The next time you order salmon in a restaurant, it may come from Florida of all places!
That’s where the new frontier of salmon farming is taking place. A company called Atlantic Sapphire is building a state of the art salmon farm on 20 acres south of Miami in which the fish will be grown in on-land pens. The onshore facility has will feature many tanks that will be cooled to 59 degrees and slowly transition from freshwater to saltwater to mimic the salmon’s natural life cycle.
The entire site will be covered by a 400,000-square-foot roof designed to keep out the sun and withstand hurricane-force winds.
While all that work is being done above ground, the key to the project lies underneath.
Just underground lies the Biscayne Aquifer, a freshwater reservoir from which much of the region extracts its drinking water. Below that is a layer of impermeable clay, followed by a separate layer of saltwater.
Underneath that is another impermeable layer of clay, mud and rock, followed by a region called the “boulder zone.” That porous, cavernous segment is so deep — starting at about 3,000 feet — that many Florida municipalities already pump their wastewater down there.
Atlantic Sapphire hopes to produce 10,000 metric tons of salmon in South Florida by 2020.
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Stefano says
The commercial Gill Net boats should be worried??