Ep. 047 - THE FISH FLUENCER: James Sibley on How Tech Is Changing the Way We Farm the Sea
Welcome to the Seafood Summer Series 2026 on the Bites and Bytes Podcast, and we are kicking it off with a great one!
Over 120 million tons of seafood are farmed every year. Most people have no idea. And the technology making it happen: AI-powered feeding systems, underwater robots, satellite-connected ocean farms, is advancing faster than the policy and security frameworks trying to keep up with it. That disconnect is exactly why this conversation matters.
James Sibley, known in the aquaculture world as the Fish Fluencer, is an aquaculture educator and content creator who has spent five years visiting fish farms across four continents to explain one of the most consequential and overlooked food systems on the planet. From salmon farms in Scotland and New Zealand to shellfish operations in Southeast Asia, James has seen firsthand how technology is transforming the way we farm the sea, and what happens when that technology outpaces the people managing it.
This episode covers aquaculture technology, smart fish farming, ocean farming innovation, seafood supply chain transparency, and food security. If you eat seafood, work in food and agriculture, or care about where your food comes from, this one is for you.
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Guest: James Sibley
"Fish Fluencer" | Aquaculture Creator & Founder
🌐 james-sibley.com
💼 linkedin.com/in/jameslsibley
📸 Instagram: @sibleyaqua
▶️ TikTok: @sibleyaqua
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Episode Key Highlights
00:03:15 Meet James Sibley: The Fish Fluencer
00:07:26 James's Origin Story: From Fishmonger to Content Creator
00:14:12 Inside the Farm: AI, 4K Cameras, and Live Monitoring
00:18:19 Cleaner Fish: Nature's Answer to Sea Lice
00:24:33 Climate Change: The Ocean Feels It First
00:36:09 Aquaculture and Global Food Security
00:38:39 IoT, Drones, and Tech on the Water
00:41:39 Underwater Robots and ROVs
00:47:00 Cybersecurity on the Water
00:53:04 The Supply Chain Reality: 3 Years vs. 48 Hours
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📘 Info on Kristin’s upcoming book
“Securing What Feeds Us: Cybersecurity in Food and Agriculture.”
Publish Date: September 29, 2026, published by Wiley
Learn More here: https://securingwhatfeedsus.com/
Newsletter: https://kristin-king.kit.com/newsletter
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🎤 Book Kristin Demoranville to Speak
To invite Kristin to speak at your conference, corporate event, webinar, or workshop, visit the website and submit a request.
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🛡️ About AnzenSage & AnzenOT
AnzenSageis a cybersecurity advisory firm specializing in cyber-physical risk management for the food, agriculture, zoo, and aquarium industries. AnzenSage offers practical, strategic guidance to help organizations anticipate risks and build resilience. Learn more about their offerings at anzensage.com.
AnzenOThelps organizations understand and prioritize operational risk faster, without relying on slow or static assessments. Compliance supported, including NIST, ISA/IEC 62443-2-1, NIS2 Directive, CMMC, and many other industry-specific frameworks. Subscription access is available, including a student option. Learn more at anzenot.com.
Listen to full episode :
Episode Guide:
00:00:19 Introduction & Seafood Summer Series Kickoff
00:01:34 Favorite Food & Food Memory
00:03:15 Meet James Sibley: The Fish Fluencer
00:07:26 James's Origin Story: From Fishmonger to Content Creator
00:10:22 The Online Backlash: Aquaculture's Misconception Problem
00:14:12 Inside the Farm: AI, 4K Cameras, and Live Monitoring
00:16:08 [MID-ROLL: Book Pre-Order & Upcoming Events]
00:18:19 Cleaner Fish: Nature's Answer to Sea Lice
00:21:38 Open Ocean Challenges: Storms, Toxins, and Weather
00:22:32 Sea Pen Engineering: How Farms Survive the Ocean
00:23:30 Predators: Seals, Sharks, and Keeping Fish Safe
00:24:33 Climate Change: The Ocean Feels It First
00:26:50 Mobile Farming: Towing 100,000 Fish
00:27:30 Regulation and Policy as a Barrier to Growth
00:29:09 Stewardship: Shellfish as Ecosystem Builders
00:31:34 [MID-ROLL: AnzenSage & AnzenOT]
00:33:00 Seabed Recovery: A Case Study from Scotland
00:35:10 Best Practices: Where and How to Place a Farm
00:36:09 Aquaculture and Global Food Security
00:38:39 IoT, Drones, and Tech on the Water
00:39:15 Norway: The Epicenter of Aquaculture Technology
00:40:29 Automated Feeding and Smart Farm Tools
00:41:39 Underwater Robots and ROVs
00:43:20 Tech Built for Safety First
00:44:13 Toward Fully Autonomous Ocean Farms
00:45:45 Tech Adoption Challenges: The Silicon Valley Problem
00:47:00 Cybersecurity on the Water
00:48:53 What Fish Actually Eat
00:49:27 Salmon Varieties: How to Be a Salmon Snob
00:51:23 Seafood Experiences Around the World
00:53:04 The Supply Chain Reality: 3 Years vs. 48 Hours
00:53:50 Food Safety, Traceability, and Who's Really to Blame
00:55:13 The Future of Aquaculture Education
00:56:33 Outro
-
00:00:19 Kristin King
Welcome back.
00:00:19 Kristin King
to the Bites and Bites podcast.
00:00:21 Kristin King
I'm your host, Kristen King, and I am wicked excited about what we're doing this summer.
00:00:26 Kristin King
Today, we're kicking off our seafood summer series.
00:00:30 Kristin King
And if you think you know where your seafood comes from, the series is definitely gonna change your mind.
00:00:34 Kristin King
Today, I'm sitting down with James Seedley, who goes by The Fish Fluencer, and that title is well earned.
00:00:42 Kristin King
James is an aquaculture educator and content creator who has spent the last five years traveling to salmon farms in Scotland
00:00:50 Kristin King
mussel operations in New Zealand, shellfish beds across 4 continents, figuring out how to explain what are the most important and least talked about food systems on the planet to people who have no idea that it actually exists.
00:01:03 Kristin King
Aquaculture, for those of you who are new here, is farming the sea, and it isn't directly what you're picturing.
00:01:08 Kristin King
Technology running these operations would surprise most people who work in tech for a living, which is exactly why we're here today.
00:01:15 Kristin King
What I hope you take away from this conversation is that food on your plate has a story, a supply chain, and a data trail.
00:01:22 Kristin King
Understanding that matters whether you're in cybersecurity, food safety, policy, or you just eat fish on a Tuesday.
00:01:28 Kristin King
All right, let's jump into it.
00:01:34 Kristin King
in Bites and Bites fashion, we're going to start where we always start.
00:01:37 Kristin King
Favorite food and favorite food memory, go James.
00:01:41 James Sibley
Oh, that's such a difficult question, right?
00:01:44 James Sibley
I love everything with a few exceptions, right?
00:01:46 James Sibley
I just came back from New Zealand where they have some of the only freshwater king salmon farms in the world.
00:01:52 James Sibley
And in my head, I was like, salmon in freshwater, that's going to be, I don't know, I'm used to like American fish and trout in freshwater.
00:01:59 James Sibley
And it's very like, I don't know, flaky and bland in a way.
00:02:02 James Sibley
Not in a bad way, that's just how it is.
00:02:04 James Sibley
But this was totally something else.
00:02:06 James Sibley
It was buttery smooth.
00:02:07 James Sibley
They have a hot smoke sort of facility right there in the southern Alps.
00:02:12 James Sibley
And you know, you sit there overlooking
00:02:13 James Sibley
these massive glacial lakes enjoying some of like the most flavorful freshwater fish you've ever had.
00:02:19 James Sibley
That was, I don't know if it was the best fish I've ever had, but I think the whole experience really brought it together.
00:02:24 James Sibley
It's hard to recreate at home.
00:02:25 Kristin King
So that almost sounds like favorite memory on top of favorite food in a way, but yes.
00:02:30 Kristin King
Can you eat that raw?
00:02:31 Kristin King
Is that like a good one raw too?
00:02:32 Kristin King
Or is that something you'd always have to cook with fresh water?
00:02:35 Kristin King
Is there a difference?
00:02:36 Kristin King
I'm just thinking sashimi.
00:02:37 James Sibley
Yeah, oh, I ate my fair share of sashimi out there.
00:02:40 James Sibley
I think in one sitting I did almost 400 grams.
00:02:42 James Sibley
I don't know what that is in
00:02:43 James Sibley
That's A lot.
00:02:44 Kristin King
That's a lot of fish.
00:02:46 Kristin King
I hope you had some fiber with that.
00:02:47 Kristin King
That's wasabi.
00:02:48 James Sibley
I don't know.
00:02:49 James Sibley
That counts.
00:02:49 James Sibley
That makes me a little jealous.
00:02:51 James Sibley
Yeah, I mean, especially with the raw seafood across the board, it's a freshness game, right?
00:02:55 James Sibley
And the states here, we import almost all of our seafood from international points.
00:03:00 James Sibley
So it's hard to get it at the freshness you can hit the country of origin.
00:03:03 James Sibley
That's not true across the board, largely, especially if you're just getting sushi at Market Basket.
00:03:08 James Sibley
Yeah, that's going to be the case.
00:03:09 Kristin King
James, go ahead and introduce yourself and then we'll kind of get into like why you're in New Zealand.
00:03:14 Kristin King
other fun places that you've been to?
00:03:15 James Sibley
Yeah, sure thing.
00:03:16 James Sibley
I'm James Sibley.
00:03:17 James Sibley
I am what some people call a fishfluencer, an influencer perhaps.
00:03:21 James Sibley
I like to think of myself as a sort of a seafood educator in the aquaculture space.
00:03:25 James Sibley
So that's farming the seas, the oceans, the waterways.
00:03:28 James Sibley
Anything underwater or even floating on the water is considered aquaculture, right?
00:03:32 James Sibley
So the world produces a little over 200 million tons of seafood every year.
00:03:37 James Sibley
And a few years ago, we actually surpassed wild capture with farming and aquaculture.
00:03:43 James Sibley
So
00:03:44 James Sibley
is the predominant form of seafood production around the world.
00:03:46 James Sibley
And this is, I mean, aquaculture is not like agriculture in the sense that it's been around for a millennia and we have domesticated species that we all know and love, cows, pigs, chickens, et cetera, that you really can't even find in the wild anymore.
00:04:00 James Sibley
Aquaculture is more of a frontier.
00:04:02 James Sibley
Even some of the most established farming regions of the world, be it Norway, Canada, China, they've only been doing this at scale for 40, 50 years.
00:04:10 James Sibley
And these species are only just under domestication now.
00:04:13 James Sibley
And there's
00:04:14 James Sibley
hundreds of species.
00:04:15 James Sibley
So it's just, it's fascinating, right?
00:04:17 James Sibley
Everything from seaweeds and algaes to a host of shellfish.
00:04:20 James Sibley
Most of the shellfish we eat in the US is farm raised.
00:04:22 James Sibley
Even large fin fish.
00:04:24 James Sibley
So the salmon we're all used to, cod, halibut, they're ranching tunas, right?
00:04:29 James Sibley
So we're starting to enter an era where we understand our oceans enough, we have the right infrastructure and technologies to support a responsible farming ecosystem on basically the world's largest resource, you know, 71% water.
00:04:41 James Sibley
It's a really fun time.
00:04:42 James Sibley
And so my role there as a
00:04:44 James Sibley
is I communicate this sort of hidden world in the water with the public and the industry alike, right?
00:04:49 James Sibley
So it's incredibly global, incredibly fractured industry in that way, right?
00:04:52 James Sibley
There's farms in Canada that might be doing things totally different than how they're farming in Norway or Scotland.
00:04:58 James Sibley
So I go around as many as I can between species, between operations, and try and break that down into digestible, engaging video content for people to just enjoy in their leisure.
00:05:08 James Sibley
It's been a really fun experience, but it's also quite a difficult space to operate in the digital media world.
00:05:14 James Sibley
My role here is to try and communicate this sort of hidden world.
00:05:17 James Sibley
We're doing 110, 120 million tons globally per year of farm seafood.
00:05:23 James Sibley
And people don't really know what that means, and they should, because it's really important and interesting.
00:05:28 Kristin King
I echo this because as someone who's trying to advocate for cybersecurity inside of food and agriculture, it's
00:05:35 Kristin King
I feel very alone a lot.
00:05:36 Kristin King
There's not a lot of us.
00:05:38 Kristin King
And to hear you say that you're in somewhat of a similar situation of education and being an advocate and probably at times an activist in some ways for the industry that you love so much, yeah, it's a little, it's sometimes difficult because people definitely look at you and go, what are you talking about?
00:05:52 Kristin King
Like, why should I care about this?
00:05:54 Kristin King
Or, okay, cool, seafood.
00:05:56 Kristin King
I'm sure people just say like, whatever.
00:05:57 Kristin King
They glaze over the fact that all this effort that goes into creating that food or harvesting that food or growing that food, I'm sure could be quite
00:06:05 Kristin King
at times.
00:06:05 Kristin King
So thank you for the work that you do, James.
00:06:07 Kristin King
I did find you via social media.
00:06:09 Kristin King
I think it was LinkedIn and then it was Instagram.
00:06:12 Kristin King
And then I saw some of the videos you put out and it was good content because you spoke plainly.
00:06:16 Kristin King
It wasn't a lot of tech speak.
00:06:17 Kristin King
It wasn't a lot of over the top scientific data.
00:06:19 Kristin King
It was just, here's the information, some really cool, great real running behind it.
00:06:24 Kristin King
And then it was easy to understand.
00:06:26 Kristin King
And I felt educated.
00:06:27 Kristin King
And I don't consider myself a seafood expert.
00:06:29 Kristin King
I know enough.
00:06:30 Kristin King
I mean, I think from being from New England, I think we have a little bit of a different subtle nuance understanding
00:06:35 Kristin King
of seafood.
00:06:36 Kristin King
It's part of our culture in a lot of ways.
00:06:38 Kristin King
But thank you for the work that you do.
00:06:40 Kristin King
And I do appreciate it because again, there isn't a lot of information out there.
00:06:44 Kristin King
Some of the stuff that's out there is research, of course, and that's great.
00:06:48 Kristin King
But it's so interesting to hear that there's so much that's produced in farm now, but yet we don't realize it.
00:06:54 Kristin King
And that's, again, I feel like, wow, we've moved so far into our privileged modern lives that we have zero idea where our food comes from and nor do we care.
00:07:03 Kristin King
Yeah, so I wrote down questions because you were talking
00:07:05 Kristin King
and I'm like, my brain's firing off and I'm so curious.
00:07:07 Kristin King
Let's talk a little bit about the process of agriculture.
00:07:10 Kristin King
How did you get there?
00:07:12 Kristin King
I know you've been in biology for a long time, but what drew you straight to this?
00:07:16 Kristin King
And then what is the most fascinating part of it to you?
00:07:19 Kristin King
Like what do you really like?
00:07:21 Kristin King
It keeps you just go, yes, you just get so excited every time and you think about it or have to talk about it.
00:07:26 James Sibley
Yeah, absolutely.
00:07:26 James Sibley
So as you mentioned, right, it's sort of like a whole farming ecosystem is a bit removed from
00:07:32 James Sibley
urban life, which is where the majority of people find themselves now.
00:07:35 James Sibley
Aquaculture is especially prone to this because you need clean, pristine waters away from basically any human development, or at least as much as you can.
00:07:44 James Sibley
So by default, aquaculture tends to operate out of sight, out of mind.
00:07:49 James Sibley
So it leaves it in kind of this ethereal area where it just happens, you know, oysters and salmon, they just show up at the store.
00:07:55 James Sibley
But obviously there's so much more to it.
00:07:57 Kristin King
Yes.
00:07:58 James Sibley
And I did not really know about this sector at all growing up, right?
00:08:02 James Sibley
I grew up in a bit of a farm town west of Boston in Massachusetts.
00:08:06 James Sibley
So I was familiar with sort of small scale farming production.
00:08:09 James Sibley
I actually worked the farms in the summers during high school.
00:08:12 James Sibley
And then I went off to university in Boston, kind of focusing on microbiology, genetics, and humans, not really having any focus on food production or those systems.
00:08:20 James Sibley
But COVID hit.
00:08:21 James Sibley
And so like many of us, that was a bit of a reset, right?
00:08:23 James Sibley
I had a year off of school because, I mean, Boston shut down.
00:08:26 James Sibley
So I wanted to return to my roots in a way.
00:08:29 James Sibley
I grew up kind of picking watermelons and staking
00:08:32 James Sibley
tomatoes and all that, but COVID hit in the middle of winter, so that wasn't really an option.
00:08:36 James Sibley
So I just happenstance chose something similar.
00:08:40 James Sibley
Okay, there's a position here at Whole Foods via fishmonger on the counter.
00:08:44 James Sibley
Why not?
00:08:44 James Sibley
Right?
00:08:44 James Sibley
Sounds kind of similar in a way.
00:08:46 James Sibley
It's still food.
00:08:47 James Sibley
And the second I hit the counter there, the fishmonger counter, I was totally sort of just enthralled by everything around me, right?
00:08:54 James Sibley
There's all this new sort of food around me that I had no idea where it was coming from.
00:08:58 James Sibley
And people were asking me at the counter, right?
00:09:00 James Sibley
And I was just thrown to the wolves.
00:09:02 James Sibley
Serve them fish, and that would get questions like, Why is that same in a different color than this?
00:09:07 James Sibley
Why am I buying live oysters?
00:09:08 James Sibley
That seems weird.
00:09:09 James Sibley
I didn't know the answer to any of this, so I started researching it as best I could, and that's when I found this whole world of...
00:09:16 James Sibley
aquaculture, right?
00:09:18 James Sibley
The second you start to look at where your seafood is coming from, you realize that, most of this or a lot of this is being fought.
00:09:23 James Sibley
And what in the world does that mean?
00:09:25 James Sibley
How do you farm a shrimp, right?
00:09:26 James Sibley
Because in my mind, farming was tomato steaks and the cattle out back.
00:09:30 James Sibley
How you could possibly farm the water in a three-dimensional space, totally beyond me.
00:09:34 James Sibley
So as a biologist in training at the time during university, I really just wanted to figure that out.
00:09:40 James Sibley
Clearly there was something out there, a big world on the water that I was totally just naive to.
00:09:46 James Sibley
And it seemed like most people were too, because I'd get these questions like, why does it say it's farmed?
00:09:51 James Sibley
Like, where's the wild salmon?
00:09:52 James Sibley
And then as I would look into it, I realized, oh, there's basically no wild salmon left in the Atlantic, at least not commercially.
00:09:58 James Sibley
Interesting things like that, right?
00:10:00 James Sibley
So I started to make content.
00:10:02 James Sibley
This wasn't my initial intention.
00:10:03 James Sibley
I thought I would kind of move on from biology in Boston from the degree into maybe biotech or something in that space.
00:10:10 James Sibley
But I just couldn't get away from seafood.
00:10:11 James Sibley
And when I started making videos explaining what I was talking to customers every day about, I really kind of found
00:10:16 James Sibley
outlet during COVID, and then I built an audience suddenly, right?
00:10:19 James Sibley
It started on TikTok, but I moved on to most of the major platforms pretty quickly.
00:10:22 James Sibley
And as I was making content, I would notice trends amongst my viewers.
00:10:26 James Sibley
Whenever you make any content about food production, there's heated debates sometimes.
00:10:31 James Sibley
People are very passionate.
00:10:32 James Sibley
It's controversial.
00:10:34 James Sibley
Yeah, they are.
00:10:34 James Sibley
Not a bad thing, right?
00:10:35 James Sibley
It just is the lay of the land.
00:10:36 James Sibley
Now, when I would get comments and responses on wild capture talk, right, when I was talking about tuna coming into the Boston Harbor, which is a huge industry here, or, you know,
00:10:46 James Sibley
clams and scallops and the likes.
00:10:48 James Sibley
The sort of backlash that I might get or the concerns I would hear made sense to me.
00:10:52 James Sibley
It was, stop pillaging the oceans.
00:10:55 James Sibley
Like what's, what are the, what are the regulations on this?
00:10:57 James Sibley
What's the safety?
00:10:58 James Sibley
I get it.
00:10:59 James Sibley
What I did not get was when I would talk about aquaculture, the comments I would get were not about emptying the oceans.
00:11:06 James Sibley
It was, you know, you're destroying the seabed, you know, this fish is toxic, all these things that just, there's no basis for that.
00:11:13 James Sibley
That sort of, you know, I can understand that we want to protect
00:11:17 James Sibley
from overfishing.
00:11:18 James Sibley
I don't understand why farming the ocean is like innately bad.
00:11:22 James Sibley
It's not, right?
00:11:23 James Sibley
It all comes down to how they do it, where, why, and when really.
00:11:27 James Sibley
So that totally drew me in.
00:11:29 James Sibley
Like how did that disconnect happen, right?
00:11:31 James Sibley
It must have happened decades before I came into the scene because this is ingrained in everyone, not just from folks who don't eat meat, but anglers, commercial fishermen, policymakers.
00:11:40 James Sibley
I really wanted to understand that because of the sort of weird
00:11:44 James Sibley
and offbeat comments I was getting on aquaculture content, I totally doubled down.
00:11:48 James Sibley
That was all I wanted to do.
00:11:49 James Sibley
I wanted to figure this stuff out.
00:11:51 James Sibley
And as I've pursued that over the years, it's been about five years since I started this up, I've ended up all over the world finding out how these aquaculture systems would work.
00:12:00 James Sibley
Everything from microalgae farms to land-based and offshore salmon farms and shellfish in four different continents.
00:12:07 James Sibley
I mean, this is a sort of hidden industry that's supporting coastal communities in a way that many thought had
00:12:14 James Sibley
to be abandoned, right?
00:12:15 James Sibley
I've been to small island communities that would have otherwise been uninhabited had aquaculture not come in and provided a replacement for fishing.
00:12:23 James Sibley
And that sort of resonates around the world, but not to the people eating all that seafood, right?
00:12:29 James Sibley
It kind of gets lost by that point.
00:12:31 James Sibley
You're lucky if you go buy salmon and it even tells you what country it came from, let alone how it was farmed, right?
00:12:37 James Sibley
The conditions under which it was raised, by who, right?
00:12:41 James Sibley
There's thousands of farming companies out there and nobody has a clue.
00:12:44 James Sibley
Some of them are quite large companies, global farming operations, and they all just, they operate so far from consumers that they're just out of mind.
00:12:52 James Sibley
So I really want to change that, right?
00:12:55 James Sibley
I mean, these are, this could be the future of protein production in a lot of ways, right?
00:12:59 James Sibley
There's no reason that we need to stop here.
00:13:01 James Sibley
This is just where aquaculture is reached today.
00:13:03 James Sibley
The potentials are largely limitless.
00:13:05 James Sibley
We've used, at least, I just came back from Scotland, right?
00:13:08 James Sibley
And the utilization of coastal area, sort of like the viable coastline for aquaculture, is about one
00:13:14 James Sibley
1000th of a percent.
00:13:16 James Sibley
And Scotland has quite a large production.
00:13:17 James Sibley
They're the third largest producer of salmon in the world.
00:13:19 James Sibley
So we have huge opportunity in front of us.
00:13:22 James Sibley
The industry has not done a good job of.
00:13:24 James Sibley
telling people what they do and how they do it.
00:13:26 James Sibley
And that's causing a lot of problems because they're getting stopped by regulation, by government, by those who live in their communities that don't understand how it works.
00:13:34 James Sibley
So it's kind of scary.
00:13:35 James Sibley
And that's where I found myself now is I started with just an interest in seafood and just as a biologist, it led me to cultivation.
00:13:42 James Sibley
And now I'm trying to bring people on the same journey I went on really, where it was a journey of discovery.
00:13:47 James Sibley
It still is.
00:13:48 James Sibley
Every time I visit a farm, there's something different about it.
00:13:51 James Sibley
And that's where I am today.
00:13:53 Kristin King
That is, thank you.
00:13:54 Kristin King
That was, I have so many questions now and I have so many thoughts, which is great because it's exactly what you should be inspiring people to have, these kind of thoughts and things like that.
00:14:04 Kristin King
What did you find to be the most surprising when you really started going down this rabbit hole, if you will, about something that you were like, wow, I didn't know that.
00:14:11 Kristin King
Holy crap.
00:14:12 James Sibley
Yeah, just how well these farmers understand the waters and their crop, their livestock.
00:14:19 James Sibley
You know, we have this
00:14:21 James Sibley
picture of the ocean as sort of like the Wild West, the last frontier of fishermen heading out with nets and dragging up whatever comes out.
00:14:28 James Sibley
That is absolutely not the case, especially in aquaculture, right?
00:14:31 James Sibley
Technology has really helped this sector grow because they can have live monitoring of everything from DNA sampling to years and years of water quality and fish health data that's coming into these environmental science hubs dedicated to aquaculture in hotspots around the world.
00:14:50 James Sibley
So these companies, these farmers, they know everything about their waters and their fish, how their fish are doing, how fast they're growing, any sort of health problems they might be having, right?
00:15:00 James Sibley
There's no unknown in the grand sense like that.
00:15:03 James Sibley
There's still challenges, of course, but it's a really, really controlled environment, much more than I thought it would have been.
00:15:08 James Sibley
Because when you look at a farm, for instance, a fish farm is typically a big net hanging in the water.
00:15:14 James Sibley
And it's stationary and it's static and there's not much going on.
00:15:18 James Sibley
The fish are just feeding.
00:15:19 James Sibley
But when you really start to look into it, it's how are they feeding?
00:15:22 James Sibley
Oh, they're on these large, they're connected by large tubes to feed centers that are remotely feeding with these AI controlled systems.
00:15:30 James Sibley
There's cameras in the pens that give live 4K feeds of the fish, hundreds of thousands of fish.
00:15:36 James Sibley
And they're taking these sort of population aggregate measurements about how they're growing, how they're feeding behaviors, right?
00:15:43 James Sibley
These farmers, they know how they're
00:15:44 James Sibley
fish feel every day.
00:15:45 James Sibley
And the same thing goes for all other forms of farming out there in the water.
00:15:48 James Sibley
Shellfish and seaweeds are also moving towards this sort of smart farming strategy.
00:15:53 Kristin King
It made me smile when you said that because of course a farmer would know their livestock, if you will.
00:15:58 Kristin King
Of course they would know everything about them and be experts in it.
00:16:02 Kristin King
Why wouldn't that translate to fish or any type of seafood in general?
00:16:06 Kristin King
Or of course, because that's their profession.
00:16:09 Kristin King
And yeah, there's a ton of tech.
00:16:10 Kristin King
A lot of people don't realize how much tech is involved in the food industry as a whole,
00:16:14 Kristin King
this, they couldn't probably do what they do without tech, right?
00:16:17 Kristin King
Because the monitoring alone.
00:16:18 Kristin King
And these are 24 by 7 operations.
00:16:20 Kristin King
I mean, this is a lot of work that goes into these products in general.
00:16:29 Kristin King
Quick break.
00:16:30 Kristin King
And while you're here, can I ask a favor?
00:16:34 Kristin King
If you're enjoying this conversation, please like, comment, and share.
00:16:37 Kristin King
It really does help people find the show.
00:16:40 Kristin King
All right, a little housekeeping stuff.
00:16:42 Kristin King
My book, Securing What Feeds Us, Cybersecurity and Food and Agriculture, is available for pre-order right now and will be published on September 29th, 2026 through Wiley Publishing.
00:16:54 Kristin King
If you've been listening to the show for any length of time, you know this book has been something I've been building towards.
00:17:01 Kristin King
You can find the Predator link and all kinds of other information at securingvisas.com.
00:17:06 Kristin King
Yes, I finally stood the website up.
00:17:07 Kristin King
Hooray.
00:17:09 Kristin King
I'm really excited.
00:17:10 Kristin King
This is where you can go find other reading and recommendations to help as compliments to the book.
00:17:15 Kristin King
You'll be able to find out where I am, what events I'm going to be at, book signing or otherwise.
00:17:20 Kristin King
And also I'm going to put some other fun stuff on there because we do need to continue having a resource of where to find this information.
00:17:26 Kristin King
I hope you like it.
00:17:27 Kristin King
On the events side, speaking of events,
00:17:30 Kristin King
The second annual ICS SCADA Cybersecurity Symposium is meeting June 16th through the 18th in Chicago.
00:17:37 Kristin King
If you work at critical infrastructure, this program was most definitely built for you.
00:17:41 Kristin King
can use code LINKD for 15% off registration.
00:17:47 Kristin King
I will be there.
00:17:48 Kristin King
Please say hi, and I'll be speaking on the first day.
00:17:51 Kristin King
And also speaking of events,
00:17:53 Kristin King
You are officially invited to the inaugural Thought Leader Product Safety Innovation Summit on August 14th.
00:18:00 Kristin King
It's a virtual event focused on leadership across agriculture, food, pharmaceuticals, and nutraceutical.
00:18:07 Kristin King
I'll be there as the closing keynote.
00:18:09 Kristin King
You can use Summit 26 at registration.
00:18:13 Kristin King
Links to everything will be in the show notes.
00:18:15 Kristin King
Now back to the conversation.
00:18:19 Kristin King
I have a couple thoughts here around that.
00:18:22 Kristin King
Are there fish or other species that they're using that are helping with farming and not just because I'm just thinking like, I think I saw something about their group, they have different farms that have certain fish that are complementary to whatever fish they're particularly raising or harvesting that can help out with like cleaning or different types of symbiote type relationships.
00:18:42 Kristin King
Have you seen any of that yet?
00:18:43 Kristin King
Because actually that's new for me because I saw that recently and I was like, wow, is that a thing?
00:18:47 James Sibley
Yeah, absolutely.
00:18:48 James Sibley
So there's, this is kind of a new frontier.
00:18:52 James Sibley
So one of the things I love most about aquaculture is it's sort of 1 big trial.
00:18:57 James Sibley
I don't mean that isn't like it's a mad scientist in a lab with beakers and everything's fuming.
00:19:01 James Sibley
It's, you know, the farmers are iterating every cycle, trying out new technologies, trying out things that didn't work, like reexamining their challenges.
00:19:07 James Sibley
Like if they had one bad year because the water temperatures were warm, okay, good to know.
00:19:12 James Sibley
If that's a five year trend, that's concerning, what can we do?
00:19:15 James Sibley
So I love it because it's always changing like that, right?
00:19:18 James Sibley
One of those techniques they've figured out over the years,
00:19:21 James Sibley
This is actually not the most recent development.
00:19:23 James Sibley
They've been using what are called the cleaner fish for a couple decades now, but only now are they starting to actually farm the cleaner fish too, to bring into the farms to keep it a closed system.
00:19:32 James Sibley
Now, cleaner fish are specifically for salmon farms.
00:19:36 James Sibley
So salmon have a natural ectoparasite called sea lice.
00:19:40 James Sibley
You might have heard of it in the salmon farming world if you're attuned to it.
00:19:43 James Sibley
But it's one of the industry's sort of greatest challenges is how to mitigate sea lice because it comes in from wild fish as they swim by or near pens.
00:19:52 James Sibley
and jumps off into the farms, and then now you have a parasite that, is not a death sentence to the salmon, can kind of get out of control if other pieces of the puzzle start to stress the fish out.
00:20:03 James Sibley
The waters are too warm, you have a harmful algae bloom.
00:20:06 James Sibley
Something like this can bring sea lice levels up to a problematic level.
00:20:09 James Sibley
So cleaner fish are one of the many mitigation efforts used in preventing and reducing sea lice numbers.
00:20:16 James Sibley
So things like balan wrasse or lumpfish, these are, since lice are a
00:20:21 James Sibley
natural pressure on salmonids in the wild.
00:20:23 James Sibley
They are species of fish that co-evolved with the emergence of lice to eat them off.
00:20:28 James Sibley
Lump fish are so cool.
00:20:30 Kristin King
Lump fish are so cool.
00:20:31 Kristin King
Sorry, I just totally, oh, they're so cool.
00:20:33 Kristin King
Please look it up.
00:20:35 Kristin King
They're really cool.
00:20:36 Kristin King
Sorry.
00:20:36 James Sibley
They are really cool.
00:20:37 James Sibley
They're these little blue fish and they have a sucker on the bottom to stick onto the salmon, which is really cool.
00:20:42 James Sibley
But these fish will eat lice off of salmon.
00:20:44 James Sibley
It's sort of a natural process that just exists in nature.
00:20:48 James Sibley
It's A mutualistic relationship and it's just one of the methods used to
00:20:51 James Sibley
fight sea lice.
00:20:52 James Sibley
Now there's no silver bullet in farming.
00:20:53 James Sibley
There's no like, oh, here's the answer to all problems ever.
00:20:57 James Sibley
Cleaner fish absolutely help with sea lice.
00:21:00 James Sibley
And if you combine that with a bunch of other techniques to help reduce sea lice, things like freshwater treatments, you can really help bring down those numbers in troubling like summer months when biology is tough in the ocean or when the fish may have like a stressful event like a transfer or perhaps there's, you know, biotoxins in the water from some other unrelated thing in the world.
00:21:17 Kristin King
That's interesting.
00:21:19 Kristin King
Sorry, love fish are so cool.
00:21:20 Kristin King
Sorry, I'm still on love fish.
00:21:21 Kristin King
I just think it's a brilliant idea to use other creatures to help.
00:21:27 Kristin King
I mean, it just makes sense, like on a systems thinking ecosystem level, like that just makes sense to me.
00:21:32 Kristin King
And the fact that they're doing it and it's really successful shows how well the natural world just kind of works itself out.
00:21:37 Kristin King
You mentioned issues.
00:21:38 Kristin King
So you mentioned toxins.
00:21:40 Kristin King
And what other issues do farmers face in this regard?
00:21:42 Kristin King
So I'm assuming weather is obviously an issue.
00:21:45 Kristin King
And you said temperature rising in the seas is an issue.
00:21:47 Kristin King
What about predators?
00:21:48 Kristin King
I'm thinking birds.
00:21:49 Kristin King
Probably there's other predators, but how did
00:21:51 Kristin King
those the type of things that people are dealing with in this regard.
00:21:54 James Sibley
So I mean, we have to think that these farmers are operating in basically the open ocean, right?
00:22:00 James Sibley
It's an open system and Mother Nature throws at you whatever you want.
00:22:04 James Sibley
And that can include.
00:22:06 James Sibley
massive storms, right?
00:22:08 James Sibley
You can see swells on some sort of more exposed sites that are up to 10 meters.
00:22:13 James Sibley
And over the decades, they've been figuring out how to build the infrastructure to support this.
00:22:18 James Sibley
When they first started to bring like large farms out to sea,
00:22:22 James Sibley
They were wooden, right?
00:22:23 James Sibley
And that was great in the sunny, calm summer.
00:22:26 James Sibley
And then you would have a hurricane come through and then you didn't have a farm.
00:22:29 James Sibley
Yeah, that would be gone.
00:22:31 James Sibley
So, lessons learned, right?
00:22:32 James Sibley
Nowadays, sea pens are largely these fully recyclable HTP rings that are quite large.
00:22:39 James Sibley
Some of these are 160, 200 meters in circumference and they're flexible, so they'll bend and move with the water.
00:22:45 James Sibley
And that's just for sea-based systems.
00:22:47 James Sibley
There's also land-based systems where a lot of fish, shellfish and all that
00:22:51 James Sibley
They start in land-based hatcheries.
00:22:53 James Sibley
So that faces a whole separate world of you're basically the world's largest aquariums are aquaculture facilities, right?
00:22:59 James Sibley
They're working with millions and millions of live organisms trying to maintain that sort of live ecosystem.
00:23:05 James Sibley
But when it hits the open ocean or open lakes, whatever it might be, that's when they run into natural forces.
00:23:11 James Sibley
So predators are absolutely one of the biggest issues.
00:23:14 James Sibley
Things like sea lions and seals, wherever they exist, are a huge problem for finfish farmers.
00:23:19 James Sibley
So that's any typical fish you
00:23:21 James Sibley
you might find because they will jump onto these pens and some of them can weigh a ton and just collapse in bird nets and end up in the pens.
00:23:28 James Sibley
So there's a lot of efforts right now around the world to try and just keep them away, right?
00:23:33 James Sibley
You don't want to hurt them.
00:23:34 James Sibley
You never want to, you know, in days old, you know, fishermen and the likes, they used to cull seals and sea lions.
00:23:39 James Sibley
That does not happen anymore in most places in the world.
00:23:42 James Sibley
So it's all about mitigation.
00:23:44 James Sibley
How do we keep these predators away from our crop and our livestock?
00:23:47 James Sibley
So things like these massive bird nets that come up and over salmon farms.
00:23:51 James Sibley
are proving to be really effective at just, well, the seagulls can't land anymore.
00:23:55 James Sibley
So that's that, right?
00:23:56 James Sibley
So some of it's an easy fix.
00:23:57 James Sibley
Some of it, like seals and in some places, sharks are not easy fixes.
00:24:02 James Sibley
And they're actually still trying to develop ways to mitigate these challenges, right?
00:24:06 James Sibley
I recently saw a farm in Scotland that is using nets that have sort of a built-in metal lining in the actual weave of the netting around the farm to help keep the seals from biting through it.
00:24:18 James Sibley
And it's proving really effective.
00:24:20 James Sibley
Like the seals just
00:24:21 James Sibley
A hole in the net is not the end of the world because they have robots that they send into the nets all the time, look for holes, look for tears, and they can fix them even underwater with the robots.
00:24:30 James Sibley
It's pretty cool.
00:24:31 James Sibley
But you don't want that to happen in the 1st place.
00:24:33 James Sibley
So yeah, predators and the lakes are definitely an ongoing problem.
00:24:37 James Sibley
But honestly, warming waters are probably the biggest issue that the global aquaculture sector faces, right?
00:24:43 James Sibley
So fish and shellfish are the first sort of farmed species to feel those changes in climate change because while we just kind of sit
00:24:51 James Sibley
out here in the air, you might not notice a one degree change on average throughout a year.
00:24:57 James Sibley
Fish do in the water.
00:24:58 James Sibley
Some places in the world where there's quite large salmon farming operations, they're seeing three, four degree increases on average Celsius on average in the summer times.
00:25:08 James Sibley
And those sorts of changes really stress fish out.
00:25:10 James Sibley
It's too much, right?
00:25:12 James Sibley
It's not what nature intended.
00:25:14 James Sibley
So they're looking at how they can help the fish stay cooler, whether it be through selective breeding with thermotolerance, so
00:25:21 James Sibley
maybe 5 generations from now in 10, 15 years, those fish will be acclimated to warmer temperatures or new sort of farming strategies that keep the fish cooler.
00:25:30 James Sibley
Maybe we can take these pens, hang them from floats and submerge them 20 meters underwater.
00:25:35 James Sibley
There's colder water down there if you get far enough out in the ocean.
00:25:38 James Sibley
So all sorts of strategies like this are like actively being tried right now all around the world.
00:25:43 James Sibley
But yeah, I would say that the water temperatures is probably the biggest sort of problem of the future.
00:25:48 James Sibley
The good thing about it is it's totally something that aquaculture
00:25:52 James Sibley
can tackle, right?
00:25:53 James Sibley
It's not the first issue to face this sector, and it won't be the last, but it's definitely, in my mind, the most prevalent at the moment.
00:25:58 James Sibley
And there's a lot of work.
00:26:00 James Sibley
Everywhere I go, it's what they're looking at.
00:26:02 James Sibley
Thermotolerance in salmon, thermotolerance in oysters and mussels, moving more of their operations on land or further out to sea where they can control what the water temperatures are like better.
00:26:12 Kristin King
It makes a lot of sense considering if you think about cattle, they have the slip gene now so they can stand at 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
00:26:18 Kristin King
It makes sense that we'd start manipulating our fish stock
00:26:21 Kristin King
as well in some ways to be able to tolerate global climate change.
00:26:24 Kristin King
Because let's be real, it's decimating farming across the world, regardless if it's in the ocean or not.
00:26:30 Kristin King
It's got severe issues with a lot of things.
00:26:33 Kristin King
And the farmers, all of them are
00:26:35 Kristin King
are frontline workers in that regard, and they see it clearly.
00:26:38 Kristin King
I'm not surprised to hear that they're working on thermal tolerance at all.
00:26:41 James Sibley
Yeah, and a lot of people with regards to the ocean, right, what's kind of cool about aquaculture, especially with net pen farming, is they're technically mobile, right?
00:26:50 James Sibley
There's no reason that a farm couldn't just be picked up and moved.
00:26:54 James Sibley
And actually, they do that all over the world for like transferring and harvest.
00:26:57 James Sibley
They will literally unmoor a pen, get a tugboat, and tow 100,000 fish to somewhere else for harvesting or transfers, whatever it might be.
00:27:05 James Sibley
So it's actually unlike any other kind of farming system, you can just pick it up and go somewhere else in theory.
00:27:10 James Sibley
In practice, it's much more difficult than that, right?
00:27:13 James Sibley
If we're farming on the top of Scotland and the water's getting warmer, where do we go?
00:27:18 James Sibley
The open ocean, that presents a whole new world of changes.
00:27:21 James Sibley
Same thing in the south and the southern hemisphere, right?
00:27:24 James Sibley
We're farming the bottom of New Zealand, the bottom of Australia.
00:27:26 James Sibley
Where do you go from there?
00:27:27 James Sibley
Antarctica, right?
00:27:28 James Sibley
That presents some new challenges.
00:27:30 James Sibley
So moving farms around can be pretty complex in that way.
00:27:33 James Sibley
And it's also, this is a huge
00:27:35 James Sibley
in aquaculture, and I'm sure it is in the rest of agriculture, is regulation and policy, right?
00:27:39 James Sibley
So just because you can do something and the biology might check out and the science supports it doesn't mean it's actually going to happen.
00:27:46 James Sibley
It's such a big problem that, for instance, there was a large company that wanted to start up a half billion dollar project in Maine.
00:27:53 James Sibley
It would be a massive development in Maine to do land-based salmon farming.
00:27:57 James Sibley
It's a new technology that they're trying out, incredibly expensive, but a lot of promise.
00:28:01 James Sibley
They were trying to do this for over a decade.
00:28:03 James Sibley
They got caught up in the courts.
00:28:05 James Sibley
And eventually they said, this isn't worth it.
00:28:08 James Sibley
We're selling the land and we're going to Norway to build there.
00:28:11 James Sibley
And then we'll sell the fish back to the US.
00:28:13 James Sibley
And it's something I'm seeing all over the US right now and Canada even now.
00:28:17 James Sibley
And it hurts me, right?
00:28:18 James Sibley
Because I'm an American.
00:28:19 James Sibley
I don't want to have to get on planes and go everywhere else to go show off the farms of the world.
00:28:24 James Sibley
We have a lot of great waters here in the States and they're just incredibly underutilized.
00:28:29 Kristin King
That's so sad because Maine, when people think Maine, the immediate picture on their head should be a Red Lobster, right?
00:28:35 Kristin King
So
00:28:36 Kristin King
is a seafood hub.
00:28:37 Kristin King
However, the fun fact actually, blueberries are very popular in Maine.
00:28:41 Kristin King
Please don't just count the blueberry.
00:28:42 Kristin King
are really good too.
00:28:43 Kristin King
But I'm sure there's a bunch of influencers that are out there as well and some really great, amazing fishermen in that space with lobsters and educating people on how lobsters are taken as well and what is not taken and the regulations around that.
00:28:56 Kristin King
Obviously can't take a pregnant lobster.
00:28:58 Kristin King
They try not to take the females really at all.
00:29:00 Kristin King
You know, there's a lot of a lot of them will pick them up and clean them off if there's a barnacle issue or whatever else is going on.
00:29:06 Kristin King
There's a lot of care and love that goes into that industry.
00:29:09 Kristin King
And I'm hopeful that other industries will also
00:29:12 Kristin King
sort of pick that up because it's a stewardship, right?
00:29:15 Kristin King
You're really a steward of what you're doing and your environment.
00:29:17 Kristin King
And it got me thinking about how really in a way this is also helping with sustainability.
00:29:23 Kristin King
It's regenerative ag and it's finest, if you will, but it's also helping with sustainability because you can keep fish stocks and species alive.
00:29:30 Kristin King
We're not going to necessarily lose them like we have in the wild.
00:29:33 Kristin King
Cod has obviously been a very hot topic in a lot of places because it's gone in some places.
00:29:38 Kristin King
And do the farmers realize that that's part of their job too in a way?
00:29:42 Kristin King
that there are stewards of a particular species that they are farming so people can enjoy generations to come.
00:29:47 Kristin King
Is that something that you noticed on your travels?
00:29:49 James Sibley
Percent is that before they are farmers, right?
00:29:53 James Sibley
They are water men and women.
00:29:54 James Sibley
Yes.
00:29:54 James Sibley
They live in the areas, they fish the areas, they're raising kids there.
00:29:57 James Sibley
That's what matters is that they maintain or improve the sort of ecosystem in which they were operate in.
00:30:02 James Sibley
Now that's actually not too difficult for like shellfish operations, right?
00:30:06 James Sibley
So oyster farms, mussel farms, even scallop farms, that those exist.
00:30:10 James Sibley
Those are filter feeders.
00:30:11 James Sibley
There's no input and
00:30:12 James Sibley
They actually clean the water and they operate as artificial reefs.
00:30:15 James Sibley
So a lot of longstanding mussel and oyster farms have been to that have been there for decades, let's say, have flourishing marine ecosystems because they're protected, right?
00:30:24 James Sibley
You can't, you don't have boats going over them.
00:30:26 James Sibley
You don't have recreational and commercial fishermen coming through.
00:30:28 James Sibley
They're sort of cordoned off farming areas that they're just full of life.
00:30:32 James Sibley
So that's, you know, mussel farmers always think of themselves as benefiting the ecosystems in which they operate in.
00:30:37 James Sibley
And they totally do.
00:30:38 James Sibley
It gets a little more complex when you move into things like fish, right?
00:30:41 James Sibley
Fish
00:30:42 James Sibley
and inputs, you have to feed them.
00:30:44 James Sibley
So you have to consider where that feed is coming from.
00:30:47 James Sibley
You also have to consider the outputs, right, the waste.
00:30:49 James Sibley
So that's not to say that shellfish don't have waste output.
00:30:52 James Sibley
They do.
00:30:53 James Sibley
It's just viewed differently by regulators and by the ecosystem itself.
00:30:57 James Sibley
It can be more, you know, the organic matter coming out of fish can be more intense on the ecosystem.
00:31:01 James Sibley
So a lot of sort of funding and money in the industry in the last 10 years, I would say, has gone into benthic monitoring and reduction of organic loading on the environment.
00:31:12 James Sibley
This really means how can we feed more efficiently, waste less food, and when, I mean, fish have to poop, that's life.
00:31:19 James Sibley
But how can we ensure that the area in which that's happening is minimally impacted, right?
00:31:25 Kristin King
Hi, we're Anson Sage.
00:31:28 Kristin King
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00:31:34 Kristin King
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00:31:40 Kristin King
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00:31:50 Kristin King
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00:31:52 Kristin King
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00:32:59 Kristin King
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00:33:01 Kristin King
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00:33:09 James Sibley
I was recently at a salmon farm in Scotland.
00:33:11 James Sibley
It had been there almost 50 years and it was an old site.
00:33:15 James Sibley
So it came to existence before they really knew about these things.
00:33:18 James Sibley
Like, oh, we should be operating in much more exposed areas, much more, much stronger water flow.
00:33:23 James Sibley
So the site was kind of grandfathered for a while.
00:33:25 James Sibley
They decided, you know what, we're going to put it somewhere else.
00:33:28 James Sibley
We're going to put it in higher water currents, better monitoring, etc.
00:33:31 James Sibley
So they actually picked up, they moved it once they got all the licensing to do that.
00:33:35 James Sibley
And then they decided to monitor the seabed after the fact, right?
00:33:39 James Sibley
great opportunity, very rare to find something like this, a case study where you can just see what the environment, what the seabed does after, intensive salmon farming leaves.
00:33:48 James Sibley
And what they discovered was there's a bit of like an ellipses around where the farm is, where you see more organic loading.
00:33:55 James Sibley
It doesn't mean like the seabed is suffocated and we're sitting in like layers and layers of feces.
00:33:59 James Sibley
It's not the case, right?
00:34:00 James Sibley
What we're talking is a change in the environment, right?
00:34:03 James Sibley
So you see more macrobenthos that are kind of brought in by the nutrients.
00:34:06 James Sibley
And they can compare that with like, let's say 2 miles up
00:34:09 James Sibley
to look at what they assume nature is.
00:34:11 James Sibley
I mean, it's hard to know in Scotland.
00:34:13 James Sibley
People have been there a long time, but just comparing with what hasn't been farmed.
00:34:17 James Sibley
And what they found is that after one year, that ellipses had shrunk, that zone of detectable impact had shrunk by over 50%.
00:34:25 James Sibley
And then after just under three years, it was like 34 months, it was completely gone.
00:34:29 James Sibley
There was no detectable, there was no detected impact on the environment after that point.
00:34:33 James Sibley
So it was actually, it was really exciting for the industry because nobody had any idea going before this in Scotland, if like,
00:34:39 James Sibley
how long that impact would last.
00:34:41 James Sibley
And for it to be such a short time frame, the seabeds are alive.
00:34:45 James Sibley
It's not just like mud.
00:34:46 James Sibley
Even if it looks like mud, it's like soil.
00:34:48 James Sibley
It's living.
00:34:49 James Sibley
So it recovers incredibly fast under a farm.
00:34:52 James Sibley
Can't really be said about a lot of other kinds of farming there.
00:34:55 James Sibley
And that kind of focus on how the seabeds are impacted is one of the key sort of debates today.
00:35:02 James Sibley
I spend a lot of time in Scotland, so that's where I know this debate is happening, but I know it's happening elsewhere around the world.
00:35:07 James Sibley
There is always an impact.
00:35:08 James Sibley
It's just about how do
00:35:09 James Sibley
right?
00:35:10 James Sibley
Let's put a farm somewhere where there's not a reef below us, there's not endangered seagrass beds.
00:35:16 James Sibley
Put the farm just over some mud in high current areas and then monitor the heck out of it, right?
00:35:21 James Sibley
Live data every day for years and years and years, the entire time the farm's operating.
00:35:25 James Sibley
And then practices like fallowing, right?
00:35:27 James Sibley
Same as land, you give the seabed time to rest.
00:35:29 James Sibley
So you harvest your fish out, you wait six to nine months, put them back in, and the seabed, if you do that regularly, your impact is incredibly shrunken.
00:35:38 Kristin King
Makes total sense.
00:35:39 Kristin King
And along the same lines of this sustainability conversation we're having, you made me think about food security and how, you mentioned it kind of already a little bit, so I'm just going to poke at it.
00:35:49 Kristin King
The coastal communities, a lot of them have lost their fishing ability because of what we're fishing in the ocean.
00:35:54 Kristin King
And people don't realize actually that seafood in general is a very large protein around the world.
00:35:59 Kristin King
Like it's not just a thing you enjoy because you had a special occasion or it's actually people's primary protein, like this is what they eat.
00:36:07 Kristin King
Do you think that this type of farming can be
00:36:09 Kristin King
certain places that have lost this, whether, like you said, the island nations or any other coastal areas where it's been overfished?
00:36:16 Kristin King
Do you think this is something that can be the future for food security in different countries around the world?
00:36:21 James Sibley
Absolutely.
00:36:22 James Sibley
And everywhere I go, that's what the farmers think.
00:36:25 James Sibley
A lot of them are ex-fishermen or they're from 10 generation fishing families.
00:36:29 James Sibley
Already in Southeast Asia and even up through Korea and China, aquaculture is everywhere.
00:36:34 James Sibley
China alone does over 50% of global aquaculture.
00:36:38 James Sibley
They
00:36:40 James Sibley
have taken this in stride.
00:36:41 James Sibley
They have a lot of people to feed.
00:36:42 James Sibley
So in the last two decades, they've really ramped up their production in a lot of really creative ways too.
00:36:48 James Sibley
So it's not, it doesn't have to be just, I want to have a farm.
00:36:52 James Sibley
Here's an acre of water and let me go put out some mussel lines and see what happens, right?
00:36:56 James Sibley
It can be much more coordinated than that.
00:36:58 James Sibley
For instance,
00:36:59 James Sibley
In Maine, I was out with a lobsterman in Damascott River Basin area.
00:37:04 James Sibley
And because his season is getting shorter and shorter every year, he's not catching what he needs to.
00:37:10 James Sibley
A local kelp farming company offered to give him lines to put out and harvest on a co-op program as well.
00:37:17 James Sibley
So he's supplementing his dwindling lobstering season with kelp.
00:37:20 James Sibley
And it's a really popular strategy that's taking off with a lot of lobstering in Maine at the moment.
00:37:24 James Sibley
It is.
00:37:24 James Sibley
Yeah, it's great.
00:37:25 James Sibley
It's brilliant.
00:37:26 James Sibley
It's stability, right?
00:37:27 James Sibley
It's stability for other waterways.
00:37:29 James Sibley
And kelp is, the lobster boats are already equipped with everything they need to farm kelp.
00:37:33 James Sibley
You need a big crane and you need some knives and some guys on board.
00:37:37 James Sibley
And that's that.
00:37:38 Kristin King
Yeah.
00:37:38 Kristin King
Kelp is perfect for me and I could see that completely be taking off.
00:37:42 James Sibley
Absolutely.
00:37:42 James Sibley
No, it's been going on for years now and they're really hoping to scale this up as far as they can.
00:37:48 James Sibley
Kelp is a huge interest globally.
00:37:50 James Sibley
It's still a bit of a difficult species to farm because the finances don't make total sense at the moment, but they're working on ways to make kelp a more,
00:37:59 James Sibley
right, or something that people could eat.
00:38:01 James Sibley
Right now, a lot of it ends up in fertilizers, which is great.
00:38:04 James Sibley
It's a great source for natural fertilizers, but it's also not expensive by the time.
00:38:09 James Sibley
So from a farming standpoint, you either need to farm a heck of a lot more on the same boat, or you need to get the price up at the end consumer.
00:38:17 Kristin King
Love the creative ways to work with the environment around us.
00:38:19 Kristin King
So like that's, that actually fills my heart up.
00:38:22 Kristin King
Like I love to hear that kind of stuff.
00:38:29 Kristin King
Let's quickly switch into tech because you've talked a little bit about it over the place.
00:38:32 Kristin King
And obviously, since I am a tech cybersecurity podcast, I want to make sure I definitely jump into this or dive in since we should start using more puns.
00:38:39 Kristin King
So I'd love to talk about the different IOT devices, so the internet connected devices that are in this particular farming.
00:38:45 Kristin King
I'm assuming there's drones being used in various ways, so I'm interested to hear about that.
00:38:49 Kristin King
And we can talk a little bit more about these robots because the idea of a robot fixing a hole in a fishing net is kind of epic.
00:38:55 Kristin King
And also, I'm assuming they have divers.
00:38:57 Kristin King
So there's going to be some interesting diving
00:38:59 Kristin King
that has to go into this, especially since some of the water could be really super cold.
00:39:02 Kristin King
And I'd love to hear about like how they're dealing with that.
00:39:04 Kristin King
So go for it.
00:39:05 Kristin King
All things tech.
00:39:06 James Sibley
All things tech, yeah.
00:39:07 James Sibley
So some of the largest companies in aquaculture have put out plans.
00:39:11 James Sibley
It's we are a smart farming company.
00:39:13 James Sibley
It's one of those like 90 degree right angle turns.
00:39:15 James Sibley
This is what we're going to do.
00:39:17 James Sibley
And that's for a bunch of reasons, right?
00:39:19 James Sibley
So the only way to sort of scale what we do on the water is to be able to get one person to be more and more productive with how they can farm.
00:39:26 James Sibley
They've reached points in Norway where like three or four
00:39:28 James Sibley
can effectively manage and monitor 3, 4,000 tons of salmon at a time.
00:39:32 James Sibley
Norway does about a million and a half tons of fish every year, sorry, of salmon every year.
00:39:38 James Sibley
They only have 5 million people in the country.
00:39:39 James Sibley
So salmon is actually their number two export behind oil.
00:39:42 James Sibley
They are a tech heavy country and Norway is sort of the epicenter of tech and aquaculture.
00:39:47 James Sibley
So whatever they're doing with their salmon farming seems to trickle out into the world in different ways.
00:39:53 James Sibley
You can't just take what Norway's doing, which might be autonomous feeding or submersible
00:39:59 James Sibley
depends on these large winches out in deep waters.
00:40:02 James Sibley
You can't just apply that elsewhere in the world.
00:40:04 James Sibley
It doesn't work, right?
00:40:05 James Sibley
But you can adapt it to fit the scenario you're in.
00:40:08 James Sibley
terms of like the actual tech I'm seeing right now, automated feeding, centralized feeding is a huge one, right?
00:40:14 James Sibley
So traditionally on most fish farms, you have to send out a ton of people every day with bags of feed over their shoulder and a scoop and they do that.
00:40:23 James Sibley
They scoop all day.
00:40:23 James Sibley
It's incredibly labor intensive and it's really, it's a hard job.
00:40:27 James Sibley
Same thing is true for the like
00:40:29 James Sibley
Oysters, right?
00:40:30 James Sibley
Oysters have to try to be flipped in and out of the water.
00:40:32 James Sibley
They're an intertidal species.
00:40:33 James Sibley
So traditionally that's done by hand.
00:40:35 James Sibley
You have guys that go out there and flip oyster bags for weeks on end, and then they turn around and they flip them back the other way.
00:40:41 James Sibley
Wow.
00:40:42 James Sibley
So we're seeing a lot of like large infrastructure, large tech coming in that's helping with some of these really arduous processes like autonomous feeding, right?
00:40:50 James Sibley
You put a floating spinner connected to a large barge that's hooked up to the internet, usually through satellites because these barges are way out at sea.
00:40:57 James Sibley
And then you have somebody on the
00:40:59 James Sibley
mainland, who has a big, one of those like hacker man screen setups in front of them with all the cameras on the fish, they can see the pellets coming down and they're starting to implement systems that it's pellet detection, it's fish behavior detection.
00:41:10 James Sibley
So are these fish satiated?
00:41:11 James Sibley
Should we stop feeding, right?
00:41:13 James Sibley
If they're not satiated, how quickly are we feeding?
00:41:17 James Sibley
All of these pieces come into play when it comes to feeding your fish.
00:41:19 James Sibley
Feeding the fish is the most expensive part of all fish farming.
00:41:23 James Sibley
It's usually well over 50% of the cost.
00:41:26 James Sibley
So it's really important that they get it right.
00:41:28 James Sibley
So a lot of tech is going into feeding there.
00:41:30 James Sibley
But a lot of tech is also going into maintaining the structural stability of these pens.
00:41:34 James Sibley
They need to be flexible out at sea and you have a lot of cameras out there all the time.
00:41:39 James Sibley
A lot of this stuff can be up to 30, 40, 50 meters deep in the water column.
00:41:43 James Sibley
So it's, and these are, for instance, Scotland is not known for having clear waters.
00:41:47 James Sibley
They're nutrient rich and they're totally, they're great for fish.
00:41:50 James Sibley
But visibility, I mean, you can't see the seabed anywhere unless you're like in one meter of water.
00:41:54 James Sibley
That's just how it is.
00:41:55 James Sibley
So you need these sorts of cameras and robots in the water.
00:41:58 James Sibley
The most common utilization of robots, everybody's doing this right now, is net cleaning.
00:42:03 James Sibley
So you have these robots the size of like a person, probably some of them are like a Mini Cooper.
00:42:08 James Sibley
And they have treads on them.
00:42:10 James Sibley
They're kind of like tank treads and they run around the inside of the pen controlled by a boat.
00:42:16 James Sibley
You know, they're hooked up on wires and they have large brushes that sort of, it's called defouling or just removing all the growth on the nets to keep the water flowing.
00:42:25 James Sibley
This needs to be done in the summer, sometimes like once every 10 days on every pen.
00:42:29 James Sibley
Scotland, for instance, has over 1800 individual pens and they all need to be cleaned every two weeks.
00:42:35 James Sibley
So it's a big process.
00:42:37 James Sibley
It's an expensive process.
00:42:39 James Sibley
So the robots are really helping with that.
00:42:40 James Sibley
And, you know, sending divers down is something a lot of farms still do.
00:42:44 James Sibley
They want to move away from it in a lot of places.
00:42:46 James Sibley
It's expensive and it can be dangerous, right?
00:42:48 James Sibley
So if you can send a robot down, we call them, you know, the ROVs in the sector here to do whatever you need to for you, fixing nets, net
00:42:56 James Sibley
inspections, picking up things with robot arms, they're starting to move toward that.
00:43:00 Kristin King
Makes sense, totally.
00:43:01 Kristin King
Whatever you can do.
00:43:02 Kristin King
A lot of people don't realize that tech is created specifically actually in the food and ag sector for human safety.
00:43:08 Kristin King
So think about cutting lines for chicken, things like that, or any cutting line for any type of protein.
00:43:12 Kristin King
They actually, the robots are for safety purposes.
00:43:15 Kristin King
The problem is they're not as fast as humans.
00:43:17 Kristin King
Humans still cut faster, which is kind of wild to think about.
00:43:20 James Sibley
Wow.
00:43:20 Kristin King
But yeah, so most tech is brought into the industry because of safety.
00:43:24 Kristin King
And I think it's a kind
00:43:26 Kristin King
kind of an honorable way to bring in tech, not just because it's going to make us whatever.
00:43:29 Kristin King
I think that that's the fact that they're thinking about safety first is super important.
00:43:33 James Sibley
Alters are operations fundamentally, right?
00:43:35 James Sibley
A lot of farms that are salmon farms, for instance, that operate very, very far away from any civilization, they need to live out crews.
00:43:43 James Sibley
And that's not only is that expensive, but you're asking a lot of people to live out on a farm 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off, some sort of system like that.
00:43:49 James Sibley
So by being able to put these systems on more and more sort of remotely controlled systems, some of these sites are able
00:43:56 James Sibley
to move off of a live out system, which makes it much more viable as a sort of farming strategy.
00:44:01 James Sibley
That's especially true in Canada.
00:44:03 Kristin King
I would think that, would be a really tough life at times, depending on the weather and what was going on in the world or, yeah, that could be a lot.
00:44:11 Kristin King
If they can move away from that, would be really interesting.
00:44:13 Kristin King
Fully autonomous fish farm.
00:44:15 Kristin King
I'm sure we're not actually not that far away from it.
00:44:17 James Sibley
Would never be, you can never just leave it after all it's farming, but if you can monitor it 24-7 in other ways than literally standing on the pen and
00:44:26 James Sibley
They should, especially with fish, right?
00:44:27 James Sibley
It's difficult to know what's going on in a pen just by looking at it.
00:44:31 James Sibley
You can have 100,000 salmon in one pen and you only see 50 swimming around the surface because some of these nets can be 30, 40,000 cubic meters, right?
00:44:40 James Sibley
And they can go down at least 30 meters.
00:44:42 James Sibley
So understanding your population can only be done with technology.
00:44:46 Kristin King
Just love what we're doing with tech in general, but of course the cybersecurity expert amigos, well crap, what are we doing to secure that because that's all open.
00:44:54 Kristin King
And we're probably using default
00:44:56 Kristin King
passwords and who's updating that firmware and how are we controlling this and is there security awareness and what are people actually doing?
00:45:02 Kristin King
Are we sharing our logins?
00:45:04 Kristin King
And I'm sure I just said everything that actually is happening.
00:45:06 Kristin King
And I worry because I think that a lot of regulations and policies, you've already mentioned this, James, are going to happen in isolation on land and not be functional on water.
00:45:16 Kristin King
And I hope that the right people get in the room when that time comes.
00:45:20 Kristin King
They can have a serious conversation about the lifestyle and the human aspects around any type of
00:45:26 Kristin King
farming to make sure it doesn't cause cumbersome actions that could impact safety or the quality of the food.
00:45:32 Kristin King
And that is always my concern when I'm talking to policy and regulators is, hey, we need to not do this in isolation.
00:45:38 Kristin King
We need to talk to people that are actually doing it because otherwise they're going to find workarounds and it's still going to be unsecure anyways.
00:45:43 Kristin King
That is my point there.
00:45:45 James Sibley
No, I mean, it's absolutely true.
00:45:46 James Sibley
And just the adoption of tech on like ocean farms is it's difficult.
00:45:51 James Sibley
Not only are a lot of farmers sort of, you know, they have something that works and it can be difficult
00:45:56 James Sibley
to bring them on board with expensive technological trials.
00:45:59 James Sibley
But a lot of times they don't work, right?
00:46:01 James Sibley
So you have, there's this thing in the aquaculture space of like Silicon Valley, like, oh, here's a fancy light, put this in your pen.
00:46:06 James Sibley
And they put it in their pen and it immediately breaks and shatters and the storms rip it away.
00:46:10 James Sibley
And that's that.
00:46:11 James Sibley
So it's that sort of mentality, right?
00:46:12 James Sibley
Of these things need to be able to stand 100 mile an hour winds, 10 meter swells, any sort of biofouling.
00:46:19 James Sibley
Like there's regularly boats going out to these pens that are 50, 100 meters long, serious mass
00:46:26 James Sibley
vessels.
00:46:27 James Sibley
everything needs to be built to withstand basically the toughest environments on earth.
00:46:32 James Sibley
And a lot of times it doesn't start that way.
00:46:34 James Sibley
The most successful tech I'm seeing on sites now is, it could survive a nuclear winter.
00:46:38 James Sibley
And that's what you need.
00:46:39 James Sibley
That's, I mean, fish thrive in that kind of environment.
00:46:42 James Sibley
They love rich, cold waters.
00:46:44 James Sibley
And you only find those in pretty tough places.
00:46:47 Kristin King
Yeah, isolated, remote places.
00:46:50 Kristin King
The problem with a lot of the tech that's out there is people run before they walk or crawl in this regard.
00:46:55 Kristin King
And I think that a lot
00:46:56 Kristin King
more research needs to be spent before we just toss solutions at things.
00:47:00 Kristin King
Because again, in the back of my mind is it's insecure.
00:47:02 Kristin King
Who's going to say like a pirate isn't going to roll up and try to hack your system and steal your stuff?
00:47:06 Kristin King
Like that could happen.
00:47:07 Kristin King
There's probably plenty of data that people don't want to share.
00:47:09 Kristin King
I mean, you don't necessarily want to know what your stock count is or any type of data that's just going to make you a target.
00:47:16 Kristin King
I'm sure you want to lock down.
00:47:18 Kristin King
So to me, as much as tech is great, we should crawl a little bit before we're running straight at it.
00:47:24 Kristin King
And again, this is the reality of it
00:47:26 Kristin King
Because we're not considering the people that are actually using it and how they're going to use it and how it's going to either help or hurt or make it ridiculous for them.
00:47:32 Kristin King
Like there's a lot of factors in here that I consider when I talk about it.
00:47:38 Kristin King
You know that nagging feeling, that one that says your operations might be more exposed than you realize, but a full-blown assessment feels out of reach?
00:47:46 Kristin King
Traditional OT cyber physical assessments are expensive, time-consuming, and let's be honest, you get a point-in-time report that's outdated the moment something changes.
00:47:57 Kristin King
That's not risk management, that's just a snapshot.
00:47:59 Kristin King
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00:48:05 Kristin King
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00:48:12 Kristin King
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00:48:17 Kristin King
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00:48:23 Kristin King
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00:48:35 Kristin King
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00:48:48 Kristin King
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00:48:53 James Sibley
So I eat a lot of salmon just because I spend a lot of time around salmon farms.
00:48:56 James Sibley
Salmon only makes up, it's not a huge chunk of the world's seafood production.
00:49:00 James Sibley
It's only about 3 million tons around the world.
00:49:02 James Sibley
3 million tons is a lot of fish, right?
00:49:04 James Sibley
Don't get me wrong.
00:49:04 James Sibley
Yeah, but that's surprising.
00:49:05 Kristin King
It's not a top fish to me.
00:49:07 Kristin King
I don't know.
00:49:08 Kristin King
But maybe I'm just an average consumer in this regard.
00:49:11 James Sibley
Yeah, well, Asia takes the cake with it and they don't do a lot of salmon.
00:49:14 James Sibley
So the species that are popular there.
00:49:16 James Sibley
Benghasius, tilapia, those tend to reign supreme.
00:49:19 James Sibley
Salmon's definitely a top five in terms of how they're farmed.
00:49:21 James Sibley
But right, we're talking
00:49:23 James Sibley
200 plus million tons a year of total production, only 3 million is salmon.
00:49:27 James Sibley
I eat a lot of salmon.
00:49:28 James Sibley
Especially if you get really into the salmon world, the farmed salmon world, there's all sorts of different things to look out for.
00:49:33 James Sibley
Interesting things for eating it, right?
00:49:36 James Sibley
Was this raised entirely on land?
00:49:39 James Sibley
Was it raised in fresh water, right?
00:49:41 James Sibley
That was an interesting one.
00:49:42 James Sibley
There's different species of salmon being farmed around the world that taste totally different.
00:49:46 James Sibley
And how they're farmed in what kinds of waters, what they're fed, totally changes the texture of the meat and how it cooks all
00:49:53 James Sibley
So I'm a huge fan of king salmon.
00:49:56 James Sibley
I was eating a lot of that in New Zealand.
00:49:57 James Sibley
It's all they farm there, actually.
00:49:58 James Sibley
They're king salmon only country.
00:50:00 James Sibley
And man, that's a buttery fish, right?
00:50:02 James Sibley
You don't even need, you know, anything in the pan.
00:50:05 James Sibley
It just melts.
00:50:05 James Sibley
It's fantastic.
00:50:06 James Sibley
It's funny because it's almost, the way.
00:50:08 Kristin King
You're describing it, James, it's almost like you're a wine snob of like salmon in a way.
00:50:13 Kristin King
Because you really, the way you describe it is, you hear the excitement when people talk about wine.
00:50:17 Kristin King
Like it's, and I happen to be a wine lover, so I really appreciate this conversation.
00:50:21 Kristin King
But now I'm like, oh, you could be a
00:50:23 Kristin King
Salmon snob?
00:50:24 Kristin King
Excellent.
00:50:25 Kristin King
This is a new thing.
00:50:26 James Sibley
Well, this is fantastic.
00:50:27 James Sibley
It's for everything you can farm out there, right?
00:50:29 James Sibley
Because the second you can control the environment, you can, well, you can't control the environment.
00:50:32 James Sibley
The second you can control some parameters, you can make all sorts of like interesting adjustments and make like a unique product.
00:50:36 James Sibley
Another really cool one I had recently was green shell mussels.
00:50:39 James Sibley
I'm a sucker for those.
00:50:40 James Sibley
They're like twice the size of the blue mussels we're used to, and they are just delicious.
00:50:45 James Sibley
They are so much better.
00:50:46 James Sibley
You can only farm them in the Pacific's, you know, no shade in New England, but yeah, it's I mean, they're huge mussels that.
00:50:53 James Sibley
lot more omega-3s in them, just by virtue of how our biochemical processes involved.
00:50:58 James Sibley
So they're really, like they're really fatty and you feel it when you cook it.
00:51:01 James Sibley
They don't shrink up into nothing.
00:51:02 James Sibley
They're these huge, you have to like mussels in order to like green shell mussels, but definitely want to try if you're a mussel fanatic.
00:51:09 Kristin King
Yeah, I do love mussels, I have to say.
00:51:11 Kristin King
I'm definitely one of those people that order zone when I see them.
00:51:14 Kristin King
It's interesting that you're talking about Southeast Asia because I've spent a lot of time there in my travels around the world doing various risk assessments in different places.
00:51:23 Kristin King
And the seafood game is so different.
00:51:26 Kristin King
There is totally different in some many ways than North America in general.
00:51:31 Kristin King
And I remember I was at an open market in Thailand when it's very trendy.
00:51:35 Kristin King
You've seen it on social media, I'm sure.
00:51:37 Kristin King
It's one of the floating markets.
00:51:38 Kristin King
And I remember I got some pineapple and then we got a prawn and the prawn was like the size of a brick.
00:51:44 Kristin King
It was so big.
00:51:45 Kristin King
And I remember thinking this, it had like, it looked like a fighting prawn.
00:51:49 Kristin King
Like it would have killed you in the wild kind of thing if it saw you.
00:51:52 Kristin King
I just remember I couldn't even
00:51:53 Kristin King
I looked at, I'm like, I don't know if I want to touch it.
00:51:55 Kristin King
See, I know it's dead, but like, I don't know if I want to mess with this.
00:51:58 Kristin King
That thing was so delicious.
00:51:59 Kristin King
It was crazy good, sweet.
00:52:01 Kristin King
We also went to a fishing village in Malaysia.
00:52:04 Kristin King
We were in Penang.
00:52:05 Kristin King
We were on the island side, not the mainland.
00:52:07 Kristin King
And I remember they just pulled that fish straight out of the water right then.
00:52:11 Kristin King
And that whole ecosystem was coming back because they had otters.
00:52:14 Kristin King
They were coming back through.
00:52:15 Kristin King
Very exciting moment seeing wild otters.
00:52:17 Kristin King
And it was so interesting because I remember thinking, I'm never going to have fish this fresh probably for a long time, if ever again.
00:52:24 Kristin King
I mean, yes, the eyeballs were there.
00:52:25 Kristin King
And yes, you were picking the bones and all these things.
00:52:27 Kristin King
But it was so well done.
00:52:28 Kristin King
And it was so authentic that it stayed with me.
00:52:31 Kristin King
It's created quite the memory.
00:52:33 Kristin King
I mean, food is always a memory, as we've always said on this show.
00:52:36 Kristin King
But yeah, you're making me think of all the fish dishes I've had in my lifetime.
00:52:39 Kristin King
And you know, and then Japan.
00:52:41 Kristin King
I've been to Japan so many times.
00:52:42 Kristin King
And that's an entirely different seafood culture as well.
00:52:45 Kristin King
I'm not a huge fan of uni, probably because I haven't had it really good yet.
00:52:48 Kristin King
No, I think I had it.
00:52:50 Kristin King
I'm not surprised, to be honest.
00:52:54 James Sibley
A lot of people have aversion to seafood.
00:52:56 James Sibley
They had a bad experience.
00:52:57 James Sibley
They might think they're allergic, this, that and the other.
00:52:59 James Sibley
A lot of it comes down to mishandling, right?
00:53:01 James Sibley
So, and it's such a shame because farming seafood takes a while.
00:53:04 James Sibley
It takes three years to bring a salmon up to like 5 kilos.
00:53:07 James Sibley
Wow.
00:53:07 James Sibley
So all that time, all that money goes into it.
00:53:10 James Sibley
And then it wasn't kept at temp for 12 hours by a secondary processor somewhere down the road that they no control over.
00:53:16 James Sibley
So it, you know, it's, you have the first three years, that's all the farmers.
00:53:20 James Sibley
And then the next 48 hours, it's
00:53:23 James Sibley
Man, I hope they do it right.
00:53:24 James Sibley
That's kind of just left to the markets.
00:53:25 James Sibley
That's where most issues with seafood come around, right?
00:53:27 James Sibley
Farm seafood is, it's hard to get sick from just by the nature of how of its control.
00:53:34 James Sibley
But whatever happens in the middle, the processing, secondary processing, value adding, shipping around the world, cooking, things can happen.
00:53:41 James Sibley
Yeah.
00:53:41 James Sibley
That's primary reason why people get like sick or, you know, something went wrong.
00:53:45 Kristin King
You know, and it's so funny because as of recording, there's a bad listeria about break happening in the United States right now.
00:53:50 Kristin King
And people want to point fingers at the farmer.
00:53:53 Kristin King
And you're right.
00:53:53 Kristin King
What about all the secondary processes in between?
00:53:55 Kristin King
And it's crazy.
00:53:57 Kristin King
And the traceability laws that are happening or going to happen are going to, we'll be able to pull down data down to like the actual seed, which is fine.
00:54:05 Kristin King
Like great.
00:54:05 Kristin King
We can treat exactly which farm it came from, but that doesn't really necessarily mean it was the farmer's fault.
00:54:10 Kristin King
You know, that it could have been a trailer that wasn't cleaned properly.
00:54:14 Kristin King
It could have been handling in a grocery store or handling in distribution in general.
00:54:18 Kristin King
And you're so right.
00:54:19 Kristin King
And I think we need to talk about that more.
00:54:21 Kristin King
I think we need to have that
00:54:23 Kristin King
you just had one bad experience with it, but it may not have been the full experience.
00:54:27 Kristin King
I've had scallops forever.
00:54:28 Kristin King
I mean, it's a huge staple as a kid.
00:54:30 Kristin King
I still love them.
00:54:30 Kristin King
In fact, I actively crave deep fried scallops and shoestring onion rings and shoestring fries from New England, like with tartar sauce and all the things.
00:54:39 Kristin King
But every time I think about that, because I've only had scallops cooked,
00:54:43 Kristin King
But when I went to Japan for the first time, I had them raw.
00:54:46 Kristin King
Amazing.
00:54:47 Kristin King
Totally changes how you think about scallops after that.
00:54:50 Kristin King
They're sweet and they're buttery and it's so different and so epic.
00:54:54 Kristin King
We're going to sign off in a sec.
00:54:55 Kristin King
There are people out there that are trying, I think in their own ways and just excited about seafood.
00:55:00 Kristin King
So your message is definitely resonating with people, whether it's indirectly or directly.
00:55:04 Kristin King
And thank you for what you do, James, because I think that we need this right now, especially since we're losing that educational piece with our giant
00:55:13 Kristin King
environmentalist type people that are aging out or passing.
00:55:17 Kristin King
And we need more David Attenboroughs and Jane Goodalls and all those people to just be excited about the world around them and also help promote that this is okay and that we can do this.
00:55:27 Kristin King
And also we need to secure this damn tech because now I'm nervous more than I was before we started.
00:55:32 James Sibley
Yeah, no, thank you so much for having me.
00:55:34 James Sibley
My one message to the world is we need more people doing what I do.
00:55:37 James Sibley
Let's get the farmers on online talking about what they do, the experts, people in institutions, because I mean, there's whole sectors of the world
00:55:43 James Sibley
of the world that are dedicated to aquaculture, but they're sort of in a little bubble.
00:55:47 James Sibley
In like Norway, it's popular to study, you can get an undergraduate degree in aquaculture.
00:55:51 James Sibley
That's just a thing.
00:55:51 James Sibley
And it's just kind of known.
00:55:53 James Sibley
And if I had known, I would have done it.
00:55:54 James Sibley
The more information we can get out there from those who work in the sector, or if you're adjacent, right, I didn't start in this, but here I am now.
00:56:00 James Sibley
So just getting that stuff out there, showing people how cool it is.
00:56:03 James Sibley
And I think that, you know, if we can get that feeling of it's the same as like a backyard garden, it's that innate, right?
00:56:08 James Sibley
It just makes sense.
00:56:09 James Sibley
We're like sheep in a field.
00:56:10 James Sibley
It just feels right.
00:56:11 James Sibley
I want us to get there.
00:56:13 James Sibley
a long road ahead, but I'm confident.
00:56:15 Kristin King
Definitely going to be the future.
00:56:17 Kristin King
It is the future.
00:56:17 Kristin King
It's now and it is the future.
00:56:19 Kristin King
So thank you again for sharing your expertise.
00:56:22 Kristin King
This has been super fun for me.
00:56:23 Kristin King
So I'm so nerded out on so many levels.
00:56:26 Kristin King
So thank you very much.
00:56:27 James Sibley
All right, have a good day.
00:56:33 Kristin King
That's a wrap on today's episode.
00:56:34 Kristin King
I'd like to thank James for taking the time out to come onto the show and share all the fun facts and wisdom.
00:56:40 Kristin King
It was a lot of fun, and I hope you learned as much as I did.
00:56:42 Kristin King
If you're listening and you feel a little differently about seafood, good.
00:56:46 Kristin King
That's the whole point.
00:56:47 Kristin King
Aquaculture is feeding the world in ways most of us never think about, and the technology driving it is advancing faster than most people realize, including those who are supposed to be securing it.
00:56:57 Kristin King
The seafood summer series continues on next episode on the Bites and Bites podcast, so make sure you tune in.
00:57:03 Kristin King
In the meantime, stay safe, stay curious, and we'll see you on the next one.
00:57:07 Kristin King
Bye for now.
