September 3, 2025 — Mike Coogan has been doing aquaculture, or fish farming, formally for over a decade. Informally — through at-home hobby fish tanks and aquariums — he’s been doing it much longer.
Now, he’s joined a legislative effort to streamline the regulatory process for aquaculture to help create a U.S. industry.
Coogan is a researcher at the University of New Hampshire, where he works on the school’s AquaFort, a pilot project where researchers are growing steelhead trout in the mouth of the Piscataqua River near New Castle.
“We have a tiny, tiny coastline, just 18 miles,” he said of the Granite State. “But we do a lot of interesting work, and have been sort of leaders in offshore aquaculture or open ocean aquaculture for the last 25 and change years.”
The fish farm uses a method called multitrophic aquaculture, which means they grow different species together, in small 20-by-20-foot underwater cages with 15-foot nets, Coogan said. They line the perimeter of the farm with sugar kelp and blue mussels to create “a biological curtain” to absorb nutrients and prevent disease. UNH is the only university growing fish in the ocean, he said.
That fish farm and others like it are far from a large-scale industry though. Aquaculture produces only 7% of domestic seafood in the U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Roughly 70% to 85% of seafood in the U.S. is imported, and it’s estimated half of that comes from aquaculture, per the NOAA. Aquaculture in the U.S. largely consists of catfish farms across the South. In New England, oysters and other shellfish are farmed. Coogan said the New Hampshire oyster farms are limited, with only a little over a dozen operating in Great Bay and Little Bay near Portsmouth and estuaries near Hampton.