A barramundi farm in the Arizona desert is working to become one of the largest suppliers of aquaculture-produced premium whitefish in the United States.
Desert Springs Barramundi, located in Dateland, Arizona, was formed in 2022 and is currently producing 500 metric tons (MT) of barramundi in the desert each year. The relatively new company was formed by MainStream Aquaculture – a vertically integrated producer and supplier of barramundi established in 2001.
MainStream Aquaculture’s roots are in providing barramundi fingerlings to other producers, and over the past two decades, the company has grown to become a dominant global supplier of the species. MainStream Aquaculture CEO Boris Musa told SeafoodSource that the company is now exporting its fingerlings to 32 different countries and it supplies roughly one-third of all barramundi aquaculture production globally with its fingerlings.
“In our endeavors to grow the business, we started supplying fingerlings to the United States,” Musa said. “We actually started supplying juveniles to the United States in 2012.”
Alongside fingerling production, the company has also worked to develop its own full-scale aquaculture operations in Australia supplying the retail and foodservice markets. Its operation in Australia is now operated at scale across five farms, providing barramundi predominantly to the domestic market.
“We've recently acquired our sixth farm,” Musa said. “We operate a combination of indoor recirculating farms for barramundi, as well as outdoor pond farms in Australia's north.”
That business has continued to grow and has been successful at substituting both imported and domestically caught premium whitefish with a locally farmed alternative.
As MainStream continued to grow its domestic aquaculture operation, it also continued to supply quantities of fingerlings to the U.S. – and through that saw an opportunity. Musa said through multiple visits to the U.S., the company developed the view there is a clear market for premium whitefish in the country.
Musa said the fact the U.S. imports the vast majority of the seafood it consumes leaves the door open for a domestic producer that could capitalize on the market’s desire for premium whitefish species that is both sustainable and affordable.
“We could see our fingerling customers – many of whom were operating at a boutique scale – are highly successful in local markets,” Musa said. “So, we started a serious process with due diligence and inquiry about 10 years ago.”
One of the keys to a successful barramundi operation was finding a location that had all the resources that the company needed – which meant MainStream Aquaculture searched throughout the entire country for a suitable site.
“We searched far and wide from Florida, to the Northeast, to the Northwest, to the Southwest,” Musa said.
Through that search, the company discovered an extremely promising site in the Arizona desert, and after investigating, it decided to start Desert Springs Barramundi.
The secret to the Arizona site’s success is right in the name of the company: desert springs. Musa said MainStream Aquaculture’s search found a geothermal water resource that provides a large supply of warm, slightly saline water.
For Desert Springs Barramundi, that water met every metric that the company needed to create a successful operation. The 30-degree-Celsius water is ideal for producing barramundi – which is a tropical species – and the fact it is already heated geothermally results in a reduction in energy costs. The salinity of the water also helps, but Musa said it is less important for the fish and more important for the sustainability of the company.
“The reason salinity is important for us in an agricultural context is we don’t want to be taking water from other users. We don’t want to be taking freshwater that could be utilized for crops, could be utilized for dairy farms, or could be utilized for other industries, which would mean we’re competing with those other sectors for precious water resources,” Musa said.
Given its location in a desert, ensuring the company is responsibly using water resources was an important part of the company’s goals. The slightly saline water was, prior to Desert Springs Barramundi, going unused and was largely unsuitable for any other application.
“We can say authoritatively that we’re not taking water from any other users,” Musa said.
Once MainStream Aquaculture identified the location, it began its early tests and due diligence. The company engaged the owner of a tilapia farm in the area and used that as a staging ground to expand into the U.S. It first began farming barramundi under the farm's previous ownership in 2019, before later purchasing the farm in July 2022.
The farm’s location in Arizona is within an eight-hour transit time to ...
