A row of old warehouses came into the view as the car went pass the green Vincent Thomas Bridge to reach the coastline of southern San Pedro. Lindsay Cruver stopped at the spacious parking lot at Berth 58, locked the car and stepped into her office — two retrofitted shipping containers, orange and blue, with the company name Catalina Sea Ranch printed on them.

Catalina Sea Ranch is an offshore mussel farm operated in federal United States waters. Cruver has been working as a researcher for the company since its foundation two years ago.  “Our country is actually lagging behind in aquaculture,” Cruver said, “what we are doing is really to catch up with other countries and try to grow more seafood by ourselves.”

Over 90 percent of seafood consumed in the United States is imported. Nearly 65 percent of aquaculture production is inland and concentrated mostly in the tropical and subtropical regions of Asia.

In recent years, the United States has slid to 17th place in world farmed seafood production, slipping behind Myanmar and almost leveled with Malaysia, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

The country is consuming very little seafood. Compared to the recommended 20 percent, seafood accounted for 5 percent of total consumption from the protein foods group in 2014, which was dominated by meat and poultry.

Culturally, the Americans are more inclined to consume terrestrial meat than seafood. Beyond that, the country does not farm fish the way it farms cows and chickens. The amount of fish and shellfish harvested from the wild annually in this country is about 7 times greater than the amount produced by domestic aquaculture farms.

Now the search is on for a more sustainable way of getting food from the sea, as 85 percent of the world’s marine stocks are either fully exploited or overfished, World Wildlife Fund says.

One of the options would be developing sea ranches and farm fish in the ocean. But they are never perfect businesses as the aquaculture farms bear the risks of spreading diseases to wild fish, harming local habitat and impacting fishing activity.

Cruver said the it had been very hard for sea ranches, both coastal and offshore farms, to get permit. “It’s not just the regulators,” she said while pointing at the other side of the terminal island, “people who live there do not want to see warehouses and fishing nets – they want to have the view of the beautiful, clean sea surface.”

Due to the concern on aquaculture pollution and transmitted disease carried by the finfish, there had not been any permit given to offshore finfish producers. The shellfish farms are easier to manage, as mussels, oysters and clams do not move around, nor do they feed on small fishes. So, the Catalina Sea Ranch started as a pilot to farm shellfish. For now it is the only offshore sea ranch in Southern California.

It takes an hour for the boat to reach the sea farm from the port behind the warehouse. On the surface of the sea one could only see the floater and the data monitors powered by solar panels.

The ranch is underwater, where thousands of mussels were tied onto the grouped ropes. “Technically, the mussels grab onto the ropes,” Cruver said, “as they had numerous ‘hands’ called mussels threads.” When a mussel is put close to something, it naturally attaches itself to it within minutes using those threads.

The sea ranch currently sees a satisfying performance as it delivers 2 million pounds of mussels year-round to the retailers all over Southern California. It has to prepared itself for challenges, though. With climate change bearing down on the tropics, the changing ocean condition makes it more difficult to predict what’s going to happen for a business under the sea.

Cruver said that anyone in the west coast aquaculture industry would be familiar with the crisis confronted Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery. In 2008, the hatchery almost went out of business as the baby oysters they attempted to produce wound up dead on the bottom of the tanks month after month, causing a 75 percent decrease in its oyster production in the year.

It turned out that the “ocean acidification,” a byproduct of climate change, is to blame, as opposed to foreign bacteria, which is a more commonly seen problem in sea farms. A study in 2009 by FAO predicted that it is likely that diseases affecting aquaculture would increase both in incidence and impact.

Multiple universities and research institutions are attempting to provide solutions to the chronic threats, as the human society needs to turn to the sea for more food in order to ease the resource-intense inland farming industry.

Sarah Lester, an assistant professor at Florida State University, recently found in her study that Southern California has huge potential for offshore ocean farming, as long as it was carefully planned.

This gives more weight to the two containers at the giant warehouse in San Pedro. Cruver and her other 20 colleagues will also have to be prepared for future competitions, as what they are doing is setting a pace for more new comers in this under explored business field.