There was some bad news this month for the Norwegian fish feedlot industry in Canada: their own trade magazine featured the following headline:
The Critics Are Right: It’s Time To Close Down Salmon Farms
(link to text only version)
As many of our readers know, the Norwegian salmon feedlot industry continues to defend its BC operations fiercely against critique from fishermen, environmentalists and marine biologists. Despite the political clout of this lucrative industry, and after years of activism, research and protest, several “salmon farms” were finally removed from the Discovery Islands channels — a constrained migratory path for wild salmon.
This removal was in response to evidence that researchers and activists have been presenting for years that the effluent from Atlantic salmon feedlots damages the health of wild salmon as they pass through it. Not only do the feedlots use antibiotics and pesticides to keep the non-native fish alive in their high-density close confinement, critics say; but the crowded and unhealthy fish are a perfect breeding ground for sea lice, a natural parasite that affects salmonids on the BC coast. Critics of the industry say the locally inflated superdense population of sea lice from the infested salmon feedlots, has been spilling over onto the migrating salmon, weakening the fish and reducing their numbers.
This theory was strengthened a year after the fish feedlot removals; returns of pink salmon in the Discovery Islands corridor were reported to be significantly larger than they had been for several years. Many took this as a vindication of long-standing criticisms of salmon feedlot operations.
There are many pressures on salmon, including destruction of riparian habitat by logging, overfishing of small fish species lower on the food chain, and the warming of our coastal waters due to climate change. The fish feedlot industry has vigorously insisted that any decline in wild salmon populations is due to these other factors, and has nothing to do with their activities — and that sea lice in particular are not a problem.
Meanwhile the BC industry spent about 40 million dollars in 2020 on a specialised vessel from Norway, equipped. among other things, to vacuum the sea lice off the feedlot fish. [This large investment in a “delousing ship” at the time led one mischievous fisherman on Facebook to suggest that maybe they were focusing on the wrong species — and should be harvesting the sea lice as their protein-rich product.]
Despite this tacit admission that sea lice do in fact pose a significant threat to salmon health — and that their feedlots are in fact infested with lice — the industry disputes the startling improvement in pink returns, saying it cannot be ascribed to the net pen closures. DFO’s latest official report (2024) supports the industry position. DFO’s report angered several marine biologists — 16 of whom joined in a letter of protest which referred to DFO’s selective reporting and cherrypicking of data as “a scientific sin.” The scientists also pointed out that DFO’s report was written by employees of DFO’s own Aquaculture Management and Aquaculture Science division, and was externally reviewed by one industry-associated professor — in violation of “any reasonable standards of independent peer review.”
So the debate rages on: how harmful are salmon feedlots to wild salmon? Should net pen salmon feedlots be banned altogether from the BC coast, banned from constricted migratory paths only, or allowed to proliferate without restrictions, as the industry demands? The industry, when asked to move its operations out of what once were pristine coastal waters and into closed-containment facilities, has traditionally responded that this is impractical, too expensive, unreasonable, impossible etc. But public pressure continues — and is unlikely to let up.
Now it seems the entire debate may be on the verge of becoming moot. This Fall, a magazine called IntraFish — a trade journal of the feedlot fish industry — featured the startling headline mentioned above: “The critics are right: it’s time to close down salmon farms.” And the subtitle of this article is “It will take time and significant investment, but declining fish health is pushing the industry in one, undeniable direction.”
It’s worth emphasising that this article is not from any of the various environmental magazines, papers or websites which have been challenging the fish feedlot industry for decades. This is in the industry’s own trade journal. The author, Drew Cherry, has 20 years’ experience covering global seafood, acquaculture, and fisheries industries.
Mr Cherry’s article opens with the following stark warning:
A rash of stunningly bad news on sea lice should have salmon farmers around the world, not just northern Norway, scrambling for solutions.
Even before sea lice counts hit record levels this year in Norway, financial losses from lice in the global salmon farming industry were astronomical. It’s certain that 2024 will show a new high-water mark.
The high lice load, attributed to higher-than-normal water temperatures, follows just a few months after lower-than-normal water temperatures led to some of the worst outbreaks of winter sores, again costing the industry hundreds of millions of dollars. Add jellyfish attacks and other diseases to the mix, and it becomes clear why salmon mortality in Norway hit record levels in 2023.
Norway, of course, is not alone in facing biological challenges. Every major salmon farming region is facing a mix of the above or other climate-related challenges, such as harmful algal blooms. It’s a remarkable testimony to the financial health of the salmon farming industry that it continues to be extremely profitable despite these huge losses.
[The scale of losses in the North European salmon feedlot industry is not often reported in popular media, but can be guessed at from occasional articles such as this one about the illegal dumping of huge numbers of dead fish in Scotland.]
The Intrafish article goes on to explain that despite this profitability, “increasing restrictions and scrutiny” mean that the industry cannot “continue indefinitely to farm as it has.”
“Consensus is growing,” Mr Cherry writes, that the best way forward for this global industry is “moving towards semi-closed or closed containment systems — a view shared earlier this year by a former CEO of Mowi, the worlds largest salmon producer.”
Mr Cherry adds that “The transition will cost hundreds of milliions of dollars and it will take a long time — but the sooner the industry starts investing, the less it will cost in the long run.” Manufacturers of closed-containment equipment and systems are receiving record numbers of inquiries, and the Norwegian government has spent significant seed money to encourage innovation in closed and semi-closed salmon feedlot systems.
Akvafuture is one of the hopeful suppliers of closed-containment systems, and they are hoping to break into the BC market. Their system uses large impermeable bags or sacs to contain the fish, pumping fresh seawater in from below the depth in which sea lice are usually found. Skeptics may fear that the industry will continue to dump its effluent directly from the closed systems into our tidal waters, but Akvafuture claims their system is environmentally responsible: “Discharge water is filtered to remove fish faeces and sludge, which is dried on site and used for fertiliser and biogas. Akvafuture also grows mussels and kelp at its sites to take advantage of nutrients left in the discharged water after filtering.”
Interestingly the most vocal proponents of closed containment systems today are the financiers who lend to this lucrative industry. DNB is the largest lender in this sector, and its head of seafood lending was asked where she would advise the sector to invest. Her answer: “We really like these closed compartments, to do something about the sea lice.”
So perhaps it’s time for the industry to stop arguing about whether a concentration of sea lice in the net pen feedlot does or does not endanger wild stocks nearby. It now appears that their own feedlot salmon are having a hard time surviving their parasite burden, among other challenges. It looks increasingly likely that the salmon feedlot industry will be forced to move ashore or to floating closed containment systems.
They have put up quite a PR blitz over the years — including repeated personal attacks on salmon advocate Alexandra Morton — seemingly indifferent to public opinion, citizen and stakeholder activism, and political pressure to save the lives and health of our wild stocks. But they can hardly refuse to save their own business model. It will be interesting to see the reaction of the local face of the far-reaching Norwegian industry — here in BC — to this news from their own trade journal.
[uncredited illustrations were generated by Midjourney, prompts by author — all others as credited in captions. ]