Salmon Farms on Land Take Aim at a $19 Billion Industry

Standing on a palatial salmon farm next to the Florida Everglades, Damien Claire isn’t bothered by the water dripping from the pipes and ducts overhead, even as it soaks his company-issued button-up and shaggy brown hair. Instead, the 47-year-old chief marketing officer for aquaculture company Atlantic Sapphire ASA is focused on the 450,000-gallon tank before him swirling with some 30,000 fully grown salmon. When one, a 10-pounder, leaps from the water, Claire yelps, “She says hi!” 

This wasn’t the future he’d imagined for himself two decades ago, when he was a “tech guy” at a Wall Street hedge fund. But Claire couldn’t resist the pivot when, in 2011, he met Atlantic Sapphire co-founder Johan Andreassen, who said to him, “I’m going to change the world—do you want to be a part of it?”

Salmon are an unlikely vehicle for a world-changing venture, but Andreassen and his cousin Bjorn-Vegard Lovik saw potential to alter the way fish are grown for human consumption. In the 1990s the cousins were the first to introduce tiny, sea-lice-eating fish into open-water salmon cages, called net-pens, in their native Romsdal, Norway. The tactic has been successful at curbing sea-lice-related deaths, yet infestations, along with disease outbreaks and mass escapes that threaten native marine species, remain major problems. The net-pen industry produces 99% of the salmon the world eats, yet the mortality rate is estimated at 10% to 15%.

Andreassen and Lovik were looking for a better way to raise the fish, so in 2010 they founded Atlantic Sapphire and established their first “bluehouse” in Denmark. The bluehouse, like a greenhouse with water, utilized a complex filtering technique called a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) to raise Atlantic salmon in highly controlled conditions entirely on land.

Some of the concrete tanks at Atlantic Sapphire’s bluehouse in Florida. The plan is to produce 180,000 metric tons of salmon a year at this facility by 2031.

Some 3.8 million metric tons of salmon—about 700 million individual fish—are consumed globally each year, fueling a $19 billion industry that’s projected to more than double over the next decade. By volume, the US is the planet’s largest salmon consumer—the average American eats about 3 pounds per year—yet it imports 96% of the fish, primarily from Canada, Chile and Norway. Andreassen and Lovik understood that an oceans-spanning supply chain not only was economically vulnerable but also left a massive carbon footprint. The “dream,” Claire explains as we sit in Atlantic Sapphire’s sleek, unabashedly Scandinavian-design conference room, was not just to take salmon farming out of the ocean but also to bring it to its biggest market.

Andreassen initially wanted to set up Atlantic Sapphire’s first American bluehouse in Maine, where Atlantic salmon are a native species. Then he learned about South Florida’s subterranean geography, which is layered with both fresh and saltwater aquifers—a huge advantage for raising fish that are born in freshwater in the wild before they migrate to saltwater as adults. In 2017, Atlantic Sapphire broke ground on a $250 million facility with the design capacity to produce about 9,500 metric tons of fish every year. The complex is located on what used to be tomato and squash fields inside a chessboard of farms in Homestead, a dusty agricultural hub that grows many of the houseplants sold in the US. 

In 2019, the first year Atlantic Sapphire successfully hatched salmon, it announced plans to scale up to 90,000 metric tons by 2026 and to more than double that volume by 2031. To accomplish that, the bluehouse would have to be massively expanded. So, in 2021, construction on the second phase of the facility started. Where rows of tomato plants once stood, three dozen 580,000-gallon concrete tanks began rising into the sky. 

Atlantic Sapphire’s Homestead Bluehouse is the largest land-based salmon farm in the world, but according to a 2024 report by Boston Consulting Group, more than 110 similar projects are in various stages of completion. Most are in Iceland and Norway, where the salmon aquaculture industry has been operating the longest, but others are sprinkled around the globe, including in the United Arab Emirates.

Atlantic Sapphire’s bluehouse, built on former tomato and squash fields just outside the Everglades, is the largest land-based salmon farm in the world.

Superior Fresh, which runs a 100,000-square-foot facility in Northfield, Wisconsin, became in 2018 the first land-based farm in the US to send salmon to market. The company has since opened a second location at a former fish farm in Albany, Indiana, which will start shipping fillets to retailers this summer. “It’s precision agriculture,” co-founder Brandon Gottsacker says of raising salmon in an RAS. “If you create an ideal environment for the fish to thrive in, you don’t need to add any harsh chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics.”

Lars Daniel Garshol, a salmon industry expert for the Norway-based seafood analyst Kontali, estimates that land-based salmon farming will eventually achieve industry dominance. Traditional net-pen farmers, he says, are facing “barriers of trade and stagnation” because of geopolitical turmoil and capacity caps on farms in places such as Norway. Negative public perception is also growing due to the environmental and mortality risks; net-pen farming is banned in several US states and is being phased out in British Columbia.

But overhead remains the primary obstacle for the land-based industry, with initial investment up to 12 times higher than for a net-pen farm. And operational costs—particularly the immense amount of electricity required to power an RAS and pump cool water—can be up to 50% higher. Andreassen, who left Atlantic Sapphire in 2023, has been candid about the challenges facing the industry he pioneered. “Without better volume performance, the cost structure won’t work,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post in April 2025, noting that a handful of the world’s leading land-based salmon farms had fallen short of their production goals the year prior, including Atlantic Sapphire. “Reality must come before theory.” 

Damien Claire, Atlantic Sapphire’s chief sales and marketing officer, at the company’s ‘bluehouse’ salmon farm in Homestead, Florida.

On the morning I meet Claire, he structures our tour to follow the life cycle of an Atlantic Sapphire salmon. Our first stop is the hatchery, where one side of the room features a floor-to-ceiling rack of black trays full of bright orange roe, resembling a bank of glowing database servers. Claire carefully pulls out a tray, revealing thousands of eggs in a bed of crystalline water. On the other side of the room, a gigantic computer cycles through data from some of the facility’s roughly 10,000 sensors, which monitor every step of each fish’s existence, from yolk sac to packaged fillet. 

Atlantic Sapphire, Claire says, is leaning more on artificial intelligence to raise better fish. The facility’s tanks, for example, are equipped with cameras whose output is analyzed by AI to optimize feeding. As they mature, the salmon move through a network of pipelines to progressively bigger rooms until they reach their final tanks. Then they’re sent through a pipeline that’s pulsed with electricity to stun them unconscious. After the fish are processed, their fillets are shipped out to grocers like Publix, Sprouts and, most recently, Fresh Thyme Market. 

Salmon eggs in trays at Atlantic Sapphire, waiting to hatch.

At times, it’s hard not to feel bad for the land salmon, who never get to experience the marine world of their wild cousins. But Atlantic Sapphire’s mortality rate, which is below 2%, speaks to their pristine conditions. Everywhere, enormous filters and sophisticated machinery, all of it either damp or soaking, hum—laying bare the technological and financial wherewithal needed to raise creatures on land that are meant for the sea. “In the ocean, you just wait for Mother Nature,” Claire says of his company’s ultimate goal of producing one-seventh of the US’s salmon. “Here, we need to use, to the best of our abilities, the infrastructure that we built.”