What is Aquaculture?
Aquaculture is the practice of farming lake or seafood. It’s like agriculture, but done with fish, crustaceans and shellfish. Aquaculture businesses breed and harvest plants and animals in water – fresh water, lakes or sea water – and prepare them for human consumption.
Aquaculture already provides over half of all the fish product that we eat in the world. It’s the world’s fastest-growing food-producing sector, and it’s going to play a crucial role in helping to feed a planet with an ever-growing population.
Aquaculture: Benefits and challenges
We need aquaculture to help feed the world. By 2050, there will 9.7 billion people on the planet, according to the UN, and this growth will put huge pressure on food production in general, and fish in particular.
Fish are under massive pressure already. Some 33% of fish stocks have already reached their biological limit because of destructive fishing practices and overfishing. What this means is that wild fish stocks don’t have time to replenish before they are fished again. The world needs aquaculture or fish farming to help meet the ever-growing demand for seafood and provide people in developing countries with healthy protein, while reducing the pressure on wild fish.
Aquaculture is the fastest-growing food production sector in the world. It already produces more than half of the fish eaten in the world today. But this rapid growth in demand also brings challenges. Badly managed fish farms can create a number of serious problems, including:
- water pollution
- damage to the local environment
- poor working conditions
The bigger the aquaculture industry becomes, the greater its potential impact – for good or bad – on the environment, on workers and on local communities. So this is the mission of all us here at the Bayrise Fish Farm: to help the industry to play its crucial part in feeding a growing global population while still respecting the planet and its people. We want to help minimize the industry’s impact on climate change and protect fish welfare too.
