June 4, 2025 — Each spring, fishermen set nets in Maine’s rivers to fish for the state’s most valuable catch. No, not the iconic lobster, but tiny glass eels that fetch wholesale prices topping $2,000 per pound. Those baby eels, each two to three inches long, aren’t destined for dinner yet. Instead, they’re bought by aquaculture farms in Asia and grown to maturity in tanks; each pound of glass eels yields about 1,250 pounds of adult eels. Those adult eels are then sold back to the American market.
To Sara Rademaker, a marine educator with a degree in fisheries and aquaculture, the system didn’t make any sense: “Why don’t we just grow our fish in our own community?” she asked. In 2014, she launched American Unagi, North America’s first large-scale, land-based eel aquafarm. It started as a small, home-based operation but quickly grew. “We had 7,000 [glass eels], and then we jumped to 50,000 — and then 500,000.”