VENICE -- A move by an aquaculture company to change its fish farming operation has activist groups that tried unsuccessfully to block the project arguing that the federal permitting process should begin all over again.
Vellela Epsilon, sited in the Gulf about 40 miles west of Sarasota, won federal Environmental Protection Agency approval for a pilot aquaculture project to raise kanpachi. Several environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, fought the permit and have sued to block it. Recently the project's parent company, Hawaii-based Ocean Era, applied to change the species involved to red drum. That has the groups that opposed the project calling for the EPA to revoke the existing permit and force the approval process back to step one.
Sierra Club Florida's senior organizing director, Cris Costello, says there are other red drum production facilities on land, and that aquaculture could affect wild red drum populations through breeding with escaped farm fish. But Costello says her biggest concern is that fish farming in this location, and the nutrients required, would add to problems with red tide blooms. The company says red drum would require less feeding than kanpachi. Ocean Era says deep freezes have devastated red drum farming operations in Texas.
Opponents of the aquaculture plan are holding a rally next to the Venice pier Tuesday (13) at 11:30 a.m. Those include Food & Water Watch, Center for Food Safety, Healthy Gulf, Recirculating Farms, Sierra Club, Suncoast Waterkeeper, and Tampa Bay Waterkeeper .
Listen to an interview with Cris Costello below:
We received this response from Vellela Epsilon's parent company, Ocean Era, which suggests that opponents are denying the science on the benefits of aquaculture:
(For) more than six years, we have been working towards the permits needed for our Velella Epsilon - a small-scale demonstration project for a single batch of fish - only 20,000 kanpachi (which is ~ 1% the size of a commercial fish farm) to be located more than 40 miles offshore from Sarasota.
We have faced numerous obstacles over this period of time from opponents who object fundamentally to the idea that we can grow fish in the ocean in a responsible manner. Yet organizations such as WWF, The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International have been advocating that we need to grow more seafood … that’s an environmental imperative. Now Environmental Defense Fund has introduced legislation in Congress that calls for moving offshore aquaculture forward, with small demonstration projects (just like Velella Epsilon). And Aquaculture Stewardship Council has certified the Kona farm (the only other offshore fish farm in the US), which is the most rigorous measure of environmental and socially-responsible aquaculture.
So … what exactly are these other folks opposed to?
Ocean Era is now proposing to change the species (from kanpachi to red drum) and the mooring system (to use multiple anchors, instead of just the one large one).
We believe that red drum offers much more market opportunity in the mainland US. There are already three producers of offshore farmed kanpachi (Almaco Jack) that are selling into the US market (Kona, Mexico and Panama). Recent production of farmed red drum (in Texas pond culture) has been impacted by deep freezes. We believe that there is a lot of potential for market growth for red drum – at the moment, farmed red drum is being imported into the US from as far away as Mauritius. We should be farming this species here, in our own waters. There are numerous hatcheries around the Gulf that are already producing red drum for stock enhancement for recreational fishing, so we can readily obtain red drum fingerlings from the same region that we will deploy the demonstration pen. And there is no competing commercial fishery for red drum, as the commercial fishery was shut down years ago, to protect wild stocks.
Red drum grow more slowly than kanpachi, and so they will eat less feed, and excrete less. They also do not need a high protein diet. These factors mean that the impacts from red drum on water quality or the benthic (bottom) community will be even less than that which was modeled for the kanpachi. Please remember - the impacts from the one small batch of kanpachi were determined by the EPA to be not significant, so the impacts from the same number of red drum would also be not significant.
The change in mooring system is simply just an increase in the number of anchors, to allow the pen to remain in a fixed grid, rather than to pivot on a swing-mooring. This is also not a significant change in the impacts from the project.
This is a demonstration project – one single batch of fish. Why would the opponents want to prevent us from demonstrating to the Florida fishing and boating communities that there will be no negative impacts, and that there may be benefits from such an operation? What is it that they are really afraid of? And why would they not pay attention to the abundant science that is already available from offshore net pen operations in Kona, Panama, and Mexico?
Those that are opposed to this project seem to be willing to ignore the science on offshore aquaculture. This could be considered to be morally equivalent to climate science denial. Which side do they want to be on?
Photo: Canva