The land-based aquaculture industry is set for a break-out year in 2025 as salmonid projects worth $1.2 billion will come online, according to Spheric Research's 2024 Land-based Aquaculture Report (LBAR).
The value of projects to grow salmon to harvest weight fully on land will break a billion-dollar glass ceiling in 2025, according to the LBAR report, which you can find out more about here.
The project portfolio, which only counts fully financed projects, includes Pure Salmon's first facility in Japan and the Hima Seafood trout center in Norway.
The surge in capital expenditure on land-based farming shows how investors have been willing to invest in recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) technology, despite lingering doubts it can work at scale.
Although many of the projects are using hybrid flow-through, a more lenient technology, full recirculating projects are also proving the concept, according to DNB, Norway's biggest bank.
"We will see proof of concept for RAS [in 2024] but also for full flow through," Anne Hvistendahl, the head of seafood lending for DNB, said at the AquaSur trade show in Chile earlier this year. "If you get proof of concept, we think there will be many more of these projects."
Investments in land-based facilities amounted to $806 million in 2024 and $832m in 2023, according to Spheric Research data. Most of these projects were major RAS projects carried out by major salmon producers such as Mowi and SalMar to grow larger smolt on land.
The $1.2bn investment figure for 2025 is marked by the emergence of several grow-out projects coming online and more than making up for a projected slowdown in Norwegian post-smolt investments.
The boom in building facilities to grow bigger juveniles on land, often described as the hybridization of the industry, will slow in Norway as a consequence of the 25% resource tax on salmon. Post-smolt investments exceeded $500m in both 2023 and 2024.
This year, Ardal Aqua and Gaia Salmon will commission large-scale facilities in Norway. Although 2025 investments will drop off, DNB and others predict the post-smolt trend in salmon will continue because of tax breaks and the challenges that the traditional sea-pen industry faces with climate change.
Spheric Research used average capital expenditure estimates to calculate the industry's size and growth based on a deep database of project data that dates back to 2005 in the case of RAS smolt investments. The company started collecting data in 2018 and published the first LBAR in 2020. Spheric published the fourth edition of the report in June 2024.
The report shows that there are dozens of projects in the works that could potentially be developed to add volume to a salmon market that faces a structural shortage. Iceland, for instance, is a country that is developing several flow-through salmon farms, which would allow it to become a significant player in the global salmon market.
Japan will also become a significant land-based producer through the commissioning of Proximar, the Pure Salmon project and Atland Co., a joint venture between Japanese seafood giants Maruha Nichiro and Mitsubishi Corp.
A new country points index shows that Iceland and Japan have been among the most supportive nations on earth in advancing land-based salmon projects from the conceptual stage to execution.
The report shows which countries are most likely to host future projects as investor appetite grows for land-based aquaculture.
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