Kenny Torella

In the barrage of executive orders that President Trump signed this year, one back in April flew low under the radar.

The order aimed, among other things, to allow the expansion of aquaculture or fish farming by relaxing regulations.

And the president has a point here.

In 2022, for the first time, humans ate more fish that came from farms than fish that came from the sea.

Many of us think that this is much better, more ethical, more environmentally sound than overfishing wild fish from the oceans.

So why not expand it?

Coming up on Today Explained, Vox's Kenny Torella takes a deep dive, LOL, into what's really been going on on fish farms.

I'm Noelle King with Vox's Kenny Torella.

Kenny writes about animal welfare and the future of meat production.

And lately, Kenny has been considering fish farming.

Kenny, how long has this been going on?

Well, throughout history, there are examples of small-scale fish farming, but it only took off on a commercial scale in the 1990s.

And it took off really quickly.

By the early 2000s, humans were farming well over 200 aquatic animal species, and most of this has been concentrated in China and India.

But I think what is so noteworthy here is that chickens, pigs, and cows, you know, they were domesticated over thousands of years, while fish have been domesticated, which is essentially kind of forcing them into unnatural conditions, in a matter of decades.

As some marine biologists have written, aquatic domestication occurred 100 times faster than the domestication of land animals and on such a bigger scale.

How big, Kenny, is the fish farming industry?

Well, for context, today there's around 85 billion land animals, mostly chickens, pigs, and cows, farmed each year.

85 billion.

But there's an estimated 760 billion fish and crustaceans, which is a figure that is projected to quickly grow.