The University of New Hampshire has been selected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to host a new five-year cooperative project focused on boosting sustainable domestic seafood production.
David Fredriksson, professor of ocean engineering and the director of the Center for Sustainable Seafood Systems at UNH, said America's role in the current seafood market has a lot of potential for growth.
“We currently have over a $20 billion seafood trade deficit, so we import $20 billion more seafood than we produce in the United States,” said Fredriksson, who will lead the new cooperative institute.
For the past three years, UNH has run a small aquaculture operation in New Castle. There, they grow 20,000 pounds of steelhead trout which are distributed to local markets in Rye and Portsmouth.
Aquaculture, unlike traditional commercial fishing, involves breeding, rearing, and harvesting plants and animals in aquatic environments for commercial food production, habitat restoration, and for the protection and restoration of endangered species.
“We have several restaurants in Portsmouth that take the product, and we also smoke it and deliver it to local retailers, primarily in Newfields and Dover,” Fredriksson said.
The new cooperative institute hopes to grow domestic seafood production through aquaculture projects that will complement the existing fishing industry.
Fredriksson said methods of addressing the seafood production deficit need to be responsible towards the local people, the economy, and the environment. Ultimately, the initiative's strategy is to create small-scale grassroots community operations throughout the country.
“We’re hoping in 10 years to really grow local seafood production. But it’s going to be not one big corporation doing this,” said Fredriksson. “We’re looking to have a lot of mom-and-pop operations all over the place to fill in that gap.”
UNH currently has inshore aquaculture sites, but it also has exposed larger-acreage sites that approach offshore conditions. The goal is to demonstrate a method that works both for smaller-scale inshore sites and intermediate-scale sites to serve as a model for the rest of the country.
UNH is leading the research team including collaborators in the Southeast, the Caribbean, the Gulf, on the West Coast, and in Hawaii and the Pacific Islands. Each region has their own aquaculture project that will embrace the methodology learned in New Hampshire. For example, Alabama is farming red drum, Puerto Rico is farming pompano, the West Coast is farming California yellowtail, and Hawaii is farming Hawaiian kampachi.
