Report: Expanding Oregon's Aquaculture Industry

Executive Summary
Oregon has a long history of aquaculture, and currently produces roughly $24 million in output from a mixture of saltwater and freshwater farms. Unfortunately, Oregon’s aquaculture output lags its neighboring states. This report seeks to investigate this poor performance with three research questions:

1. What are key barriers to the U.S. aquaculture industry that prevent expansion?
2. What barriers disproportionately affect Oregon’s aquaculture industry?
3. What are strategies Oregon’s Department of Agriculture can deploy to overcome these
   barriers?

To address these questions, our team conducted a literature review which included academic papers, government websites and reports, agency financial statements, and news articles. The literature review focuses on Oregon but also includes information on U.S. aquaculture more generally in order to study our first two research questions. Our team then interviewed seventeen aquaculture producers from seven different states including Oregon. The states were chosen using criteria based on the amount of aquaculture production and geography and specific producers were selected by convenience and snowball sampling. We used the transcripts from the interviews to examine the different barriers aquaculture producers face, as well as some of the possible solutions to these barriers...

​Read the full report here.

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