January 18, 2017

California-based offshore aquaculture startup Catalina Sea Ranch announced it has closed on a $2 million round of financing from unnamed investors.

Located at Terminal Island in the Port of Los Angeles, Catalina Sea Ranch was successful at securing the first permit for offshore aquaculture in U.S. Federal waters from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The 100-acre operation plans to have the capacity to produce two million pounds of sustainably produced shellfish per year, grown 30 feet under the surface of the ocean, six miles offshore of Huntington Beach, California.

This investment, which brings the company’s total funding to over $5 million, will enable the company to purchase buoys, floats, ropes, and anchors for its offshore facility, and to launch its innovative monitoring program, according to a recent press release. It also will fund the purchase of mussel seeds. Catalina Sea Ranch is currently growing 15 million mussel seeds and plans to plant an additional 58 million in the coming months. This work is expected to lead the company to harvest and sell more than one million pounds of mussels during 2017.

Furthermore, the funding will support Catalina Sea Ranch in the deployment of its unique NOMAD buoy that will act as an Ocean Internet of Things ™, according to the company website. The platform will provide a cloud-based framework that will enable remote, real-time monitoring of the ocean to gain a better understanding of trends, to enable the anticipation of problems, and to allow for immediate corrective measures. It is expected that this valuable data will play a crucial role in the maturation of the aquaculture sector and the advancement of offshore marine spatial planning.

Indeed, Catalina Sea Ranch quotes the McKinsey Global Institute that concludes, “By 2025, the potential economic impact of having sensors and actuators connected by networks to computing systems could be more than $11 trillion annually.”

“This investment allowed us to construct our ranch and deploy the offshore technologies for demonstrating no negative impact,” said Phillip Cruver, president and CEO of Catalina Sea Ranch. “Regulators and other stakeholders will be able to monitor our shellfish ranch in real-time using the Internet. This will provide data for collaborative scientific analyses to develop best practices and responsible regulatory criteria for the future of marine spatial planning in U.S. Federal waters.”

Offshore On-Point

As climate change, pollution, urban sprawl and other factors challenge agricultural production, aquaculture has the potential to scale up to help meet food demand for a world that will need to feed 9.7 billion by 2050.

To support the sector in achieving this goal, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries announced a new ruling on January 11 allowing for the expansion of fish farming in offshore Federal waters. The plan will be similar to an existing plan for the waters in the Gulf of Mexico, and will outline the management of commercial fish farms located between three and 200 miles offshore around Hawaii and other Pacific Islands through the framework of a regulatory and permitting scheme.

The St. Louis Dispatch reports that NOAA officials have taken note of new technologies being developed to advance offshore aquaculture production, and views these advances as a tool to leverage the resources of the ocean in a sustainable manner.

The advancement of a controlled U.S. offshore aquaculture industry in the Pacific also will help alleviate the practice of foreign operations buying breedstock from U.S. companies, raising the fish in less-than-ideal conditions and then re-selling the seafood on the U.S. market as imported products.

Speaking to the St. Louis Dispatch, Michael Tosatto, administrator for NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, said, “The U.S.’s view is we’d rather have these U.S. companies pursuing these opportunities in a sustainable, environmentally-sound way in the U.S.”

-Lynda Kiernan

Lynda Kiernan is Editor with GAI Media and daily contributor to GAI News. If you would like to submit a contribution for consideration please contact Ms. Kiernan at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com