I read a little on the current fish-farming going on in the world and the problems that it creates. I see this off shore concept as a resolution to a few problems that exits.

As stated in the article waste build up in the shallow water farms in Canada and Asia are a major problem and putting the farms at sea sounds like a better solution. The other problem is food for the farmed fish. Farmed fish are feed fishmeal. This is made from the unwanted smaller fish in the world. To supply this food other countries use dragnets on reefs to catch the small fish that we would not cosumme for are selves. This is ground and feed to salmon and other farmed species. This causes a far larger depletion of our oceans then just targeting and netting salmon in the first place. It takes some thing like 3 lbs of ground fish to put 1 lbs of meat on a salmon. Of course in cages salmon would not burn a lot of fat hunting. I once learned that cattle can be walked at curtain speed with out burning fat, but if the go fasted they lose a lot of weight.

If off shore farms can some how fix this problem then I am all for it. Make be they can grow sardines at the same farms in order to feed the salmon and cod. I believe that the fall out of salmon and stripper commercial catches at the turn of the century off of California had more to do with the over fishing of sardines, the food fish of the larger species, then the over fishing of the salmon and strippers them selves.