On sun-baked land north of the Salton Sea where striped bass once were farmed in pools, entrepreneurs today are cultivating algae, another aquatic crop that might someday replace petroleum and combat greenhouse gases.
Jack Van Olst and business partner Jim Carlberg, both marine biologists, in 1979 founded Kent SeaTech fish farm, which gained prominence as the first to cultivate striped bass for food, selling 3 million pounds of bass a year in the mid-1990s.
But the San Diego-based company's profits gradually eroded because of rising feed, fuel and shipping costs and competition from cheap, imported fish. So in February 2009, its operators closed the fish farm and turned to growing algae, something they had learned as part of their fish business.
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