A Fish Out Of Water

Can farmers in Iowa help save the world’s seafood supply?

- Maddie Oatman

BY MID-OCTOBER, harvest is in full swing in central Iowa. Giant green combines crawl through rows of withered corn until well after dusk as Webster City’s farmers hurry to gather their crops before the first freeze sets in. The stiff, pale bodies of dead hogs pile up in dumpsters along gravel roads, waiting to be butchered. Geese sail south in wavering Vs, and the maple trees on the banks of Brewer Creek flare crimson.

A few miles outside of town, in a squat white barn that used to house hundreds of sows, a different sort of harvest has kicked into gear. Grace Nelson, 22 and tan with ombré hair, stands alert, clipboard in hand, watching her co-workers hustle to transfer fish from tanks to a flatbed truck bound for Colorado.

Their neighbors raise hogs and cattle, sow soybeans, and tend pumpkin patches and orchards now sagging with apples. But five years ago, the Nelsons—a third generation Iowa farming family—turned to raising fish. Hundreds of thousands of silvery barramundi, to be precise. Part of a hearty species that’s roughly the size of coho salmon and has flesh the flavor of red snapper, the Nelsons’ barramundi start their lives in their native Australia. Seventeen days after spawning, they are flown in plastic bags of water to central Iowa, where they spend their adolescence swimming against a current pulsing through rectangular tanks on the Nelsons’ farm. Barramundi easily tolerate many environments and have a flexible diet, attributes that led Time in 2011 to call them “just about perfect” as a farmed species. Once the fish reach nearly two pounds, they’ll be shipped live to seafood markets and restaurants across the country, or filleted, flash-frozen, and sent to food distributors like Sysco.