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| Brian O'Hanlon, Founder of Open Blue Sea Farms at cages holding 300 g cobia |
At an early age, Brian O’Hanlon recognized a major problem developing within the seafood industry. Growing up in New York, his father in the seafood business at the city’s famous Fulton Fish Market, he recalls that the family business never had any difficulty finding clients to sell fish to—the problem was finding quality fish to sell. Presumably, greater pressure on wild stocks and an increased demand for seafood products was creating a shortage for quality products in the marketplace. In 1999, at 19 years of age, O’Hanlon remembers his father challenging him to think outside the box. “ ‘If you could you could farm raise any fish, what would it be?’ my father asked me,” said O’Hanlon over dinner at his cobia farm in Northern Panama. “ ‘Red snapper,’ I said, ‘the supply is crashing and the price is high.’” Determined to develop a high quality aquaculture product in a sustainable manner, O’Hanlon made a trip down to the Gulf of Mexico and brought up live red snapper to his parents’ house in Long Island.
O’Hanlon set up a makeshift laboratory in his parents’ basement, and was able to successfully spawn the fish in captivity. On a trip to Florida’s
Harbor Branch research institute to improve his skills in Aquaculture, O’Hanlon met Dr. Benetti, currently a faculty member at University of Miami. When he told Benetti that the snapper he had in his homemade laboratory been spawning, O’Hanlon recalls that the experienced aquaculturist had to see the fish with his own eyes to believe it. After a trip up to Long Island, Benetti and O'Hanlon have remained close friends and research partners ever since.
What started as teenager’s pipedream to farm the sea is now coming becoming reality. Now 12 years after his initial laboratory experiments, the 31- year-old believes that his facility, Open Blue Sea Farms, may be the largest producer of farm-raised cobia in the world. While production numbers are still modest, the farm is now producing between 10 and 15 thousand pounds of cobia per week to markets that include Miami, Chicago, and San Francisco and Panama City.
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| Feeding roughly 30,000 3-4 kg cobia at one of Open Blue's Sea Stations. We have great video from inside the cage we hope to upload once we have more bandwidth in the States. |
Open Blue Sea Farms focuses its business model on providing a high quality, fresh product, and maintains sustainability as a core value. Open Blue Sea Farms is part of a larger, environmentally-minded movement to move aquaculture grow-out facilities away from the coasts to the offshore environment. Offshore siting can minimize habitat destruction and minimize water quality impacts by producing fish in nutrient-poor blue water, which is more capable of assimilating nitrogenous wastes and other particles emitted from cages. Currently, Open Blue Sea Farms raises fish in a series of cages according size. Cages which hold the largest, eventual market-sized fish are approximately seven miles offshore.
Fish farming for O’Hanlon has not come without its trials and tribulations. He recalls burning down half of parents’ Long Island house due to a failure in his basement laboratory, shortcomings of his first venture, “Snapper Farm,” in Puerto Rico, and the current challenges of developing a fish farm along the fringes of civilization.
Open Blue Sea Farms is currently undergoing a process of expansion in order to ramp up production. Currently, the company receives fingerlings produced at the University of Miami Experimental Hatchery that are stocked into at-sea cages. O’Hanlon’s eventual goal is to produce fingerlings on site in order to vertically integrate his business. While the road ahead for O’Hanlon and Open Blue Sea Farms may present some obstacles, it is clear that O’Hanlon has the tenacity to overcome them. “If you believe in something, and you try you hardest to make it work, I have to believe you will be successful.” O’Hanlon said.
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| 300 g cobia at the water's surface waiting to be fed |
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| Feed boat approaching one of Open Blue's cages. |
