Enlarge (credit: By Paul Hermans - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10766212) Fish farms play an important role in supplying the modern world’s massive demand for seafood—about half the fish we eat today comes from fish farms rather than being caught in the wild. Aquaculture helps lighten the burden on wild fish populations, and farmed fish have a much smaller carbon footprint per pound than beef.