Land-based fish farming finds a new gear

Maiman, who is the Founder and former CEO of The Kingfish Company, told the Blue Food Innovation Summit 2025 in London that the avoided issues include the depletion of wild-capture fisheries and also concerns around the impacts that traditional net-pen or sea cage farming could be having on the environment.

Featuring in the panel: Transforming land-based aquaculture: innovative farm designs overcoming scaling challenges for market success, he highlighted that sustainability isn’t the sector’s only driver.

“Beyond that, there’s a bottleneck in the global seafood supply. The wild catch has pretty much kept stable at about 90 million tonnes per year, and baring the discovery of a new ocean, there’s no reason to think that this will increase. Hopefully, this supply will remain stable. Meanwhile, over the last 30 years, traditional aquaculture – cages and open ponds – has done a remarkable job in pretty much doubling the global supply.

“Now though, as demonstrated by the salmon farming industry from Canada to Europe, we’re facing a bit of a challenge in increasing supply. Meanwhile, global demand is estimated to grow between 30 to 50% from now to 2050, and land-based aquaculture is well posing supply and meet that gap,” he said.

Trond Håkon Schaug-Pettersen, CEO of Norwegian land-based salmon farming company Salmon Evolution, told the summit he believes that especially for products like salmon, the aquaculture sector has now reached an inflection point.

While farming fish on-land is very capital intensive, Schaug-Pettersen pointed out that in the case of traditional salmon farming, there’s only very limited opportunities for growth. “With the overall supply coming down, prices have remained strong, and that creates a fundament where from an economic perspective, it makes very much sense to do this.”

Also factoring the biological challenges that land-based farming overcomes adds to the case for the sector’s growth, he said. “I think it’s a very interesting time for the industry as a whole.”

Building scale

Salmon Evolution was founded in 2017, and that in itself underlines the long lead times the industry faces, remarked Schaug-Pettersen. “It takes time to build capacity, especially in the beginning. You’re not able to substantially grow the market or the supply side over a very short period of time, but eventually you will be able to grow it. It’s the permitting. It’s finding the right location and building, and then taking it into operation.”

The project is a large one, he said. From its location on the west coast of Norway and using a hybrid flow through system that takes in high-quality water that’s at an ideal temperature from the deep, Salmon Evolution will eventually produce 36,000 tonnes of fish.

Phase one which has been in operation for three years that has a capacity of 8,000 tonnes and the company is now proceeding with construction of phase two which will take production up to 18,000 tonnes.

“To really get the economics you need, you need a certain scale and to reach this critical mass where you have this platform where you’re actually able to grow further without being dependent upon raising capital all the time. I think it is extremely important to have more sustainable growth, so phase two, which we will put into operation in a year from now, is really going to be a game-changer for our company and will take us into a position where we can grow just based on the earnings that we have.

“We’ve also had very good biological results – mortality rates, superior grade share, feed conversion ratios etc. They are all extremely good. And when we talk about production costs and relative competitiveness, I think that this what it’s all about – to have good biology.”

Adding further context, Lárus Ásgeirsson, Chairman of the Board at Laxey, which is establishing a land-based salmon farm in Iceland’s Westman Islands, highlighted that while Iceland has managed its fishing grounds responsibly, adopting best practices throughout, it has seen its lobster and shrimp resource disappear, while quotas have been removed for halibut and scallop fishing has stopped.

Fish farming is an opportunity for Iceland, and land-based production has been conducted in the country for many years, focused on Artic char and turbot, Ásgeirsson explained. For these species, the volume produced has stayed on a modest, even keel. Meanwhile, with the support of Norwegian producers, salmon farming in sea cages has taken off, although there’s already a limit in the availability of permits.

“The only way is to go on land and build big-scale salmon farms,” he said.

In actual fact, farming salmon on land is also nothing particularly new; it’s been done for decades on the smolt-side, Schaug-Pettersen said. “What we are basically doing now is just extending what we all have been doing for many years. Obviously, with full grow-out production, it’s a totally different scale, and with more scale comes new complexities. But a lot of the principles are the same and they have been working successfully for many years. I think also what you what you see now is that it is definitely possible, because ourselves and other companies have done this at scale and in full grow-out production. The next phase is really about demonstrating profitability and consistency in the production.”

He continued: “As for the uncertainty which we might have had a couple of years ago about whether this is possible, I think the consensus is that it is possible. Now, it’s more about maturing it into more consistent and stable production.”

Social acceptance

From an Icelandic perspective, the farming of fish on land in state-of-the-art facilities is something that has been welcomed by both government and local communities, Ásgeirsson confirmed.

“It’s accepted. It’s encouraged. And for now, there is nothing really restricting the volume that can be produced on land. The only issue is funding all the projects that people come up with. In Iceland, there are five projects that are partially or fully-funded and there’s more to come. So, there’s strong interest to develop this further.

“But it is capital intensive, and to start these industrialised, land-based farms you need lots of capital,” he added. “You have to rely on equity in the beginning, and that’s really holding back further development. But I think that in general people strongly believe in this, and also the sea pen – or the traditional farming industry – is seeing more and more opportunities to farm on land, at least with post-smolt production. One would see variety of land-based [farms] for salmon and other species by producing post-smolt to a kilo, or one and a half kilos, to shorten the time the salmon spend in the sea.”

The Laxey project, which is now over five years old, was partly created by its founders to add to the island economy and to provide year-round jobs, Ásgeirsson explained.

There are around 5,000 people living on the island. It’s a hardcore seafood community; it was once the biggest fishing harbour in Iceland. But as stocks diminished, so too did the fishing activities. Having obtained the necessary permits etc, a hatchery was built three years ago and then the ground was broken on the grow-out facility two years ago.

“The progress has been very, very good, and we are on time, both with the biomass and construction,” he said, adding that the company is also extremely pleased with the team that has been put together to run the farm.

“There was strong interest from people with experience in farming to take on this new state-of-the-art project and be a part of building a new generation of fish farm.”

Today, the smolt facility is “fully loaded”, he said, with over 6 million smolt and salmon eggs in the hatchery. At the same time, its first harvest of around 900 tonnes is planned for the end of this year.

Business rationale

Back in the early days of modern on-land fish production, there were a lot of “vivid arguments” about whether these farms could go on to replace the existing methods, Maiman recalled. Now though, given seafood’s global supply bottleneck, he insists “that it’s not a question of either/or”, instead the world “needs all of the above” to be able to solve the challenge and increase its contribution worldwide.

“That said, land-based is not a fix-all answer for all species in all locations and in all cases. It’s very important to analyse and make sure the projects have a solid business case,” he said.

“In my view, it’s a combination of a product-market-technology fit, whereby deploying RAS for any species and anywhere doesn’t make sense. In fact, it might actually be quite foolhardy. But when you look at the product-market-technology fit, some of the cases, such as The Kingfish Company deploying yellowtail in Europe where it is globally supplied from Japan, with some production from Australia it makes sense. Or for Atlantic Sapphire, deploying salmon in the US, where it is otherwise supplied from Norway or Chile or Scotland or Canada. That is something we’re implementing now at AquaFounders with The Black Cod Company [in The Netherlands] – again, a high-value species supplied from Alaska or North America, and deploying in Europe and potentially other markets.”

One of AquaFounders other ventures is its Farm in a Box plug-and-play hardware and software solution for modular, land-based fish farming. This prefabricated system recognises that while the aquaculture industry has proven it can build reliable systems to grow fish on land to market size, it is being hindered in scaling up these endeavours by high CAPEX and significant construction periods.

There are several other suppliers working towards providing such solutions, all with the hope that in the future many more land-based facilities can be built “with the maturity, speed and cost efficiency of greenhouses”, Maiman said.

Schaug-Pettersen fully supports the approach, saying: “I think that it’s definitely possible to do this cheaper – by doing things smarter and also through more prefabrication and standardisation. [Land-based] is working, but there’s always room for improvement, and I think it’s extremely important to have this continuous innovation when you’re dealing with biology. And especially for fish, it’s all about water quality, which, in principle, can never be good enough. You need to constantly strive to improve that. Biosecurity is also extremely important.

“Finally, it’s one thing to do something on a small scale, but when you’re doing this on an industrial scale, with thousands and thousands of tonnes in standing biomass, then having a high level of automation that limits manual processes and so forth is extremely important, because in order for this to be scalable, you need to optimise things,” he said.