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Neil Sims has a vision. He imagines thousands of red drum fish swimming in the open Gulf, the Florida sun glinting off coppery scales. These red drum are farmed, not wild. They circle inside a cylindrical floating cage miles offshore, harvested for America’s seafood market.

Sims is the founder and CEO of Ocean Era, a marine research and development company that’s been trying to launch a pilot finfish farm in Gulf waters for close to seven years. The test project would raise roughly 20,000 red drum fish in a single underwater net pen about 45 miles southwest of Sarasota, with the eventual goal of scaling up to commercial size. Commercial farms might have about a dozen of the floating pens.

“From an environmental perspective, we need people to

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