In this fish farm, climate-control chambers in fish hives (lower left) contain spawn, which is carried by divers to hatcheries (left background), where the eggs are fertilised and then piped into corrals and reared under mesh at a depth of no more than 100 feet.  A feeding device (centre foreground) sends synthetic food on currents into the corrals.  The fully grown fish are transported in tube-shaped containers by crane to waiting ships.  Fish can also be raised in pens made of residue gases bubbling up from perforated pipes on the seabed (left rear).

Guess I better go and check out the peas on the back forty.

The oceans are vast and are a potentially unlimited (or near as) supply of food, but as any North Sea cod fisherman or New England whaler can tell you, traditional fishing methods have their limits as fish stocks are over-harvested in an alarming short time. 

Some forward thinkers figured that the alternative was farming.  By this I don't mean the now familiar method of putting some fish pens in an estuary or raising shrimps in basins.  I mean turning entire continental shelves into vast mechanised farms like the ones pictured above for raising everything from prawns to pilchards.  

And it wouldn't just be fish farms either.  Kelp would be grown in the shallows lit by solar mirrors.  Huge nuclear-powered blowers would be set up in the ocean depths to force nutrient-rich waters into the upper sunlit regions to make them more fertile.  Unwanted stocks of fish would be weeded out like vermin to make way for massive shoals of commercial fish stocks to be tended and herded by fleets of fishing submarines.  Even whaling would make a comeback, not in the old hunting sense, but with pods of enormous size being raised like cattle and herded with the aid of domesticated killer whales.

No doubt "One Man and His Orca" would run for years on the BBC. 

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