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Griestal has raised fish for generations. The question was never whether the farm continues, only how. The old flow-through ponds belong to another era. The new farm keeps the springs, the site and the craft, and replaces the rest with technology that needs less water, treats what it returns to the stream, and keeps the fish in conditions we control. It makes the farm secure for a future with less water, not more. It brings fresh salmon and skilled work to the region that eats the fish. And every kilo of salmon raised on land in Bavaria is a kilo that no longer has to be farmed in the sea.

Griestal is an existing fish farm. The project modernises it into what the permit describes as a "teilgeschlossene Kreislaufanlage zur Lachszucht", a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS), for Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), with hatchery and grow-out on one site. The product is fresh salmon for the German market.

Yes. The farm will use a modular land-based system now in its third generation, refined over nearly a decade of operation at plants in Switzerland, Denmark and Norway.

Yes. The Landratsamt Unterallgäu granted the permit on 16 June 2025. The application was on public display from 10 March to 9 April 2025 and the objection period ran until 24 April 2025. No objections were lodged by the public within this period. The statements of the associations consulted were considered in the decision.

The permit sets the conditions under which the farm may operate: which springs it may use, the quality and load of the water it may discharge, and the limits it must meet in doing so. The farm is designed to those conditions and will be operated within them.

The springs at Griestal flow down the valley into the Griesbach, a small brook that joins the Östliche Günz. The farm sits within that flow. Spring water enters the farm, circulates through the fish tanks, is cleaned, and continues into the Griesbach. The farm does not consume the water: it passes through. The fish faeces and uneaten feed removed in the cleaning stages will be collected and are intended to go to a biogas plant in the region, where they would be turned into energy. Because the recirculating system reuses its water inside the farm, it draws less from the springs than the flow-through ponds it replaces, and because the fish are kept in tanks under a roof rather than in open ponds, less is lost to evaporation.

No, far less. The water footprint studies of the University of Twente (Mekonnen and Hoekstra, 2012) put beef at around 15,000 litres of water per kilogram, pork at around 6,000 and chicken at around 4,000. Most of that water is needed to grow the animals' feed; the rest is drunk by the animal and lost as vapour and manure. Farmed fish come in at around 2,000 litres per kilogram (Pahlow et al., 2015), and almost all of that is again the feed. The water the fish live in adds almost nothing to that figure: it passes through the farm and returns to the stream.

No. The permit restricts the farm to the springs named in it and prohibits connecting any further supply. There are no new wells or boreholes in the project.

No. As of September 2026, construction has not started.

As of September 2026, the municipality is developing a spring at the edge of the site for its drinking water supply.

A spring at the edge of the site fed the fish farm's ponds and hatchery. Because the modernised farm will draw less from the springs than the flow-through ponds it replaces, it can do without this spring, and the site owner assigned its rights in it to the municipality. The municipality is now developing the spring for its drinking water supply and will supply the village from it once the work is complete.

Process water from the fish tanks will pass through the farm's own treatment plant, which removes solids and nutrients, before it is returned to the Östliche Günz via the Griesbach. The permit sets limits for the load and quality of all discharged water, and the farm will be operated within them.

The fish will be raised in large tanks with continuously filtered and oxygenated water at a controlled temperature, and water quality will be monitored continuously. On a land-based farm there are no sea lice and no chemical or mechanical lice treatments, and the permit requires that no fish can escape.

No. The farm is designed to operate without antibiotics. The controlled water quality and biosecurity of a land-based farm remove the main disease pressures that make antibiotics necessary in open-water salmon farming.

A commercial salmon feed from an established salmon feed supplier. The marine share of the feed comes from trimmings of fish already caught for human consumption, with the balance from plant and other land-based proteins. Insect protein is an option and will be adopted once its environmental footprint is better than that of the current ingredients.

Net pens sit in open water. Waste passes untreated to the sea and settles on the seabed beneath the pens, sea lice are treated chemically and mechanically, and fish escape into wild stocks. None of this applies to a land-based farm, and the salmon reaches the German market without long-distance transport.

Solar panels on the site will cover part of the demand, and the balance is planned to be drawn from the grid as green electricity. A backup power supply is part of the permitted design, so the water treatment, oxygen supply and pumps keep running if the grid fails.

The site has cold spring water suited to the species and the technology is designed and proven for it. Salmon is the most consumed fish in Germany (FIZ Fisch-Informationszentrum) and almost all of it is imported.

Germany eats more salmon than any other fish and imports almost all of it. Salmon farmed in Bavaria is the same fish, raised under German environmental, food and animal welfare law, with a lower carbon footprint than salmon imported to Germany when the farm runs on renewable electricity, and dispatched within a day of harvest instead of after a truck journey across Europe. It is regional food, produced where it is eaten, with the production, the jobs and the value added kept in the region.