Hawaii’s geographic isolation is often seen as a barrier to doing business. But when it comes to aquaculture, our relative isolation is a distinct advantage.

Aquaculture is one of Hawaii’s biggest overlooked industry sectors. Global demand for fish and other seafood products is rising, but the world’s oceans can produce only about 100 million tons of product annually. Currently, half of all seafood consumed is farmed — and that will continue growing.

“That seafood gap has got to be filled in some way. Aquaculture is the obvious answer,” says Todd Madsen, president of Blue Ocean Mariculture, best known locally as the producers of Hawaiian Kanpachi.

Hawaii’s geographic isolation helped local researchers solve a problem afflicting the global shrimp industry. In the 1980s and 1990s, marine biologists at Oahu’s Oceanic Institute developed a disease-free strain of shrimp that became the foundation of the global shrimp industry.

Local entrepreneur Jim Wyban led efforts to commercialize that research, building a global brood stock export operation based out of the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority in Kona. Hawaii developed into and remains the world’s shrimp brood stock supply leader, with $40 million in exports in 2015.

Myriad other factors make Hawaii an ideal place for aquaculture, specifically “mariculture,” the cultivation of seafood in saltwater settings. For one, our ocean waters are quite temperate, with little temperature variation between seasons.

Hawaii’s near-offshore waters also become deep very quickly and feature strong currents that help circulate water in the underwater cages, flushing away effluent and other materials that can cause disease. The strong currents also help mariculture operators avoid ruining local water quality or crowding out other marine animals.

Additionally, Hawaii waters are home to many high-valued fish species, which means local mariculture operators don’t have to work against nature and introduce new species.

For entrepreneurs like Madsen, such conditions make for a real industry opportunity.

“We believe Hawaii should have and eventually will have a large, successful mariculture industry. We’ve got this huge marine resource here, particularly relative to the land resource,” says Madsen, who hails from the commercial fishing industry.

Blue Ocean operates the only open-ocean fish farming operation in the U.S., off the coast of Hawaii island, and employs about 30 people in the Kona area. Blue Ocean has a team of marine biologists that has helped it refine the larvae-rearing process for Hawaiian kanpachi. Madsen hopes to one day expand to farming moi, another popular Hawaii fish species whose life cycle has been studied by the Oceanic Institute.

“We generate lot of economic activity with our trucking and shipping, and about 30 percent of (our) fish stay here in Hawaii,” Madsen says. Blue Ocean is licensed to produce as much as 1,200 tons of fish and has leases for several facilities including 90 acres of ocean leased from the state off the Kona coast, a 2.5-acre hatchery utilizing the seawater resources provided by Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority, and a third facility at Honokohau Harbor.

As Hawaii’s mariculture industry grows, there will be job opportunities for a local workforce of marine biologists, other technical staff members and sales teams. State investments in providing access to capital and major infrastructure such as harbor facilities, seawater pumps and industrial spaces for lease such as those at NELHA will also be hugely helpful for aquaculture businesses.

To be sure, mariculture businesses often require significant investment to get off the ground. But Madsen is confident that with a few commitments from the state, the capital will come.

He says, “I think we can attract private capital for this, as long as there’s an industry framework and the state is on the record saying, ‘Yes, we would like it to develop.’”

Sara Lin, formerly a journalist in New York, Los Angeles and Honolulu, is now the associate with the Hawaii Strategic Development Corp. Reach her at sara.n.lin@hawaii.gov.