BOSTON, Mass. — May 26, 2015 — You might not think of an industrial strip mall in the suburbs of Boston as the place for a shrimp farm. But then you probably haven’t met James Tran, the founder of Sky8 Shrimp Farm in Stoughton, Massachusetts.
In his day job, he designs semiconductors for the technology industry. On nights and weekends, he works on turning out some of the cleanest, freshest, sustainable seafood in Boston.
There’s definitely a market for it. Americans eat more than 500,000 tons of shrimp a year. It’s now the most consumed seafood in America, though the shrimp industry has been plagued by reports of slave labor abroad and the environmental impact of shrimp farming at home and abroad.
I met Tran at his “farm.” It’s a 7,200-square-foot space, about the size of three tennis courts, with a series of aboveground tanks. They’re covered in bright blue tarps that hold filtered seawater and shrimp in different life stages. The tarps keep the water from evaporating, and the translucent shrimp from jumping out.