In sixty pages on Australia's future, the word aquaculture does not appear

09 September 2026

On the first day of our “Innovate to Grow” programme they gave us Our Future World to read, and I did the slightly vain thing you are not supposed to admit to: I wanted to see how my own reading of the future stacked up against the national science agency’s. Whether, in short, I was as clever as I had hoped.

SHRMP.bio just started CSIRO’s Innovate to Grow programme for aquaculture, and fresh off the starting block Our Future World was part of the week-one reading — seven global megatrends, the document the agency writes to tell the country which way the wind is blowing. I have spent the better part of two years betting my fate, a startup and the fate of 20 or so students on a particular reading of that wind: that the future of animal protein runs through aquaculture, high-tech, on land, and that a small, cool and creative team could get there. So I opened sixty pages about the forces shaping Australia’s future, looking forward to seeing the shape of my own argument looking back at me and saying: right on course.

For a good while, I did. Of the seven megatrends, my own scenario work had independently reached five — climate adaptation, alternative protein and synthetic biology, geopolitics and onshoring, the digital and autonomous shift, the move to circular resources. Their evidence made my case more thoroughly than I had made it myself. Australian oceans warming faster than the global average. More than a hundred marine species already migrating south. Eighty per cent of world trade moving by sea, a fifth to a third of it through the contested South China Sea. Onshoring named, in their own report, as the strategy for managing exactly that exposure. It is a particular pleasure to have your working checked by someone with a considerably bigger desk and marked correct - or on the flip side, telling me, you could have saved a lot of time by reading our report - which I had not before.

And the reason why it probably didn’t make it onto my reading list two years ago: aquaculture returns a zero when you try to count it.

Sixty pages on the nation’s future and the word does not appear once; seafood earns a single mention, fisheries two. The protein future the report describes is plant-based meats, edible insects, seaweed. Animal protein farmed from the water, on land — the thing I had reorganised my life around — is simply not in the picture. And this from the agency whose own aquaculture research is among the deepest in the country. Had I read the report two years ago, I might have taken the hint from that silence — instead of deciding to have a look for myself. A national foresight document and a research portfolio may be made by different people for different ends; the absence is not a failed report. But it is a fact, and it asks a venture like mine a hard question. My reading two years ago (of the Australian environment in general) left me at the fork of either I am wrong — committed to a corner of the food future so marginal no one considered it worthwhile looking at (including “Our Future World”). Or I am early, working in a space because it’s open, before the thinkers and forecasts have caught up. I expect every founder doing something meaningful and new stands on that line. But wanting to be the second kind is not evidence that you are, which was exactly the reason why I wanted to know for myself.

And this is the precise question my scenario work was built to answer: am I wrong? I built four futures to test whether it held — and, unlike a megatrends report, I made technological progress an axis rather than an assumption. Advancing science is the agency’s job, so a national forecast can reasonably assume the breakthroughs it is counting on will come. I set out to ask the colder version: what if the enabling technology comes late, or never? Two of the four scenarios sit squarely in that world. But to be frank, the cases in which technological advancement would not progress were rather unpleasant scenarios. So unpleasant that I decided to largely ignore them - for SHRMP.bio. I made nothing better than a bet that “it won’t get that bad”, because I (also) work in technology. And if it got that bad, there would be little sense in thinking about anything with a 15-20 year development horizon. (For something else that has a 15-20 year development horizon, I could not ignore this)

Yet, there is one part that a scenario cannot rescue you from, because it is not about the idea. If the country’s own science agency does not count your field among the forces shaping the nation’s future, that is not only a fact about the market. It is a fact about the landscape. Building a new industry is punishing work for a well-funded firm with floors full of people; I had proposed to do it as a company of two, on a budget of half. Reading sixty pages that never mention your field can be a way to learn that the world you meant to build in is not, possibly not yet, expecting you.

There is a turn in this, though. The programme we have just joined is a dedicated aquaculture programme — early-stage. Our stage. A national agency does not build one of those for a field it has written off. The word may be absent from the 2022 forecast; it is not absent from what the agency is now doing. With a little luck, and a decade, the next edition also has a line for us.

The opportunity is real — serious projects and companies exist in this space overseas. But we cannot drag it across the line as an outsider willing it into being - on no money. It needs the one thing a two-person startup cannot manufacture — an institution already built for this work, with the patience and the people and the standing that a company of two cannot even pretend to have. SHRMP.bio’s direction is right. And if a land-based aquaculture industry is going to grow here, it will be grown through research, on prepared ground, aligned with the national effort rather than trying to be smart from the outside. And I am glad to see we are not alone in Australia.

The SHRMP.bio scenario work is archived and public: the method, the forces shaping demand, the technology trends, and the four scenarios.