What is Aquaculture?
Dangerous practices of overfishing have completely decimated populations of fish worldwide. Aquaculture is a way to help this field by creating and working to bring populations back to sustainable levels. Aquaculture is the farming of aquatic animals like fish, mollusks, oysters and aquatic plants and can be done in both fresh water and salt water. This is an up and coming field where this industry now accounts for half of the shellfish and fish populations consumed worldwide. In order to be considered an aquaculture farm the company must show an increase in either the growth rate or quality of the marine creature. Aquaculture is similar to Agriculture in that it requires many of the same skills. It is a fast growing field with it growing in many southern states within the United States resulting in 1 billion national sales.
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There are two different types of Aquaculture farms; the
first is where the growers lease a portion of a lake or ocean to use specifically for growing their fish in the natural environment (see the negative effects of that here). The second type is the production of these fish in a more artificial environment where they might have pools and hatchlings in a building. Some examples of these can be found in Walt Disney World's Epcot on their ride - Living with the land. Another place where aquaculture is starting to take hold is at Chicago's operation known as "the plant". Jennifer Cockrall-King wrote a book titled Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution in which she devotes an entire chapter specifically to talking about the Plant. One of their featured farms is their "aquaponics" farm; this farm grows plans without the use of soil and has fish in the same tank. The waste from the fish is used to feed the plants, and the plants clean the water that is in the fish tanks creating a wonderful display of co-habitation. |