Neil Sims has a vision. He imagines thousands of red drum fish swimming in the open Gulf, the Florida sun glinting off coppery scales. These red drum are farmed, not wild. They circle inside a cylindrical floating cage miles offshore, harvested for America’s seafood market.
Sims is the founder and CEO of Ocean Era, a marine research and development company that’s been trying to launch a pilot finfish farm in Gulf waters for close to seven years. The test project would raise roughly 20,000 red drum fish in a single underwater net pen about 45 miles southwest of Sarasota, with the eventual goal of scaling up to commercial size. Commercial farms might have about a dozen of the floating pens.
“From an environmental perspective, we need people to be eating more seafood, because it is very, very low impact,” Sims said. “And offshore aquaculture has shown this is the way that we can do it with minimal impact on water quality, ocean bottom, coastlines. So we feel a moral obligation to be moving this.”…