Some of the most commonly farmed species around the world are salmon, shrimp, catfish, and trout. Like the farming of animals on land, this booming industry has become heavily industrialized, with farms on land and at sea raising and killing fish on a massive scale to the detriment of animal welfare, workers, and the environment.

It is an industry that sees fish as products, not living beings. The number of fish raised and killed by aquaculture each year are even counted not as individuals, but by their total weight in tons. 

The aquaculture industry would have us believe that fish farming can stop the overfishing of our oceans amid a troubling demand for seafood. While it is true that many populations of wild fish are being caught faster than they can recover, fish farming may jeopardize wild species, too. For example, the escape of thousands of fish from an Icelandic salmon farm in September may put wild salmon at risk. 

The fact of the matter is, aquaculture presents its own set of deeply concerning problems similar to those created by the factory farming of terrestrial animals like cows, pigs, and chickens. 

Science indicates that, like other animals, fish can suffer. We too often view fish as far different from humans and other mammals, but many researchers have concluded that fish can feel pain, even if they experience pain differently than humans do.

Like farmed birds, fish are mostly unprotected by animal welfare regulations and, as NBC News has reported, even in states where laws do not clearly exclude fish, prosecutors may be reluctant to respond to alleged abuse of fish. Sadly, this leaves their treatment on farms and at slaughter in the hands of producers. One undercover investigation revealed farmed salmon being kicked, stomped on, and thrown. Another documented catfish left to slowly suffocate out of water.

Wild-captured fish experience agonizing final moments no animal should have to endure, as pressure weighs on their bodies when they’re quickly pulled up out of the ocean’s depths in nets, and they begin to suffocate. On farms, suffering is prolonged, and fish may be kept in tanks or pens for as long as two years before they are killed.

Death, too, is cruel on fish farms, where many fish are killed slowly by suffocation or in ice water.

Like other intensively farmed animals, fish raised on industrial farms are kept in severely crowded conditions, whether they are raised in tanks on land or in ocean pens.

Just one farm may contain tens of thousands of fish, comparable in scale to many chicken farms. Like chickens, fish can experience harmful effects of such crowding, including aggression and injuries, susceptibility to disease, and changes in behavior and feeding. Furthermore, a 2020 study tied crowding and stress on freshwater trout farms to loss of body muscle and weight in the fish.

Existing in these cramped environments is a far cry from the lives fish would experience in their natural habitats. For one example, salmon may swim spans of hundreds of miles to reach the ocean from the streams in which they hatched, and much farther as they reach feeding grounds, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Sometimes, salmon will spend years at sea before returning to their original stream to spawn.

The intensive crowding, stressful conditions, and poor water quality on fish farms may leave fish vulnerable to illness. 

Bacterial diseases and infestations of parasites including sea lice often plague fish raised in these captive environments, and played a role as fish deaths nearly doubled on Scottish salmon farms in 2022. Investigators have documented the effects of such parasitic infection in farm-raised salmon, from skin lesions to scale loss and even death.

Columnaris disease, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), is a bacterial disease that “impacts almost all U.S. finfish aquaculture industries.” The illness can have a mortality rate of up to 90 percent, and infected fish may suffer from sores and develop a slimy substance on their skin and gills.

As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)points out, “disease events” or outbreaks can happen on fish farms because tanks or pens are more densely crowded than wild environments and because fish who are ill are not quickly removed by marine predators like sharks.

When it comes to public health, industry attempts to control illness in aquaculture are the biggest threat. Just like factory farms on land, fish producers use antibiotics in an attempt to prevent disease, a practice expected to rise by 33 percent by 2030. Antibiotic usage on farms can leave residue that leaks into the surrounding environments, a danger to humans as we already face a rising threat in treatment-resistant illnesses.

The nets that confine fish to ocean-based farms cannot contain the harms of aquaculture, which can have devastating impacts on our oceans.

Nearly all of the world’s salmon farming is done in open nets at sea, allowing water to flow from these farms into the water around them. The New York Times has reported that “this free exchange has been at the heart of many of the industry’s issues, worsened by severe crowding that pollutes the surrounding ecosystem…”

Sometimes, fish escape from the nets used to confine them, bringing pathogens harbored on fish farms into the open ocean where wild populations can be sickened, impacting biodiversity. In one recent example, thousands of salmon from an Icelandic farm escaped, and The Guardian warned “the impact could be deadly,” even reducing the ability of wild populations to reproduce and survive if the farmed and wild fish were to breed.

This is not where the environmental damage stops. Extraction of groundwater for aquaculture has been found in one study to accelerate sea level rise by causing land to sink.

In fish farming, many workers may be undocumented immigrants working long hours for low wages and left with little way to report concerns or injuries. Workers’ rights violations have been found on fish farms, as elsewhere in factory farming.

The industry relies on other exploitation and inequities, too. One of the most commonly farmed species of fish is the Atlantic salmon. In fact, all Atlantic salmon sold in the U.S., and most around the world, comes from fish raised on farms. A 2022 study revealed that millions of tons of small fish caught in the global south – including West African countries “facing high levels of food insecurity” – go to feed farmed salmon sold to consumers in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Pigs on factory farms are often cannibalized, forced to eat meat from fellow pigs. Sadly, the same reality exists for farmed fish, and the salmon industry is a major consumer of wild-caught fish. According to the 2022 research, 60 percent and 23 percent of the fish oil and fishmeal used in aquaculture feed, respectively, goes to feed farm-raised salmon. In 2019, NPR reported on this “fish-eat-fish chain,” noting that it takes around three pounds of “feeder fish” to produce just one pound of captive salmon.

Furthermore, a staggering 35 percent of what is produced by fisheries and aquaculture is wasted, never even reaching the market.

Promises that a sustainable solution to the overfishing of our oceans can be found in aquaculture offer nothing but false hope while reeling in hundreds of billions of dollars in profit for an industry built on the exploitation of animals, people, and our shared planet.

As of the USDA’s most recent Census of Agriculture, from 2018, the U.S. was home to 2,932 aquaculture farms in an industry worth $1.5 billion in sales. 

Globally, fish farming is projected to surpass $409 billion in revenue by 2030, and between 1990 and 2018, aquaculture production rose by 527 percent. 

This is not a solution; it’s a problem.

The good news is that the seafood alternatives industry is growing, too. At least 120 companies are producing alt-seafood around the world, according to the Good Food Institute, and the sector raised 92 percent more funding in 2021 compared to the previous year.

In other encouraging news, concerned chefs recently pledged to stop serving farmed salmon due to the industry’s impacts on the environment and animal welfare. 

If we want to do better by the oceans and the many species that call it home, the most effective answer is to shift towards a more plant-based food system kinder to animals, people, and the planet.