Get Aquacultured!

Explore the diverse paths of aquaculture experts and gain insights into the industry’s current state and future potential in the U.S. This episode features discussions on sustainable practices, challenges in permitting, and the importance of community-based aquaculture. Learn about the journeys of Mike Coogan, Michael Doherty, Gabby Bradt, and Michael Chambers as they share their experiences and visions for the world of aquaculture.
 
In This Episode:
Meet the hosts of Get Aquacultured!
 
Mike Coogan, Ph.D. Research Assistant Professor, Center for Sustainable Seafood Systems, University of New Hampshire 
 
Mike Doherty, Research Project Manager, University of New Hampshire's School of Marine Science and Ocean Engineering, Center for Sustainable Seafood Systems
 
Gabby Bradt, Ph.D. Fisheries and Aquaculture Extension State Specialist, New Hampshire Sea Grant/UNH Cooperative Extension, University of New Hampshire
 
Mike Chambers, Ph.D. Aquaculture Research Professor at the School of Marine Science and Ocean Engineering, Center for Sustainable Seafood Systems 
 
Show Notes
 
Key Takeaways:
  • Understand the various entry points into aquaculture from personal passions to academic pursuits.
  • Identify the significant hurdles in aquaculture, particularly in the U.S., such as permitting and market development.
  • Explore the potential for IMTA systems and community-based aquaculture to enhance sustainability and local economies.
  • Recognize the importance of adapting to the American palate and developing diverse seafood markets.
  • Consider the balance between large-scale offshore aquaculture and localized, small-scale farming for future growth.
 
Resources Mentioned:
 
 
Connect With Us:
 
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Featured Quotes:
  • Michael Chambers: “And then finally was drawn to attaching biology to the ocean in a form of aquaculture where hopefully you can make money growing species from the water.”
  • Mike Coogan: “You know, you grow fish, you’re pulling less fish out of the ocean and you’re producing fish that helps the environment…you can make money off of it.”
  • Gabby Bradt: “I feel like we need to be realistic about how big these industries can get and sort of the regulatory framework that we have to work within in terms of permitting and going offshore and who else we have to share the ocean with.”
 
Behind the Story:
The journey into aquaculture is often a blend of childhood fascination, academic curiosity, and a desire to contribute to a sustainable food system. The speakers share how early influences, such as marine documentaries and hands-on experiences, shaped their career paths. They address the realities of the industry, including regulatory hurdles and market limitations, while emphasizing the potential for community-based approaches to foster growth and acceptance of aquaculture in the U.S.
 
Take Action:
Explore local aquaculture initiatives in your community to support sustainable seafood practices.
 
Share This Episode:
Dive into the world of aquaculture with the latest episode of Get Aquacultured! Learn about sustainable seafood, industry challenges, and the future of fish farming with experts from UNH and NH Sea Grant. #aquaculture #sustainableseafood #podcast

Creators and Guests

Host
Gabriela Bradt, Ph.D., Zoology/Animal Biology
Host
Michael Chambers, Ph.D., Zoology/Animal Biology
Michael has been advancing open ocean farming technologies for over 30 years in the US and Abroad. In the US, he has managed submerged cage culture projects in the Gulf of Mexico, Hawaii and the North Atlantic.
Host
Michael Coogan, Ph.D., Aquaculture
My research focuses on using modern technologies to overcome challenges to aquaculture expansion in the United States. Current projects include improving sustainability through extractive species co-culture (IMTA), streamlining environmental monitoring and permitting, reducing threats to whales, and creating more efficient production through genetics and culture methods. I am passionate about producing food locally and protecting the natural environment through community engagement and robust science.
Host
Michael Doherty, M.S., Biological Sciences: Marine Biology

What is Get Aquacultured!?

Get Aquacultured! is a new limited-series podcast from University of New Hampshire The Center for Sustainable Seafood Systems that dives into the many sides of aquaculture—straight from the people who know it best. Hosts Gabriela Bradt, Michael Coogan, Michael Chambers, and Michael Doherty share a lively conversation with industry experts, practitioners, students, and educators working in aquaculture. Together, they’ll bust myths, spotlight different perspectives, and bring the fascinating world of aquaculture to life. From science and innovation to classrooms and coastal communities, Get Aquacultured! explores stories you won’t often hear in the mainstream media—but that matter for our oceans, our food systems, and our future. Fun, informative, and accessible, these conversations are designed to connect you with the people and ideas shaping aquaculture today

Mike Coogan

Hey there and welcome to Get Aquacultured! the podcast where we dive into the deep end of the world's fastest growing food industry. On this podcast, we invite industry professionals, researchers and educators to bring you inside the systems that make up modern aquaculture. So whether you're a curious eater, a coastal neighbor, or someone who likes to nerd out about ocean science, we're glad you're here.

I'm Mike Coogan. I'm an aquaculture and fisheries research scientist here at University of New Hampshire. We all work together here. My research is really focused on IMTA integrated multi trophic aquaculture and looking at ways that we can reduce our environmental impact. So through environmental monitoring and adjusting technology to make it more sustainable and really looking at community-based seafood.

Michael Doherty

My name is Michael Doherty and I am a research project manager with the University of New Hampshire's School of Marine Science and Ocean Engineering. Specifically, I work within the center for Sustainable Seafood Systems and New Hampshire Sea Grant. And I've done research over the years on finfish aquaculture, algae aquaculture and shellfish aquaculture.

Gabby Bradt

Hi everybody. My name is Gabby Bradt.

I'm the fisheries and aquaculture extension specialist for New Hampshire Sea Grant and UNH Cooperative Extension. I started in aquaculture A long, long time ago when I had to go collect baby summer flounder that were being grown in our, our only big aquaculture facility at the time, Great Bay Aqua Farms, and I was looking at the effects of feed on pigmentation in developing flounders. Since then I've had my finger in pretty much anything that had to do with fisheries gear, invasive species and shellfish aquaculture and seaweed.

Michael Chambers

My name is Michael Chambers. I'm an aquaculture research professor at the School of Marine Science and Ocean Engineering as well as the center for Sustainable Seafood Systems and New Hampshire Sea Grant. And I've been developing open ocean aquaculture technologies for over 30 years in the Gulf of Mexico, Hawaii and now in the North Atlantic and have grown species ranging from shrimp to ornamentals to seaweed, shellfish and marine finfish.

Mike Coogan

Can we start off just by talking about Gabby you touched on a little bit, but how everyone got into aquaculture because I think everyone comes in from a different way. But Gabby, you want to, you want to take it off, little flounder action.

Gabby Bradt

I was a graduate student in the zoology department here at UNH and needed some extra funding. So my, my advisor said, well, I have this grant and I need some help with it and you can do that on the side. So essentially, yeah, we were looking to see what the development of baby flounder pigmentation patterns, how they were affected by different diets that they were being fed at this local aquafarm. Because what was really interesting was that when they would grow them out, they would actually have a higher rate of albinism or malpigmentation. And so they couldn't really take them to market in that condition. So the question that we were trying to figure out is, you know, pinpointing what aspect of the food that they were eating was creating these impacts. So that's how I initially got into aquaculture.

And then Michael and I started working on seaweed and you know, he was trying to figure out the lines, et cetera, how to do the farming and so on. And he's like, but how do we get people to eat it? So that's how he and I started working on sort of the IMTA and seaweed aquaculture work. And then it just sort of, for me, the seaweed stuff took off. Both the outreach education and some of the research, Chambers you're up to.

Michael Chambers

What drew me to aquaculture? Well, growing up in northern Wisconsin, in the deep forests, I spent time watching Jacques Cousteau on the television set. I'm not sure if you youngsters know who Jacques Cousteau is, but he was an ocean explorer. He developed the aqua lung, the modern day scuba apparatus. And he really pulled me into the ocean environment and what a wonderful environment it actually is. And so as I grew up, I learned to dive at a young age and explored freshwater lakes and then eventually to the oceans. And I ended up working in different marine operations, offshore research, archaeology.

And then finally was drawn to attaching biology to the ocean in a form of aquaculture where hopefully you can make money growing species from the water. And so that was my initial lure and that's where I ended up today.

How about Mr. Doherty?

Michael Doherty

Yeah, my background is, I don't know, a little varied. I, I, I went to school for biology and just became really, really interested in marine biology, specifically because of an invertebrate zoology course I took that just kind of amazed me because of the, the extreme diversity of invertebrates in the, in the ocean, in the marine world. And then after I graduated, I actually got into informal education. I worked as an educator for our local seacoast science center, where I was able to connect people to the ocean in a few different ways. But I became just super interested in seafood systems because that seems to be, at least for me, the biggest way I interact with marine life by eating it. So seafood systems kind of fascinated me. I also got to meet a lot of local commercial fishers and it just kind of drew me in.

And then I went to grad school at the University of New Hampshire with my advisor, Dr. Elizabeth Fairchild, working on lumpfish aquaculture. Working with lumpfish was, was fun. If you, if you don't know what they are, I would recommend googling them. They're adorable, I think the cutest fish in the sea they are. And goofy as well. They're a very effective cleaner fish and they rem parasites off of salmon in another form of aquaculture and salmonid aquaculture.

And since then I've become involved in Michael Chambers work.

Mike Coogan

So my foray into aquaculture, sort of like you Michael, I was inspired by a legend, but mine was, mine was Steve Irwin growing up.

Gabby Bradt

Why am I not surprised?

Mike Coogan

Yeah, so I grew up in Brooklyn, which now is sort of like a aquaculture hub, but certainly wasn't back in the, in the 90s. Watched a lot of Animal Planet. That was pretty much all I watched. And you know, Steve Irwin was the guy. He got me really excited about the ocean and wildlife in general. I didn't have a ton of wildlife around me growing up, but I did have like the coolest aquarium store just around the block from me. And when I was in middle school I used to take the subway to school into Manhattan every day.

And I would come home and on the, it was on the way home and you. I would get off the subway at like 3:30 and I should have been home by like 3:35, you know, it was right there. But I would come home at like 6 and my mom had no idea where I was every day. And it turns out I finally took her there to this spot and they like knew who I was and like I was working in the back and my mom was like why are you hanging out with like these 40 year olds and why do they know who you are and everything about that. And I would spend like two hours every day working in this fish store. And I was like, you know, 10 to 10 to 13 and you couldn't officially get a job until you were 14. They were like, yep, don't worry, you're going to have a job when you turn 14.

You've put in your 10,000 hours already at the store. And I knew like every single tropical fish and coral and all of that. And then they ended up shutting down like right before I turned 14. So I got into the restaurant business instead, which wasn't so fun. But that was my intro and I knew I wanted to Be a marine biologist from then on. And then I went to University of Miami where I studied marine science in general. And I got my first lab gig working in a coral lab.

And I was doing coral restoration, a little bit of genetics, but mostly like going out and diving. We used to go out and there was like a big citizen science program and we would just do like coral fragmentation on staghorn coral and help out plant it onto reefs. That's what I thought I was going to do for a while. And then we ran out of funding or, or they said we ran out of funding. I might have gotten fired. I don't really know what happened, but basically I didn't have a job anymore and I needed a new job and a new lab to work for. Dan Benetti, who's an aquaculture legend, was the director of the program there.

And I used to see they also had a bar there. I used to see all these guys coming in like totally dirty, in their like knee high white boots, rubber boots, and then, you know, just smelling like fish. And they seem to have a good time. And I was like, I want to be involved in that. I want to see what they're doing. So I went over there and I was hooked immediately. It was like by far the most hands on marine science discipline I had ever seen.

And I was taking a lot of fisheries classes. It was all sort of like gloom and doom. It was like the cod crash and you know, like all of these different fisheries collapses that you were hearing. Nothing seemed to be doing well. And there was all these different fisheries management acts that didn't seem to be helping a ton, at least to my knowledge at the time. And I, you know, saw this simple equation. You know, you don't, you grow fish, you're pulling less fish out of the ocean and you're producing fish that helps the environment like you touched on earlier, Michael, you can make money off of it.

And I loved that idea as well. Probably especially after losing a job. I was like, there should be more privatization or at least some sort of business to marine science. Because everything that I heard was like asking the government for money, which as we know right now does not always work out. And sometimes they pull that money out. Aquaculture sort of covered a lot of ground. It was a really cool way to learn about fish and different marine organisms.

Super hands on. You can learn so much that you can't learn from studying things in the wild. They're in front of you all the time. You get to learn systems. I like building things and that's such a cool part of aquaculture.

I don't know. I got hooked right away. And then I decided to go for my PhD at Auburn. I went from these really sexy tropical fin fish species, tunas and mahi mahi and cobia and snapper, to the mighty catfish. Went from like working in these high tech RAS systems and net pens to working in ponds and doing a lot of genetics work there, trying to improve the genetics for aquaculture. And then I met Michael Chambers and he hooked me in. I was going to move to the west coast and I met him one night, was about to sign the contract and I heard him talk at an event in Hampton Bay, New York at Mana Fish Farms.

He was awesome. And we got to chatting and he was like, you're not going there. You're coming with me. A few months later I told them I wasn't going anymore. They were like, you're crazy. And then a few months later I moved over to Maine and started working with, with this group. And it's been awesome.

Michael Chambers

Yeah. But a lot of fun.

Michael Doherty

I. I have to be honest with you, Mike. Catfish is not my favorite fish. No, I can, I can enjoy it here and there, but it's not a type of fish that I can eat a lot of.

Michael Chambers

In Mike's defense, I would say you have to go down south and eat Southern fried point catfish.

Gabby Bradt

I will say in terms of what you were saying, Coogan, to build things and learning how to put systems together, I think that's one of the things from my PhD experience that I didn't get. I still feel like women in general don't get that training. And so, you know, what's a pump?

What's a chiller? How do we connect all this stuff together? So that's the other thing that I also really like about, about the stuff that we do and is you can be creative and that it's almost like big underwater tinker toys. Almost.

Mike Coogan

Right.

Gabby Bradt

Like, how do we put them all together in different things and so on. So hands on for. I also like growing things now.

Michael Chambers

There's something that's very appealing and motivating when you can grow something from an egg and bring it to an adult size and then sell it, you know, especially ornamentals. And I, I have too many fish tanks in my house. My wife gets on me. But I do, I'm able to grow cherry shrimp and ornamental guppies and I trade them at the pet stores for food and tanks and heaters and lights and fish food.

Gabby Bradt

Right?

Michael Chambers

Yeah. And I get fish food not Regular food. I get such satisfaction out of being able to grow something and then trade it or sell it. And much like what we do with the Aquafort right now, and we've developed some incredible technology there, but now that we have a consistent supply of fresh fish in the summertime now, we can really explore these new markets and taking them to areas to be smoked or tinned or Ike markets. And it's a whole new thing for me right now that's getting me very excited about growing fish.

Mike Coogan

Yeah, the business side is really cool. Some other disciplines are starting to pick up on that, but it's never as clear cut as an aquaculture. You know, it's a business, and if you're not. If you're not making money, then you don't have a successful operation.

Michael Doherty

It's been pretty fun with this smoked trout product doing direct sales to people. In the past, we mostly sold to markets like fish markets or restaurants, but having this product available for just individuals to purchase and come pick up has been pretty cool because we're, I mean, I'm personally, I think it's neat to meet and talk to folks that would otherwise have no idea like what we're doing. They probably have very limited awareness about aquaculture. So it's cool to. To bring them to our facility and hand them a filet and say, this, this is. Yeah, this is a farmed product right here in New Hampshire.

Michael Chambers

And this is a great opportunity for us to put on a New Hampshire Sea Grant hat and do that extension outreach and pull people into the product.

Mike Coogan

But we've been talking about a lot about us. But let's talk about this podcast. We're going to talk about some fin fish, obviously, all sorts of shellfish and inverts. We've got oysters, mussels, scallops, different types of crustaceans. We're going to have some mollusks on there, Sea urchins, perhaps some macro algae. Definitely, definitely some kelp.

Gabby Bradt

Got to have some macro algae.

Mike Coogan

What else do we got?

Michael Chambers

Shrimp?

Mike Coogan

Got trout. Trout, yeah.

Gabby Bradt

Trout, yeah.

Michael Chambers

Lump fish, yeah.

Mike Coogan

All sorts of different creatures. And then, you know, the business side of it, as we touched on, you know, we're going to be interviewing different business owners, different people from both growers, you know, processors, chefs, talking about different markets, you know, how you build a market, a little bit about permitting and how you navigate that. Because that's something that is a huge bottleneck, a huge obstacle in our industry and something. I don't know, a ton. Michael, you're pretty in the know.

Michael Chambers

Yeah, it Is permitting is one of the biggest hurdles to entry in the aquaculture industry, particularly in the ocean environments in the United States. The rest of the world is going like banshees to, to produce seafood and we're way behind. But we could be one of the leaders if we were able to figure out this permitting pathway and make it simplified.

Mike Coogan

Michael, could you touch a little bit on aquaculture in the US versus the rest of the world? Like who the leaders are, where we're at, some, some key players and all that.

Michael Chambers

Right. The biggest producer of aquaculture products is, is China and Asia. And they grow there a lot of freshwater carp, they grow a lot of seaweed, freshwater plants as well. A lot of that stuff does not. It's not exported out of the country. It stays within the country. We see a lot of shrimp aquaculture and in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, in central South America, we have a very small shrimp industry.

United States finfish industry is very small. I think the largest industry in the United States is catfish farming down south. But we, we develop a lot of technology here, a lot of federally funded technology that's gone overseas because labor is cheaper there, the environments are warmer, species can grow faster, but in the end of the day, it ends up coming back and we have to buy it, to put it on our shelves and, and consume it. So one of the big things we promote about the IMTA system is a small scale farming system for coastal communities so everybody can grow seafood in their backyard and cut down that carbon footprint coming from overseas. So it really makes sense and it provides jobs, it keeps an active, working waterfront. Fishermen getting involved with this part time or they feel they want to do it full time. A lot of really interesting and great facets to considering how best to do this in our local communities.

Mike Coogan

Where do you see aquaculture going in.

Michael Chambers

The future in the U.S. certainly we can go offshore. We have, I don't know the exact number of federal waters in the exclusive economic zone anywhere from the Virgin Islands to Hawaii. We have huge amounts of water to go offshore. And it doesn't take a very big footprint to produce a lot of fish to feed the United States alone. Something the size of maybe Rhode island could produce more than what we need in the United States right now. But we have to do it in a responsible manner.

We have to go offshore. We have to put in farms that can survive the offshore environments that don't do damage to the bottom or to other fisheries around it. So I think that offshore is definitely one opportunity. The other aspect would be land based recirculating aquaculture. And there's a number of facilities being considered, but they don't seem to be making money just yet. It's a very high level of technology, high level investment, high level of risk, because if one thing goes wrong and that pump shuts off, then all your fish die. We hope it will become more successful in the near future.

There's a lot of investment going into it, partly because people can't get permits offshore. Hopefully we can go both directions in the future for the US I also.

Gabby Bradt

Feel like we need to be realistic about how big these industries can get and sort of the regulatory framework that we have to work within in terms of permitting and going offshore and who else we have to share the ocean with. I definitely love to dream big about it. I do realize that we have a really, really high global population that's going to need food. You know, the work that we do I think is very important. Trying to figure that out, like, how do you scale up responsibly? I think for me, that part of the aquaculture equation is really hard because like Michael was saying, aquaculture right now is not really for everyone. You do need to have some sort of, you know, financial input that you, you know, whether you start off as a hobby or you have somebody investing in you and so on, it's not like it really isn't like I can just go and start my own oyster farm without a job or anything.

I don't see that happening. People who have started small scale, you know, still have their regular jobs. So it's not like you can just ditch everything and then scale up really big. And I feel like we need to solve that. If we are going to provide all of this food from the ocean to sustain our population, how do we do it without breaking everybody's bank, but also not destroying the resource as well? So I feel the same way about seaweed aquaculture. We've come so far with it, but developing those markets and saying, yep, I can grow this in my backyard, it's not really as easy as that.

And then the market development, I think, is also key. And the American palette is just really small. Right. Like you were mentioning catfish and I was making a face. How many people, you know, how many people were like, completely awed when we put in all these different seaweed species in front of them and used them in our cooking, and they're like, I didn't know we could eat this stuff. And I thought it was going to take. It tastes like, you know, low tide and it smells fishy.

And you Know all this other stuff. So, you know, really working with the American palate I think is also a challenge. I think there's a bright future for aquaculture in the US Getting over some of these hurdles and the money aspect of things. Yeah, there's potential to make bank, but also to break it.

Michael Doherty

But I guess I see in the US the future of aquaculture growing as an industry best if it's kept localized. Sort of community-based farms like our, our IMTA farm where we raise steelhead trout. It's not huge and it could be scaled up, but we sell our fish right here in New Hampshire. But it's really focused on feeding the community.

Gabby Bradt

Starting off this way, right, is seems like a better way to introduce the American public to aquaculture. People are, are becoming, I feel people have really been more interested in figuring out where their food is coming from. But I feel like if you were to put a giant, giant aqua farm right off of the New Hampshire coast, I mean, well, a, you wouldn't, they wouldn't let you. The fishing industry probably would be like, I don't think so. But you know, really I'm talking huge, right? I feel like New Hampshire would say, no, this is too much, it's too big, too fast. I feel like some of the people that we work with, it did start that way, right?

You know, they saw it and they're like, oh, let me look into it. And suddenly we have, you know, more oyster growers in Great Bay or we have more women owned businesses as well.

In terms of aquaculture. I feel like aquaculture seems to be a little bit more accepting and inclusive in that respect too. Another aspect of it that I really, really like, you know, there could be.

Mike Coogan

A future in any direction really. It depends, you know, what success stories work. You know, it depends where the success stories are. And we've seen a lot of failures in this industry and it seems like the small scale, those small wins are really necessary. You need to rack up a bunch of small wins. You know, that's how the oyster industry, which is growing like crazy, grew. And it's now across the entire country.

All aquacultured species are cold blooded. And so you got to think about which environment makes the most sense for that species. The south is where you're going to grow things really quickly. But there's, you know, the Northeast has the best oysters in the world and a lot of, a lot of good offshore waters sort of don't do what terrestrial agriculture did. You know, it used to be that everybody had their small farms. I'M not saying everybody needs to have an oyster farm in their backyard. Obviously that doesn't make sense.

But it used to be you knew where your food came from. Like, you touched on Gabby, and people had their own farms and you didn't have to travel across the world or get food or feed shipped from across the world in order to put a meal at the dinner table. And I think that we have a lot to learn from, like, the last 500 years of messing things up. There's always going to be some, some farms that are much bigger, and I think, you know, there's definitely a market there that might be necessary for, for some species. But it sucks when you have, you know, $100 million investment into something that fails a few years later, and it really damages the industry quite a bit. And like, you were talking about Gabby getting the American public excited about new types of food. You know, 20 years ago, nobody ate oysters, and now it's like a sexy food.

The other really cool thing about aquaculture is it's not like the land where you have cattle, pigs, chickens, and maybe sheep or goat or whatever. It's really those three. Right? We have hundreds of different species to choose from.

Michael Chambers

And I think to add to that, Mike Coogan is that many people don't realize this, but for everything we grow on land, plants, pigs, sheep, chickens, we have to feed them water in the ocean. We don't use any fresh water, we don't use fertilizers, we don't use pesticides. So there are some real benefits to looking at that blue pasture of which our planet has 70% water on it and 30% land. So it really does make sense to go that direction.

Mike Coogan

Thanks for listening. Each episode is sustainably cultured here at the University of New Hampshire and produced by Talia Katreczko. Get Aquacultured! is funded by the EE Blue Aquaculture Literacy Grant and supported by NOAA and the North American Association for Environmental Education. Subscribers, subscribe today and listen to more episodes wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you heard, leave us a review. We'll catch you next time on Get Aquacultured!.