish and diseases of traditional fish farms into ocean or freshwater environments. Since 1992, lead researcher Dr. Steven Summerfelt and his team have been working on ways to make the technology more efficient and cost-effective.

“We hope to revolutionize the fish-farming industry using water recirculating systems that produce healthy fish in a manner that does not jeopardize our natural water resources,” says Sommerfelt. “Our biggest challenge has been to make the water recirculating system technologies more cost-competitive against traditional technologies. We are now reaching this goal with some species and expect to be competitive with salmon net pen farms in large-scale land-based farms.”

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Photo: Research tanks at the Freshwater Institute/The Conservation Fund