April 13, 2020 — It didn’t make the nightly news, but Great Falls Aquaculture in western Massachusetts, USA, might have been the first seafood victim of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in the United States.
Most of the fish being raised in the company’s recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) facility in rural Turners Falls, Mass., are sold to live markets in major U.S. and Canadian cities, like New York, Boston, Toronto and Vancouver. The fish are typically raised to about 1 pound in size, perfect for whole-roasted individual servings.
Don’t worry – the fish are all alive and safe. But the fact that they’re all still in the tanks is a problem. Shortly after Chinese New Year celebrations in late January, the market for live barramundi (Lates calcarifer), known as the Asian sea bass, simply up and vanished.
“We were in contact with our Chinese customers on a daily business. Things were slowing down, family members weren’t coming home, they weren’t buying as much. They were nervous,” company owner Keith Wilda told the Advocate in late March. “Then, second week of February, people stopped going to Chinese restaurants in New York City.”
Great Falls was selling 23,000 pounds of barramundi per week before the COVID-19 outbreak. “Next week, I don’t know that I’ll even sell a fish,” he said, with 945,000 hungry barramundi currently swimming in indoor tanks. It’s a living inventory that reminds him of the tens of thousands of dollars it costs each month to operate, in energy and heating costs alone.