Other Aquaculture (United States) — NAICS 112519

A Histometrics industry primer for public-market and private investors.

NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the federal coding scheme used to tabulate industries; the 2022 revision defines code 112519.[1]

1. Overview

"Other Aquaculture" is the catch-all corner of U.S. fish farming: everything raised in water that isn't a finfish or a shellfish. In practice it staples three very different businesses together under one classification code — alligator farming (the largest by value), algae farming (mostly land-based microalgae grown for nutritional ingredients), and seaweed/kelp farming (an early-stage ocean crop) — plus small amounts of frog, turtle, and aquatic-plant production.[1][3]

The code is tiny in dollar terms and overwhelmingly private and fragmented, but it houses two completely different value pools. One is a luxury-leather supply chain: American alligator hides feed the exotic-leather ateliers of Europe's luxury houses, and the biology — a multi-season grow-out funded by a conservation model — is unusually durable.[20][21] The other is a specialty-ingredients and "blue-economy" play: microalgae supplies high-margin health and feed compounds (astaxanthin, spirulina, algal omega-3), and farmed kelp is a policy-favored sustainability story.[13][15][26] These share almost nothing except that the crop happens to live in water.

Public-market exposure is thin and, after the sole listed microalgae pure-play went private in early 2026, essentially indirect — reached through the luxury houses that buy alligator hides, or through diversified ingredient companies with algae lines.[9][21] Direct ownership of the actual industry — family alligator farms, microalgae producers, venture-backed kelp aggregators — sits in private hands. For either kind of investor the central question is not market-growth hype; it is whether an operator can produce consistent biological yields, clear a heavy regulatory path, process efficiently, and sell into a genuinely high-value market.

2. What it is and how it's structured

Scope (what NAICS 112519 covers). Establishments primarily engaged in (1) farm-raising aquatic animals other than finfish and shellfish, and/or (2) farm-raising aquatic plants. The official index items are alligator, algae, frog, seaweed, and turtle production, plus aquatic-plant/"sea plant" agriculture.[1] The unifying feature is farming — confinement, feeding, predator control, controlled grow-out — as opposed to wild capture.

What it explicitly excludes (and the adjacent codes).

• Finfish farming and fish hatcheries → NAICS 112511. Catfish, trout, salmon, tilapia, baitfish, ornamental/sport fish. This is the largest aquaculture code and is not in 112519. (Land-based salmon company AquaBounty, for example, sits here, not in 112519.)[1][12]
• Shellfish farming → NAICS 112512. Oysters, clams, mussels, shrimp, crawfish. Despite loose usage on some commercial websites, shellfish have their own code and are not in 112519.[1]
• Catching frogs, turtles, or terrapins from the wild → NAICS 114119 (Other Marine Fishing). Wild capture is fishing, not aquaculture.[1]
• Hydroponic (soil-less) crop growing → NAICS 111419.[1]
• Food processing and branded products are generally classified outside aquaculture when the company buys rather than grows the organism.

The sub-industries and their ownership.

• Alligator/reptile: family-owned "ranch/grow-out" farms concentrated on the Gulf Coast (Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, Texas), increasingly tied to — and in some cases part-owned by — European luxury houses that need secure hide supply.[19][20][21]
• Microalgae: a handful of specialized producers (open ponds or photobioreactors) selling branded supplements and bulk nutraceutical and animal-feed ingredients.[8]
• Seaweed/kelp: early-stage, venture-funded startups and grower cooperatives, often organized around an aggregator that supplies seed and guarantees a buy-back to many small ocean-lease farmers.[13][14]

Ownership is mostly private and fragmented, and federal data generally count farms, not ultimate owners — so one company can control several sites.[3]

3. How big it is

Our federal ground truth for this code is thin, and that is itself the story. The one hard federal business statistic we hold for NAICS 112519 is the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) size standard of $3.75 million in average annual receipts (effective March 17, 2023) — the ceiling below which a firm counts as "small" for federal programs.[4] That is a program threshold, not a revenue estimate. We do not hold Census establishment counts, employment, or payroll for this code.

Why the usual federal business datasets are blank here (the undercount caveat). County Business Patterns (CBP), the Statistics of U.S. Businesses, and the Economic Census — the standard sources for firm counts and payroll — exclude crop and animal production entirely (NAICS 111 and 112).[5] Because aquaculture sits in NAICS 112, it falls outside all of them. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) undercounts further still: it excludes proprietors, unincorporated self-employed workers, unpaid family members, and many farm workers[6] — exactly the people who run small family and fisherman-operated farms. The authoritative federal source is instead the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and its National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), via the Census of Aquaculture (a special study of the farm Census of Agriculture, run roughly every five years). Treat that, not the business datasets, as the real yardstick.

What the USDA Census of Aquaculture (2023) shows. Total U.S. aquaculture sales were $1.908 billion across 3,453 farms, up sharply from 2018.[2] NAICS 112519 is a small slice of that. The closest federal proxy is USDA's "miscellaneous / other aquaculture" special-study category, which reported 238 farms and about $157.7 million in 2023 — but that category also sweeps in some products (caviar, eels) that fall outside the strict 112519 definition.[3] The sub-segments that clearly belong to 112519, dominated by alligators, are:

Summing the pieces that clearly belong to the code gives roughly $135–140 million in U.S. farm-gate value — about 7% of all U.S. aquaculture, and a rounding error against the ~$800 million food-fish and ~$575 million mollusk segments in other codes.[2][3]

Two honest limits on even these figures: (a) USDA counts only farms with sales — an aquaculture farm is a place selling at least $1,000 of product in the census year, so hobby and pre-revenue operations are missed;[7] and (b) alligator "value" is measured differently by different agencies — Louisiana's state wildlife agency put its 2024 farm harvest near 309,000 animals worth roughly $72 million, versus the USDA national farm-sales figure of $95 million, because state numbers key off hide/harvest counts rather than farm receipts.[20]

4. The investable universe

There is no clean listed pure-play anymore. Practically all direct exposure is private; listed exposure is indirect, pre-revenue, or venture-like.

Public — direct or near-direct

Public — indirect / adjacent (algae or alligator is a small part of a much larger business)

Private / other owners (no reliable federal ranking exists; these are the visible participants)

• Alligator: Golden Ranch Farms — a privately owned Louisiana operation controlled by Arlen "Benny" Cenac Jr. and described as one of the country's largest alligator farms[19] — plus many family farms across Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, some now partly owned by luxury maisons securing hide supply.[20][21]
• Seaweed/kelp: Atlantic Sea Farms (Maine aggregator, ~1.3 million lb harvested in 2024 across its partner-farmer network);[13][14] Symbrosia (Hawaii red-seaweed feed additive, raised additional private funding in 2025);[16] Blue Ocean Barns (livestock-feed seaweed benefit corporation);[17] Indo-Pacific Sea Farms (Hawaii);[18] plus larger single-site kelp operations in Alaska.[15]
• Microalgae: BGG (world's largest natural-astaxanthin producer), Algatechnologies, and others — mostly private and often foreign.[26]

Bottom line for a public-market investor: there is no longer a way to own the code directly. The cleaner listed exposures are luxury-leather demand (own the buyer, not the farm) or diversified ingredient majors where algae barely moves the needle; ZIVO and Phibro are venture-like or indirect. There is no U.S.-listed seaweed pure-play.

5. How the money works

The three sub-industries differ, but all are agricultural: revenue = volume × realized price, and profit turns on biological yield, mortality, feed/energy cost, and product mix. The key split everywhere is commodity vs. value-added — a low-priced bulk crop can be unattractive even at strong yields, while a branded, tested, or regulated ingredient supports better economics but carries marketing and compliance cost.

Alligator (hides + meat). A luxury-leather story, not a meat story. A farm collects wild eggs (paying landowners for access), incubates and grows animals over a grow-out of roughly 12–15 months to market size,[24] then sells. The hide is the prize — a flawless belly skin bound for a handbag is worth vastly more than the meat, a secondary byproduct. Owners make money by maximizing hide grade, controlling feed conversion and mortality, and financing multi-season working capital tied up in living inventory.[24][25] Downstream, the value concentrates in tanning and finishing — which is why luxury houses have bought tanneries and farm stakes to capture it.[20][21]

Microalgae (nutraceutical + feed ingredients). A high-value-per-kilogram specialty business. An operator grows biomass in ponds or reactors, then harvests, dries, and extracts branded products (spirulina, astaxanthin) sold as consumer supplements or bulk ingredients.[8] Margins depend on yield per pond, contamination control, extraction efficiency, energy for pumping/drying, and — crucially — brand and channel (a branded supplement earns far more than bulk powder). This behaves more like specialty chemicals or consumer health than like farming.

Seaweed/kelp (emerging low-margin crop). Today a thin-margin, market-development business. Wet kelp fetches low farm-gate prices, so growers depend on aggregators and buy-back contracts (the Atlantic Sea Farms model — free seed, technical help, guaranteed purchase) to de-risk planting, and on downstream processors to turn a seasonal wet crop into food, feed, fertilizer, or bioplastic feedstock.[13][14] The economics only work at scale with processing infrastructure that mostly does not exist yet.

What investors track across all three: yield per pond/acre/line/tank; survival, hatch rate, and contamination losses; cost per pound/kilogram; energy, feed, labor, and water costs; harvest recovery and product grade; customer concentration and purchase commitments; gross margin after processing; biological inventory and cash tied up before harvest; and maintenance/expansion capital. Cyclicality is imported from the end market — luxury demand for alligator, nutraceutical/aquafeed demand for algae.

6. What drives demand

• Luxury-goods demand (alligator). Hide volumes track the high-end handbag and accessories cycle — Birkins, exotic-skin watch straps, footwear — and are sensitive to Asian (especially Chinese) luxury consumption.[21]
• Health, supplement, and aquafeed demand (algae). Astaxanthin is the standout: a natural antioxidant used in human supplements and, above all, as the pigment that gives farmed salmon and trout their pink color — aquafeed is its dominant end use. The global astaxanthin market reached ~$537 million in 2024 and is forecast to grow ~7% a year toward roughly $800 million by 2030.[26] Spirulina and algal omega-3 ride the broader supplement and sustainable-protein trends.[10][11]
• The "blue economy" / sustainability narrative (kelp). Kelp needs no feed, fresh water, or fertilizer, and is promoted for food, animal feed, fertilizer, bioplastics, and carbon uptake — attracting policy support and impact capital.[15]
• Climate-related livestock feed (seaweed additives). Private companies are testing red-seaweed feed additives intended to cut cattle methane emissions.[16][17] Commercial progress is early; durable demand will hinge on regulatory approval, independent performance evidence, farmer economics, and reliable supply.
• Conservation-funding model (alligator). Farming funds wild recovery: because egg collection pays coastal landowners, they preserve the wetland habitat alligators need — a rare case where commercial demand underwrites the wild population.[22]
• Substitution risk on the demand side. Precision-fermentation and lab-grown alternatives (bio-identical astaxanthin, cell-cultured or plant-based "exotic" leathers) could erode demand for the farmed article over time.

7. Regulation

Regulation is species-specific and unusually heavy for such a small industry — and, for permitted operators, a source of scarcity value.

• Alligator — CITES and wildlife law. The American alligator is listed on Appendix II of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) — not because it is endangered, but by "similarity of appearance" to threatened crocodilians — so its skins can trade internationally only if legal, sustainable, and traceable.[22] Every hide carries a CITES tag (state, species, year, serial number); the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) enforces export rules, and state agencies such as the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) license farms, govern egg collection, and require farmers to return a set share (about 5%) of grown alligators to the wild, filing an annual "finding of no detriment" with USFWS.[22][23]
• Algae/seaweed as food and supplement. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates algae- and seaweed-derived foods and supplements, including GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) determinations for ingredients; seafood processors must follow the HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) system, and blue-green algae products face added scrutiny for contaminants such as microcystins.[27][28]
• Ocean farming permits (seaweed and any water-column culture). Siting an ocean farm typically requires federal sign-off from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Section 10 navigation) and an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) discharge permit under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) — which can apply even to smaller land-based facilities — plus a state coastal lease.[29] This slow, multi-agency gauntlet is widely cited as the industry's biggest bottleneck; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is pushing designated Aquaculture Opportunity Areas to streamline it.[30]
• State control. State agencies often govern farm licenses, egg collection, water rights, animal health, and local siting — so permitting timelines can matter as much as the biology.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

Production is fragmented, but processing, brands, seed supply, and customer access are more concentrated.

• Alligator — vertical integration by the buyers. The farms are fragmented family businesses, but the demand side is concentrated in a few luxury houses, and those houses are integrating upstream — buying stakes in farms, tanneries, and manufacturers to lock in scarce, high-grade hides. Bargaining power sits with the maison, not the farmer.[20][21]
• Algae — consolidation among ingredient majors. Natural-astaxanthin capacity is concentrating in a few large producers (BGG is now the world's largest), and diversified ingredient companies hold the omega-3 lines.[26] Cyanotech was a rare small independent competing on brand ("Hawaiian" provenance) rather than scale — and has now moved into private ownership.[8][9]
• Seaweed — early-stage and aggregator-led. Many small growers cluster around a few aggregators that control seed, processing, and offtake (Atlantic Sea Farms in Maine; larger single-site operations in Alaska). Maine and Alaska together supply the large majority of U.S. edible seaweed.[13][14][15][31]

Our assessment: consolidation is more likely downstream — in processing, branding, genetics, and distribution — than through ownership of every farm. Small scale and biological variability make operational integration valuable, but the underlying farms may stay locally owned.

9. Risks

• Biological and weather risk. Disease, mortality, contamination, poor hatch rates, harmful algal blooms, and Gulf-Coast hurricanes can wipe out a season; land-based ponds are exposed to temperature and energy shocks. Cyanotech itself flags weather, water availability, contamination, and nutrient balance as material risks.[8]
• Single-buyer / concentration risk (alligator). Demand funnels through a handful of luxury houses; a shift in fashion, sourcing policy, or a maison's integration strategy can reprice an entire farm's output.[21][25]
• ESG and animal-welfare pressure. Exotic skins draw sustained animal-rights campaigning and periodic retailer/brand bans and state legislative bans on exotic-leather sales — a live headwind for alligator, and a reputational overhang even for responsibly sourced supply. (ESG = environmental, social, and governance considerations.)[21]
• Input-cost and commodity-cycle risk. Energy, feed, labor, and water treatment can overwhelm farm-gate pricing; astaxanthin demand dipped in 2022 with lower farmed-salmon output, and luxury leather tracks a discretionary cycle.[21][26]
• Thin economics / scale-up risk (kelp and algae feed). Farmed seaweed is not yet reliably profitable without subsidy, contracts, and processing that largely don't exist at scale, and pilot results may not translate into stable commercial yields.[13][16]
• Regulatory and trade risk. CITES/permit compliance is costly; ocean-lease permitting is slow; and cheaper foreign supply (imported crocodilian skins; Chinese/Indian spirulina and astaxanthin) pressures U.S. producers.[8][22]
• Financing risk. Pre-revenue listed companies and private start-ups may need repeated capital raises before reaching positive cash flow.[9][10]
• Public-market-specific risk. There is now no listed pure-play: the lone one, Cyanotech, deregistered after going private in early 2026, so listed exposure is only indirect.[9]

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public routes. There is no longer a clean pure-play to buy — Cyanotech's going-private deal removed it.[9] Remaining listed exposure is indirect:

• Own the demand side of alligator through luxury equities (Hermès, LVMH, Kering), accepting that alligator is a tiny sliver of those businesses.[21]
• Gain algae-ingredient exposure through diversified players such as Corbion or DSM-Firmenich, where algae is likewise minor; or take venture-like exposure via ZIVO Bioscience or feed-platform exposure via Phibro.[10][11]
• First, classify honestly: determine whether a company actually farms an organism, supplies technology, processes a crop, sells branded products, or merely rides a broad aquaculture narrative — then test yield, cash burn, working capital, customer concentration, and dilution. Do not apply mature agricultural-company valuation to a pre-revenue algal platform without commercial evidence.

Private routes. This is where the real industry sits: direct ownership or backing of alligator farms and tanneries (increasingly a luxury-supply-chain play), microalgae producers, or seaweed aggregators/growers. Kelp in particular has drawn venture and impact capital on the blue-economy thesis.[13][15] Diligence should center on permits and renewal rights; water, energy, and site security; verified yields and loss history; processing and storage capacity; purchase contracts and customer quality; insurance and disaster resilience; capital needed to reach commercial scale; operator/technical depth; and credible exit routes.

Near-term drivers to watch. The luxury demand cycle, especially China, which sets alligator-hide pricing;[21] astaxanthin and supplement demand, plus the recovery of farmed-salmon volumes that pull aquafeed pigment;[26] permitting reform — NOAA's Aquaculture Opportunity Areas and state leasing — the gating factor for whether U.S. seaweed can scale;[30] and ESG/policy on exotic skins, where further bans would pressure alligator demand.[21]

The honest synthesis (our judgment). As a code, 112519 is too small and too private to be a mainstream allocation, and it no longer has a listed pure-play. But it houses two genuinely interesting, opposite-in-character exposures: a defensive, high-margin luxury-leather supply chain with a durable conservation-funding model, best owned indirectly through the maisons; and a higher-growth specialty-ingredients-and-blue-economy theme (astaxanthin today, kelp and algae-feed tomorrow) whose upside is real but whose scale, margins, and permitting are still unproven. The best opportunities are likely vertically integrated operators with proven yields, regulatory clearance, processing capability, and contracted demand; the weakest are projects with an attractive sustainability narrative but no evidence of commercial-scale biology or delivered-cost advantage. For most investors this is a niche to understand — for context on luxury, aquafeed, and the blue economy — rather than to own outright.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Manual — 112519 Other Aquaculture (definition and cross-references), 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=112519&year=2022
2. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, "USDA Releases the 2023 Census of Aquaculture Results" (3,453 farms; $1.908 billion), Dec. 16, 2024. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2024/12-16-2024.php
3. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2023 Census of Aquaculture — miscellaneous/other aquaculture production and sales tables (Volume 3, Special Studies), 2024. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Online_Resources/Aquaculture/index.php
4. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards (NAICS 112519 = $3.75 million; effective Mar. 17, 2023), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
5. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns — coverage and exclusions (excludes crop and animal production, NAICS 111–112). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/about.html
6. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages — Overview (coverage exclusions: proprietors, self-employed, unpaid family, certain farm workers), 2026. https://www.bls.gov/cew/overview.htm
7. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Census of Aquaculture — survey guide and farm definition (≥ $1,000 in sales), 2024. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Surveys/Guide_to_NASS_Surveys/Census_of_Aquaculture/
8. Cyanotech Corporation, SEC Form 10-K and FY2025 results (net sales ~$24 million; ~90 acres, Kona, Hawaii), 2025. https://www.cyanotech.com/2025/06/20/cyanotech-reports-financial-results-for-the-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2025/
9. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Cyanotech Corporation Form 15-12G (deregistration after going-private transaction), filed Feb. 13, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000768408&type=15-12G
10. ZIVO Bioscience / Nasdaq, Company overview and commercial-scale manufacturing agreement with Cyanotech Corporation, 2026. https://ir.zivobioscience.com/
11. Phibro Animal Health Corporation, VERRATAIN sustainability platform / microalgae partnership with VAXA Technologies, 2026. https://investors.pahc.com/
12. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, AquaBounty Technologies Form 10-K (land-based salmon; classified NAICS 112511, not 112519), 2026. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001603978&type=10-K
13. Global Seafood Alliance / Responsible Seafood Advocate, "Maine seaweed-farming network harvests a record 1.3 million pounds in 2024," 2025. https://www.globalseafood.org/advocate/maine-seaweed-farming-network-harvests-a-record-1-3-million-pounds-in-2024/
14. Coastal Enterprises, Inc., "Atlantic Sea Farms" (Maine seaweed aggregator model), 2021. https://www.ceimaine.org/about/cei-stories/atlantic-sea-farms/
15. The Washington Post, "Can Alaska's kelp farms transform its economy?" 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2023/alaska-kelp-farming/
16. Symbrosia, "Symbrosia raises additional funding to accelerate commercial scale-up of SeaGraze" (red-seaweed feed additive), 2025. https://symbrosia.co/blog/
17. Blue Ocean Barns, Company overview (cultivated-seaweed livestock feed), 2026. https://www.blueoceanbarns.com/
18. Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority, "Indo-Pacific Sea Farms Inc.", 2026. https://nelha.hawaii.gov/our-clients/indo-pacific-sea-farms-inc/
19. Golden Ranch Farms (Louisiana), Company overview (one of the largest U.S. alligator farms; owner Arlen "Benny" Cenac Jr.), 2026. https://goldenranch.com/
20. U.S. News & World Report / Associated Press, "Louisiana's Alligator Farms Raise the Reptiles for Meat, Skins — and Conservation," 2026. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/louisiana/articles/2026-03-13/louisianas-alligator-farms-raise-the-reptiles-for-meat-skins-and-conservation
21. The Business of Fashion, "Why Luxury Brands Can't Shake the Controversy Around Exotic Skins," 2024. https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/professional/fashion-exotic-skins-trade-crocodile-snake-nancy-gonzalez-smuggling-kering-hermes-louis-vuitton/
22. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, "American Alligators in CITES Export Programs." https://www.fws.gov/story/american-alligators-cites-export-programs
23. Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, "LDWF Manages the American Alligator" (egg collection, ~5% return-to-wild, finding of no detriment). https://www.wlf.louisiana.gov/page/alligator-management
24. Mississippi State University Extension Service, "Alligators" (market-size grow-out ~12–15 months), 2026. https://extension.msstate.edu/agriculture/catfish/other-aquaculture-species/alligators
25. Louisiana State University AgCenter, "Louisiana's Alligator Industry: Transforming for the Future," 2023. https://www.lsuagcenter.com/articles/page1694197891640
26. ResearchAndMarkets via BusinessWire, "Astaxanthin Market Report 2025 … Reaching $537 Million with a CAGR of 7.3% Projected to 2030," Mar. 5, 2025. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250305466679/en/
27. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, "Aquacultured Seafood" (seafood HACCP; aquacultured food oversight), 2026. https://www.fda.gov/food/seafood-guidance-documents-regulatory-information/aquacultured-seafood
28. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, "Blue-Green Algae Products and Microcystins." https://www.fda.gov/food/natural-toxins-food/blue-green-algae-products-and-microcystins
29. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Aquaculture NPDES Permitting." https://www.epa.gov/npdes/aquaculture-npdes-permitting
30. NOAA Fisheries, "Aquaculture: Regulation and Policy" (incl. Aquaculture Opportunity Areas). https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/topic/aquaculture/regulation-and-policy
31. Maine Aquaculture Innovation Classroom, "Current Status of the Seaweed Industry," 2026. https://learn.maineaquaculture.org/