Around 130 billion farmed fish a year

Fish farms around the world kill an estimated 130 billion fish a year. That is about 4,100 fish every second, and it is more than all the land animals slaughtered for meat put together: around 88 billion chickens, pigs, cattle and other animals in 2024¹⁵.

It is also a number with a very wide margin of error. The true figure for 2022 could be anywhere from about 86 billion to 180 billion¹. Nobody knows more precisely, because nobody counts fish one by one.

Fish farming has overtaken fishing

For most of history, fish meant wild fish. That has changed. In 2024, the world’s fish farms, along with farms for shrimp, shellfish and other aquatic animals, produced 103 million tonnes, passing 100 million tonnes for the first time, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)³.

Fish farming, known as aquaculture, now supplies 53% of all the aquatic animals the world produces, and more than 59% of those eaten as food³. The rest still comes from fishing in the wild, where 72.6% of the catch in 2023 came from stocks that are fished sustainably, leaving more than a quarter from stocks that are overfished or at risk³.

An estimate, because fish are counted by the tonne

FAO, like almost every government, measures fish production by weight. That is why the number of fish on this page comes from fishcount, a research project that converts FAO’s tonnages into numbers of fish using typical slaughter weights for each species¹. It is an estimate by researchers who campaign for fish welfare, not an official statistic.

Their method explains why the number is so large. Most farmed fish are small, and among the most numerous are pond loach, Nile tilapia and common carp¹, so each tonne of fish can mean hundreds or thousands of individual animals. A tonne of beef comes from a handful of cattle.

The researchers’ earlier peer-reviewed estimate for 2019 was 120 billion fish, so the number has grown by around 10 billion in three years¹. The count covers finfish only, not shrimp, prawns or shellfish, which would add many billions more.

How farmed fish are killed

Most people would expect an animal killed for food to be stunned first, so that it is unconscious. For farmed fish, that is often not the case. According to fishcount, the vast majority of farmed fish are killed without stunning, most often by being left to suffocate in air or in a slurry of ice and water, which can take many minutes. The European Food Safety Authority and the World Organisation for Animal Health both recommend that fish be stunned before slaughter².

Given how many there are, the way farmed fish are killed may be one of the largest animal welfare questions in food production.

Wild fish on the menu for farmed fish

Fish farming does not simply replace fishing. A peer-reviewed study estimated that between 1.1 and 2.2 trillion wild fish were caught each year from 2000 to 2019, and that around half of them were ground into fishmeal and fish oil rather than eaten by people⁴. Much of that fishmeal and oil is fed to farmed animals, including farmed fish.

That means the fish on a farm and the fish in the sea are more connected than they look. Some of the growth in farmed fish is paid for with wild fish caught to feed them.

Where fish farming is heading

FAO expects the world’s production of fish and other aquatic animals to keep growing, to around 214 million tonnes by 2034, with farms supplying most of the increase³. If the number of individual farmed fish grows at a similar pace, it could pass 150 billion within about a decade. That is our own rough extrapolation, not a forecast, but the direction is clear.

Fish farming has real advantages: a growing supply of farmed fish can take some pressure off overfished wild stocks. But the scale is hard to grasp. More fish are now killed on farms than land animals are killed for meat, and most of them without being stunned first. As fish farming grows, how those fish are raised and killed is likely to become a much bigger question.

The rest of what the world raises and eats is in the food section.