Increasingly in demand, wild octopus populations are dwindling. Can farming ever be the answer?
When journalist Richard Schweid first heard about octopus farming, he was opposed. He saw no need to farm the gentle, sentient being as a food source for wealthy consumers who can source their proteins elsewhere. But his curiosity led him to begin a years-long immersion and study of the practice, leading to his upcoming book Life on the Octopus Farm. After spending years working on a Mayan octopus farm, he’s now convinced octopus farming is the right thing to do.
“In the wild, only a small fraction of octopus eggs make it to adulthood,” said Schweid. “In farming, if we can create conditions where we can raise all those babies, we might have enough food to address food insecurity in some regions.”
If raised affordably, octopus can provide a nutrient-dense meat, full of protein, omega 3s, and vitamin B12. And according to Schweid, raising octopus is much less harmful to the environment than beef.
Schweid’s opinion stands in opposition to legions of others, however. A 2025 survey in the E.U. and the U.K., for instance, revealed widespread support for banning octopus farming. In the United States, both Washington and California banned the practice in 2024, and the same year, U.S. Senators Whitehouse of Rhode Island (D) and Murkowski of Maine (R) introduced a bill to prohibit commercial octopus farming nationwide. All this before any research institution or commercial operation has cracked the code on making octopus farming a viable, sustainable business.
“Research centers have been trying to create octopus farming for 50 years,” said Ian Gleadall, professor of marine biology at Tohoku University in Japan. “It’s still a long way off.”
But that hasn’t stopped the outcry against it. While many consumers are quite comfortable with farming and eating animals like cows, pigs, and chickens, the octopus somehow strikes a more sympathetic chord. Documentaries like My Octopus Teacher and the book-turned-Netflix movie Remarkably Bright Creatures have introduced the octopus to the public eye, highlighting the animal’s intelligence and interactive personality. “The octopus currently carries quite a bit of weight as a cultural icon, and is odd-looking to boot,” said Schweib.
A 2021 review of over 300 scientific studies from the London School of Economics led the U.K. to expand its Animal Welfare Act to recognize all cephalopod mollusks (which includes octopuses) as sentient animals.
That said, from Japan and Korea to Spain, Portugal, and the United States, octopus is a highly desirable menu item. But the wild sources aren’t keeping up with demand. Overfishing may be one reason, and climate change another, but there’s no real consensus. “They’ve become quite scarce in recent years,” said Gleadall. “No one has figured out why yet.”
Thus, the incentive to farm. Many hurdles stand in the way, but researchers and farmers in several regions of the globe will continue their efforts to develop profitable octopus aquaculture.
Barriers to Success
Much of the public’s focus—and understanding—of octopus farming centers on Spain’s Nueva Pescanova, a large-scale fishing, farming, and processing operation. In 2019, the company announced that it had made a breakthrough in hatching octopus eggs and raising them to adulthood. The company promised to have its product on store shelves by 2023, raising and farming the creatures in a Canary Islands facility. But the BBC got hold of the company’s plans, released them to the public, and a loud outcry followed.
To date, Nueva Pescanova has not successfully farmed octopus and may have even abandoned its efforts. The company remains notoriously quiet and shy of the press, according to Schweib and others, leaving the issue to speculation. (Offrange reached out multiple times, to no avail.) Whether Pescanova or another operation, however, there are major barriers to raising octopus at scale.
The primary hurdle is developing a method to feed the octopus and then keep them alive, especially newly hatched babies, which have a voracious appetite. Researchers/farmers have struggled to find an affordable way to meet their nutritional needs, which vary from one species to another. Adults, in general, prefer crabs, clams, and other shellfish, while babies prefer to eat plankton. “Their diets are tricky and need to be timed carefully,” said Gleadall. “This is especially true in the para-larval stage, which lasts a month.”
Farmers have tried to feed paralarvae artemia, a type of brine shrimp, which is common in some types of fish aquaculture, but discovered it is insufficient in nutrient value. Cracking the dietary code remains elusive but Carlos Rosas Vásquez, a professor and researcher at the Facultad de Ciencias in UNAM, has perhaps come closest.
Vásquez, who has been working closely with a cooperative of Mayan women in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, created a squid/shrimp paste that they place in clamshells and then toss into the octopus tanks. It has been a hit with the octopus maya—also known as the Mexican four-eyed octopus—that the team is attempting to farm. “They need raw protein and it needs to match the acidity of what they eat in the wild,” explained Vázquez. “We’ve improved the feed mixture by adding scraps that the local fisheries leave behind.”
While the feed mix works, the Mayan operation is small; taking the same approach at scale is still an economical question mark. In Japan, an academic-corporate cooperative began working on farming in 2014 and again ran into the roadblock of keeping the juvenile octopus alive. Over time, enthusiasm for the project waned, and they achieved little progress. A larger commercial operation in the country announced its plans to farm octopus by 2020, but like Spain’s Nueva Pescanova, that never came to pass.
The Opposition
If and when someone finally figures out how to successfully farm octopus, the biggest obstacle may be the public. “Even if you can get octopus to size, you’ll have cultural pushback and it will be strong,” said Schweid.
Colorado State University professor Rebecca Niemic conducted the 2025 survey in the E.U. and U.K. and discovered that 80 percent of the respondents were unaware of attempts to farm octopus. But once the survey provided education briefs on the animals and farming practices, respondents largely turned against the idea. “We cited the fact that octopus are naturally solitary creatures and that putting them in high-density tanks risked their welfare,” said Niemic. “They are used to being highly stimulated, too, and if you put them in a bare, sterile environment, you create a welfare concern.”
Rosas understands this, and has worked hard to create rich, natural environments for the octopus he is researching for farming. “We use the same density in our ponds that you find in the wild, which equates to two or three animals per square meter,” he said. “We also use artificial grasses and rocks to create a natural environment for them.”
According to Rosas, his overall approach—along with the right diet—largely mitigates cannibalism, something opponents of octopus aquaculture are vocal about. “We put a good deal of research into this, and we know that in this density, with food meeting their nutritional requirements greatly reduces cannibalism,” he said.
There’s also the question of octopus slaughter, should anyone successfully develop commercial farming. The BBC article stated that Nueva Pescanova intended to use ice slurry tanks, which could lead to a slow and painful death. The Aquaculture Stewardship Council recommends stunning animals first, and it is unclear if that step was to be part of the Nueva Pescanova plan. But until octopus farmers can raise enough animals to even get to the slaughter stage, that’s likely a fight for another day.
To Gleadall and Schweid’s way of thinking, there’s a case to be made for humane octopus farming. “As I researched the topic, I learned it’s quite nuanced,” said Schweib. “There’s a good reason for raising them, especially if it can help address food insecurity. Plus, in places like the Yucatan, a farm can be quite economically beneficial to the community.”
Gleadall adds that farming would take the pressure off natural populations. “Most fish species around the world are being overfished,” he said. “Aquaculture is there to prevent that.”
But can anyone find a profitable model? After 50 years of trying, it remains elusive. But if researchers do breakthrough with successful aquaculture, quelling the opposition’s concerns will be an even harder road. “To my mind, octopus are a highly sentient being, and there’s no way to make farming humane,” said Niemic.
