What's the difference between farm raised fish and hatched stocked fish by the state?

I think you are right that "farm" and "hatchery" mean about the same thing.

The difference is in what happens to the fish.

Hatcheries release their fish alive.

Farms release their fish filleted.

I prefer just plain old wild bred and wild fed,

but I'm not sure a farm-raised fish is unhealthy.

Some "farms" are just netted-off areas in open water.

They're bad for the environment, since the fish turds accumulate in one location, but I don't know how healthy/unhealthy they are to eat. I know cattle and chickens get fed a lot of antibiotics on farms, but I do not know what artificial things a fish would get fed.

I buy and eat frozen fish sometimes,

but I stay away from anything that comes from China or Southeast Asia.

Their food safety standards are nearly nonexistent.

For the frying pan,

you can't beat wild freshwater panfish like bluegills, crappie and perch.

I also like wild little bullheads and bigger catfish.

My favorite probably is walleye or yellow perch,

but I also like bass.

With most fresh water filled with plenty of panfish,

and often too many of them to let them get big,

I think hungry fishermen ought to eat mostly panfish.

Peace to you.

Farm raised fish are raised by private companies to sell. As such they do all sorts of things to bulk up the fish, get them to grow faster, etc. There are regulations, but maybe not enough, to keep things healthy (the same regulations that failed to prevent "Mad Cow disease" in cattle farms a few years back).

Hatchery fish are raised by the state (a non-profit enterprise, where nobody's going to get richer by breaking the rules), to be released for people to catch. While a lot of the hatchery fish are caught in the first few days after release, plenty of them survive long enough to start feeding on natural food and get the hatchery food out of their systems. (Food does affect taste, so fish straight out of the hatchery do taste different from wild fish.)

But another big difference is how the fish are handled after being "harvested" -- if you catch a fish, clean it and get it on ice promptly, it'll be fresh. If some professional company is handling it, the packaged fish you buy at the store may not be as fresh as it should be. (I've noticed this difference in wild saltwater fish, comparing the fish I catch with the same species sold in local markets.)

Finally, some fish farms are ecological disasters waiting to happen. Any time you see "Farmed salmon" on the label, the fish is Atlantic salmon, but it was raised in pens on the Pacific coast. The crowding in the pens breeds parasites on the farmed fish, which spread to the local native salmon in the same waters. Any time a pen is broken open (whether by storms or sea lions or other accidents) this non-native invasive species is released into the ocean, where it competes with the local salmon like the silvers and kings.

So I agree with avoiding farmed fish. But hatchery fish are okay, if not great.

I don't like eating anything that came from a hatchery or farm. Heck, I don't even want to catch them. It's like finding an easter egg that somebody put there for you. What is the fun in that? And just like everybody wants organic vegetables w/o any additives, why would anyone want to eat an "easter egg" fish that grew up in a lab. Who knows what kinda things they're pumping into them. Antibiotics, steroids, perhaps something to intentionally poison the fisherman who catches and eats them...

Farm raised? That means they feed them dogfood and anything else that will fatten them up to sale size as quickly as possible. Sure, the powers that be will tell you it's safe to eat, but they say the same thing about everything on supermarket shelves thats loaded with BHT.

Farm raised fish are normally between 8 - 22" long before being released for stocking.

Stocked fish on the otherhand are little fish in the 2-4" range that are stocked for the purpose of getting larger...most of the smaller streams/creeks have stocking programs like this to keep the population from dying altogether.