And while conventional salmon farms are nearly as efficient at converting fish feed into human food, their supply chains are far more complex.

To put it another way, the goal is to produce about 15 percent as many tons of food as Florida’s citrus industry produced last year on about 0.03 percent as much land.Ītlantic Sapphire’s big advantage over its competitors in the protein world will be efficiency it’s on track to use just 1.05 pounds of feed for every pound of salmon filet, while cows devour more than six pounds of feed for every pound of beef. As one industry expert quipped to me: That’s a lotta lox. consumption, on a 160-acre tract that once grew about 5,000 annual tons of tomatoes. By 2031, Atlantic Sapphire plans to grow 220,000 annual tons of salmon, or 44 percent of current U.S. What the world needs is sustainably grown protein for a steadily increasing population, and the Bluehouse could produce enormous amounts of it. “This will be the new thing, because the world needs what we’re doing here. “You think of potatoes from Idaho, lobsters from Maine, and now you’ll think of fresh salmon from Florida,” says Atlantic Sapphire’s chief financial officer, Jose Prado. Investors seem to agree the company is now worth nearly $1 billion on the Oslo stock exchange. Like the fake-meat companies, Atlantic Sapphire will initially charge more than conventional salmon producers, but it’s betting not only that consumers will pay a price premium to try home-grown sustainable fish, but that they’ll make it part of their permanent routine. Conventionally farmed salmon already produce fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than pork and far fewer than beef, and the Bluehouse’s designers believe they drive even more drastic reductions while leaving the seas alone. It’s easier to manage cages in the sea than to build gigantic tanks on land, and President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order to make it even easier by relaxing environmental protections in marine waters, which could relieve some pressure for eco-friendly innovation in the U.S.īut if it works, Atlantic Sapphire’s push to help feed the world with less impact on the planet could be as transformative as better-publicized efforts by plant-based protein firms like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. Just this February, a nitrogen-poisoning mishap in a tank at the company’s pilot plant in rural Denmark killed 200,000 fish. The technical challenges of raising salmon that never see the outdoors are immense.

meat industry has struggled to keep slaughterhouses open and supermarkets stocked-the Bluehouse is about to start harvesting American-made protein that doesn’t have to be packed in Styrofoam, handled by multiple middlemen, or shipped around the world in carbon-belching cargo planes. At a moment when the coronavirus is exposing the fragility of elaborate global food supply chains-China recently banned salmon imports after false rumors of contagion, while the U.S. It’s also a well-timed experiment in simplified logistics.

Its red-fleshed fish are growing without antibiotics or pesticides, without exposure to seaborne diseases or parasites, without escapes that could allow them to endanger wild fish, and without damage to the overfished and overpolluted oceans. The Bluehouse is a high-tech experiment in productivity and sustainability, a supersized aquatic version of greenhouse agriculture that aims to solve a host of environmental problems plaguing conventional salmon farms in coastal waters.

Atlantic lox