Indoor Aquaculture as a Climate Solution

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Most people are familiar with vertical farming for leafy green crops. But there’s also an emerging industry inbut indoor aquaculture that is drawing awareness and interest from entrepreneurs. TransparentSea Farm founder and CEO Steve Sutton says what most people don’t know is how indoor shrimp farming can actually be a solution for certain climate concerns.

Sutton... "Trawling nets through the ocean or drifting nets through the ocean kills about 67 billion pounds a year of other sea life, other than the intended catch. Again, not all that is going to be edible, so it's a murky subject and whatever, but the point is we have to do better than that. That just can't be the way we produce fish. So when it comes to farming as a solution, shrimp farming has been done without much control. You know, I, I like to say, you know, historically it was kind of a, a gold rush and they started by collecting it from the wild and putting it in ponds that were being filled by the ocean tide. That is still to this day, the majority of the way shrimp is farmed. So yes, improvements have been made in the industry in 60 years. We're destroying less habitat than we used to destroy, but even the habitats that are there, it doesn't matter to me if, if Farmer John is the one who destroyed it. It's just that land, if it's capable of being a carbon sink of the utmost proportions, then that's what it should be. And we should find another way to produce whatever's being produced in that space."

Sutton believes indoor shrimp farming presents an opportunity to produce this protein more efficiently and sustainably.

TransparentSea is headquartered in Downey, California. Learn more at transparentseafarm.com.