Aquaculture: The future of food?

When we think of agriculture, I would imagine most people do not picture rows upon rows of fishtanks, but on Sept. 26 I had the opportunity to visit the USGS Tunison Lake Ontario Biological Station in Cortland, NY and to learn about the work they are doing for fish restoration, research and education.

These adult bloater were used for a nutrition experiment at Tunison. (Clare Shanahan

Myself and my aquaculture class who facilitated the trip were able to tour the facility and learn that they are raising Atlantic Salmon, Cisco and Bloater, all fish native to upstate New York. Historically, the hatchery has grown out fish eggs to stock local lakes and rivers with depleted populations. For example, cisco which have four subspecies, including bloater, were previously the most common prey fish in New York, but today they are not present in many of the state’s major lakes and there are no self-sustaining populations of bloater in the state. It is fascinating to see that federally-run agencies are working on restoration in this way. Moving forward, Tunison station will be decreasing their stock enhancement and focusing instead on smaller research projects. For example, an active experiment at the station was rearing bloater in different temperatures to see how they were affected.

Baby bloater, which would traditionally spawn in the winter at the bottom of Lake Ontario; at Tunison two batches of eggs were incubated at two different temperatures. (Clare Shanahan)

Although Tunison is a facility that works mainly with research and education, there are also many commercial fish hatcheries and aquaculture facilities across New York and this got me thinking about aquaculture as an industry. Aquaculture — the practice of hatching, growing and often harvesting fish, is a growing area of agriculture and something that will become more prevalent when thinking about sustainability and global food security in the future. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, aquaculture has been an important practice to decrease global food insecurity. The FAO has also argued that while aquaculture is crucial to global food security and supporting the economies of costal countries, and it has massively increased in recent years, it needs to become transformatively more sustainable. In 2022, FAO created a Blue Transformation Road Map for 2022 - 2030 to attain more sustainable fisheries and aquaculture programs. In general, aquaculture is one of the practices that could serve as a more sustainable path in the Blue Transformation Road Map to avoid depleting natural fisheries. A common criticism of aquaculture practices is that when aquaculture is done in open water, it leaves behind waste and food that can damage the broader ecosystem; a second criticism is that farmed fish can introduce diseases and negatives to native fish populations.

I do not know if aquaculture can become sustainable, and I do not know that it is the future of the global food system. But, if there is one thing I learned from my visit to Tunison and other recent aquaculture researchI have done, it is that fish farming is agriculture and it is an area we should all be talking and thinking more about for the future.