Environment & Energy

The Key to Sustainable Fish Farming? Vegetarian Fish

Most anchovies and sardines don’t end up on pizzas. Instead, they go to processing plants where they are turned into pellets to feed farmed fish. Now scientists and entrepreneurs are finding ways to create vegetarian diets for species like trout, which may lessen the strain on over-fished oceans.

World demand for seafood is rising, but many of the world’s oceans are already overfished. As a result, fish farming is booming. By 2030 nearly two-thirds of seafood worldwide will be farm-raised, according to a World Bank report issued last month.

From the environmental perspective, that is creating a major problem: millions of tons of wild fish like anchovies, sardines and mackerel are being caught in the ocean to feed farm-raised fish like salmon. In many cases, it can take three pounds of wild fish to grow one pound of farmed fish.

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https://www.kqed.org/quest/64593/vegetarian-farmed-fish-may-be-key-to-sustainable-aquaculture