Will Your Next Salmon Come from a Massive Land Tank in Florida? - POLITICO

Will Your Next Salmon Come from a Massive Land Tank in Florida? - POLITICO

Will Your Next Salmon Come from a Massive Land Tank in Florida? - POLITICO

Posted: 14 Jul 2020 08:50 AM PDT

My trip to the Bluehouse was the first time I worked outside my house since the start of the pandemic. Since I live in Miami, it was also the first time I wore long pants since the start of the pandemic. I drove south down the Florida Turnpike to this rural community at the gateway to the Keys, passed a bunch of nurseries growing palms, ficus trees and ornamental plants for Miami-area homeowners, and headed down a dusty road to a frenetic Miami-style construction site where workers were finishing the roof on that imposing white 390,000-square-foot building. Security officers took my temperature, made sure I had a mask, and led me to a trailer where Prado, the chief financial officer, greeted me at the door.

"It's coming together!" he said. "We're building the future of protein."

The coronavirus has wreaked havoc on every global company's logistics; the Chilean experts who were supposed to help Atlantic Sapphire install its fileting machines can't fly to Florida, so the company is trying to follow their instructions over Zoom. But Prado showed me how the pandemic has also accelerated the company's plans for a "vertically integrated value chain," corporate-speak for trying to do everything at the Bluehouse campus. There will be a breeding facility to try to improve the growth, health and even taste of the salmon through better genetics, an aquatic version of a stud farm for racehorses. There will be a factory to process discarded bones, heads and guts into omega-3 fish oil pills, pet-food additives and other zero-waste products. The company also plans to build an oxygen plant, manufacture biodegradable packaging materials, and convert its fish poop into fertilizer or biogas on site.

Atlantic Sapphire's leaders were already obsessed with biosecurity before Covid-19, because they've seen in Denmark how one wayward germ can paralyze production. But they believe the pandemic has heightened consumer concern about where food comes from and how many hands touch it, enhancing the business case for salmon that spend their entire lives under one roof and a supply chain that minimizes exposure to the outside world.

"We were thinking about doing all this stuff anyway, but Covid has made the rationale so much stronger," Prado told me. "It's made the rationale for everything we do stronger, because ever kilo of fish we make here is a kilo that doesn't have to be flown in from overseas."

Prado then took me to visit the Bluehouse, which from the outside looked like a warehouse and smelled like, well, a farm; its well-fed fish already generate nine tons of sludge every day, which gets separated from the wastewater and, for now, trucked off the campus. Inside, it's dominated by a few dozen concrete tanks, connected by more than 60 miles of pipes—and remember, it's only about 5 percent complete. The first half-million eggs went into the water in November 2018, and as the fish have grown from tadpole-like hatchlings to tiny fry to anchovy-like juveniles to silvery smolts and finally to adults, they've moved into gradually larger tanks, while construction workers have scrambled to finish each section of the plant in time for their arrival. They're now rushing to build the processing facility, where mature salmon will arrive through a pipe from the massive grow-out tanks, then be photographed, stunned, gutted, fileted, graded for quality and loaded onto trucks within a couple of hours.

The fish basically swim around all day in circles against an artificial current. While they seem to be crammed together even closer than feedlot cattle, Andreassen says they like swimming in schools—and that you can tell from their ravenous appetites that they're enjoying their South Florida lifestyle. I saw hundreds of juveniles in one tank the size of an above-ground swimming pool lined up directly below a horizontal bar that dispenses their feed, as if they were queuing in a cafeteria. I then watched them swarm to the surface in unison as the feed hit the water.

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