Fish Farm in Farmstead World — building in the game, and what it is on a real farm.
A fish farm raises fish in pens, ponds or tanks instead of catching them in the wild, so the harvest is predictable: the pens here float on a lake or moor to open sea, where the current carries waste away and keeps oxygen moving through the stock.
It matters because wild capture has almost no room left. The textbook puts it bluntly: about 70% of the world’s fish populations are fully exploited, over-exploited or in crisis, and overfishing has driven species toward collapse while climate change stresses the ocean (Pullman & Wu 2021, ch. 3). Aquaculture answers that with farmed volume: it now supplies roughly half of the fish the world eats (FAO).
The fleet’s environmental record is the other half of the argument. Bottom trawling drags weighted nets across the seabed, flattening habitat that took decades to grow; bycatch — the incidental catch hauled up beside the target species — is often thrown overboard in quantities several times greater than the catch itself, including young fish that never get to reproduce, and fishing operations have few incentives to avoid it (Pullman & Wu 2021, ch. 3). A pen has no bycatch and leaves no trawl scars.
Wild fisheries also carry costs that never reach a price tag: warming and acidifying water, oxygen-poor dead zones, red-tide toxins that shut shellfish beds, and drifting plastics that kill the animals caught in them (Pullman & Wu 2021, ch. 3).
There are human rights abuses in commercial fishing as well. The textbook describes refugees and migrants exploited through slave labor, unpaid wages and other labor abuses aboard fishing vessels — Thailand is the country best known for it — and tells the sinking of the Oyang 70, whose captain forced crews to haul double their safe load, and of the Oyang 75, where Indonesian fishermen escaped after diets of rotten fish, 48-hour shifts and physical abuse (Pullman & Wu 2021, ch. 3). The Associated Press investigation into forced labor behind shrimp and fish sold in the United States, “Seafood from Slaves,” won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Aquaculture is not spotless either — the textbook names escaped non-native or genetically modified fish, drug-resistant pathogens and damaged coastal habitat as real risks, and farmed fish still eat feed fish: about half a metric ton of whole wild fish goes into each metric ton of farmed seafood (Pullman & Wu 2021, ch. 3). Modern farms answer those points with current-flushed pens, careful siting, plant-based feeds and certification such as the Marine Stewardship Council.
That is why a farm beats the fleet: the harvest is planned rather than plundered, the labor sits on land under inspection, and every pound can be traced back to the pen that grew it — the survival of the seafood industry, the textbook concludes, depends on “the development of aquaculture and seafood alternatives” (Pullman & Wu 2021, ch. 3).