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By Amanda Kelley
We’ve all got to eat. Food is what keeps us alive! With Earth’s exponentially increasing population, we have had to get creative when it comes to finding the best way to go about feeding the masses.
Aquaculture is one of those creative methods. In short, it’s basically fish farming: growing and raising seafood in a way that is similar to how we grow and raise crops.
Dr. Steve Gaines from the University of California at Santa Barbara is one of the many fisheries researchers who believes that farmed fish is the only viable way to meet the growing demand for animal protein. This demand is projected to double over the next 40 years.
Gaines and his colleagues recently completed a study that analyzed the most efficient and sustainable sources of protein. They looked at wild-caught fish, farmed fish as well as your typical farm animals. They found that from an economic and environmental perspective, farmed fish is the most sustainable source of animal protein.
This would be great news, but unfortunately there is a negative connotation associated with aquaculture. Some of the laziest methods of fish farming includes producing mass amounts of waste runoff that leaches into watersheds, which has a severe impact on aquatic ecology and gives a bad name to aquaculture.
However, Gaines argues that the aquaculture facilities with best management practices are dramatically better than any protein production on land. The UC Santa Barbara researcher stated, “In many cases, it’s 50 to 100 times higher environmental impact to produce on land than in the ocean.”
More and more, the fish in your local grocery store has probably been farm raised – embrace the future and make sure you know your food!
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