Features

Nasheika Guya juggles motherhood, a PhD and being the managing director of a freshwater fish farm in Jamaica that caters for recreational anglers who can then keep and cook their catch.

While some analysts feel that the vertical farming bubble has burst, US mealworm producer Beta Hatch believes that there’s scope for a more subtle approach to indoor insect production.

Seafood production has become a globalised industry and many countries have seafood industries that are being buoyed by overseas migrant workers – hard-working people who left their home countries, and often their entire families, to seek their fortunes abroad…

Kwame David Adade took over Windmill Farms – a catfish and tilapia farm in Ghana – from his father four years ago and since then has made some interesting discoveries, especially in feed formulation.

Ten years after returning to Vietnam, Loc Tran, founder and CEO of ShrimpVet, is looking for ways to help farmers adopt more progressive and efficient practices in order to survive the current downturn in shrimp prices.

Attempts to improve access to disease-free shrimp juveniles – and clamp down on illegal imports – in Bangladesh show promise, but the sector still has a long way to go.*

Naturally occurring zooplankton species can provide an economical and effective alternative to more expensive and labour-intensive live feeds.

Croatia has emerged as a major player in the tuna ranching industry, and it is also looking to further develop closed cycle culture of Adriatic bluefin tuna, following its success at breeding them in captivity.

Francisca Samsing Pedrals – who has worked in the salmon sector in Chile, Australia and Norway – is relishing her new role at vet school in Sydney, where she wants to make more people aware of the opportunities offered in global aquaculture.

As the SEAfood Act and the AQUAA Act are being debated in Congress, Emily De Sousa joined two of America’s leading seafood chefs – Barton Seaver and Steve Phelps – on a tour of some of the world’s most extreme offshore fish farms, to find out for themselves ab…

Josh Goldman, founder and CEO of Australis, believes that the barramundi farming sector is nearing critical mass and the species is set to become a seafood staple in a range of countries.

Eslam Elsamadony is one of the pioneers of Egypt’s biofloc aquaculture sector, helping to transform a struggling farm into a system capable of producing 50 tonnes of tilapia a year.

Organic Garden aims to set up a network of land-based farms that synergistically and sustainably produce fish, vegetables, insects, algae and mushrooms, which are then sold directly to canteens across Germany, as Johannes Blei, chief farm and financial officer…

Sarah MacDonald is one of Mowi Scotland’s youngest farm managers, running one of the company’s newest and best performing farms, off the Isle of Scalpay.

Having worked in biotechnology investment and then as a pioneering seaweed and mussel farmer, Paul Dobbins was persuaded to come out of retirement for the second time to work on WWF’s programmatic and investment work and he now intends to galvanise the fledgli…

Danijel Gospic is currently looking to raise investment to build a 10,000 tonne vertically integrated African catfish farm in Croatia.

The scorching heat and low rainfall in Bangladesh in the beginning of summer have had devastating effects on the shrimp industry, particularly in Satkhira district, in the Khulna division.*

L’Esturgeonnière is France’s only sturgeon farm that both hatches its own fish and sells its own caviar, under the Perlita brand – selling it to more than 30 countries around the globe.

Zoramhluna, the founder of Zo Aquatics - a company that farms and sells a range of ornamental fish in the India's northeast state of Mizoram - believes that the sector is set to grow has scope grow.

At the age of only 19 Sander Kristiansen began managing a farm containing over a million salmon, and – one year later – he’s also in the process of designing his own unique fish farm service vessel.

The Fish Site columnist Proscovia Alando is planning to launch the first ever comprehensive independent analysis of the Kenyan aquaculture sector – in a bid to determine the number of farmers, their total production capacity, the key challenges they n…

Vincent Doumeizel, author of The Seaweed Revolution, believes that seaweed can help replace many of the worst elements of conventional contemporary agriculture and help to feed the growing global population.

Mia Avril from Castries, Saint Lucia, who has assisted in the growth of aquaculture in Trinidad, Jamaica, Dominica and the Bahamas, is a firm believer in on-farm aquafeed production and aquaponics.

Cyril Barbier is the hatchery and production manager at Gårdsfisk, an indoor farming operation in southern Sweden that aims to produce 550 tonnes of tilapia and African catfish this year.

Ireland’s Pure Ocean Algae has finished building a 600 m² seaweed hatchery building on the Beara peninsula, hoping to address the industry’s biomass bottleneck and set it on the path to success.

Kamuthanga, a tilapia and catfish RAS farm in eastern Kenya, has ambitious plans to double production by 2025.

Aquaculture startup Seafields aims to remove billions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year by growing and harvesting Sargassum in the South Atlantic Gyre, as John Auckland – co-founder and director – explains.

ZR Thahmingliana started a carp farm to honour the last wish of his father, who wanted to make the small state of Mizoram in northeast India self-reliant in fish production.

Ewan McAsh is the founder and CEO of Oceanfarmr (originally SmartOysters) – a startup that aims to streamline production and open up access to finance for 400,000 producers of oysters, mussels and seaweed around the world.

Helped by several initiatives from the government of Manipur, in north-east India, fish farmers have increased production substantially, but scientists feel that the state has not yet fulfilled its true aquaculture potential.

Peter Green, founder of Paxtier – an algae tech innovation newsletter and community – shares his thoughts on the sector’s most promising startups and some of the key emerging trends.

Vietnamese shrimp tech startup, Tepbac, recently landed a $2.25 million investment from Aqua-Spark*, AgFunder and Son-Tech Investment to scale its technology to digitise shrimp farming in Vietnam. Angela Tay, senior investment associate at AgFunder Asia, expla…

Pacu – which are also called tambaqui, pirapitinga, cachama, morocoto, or gamitana – are among the fish with the greatest potential to challenge the dominance of carps and tilapias in tropical freshwater aquaculture, especially if geneticists succeed in elimin…

Oluwasikemi Olabisi is the director of The FarmLady Aquatics Limited, a consulting company that helps prospective and existing catfish farmers through training, mentoring and production of healthy catfish juveniles.

Felix Collins, founder and managing director of Full Circle Biotechnology, believes that the company’s super-intensive “Black Box” – which is designed to produce 6,000 tonnes of insect and microbial protein with only a 1,500 m2 footprint – will dramatically re…

The rise of the offshore wind industry is a fantastic opportunity for the seaweed aquaculture sector, according to David Lamb, founder of Cultivocean.

Enos Were, the managing director of Jewlet Fish Farms, is a pioneer who has transformed East Africa’s aquaculture industry by training countless fish farmers, researchers and government officials, as well as developing his own successful independent farm.

A new project, involving researchers from Glasgow University and Kelpcrofting, a seaweed farming startup, is investigating the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) to predict biofouling of cultured seaweed and planktonic threats to farmed salmon.

Alternative proteins are often cited as being better – environmentally, ethically and nutritionally – than farmed seafoods, but the reality is much more complex and far less clear-cut than some alt-protein evangelists realise.

Robins Macintosh makes a compelling case for the merits of faster growing shrimp lines, countering the widespread belief that strains which have been selected purely for growth are always likely to have lower rates of survival.