On Monday, a growing European aquaculture company will announce plans to build a massive fish farm at the Harbor District’s Redwood Marine Terminal — the former Samoa pulp mill.
Nordic Aquafarms, the company behind the proposal, is a Norway-based firm with active fish farms in Denmark and Norway, with another $500 million project in development in the state of Maine. It currently produces farmed salmon and yellowtail at its European plants.
According to Richard Marks, who sits on the Harbor District’s Board of Directors, Nordic Aquafarms’ plans include a brand-new, state-of-the-art, enormous facility — up to 600,000 square feet in size.
The Harbor District’s Board of Directors will hold a special meeting Monday afternoon, at which point it will almost certainly approve a lease agreement with the company. The meeting will begin in closed session at 12:30 p.m. at the district’s offices on Woodley Island, followed by an open meeting at 1:30 p.m. (See agenda here.)
Nordic takes a novel, or at least unusual, approach to farming saltwater fish: All its facilities are entirely on land, rather than in pens in the sea. The farmed fish are completely isolated from wild individuals so they can’t contaminate the gene pool, and the contained environment means that the water can be treated and removed of nutrients before it is released back to the sea — both answers to the most common environmental objections to farmed fish.
