Aquaculture (United States) — NAICS 1125

A Histometrics rollup primer for public- and private-market investors. This is a short, pass-through page: at this level the industry group is effectively identical to its one child industry, so the full detail lives in the 11251 primer. Figures are reported facts with citations; statements about the future are labeled as judgments, not forecasts.

NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the federal scheme for tabulating industries; the 2022 revision defines industry group 1125, "Aquaculture," which contains exactly one industry — 11251, also "Aquaculture." [1]

1. Overview

Aquaculture is farming that happens in water: raising fish, shellfish, and other aquatic organisms to market size instead of catching them wild. In the NAICS hierarchy, the four-digit industry group 1125 and the five-digit industry 11251 cover the same activity — the code simply repeats down one level. Everything true of 11251 is true of 1125. [1] This page gives the level's own rollup figures and then hands off to the child primer for the detail.

The one line to carry: the United States imports roughly 80% of the seafood it eats and ran a $20.3 billion seafood trade deficit in 2023, so domestic aquaculture sits on a genuine structural tailwind. [4][5] But it is also a small, low-margin, biologically fragile, heavily permitted, and overwhelmingly private industry — with no large U.S.-listed pure-play anywhere inside it.

2. What's inside — and why this level equals its one child

NAICS 1125 has a single child industry, 11251, which in turn splits into three:

• 112511 — Finfish Farming & Fish Hatcheries (catfish, trout, tilapia, bass; baitfish; ornamental fish; all hatcheries) — the largest slice.
• 112512 — Shellfish Farming (oysters, clams, mussels; crawfish, inland shrimp) — the fastest-growing slice.
• 112519 — Other Aquaculture (alligators, microalgae, seaweed/kelp) — the smallest slice.

Because 11251 is the only member of 1125, the industry group is a pass-through: it neither adds nor removes anything relative to its child. The real analytical work — the side-by-side contrast among the three sub-industries, which are three genuinely different businesses (commodity fish agriculture, a coastal water-lease-and-bivalve business, and a luxury-leather-plus-specialty-ingredient grab-bag) — is done one level down. See the 11251 primer for that full treatment. [1]

3. How big it is (this level's rollup)

Our ground truth for this node is empty, and we say so plainly. Our ingested federal stats file for NAICS 1125 contains no code-specific stat_metrics at all — no sales, firm-count, employment, or payroll figure for this node. Every number below is therefore a cited external figure, labeled as such, not an ingested Histometrics metric. That gap reflects a real measurement problem: the standard federal business programs (Economic Census, County Business Patterns, Statistics of U.S. Businesses, Nonemployer Statistics) exclude Sector 11 (agriculture and aquaculture) entirely, so the usual establishment/employment tables are simply blank. [3] The authoritative source is instead the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Census of Aquaculture, a special study run about every five years. [2]

Because 1125 = 11251, the rollup figures are the child's figures (2023 Census of Aquaculture, released December 2024): [2][3]

For scale, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) receipts-based size standard is $3.75 million for the child codes — a government-contracting eligibility line, not a revenue estimate — and with the average selling farm near $552,600, essentially the entire industry falls under it. [6]

The undercount, plainly. Treat the sales totals as a floor, not a ceiling. Standard Census business data skip agriculture [3]; a large share of real output is government and tribal hatcheries (the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service alone runs 71 national fish hatcheries stocking well over 100 million fish a year) and oyster-restoration programs that book near-zero "sales" [12]; and some state census cells are withheld for confidentiality (no suppressed value is reproduced here). [2] Where small owner-operators and non-commercial stocking dominate — as they do here — the official footprint understates the activity.

4. Investable universe — where value concentrates

There is no large, diversified, U.S.-listed pure-play anywhere in 1125. Value concentrates in three pools, each reached differently (tickers appear only here and in Section 10):

• Finfish economics → foreign salmon majors, the only deep, liquid route: Mowi (Oslo: MOWI; OTC: MHGVY), SalMar (SALM), Bakkafrost (BAKKA), Grieg Seafood (GSF). U.S.-linked land-based names (AquaBounty, Nasdaq: AQB; Atlantic Sapphire, Oslo: ASA; The Kingfish Company, Oslo: KING) are small, distressed, or development-stage special situations. [11][18]
• Shellfish → almost entirely private. No U.S.-listed pure-play; the clearest integrator is family-owned Taylor Shellfish Farms, with Pacific Seafood and Cooke Inc. adding shellfish alongside broader operations. [18]
• "Other" → reached only indirectly. After microalgae name Cyanotech went private in early 2026, the cleaner routes are owning the buyer: luxury houses that consume alligator hide (Hermès Paris: RMS, LVMH MC, Kering KER) and algae-ingredient majors (Corbion, DSM-Firmenich). [16][17][18]

The owner class that actually spans everything is private, family, and vertically integrated — Cooke, Pacific Seafood, Riverence — winning by owning hatchery → grow-out → processing → branded distribution. Full detail: 11251 §4.

5. How the money works

Every part of the level shares one equation — revenue = volume × realized price, and profit turns on biological yield, mortality, input cost, and product mix — but the levers differ by segment, and an investor should never blend them into one "aquaculture multiple." Finfish is commodity agriculture where feed conversion ratio (pounds of feed per pound of gain) is the core lever; marine bivalves filter wild plankton and need no purchased feed, so their costs are seed, gear, labor, water leases, and years of cash tied up in "inventory on the water"; alligator is a luxury-leather business (the flawless belly hide is the prize) and microalgae behaves like specialty chemicals. Vertical integration is the recurring path to better economics. See 11251 §5.

6. Demand drivers

• The import gap — Americans ate ~19.1 lb of seafood per person in 2023, ~80% imported, against a ~$20.3 billion trade deficit; any durable shift toward domestic, traceable product is a shared tailwind. [4][5]
• The global structural shift — aquaculture surpassed capture fisheries worldwide in 2022; farmed protein is the growth vector. [10]
• Segment engines — finfish rides "local/sustainable" branding, shellfish the premium raw-bar and sustainability halo, alligator the luxury-handbag cycle, algae the supplement/aquafeed market. [3][17][18]
• Shared caveat — demand growth does not guarantee domestic-farm profitability; cheap imports (catfish imports were ~68% of U.S. supply in 2023) cap prices, and new capacity often needs heavy capital before it produces reliably. [7]

7. Regulation

There is no single streamlined federal permit for an aquaculture farm; the fragmentation is itself a barrier to entry and a quiet moat for incumbents holding good permitted sites. Key agencies: EPA (discharge/NPDES permits and effluent guidelines) [14]; FDA (seafood safety, aquaculture drugs, and the National Shellfish Sanitation Program that can trigger overnight harvest closures) [13]; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (structures in navigable waters) [13]; NOAA Fisheries (marine/offshore siting and Aquaculture Opportunity Areas); USFWS (national hatcheries and CITES export rules for alligator hides) [12][15]; and state agencies (licensing, water-bottom leases, water rights — often the binding constraint). For an investor the regulatory asset is a transferable, defensible, expandable production site with a clean compliance history. Full list: 11251 §7.

8. Consolidation

The pattern is uniform: fragmented at the farm level, consolidating downstream. Good farms are small and biologically site-specific — you cannot cheaply replicate a catfish pond, a classified oyster lease, or an alligator egg-collection agreement — so national farm-level roll-ups don't really exist. Value concentrates instead in integration and the buyer: hatcheries, genetics, processing, and branded distribution (Cooke, Riverence, Pacific Seafood, Taylor); luxury houses buying upstream into tanneries; and a few algae-ingredient majors. Scarcity bites — in 2025 Maine settled an antitrust case over Cooke's proposed salmon-farm lease-site acquisition, forcing divestitures. [17] Expect selective, mostly private consolidation around proven operators and well-permitted sites.

9. Risks

The level inherits its child's full risk stack, which is exactly why aquaculture has never produced a stable U.S.-listed champion: biological & weather (disease, low-oxygen kills, harmful algal blooms, Vibrio, hurricanes — often uninsurable) [7][18]; input-cost/margin compression from feed, energy, and freight [7]; import & trade pressure that caps domestic prices [7]; capital & execution risk in land-based systems, with a track record of overruns and mass mortalities [18]; regulatory/permitting and social-license friction [14][15][17]; concentration and discretionary-cycle exposure (alligator's few luxury buyers, raw-bar dining) [18]; and public-market & data-opacity — an illiquid listed universe leaning on a five-year USDA census far less timely than other sectors' monthly data. [18]

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public-market routes are thin and never a pure-play. For finfish economics, the foreign salmon majors (Mowi, SalMar, Bakkafrost, Grieg) are the most liquid and profitable option — but large-cap, sea-cage, and non-U.S.; the U.S. land-based names (AQB, ASA, KING) are restructuring/liquidity special situations — treat as venture, not income, and do not apply packaged-food multiples to farms without stable harvests. [11][18] For "other," own the buyer (Hermès, LVMH, Kering for alligator; Corbion, DSM-Firmenich for algae), accepting aquaculture is a sliver of each. [16][17] For shellfish there is essentially no listed route.

Private-market routes are where the industry actually is: direct ownership of or lending to farms, minority stakes in integrated platforms and land-based ventures, and the picks-and-shovels layer (feed, gear, hatchery genetics, water treatment, cold chain). Diligence should center on survival, feed conversion, cost per kilogram, realized pricing, harvest consistency, customer concentration, working capital, permit status, and lease transferability.

The honest synthesis (a judgment, not a forecast). As a level, 1125/11251 is a compelling story wrapped around a punishing scorecard: a real, shared structural case (a huge import gap, a global shift to farmed protein, premium demand for local product) set against thin margins, biological fragility, fragmented permitting, and a graveyard of over-promised build-outs. Expect growth through regional and premium niches owned by vertically integrated, operationally proven, conservatively financed operators — not a rapid, public-market-friendly replacement of imports. For the full analysis — including the segment-by-segment contrast that is the most useful read here — see the 11251 primer.

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Sources

Drawn from the child primer (11251). Numbering matches that primer for cross-reference.

1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Definitions — 1125/11251 Aquaculture and industries 112511, 112512, 112519, 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=11251&year=2022
2. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), "USDA Releases the 2023 Census of Aquaculture Results" ($1.908 billion; 3,453 farms with sales; ~$552,569 average), Dec. 16, 2024. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2024/12-16-2024.php
3. USDA NASS, Aquaculture Highlights & Special Studies: Results from the 2023 Census of Aquaculture (component breakdowns; coverage gaps in standard business programs), 2024. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_Aquaculture_08.pdf
4. NOAA Fisheries, U.S. Aquaculture and Fisheries of the United States 2023 (~19.1 lb per-capita; ~80% import reliance), 2024–2026. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/aquaculture/us-aquaculture
5. USDA Economic Research Service, "U.S. seafood imports exceeded exports by $20.3 billion in 2023," 2024. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note
6. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards Matched to NAICS Codes (112511/112512/112519 = $3.75M), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
7. American Farm Bureau Federation, "America's Top Farm-Raised Fish Faces Growing Pressures," and Alabama Cooperative Extension System, "2023 US Farm-Raised Catfish Industry Update" (feed costs; imports ~68% of catfish supply), 2024–2025. https://www.aces.edu/blog/topics/aquaculture/us-farm-raised-catfish-industry-update/
8. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), "Global Fisheries and Aquaculture Production Reaches a New Record High" (aquaculture surpasses capture fisheries in 2022), 2024. https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/fao-report-global-fisheries-and-aquaculture-production-reaches-a-new-record-high/
9. The Motley Fool, "Best Seafood Stocks and How to Invest in Them" (foreign salmon majors, tickers), 2026. https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/consumer-staples/food-stocks/seafood-stocks/
10. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, "National Fish Hatchery System" (71 national hatcheries; >100M fish stocked), 2024–2026. https://www.fws.gov/program/national-fish-hatchery-system/about-us
11. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, "Aquacultured Seafood" and National Shellfish Sanitation Program (Seafood HACCP; harvest-area closures), 2024–2026. https://www.fda.gov/food/seafood-guidance-documents-regulatory-information/aquacultured-seafood
12. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Aquaculture NPDES Permitting" and "Concentrated Aquatic Animal Production Effluent Guidelines" (40 CFR Part 451), 2024–2026. https://www.epa.gov/npdes/aquaculture
13. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, "American Alligators in CITES Export Programs" (egg collection, CITES tagging), 2024–2026. https://www.fws.gov/story/american-alligators-cites-export-programs
14. The Business of Fashion, "Why Luxury Brands Can't Shake the Controversy Around Exotic Skins" (Hermès, LVMH, Kering upstream integration), 2024. https://www.businessoffashion.com/
15. ResearchAndMarkets via BusinessWire, "Astaxanthin Market Report 2025" (~$537M in 2024; ~7.3% CAGR), Mar. 5, 2025. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250305466679/en/
16. U.S. SEC filings and SeafoodSource: AquaBounty (AQB), Atlantic Sapphire (Oslo: ASA), The Kingfish Company (Oslo: KING), Cyanotech (Form 15 deregistration, Feb. 13, 2026). https://www.sec.gov/
17. Maine Office of the Attorney General, "State Settles Salmon Aquaculture Antitrust Suit" (Cooke lease-site divestitures), 2025. https://www.maine.gov/ag/news-and-library/press-releases
18. NOAA Fisheries, "Understanding Shellfish Aquaculture" and "U.S. Oyster Aquaculture Market Outlook 2025"; Taylor Shellfish and Pacific Seafood company disclosures, 2024–2025. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/insight/understanding-shellfish-aquaculture