During the covid time, when politicians shut down restaurants, we tried to shine a light on the plight of those who had supplied the restaurants, including salmon farmers.
Salmon were an interesting case in that, while very popular in restaurants people did not cook it at home nearly as much as they did other protein sources. The entire supply chain got hammered. Among the points that we tried to make was that despite the dire financial situation the growers absolutely had to spend the money to keep their farmed salmon from escaping into the wild salmon populations, Here's one of our last comments on that four-year experience, January 11 this year:
"Salmon Escaping Farms Are Wreaking Havoc on Wild Fish"
You idiots!
And from Der Spiegel, May 7:
Two huge companies farm salmon right off the coast of Iceland. Critics warn that escaped farm fish present an existential danger to wild populations in the country. The country's president – and the singer Björk – have entered the debate.
The salmon is swimming directly towards the camera. Its left eye can’t be seen, but the right one seems to be looking directly at the viewer. Its mouth is open wide and its face is a flesh-colored, swollen-and-scarred mess, lacerated and eaten away at by sea lice and bacteria. A swimming cadaver. An animal bred in captivity, swimming in a hopelessly overcrowded net set up by humans – humans who are raking in millions.
Activist Veiga Grétarsdóttir calls the fish in the image the "Zombie Salmon." She says that her picture, which she snapped in the Arnarfjörður fjord in Iceland, changed everything.
Within just a few days last fall, workers pulled an estimated 1 million such zombie salmon out of the sea off the coast of Iceland, most of them dead or near death and all of them from the offshore fish farms. And beyond the conditions in which they are kept, there have been repeated cases of thousands of fish escaping the farming pens into the open sea – and into the territory of wild salmon.
Nowhere, it seems, is the debate over the mass-breeding of salmon as bitter and polarizing as it has become in Iceland. Many Icelanders are concerned that sickly, diseased and fattened farm fish could do permanent damage to the country’s ecosystem by causing irreparable harm to the native wild salmon population. Some two-thirds of Icelanders are now opposed to the fish breeding operations off the coast. Protests have been held in the capital city Reykjavík, and the singers Björk and Rosalia even dedicated a song to the salmon. The founder of the U.S. outdoor brand Patagonia even visited Iceland in an attempt to personally convince the president to put a stop to the farming.
But there are also many for whom the lucrative fish industry is part of their identity. And the government sees fish farming as an opportunity to redevelop the western part of the country.
Measured globally, Iceland is still a relatively small player in the salmon industry. Worldwide production of the fish could exceed 3 million tons this year for the first time, and Iceland is responsible for just 45,000 tons of that. Still, Iceland’s share translates to the weight of 225 million packages of smoked salmon at discount supermarkets. And the largest fish farms want to expand, hoping to double their output by 2030.
Those interested in getting a first-hand look at the fish farms in the Westfjords must spend almost an entire day driving along the coast, far off the well-beaten track of the Ring Road. In many spots, Route 60 is more of a track than a road, covered only by gravel for several kilometers at a time. Snowstorms are a fact of life all the way into April, with visibility often dropping to below 50 meters. Mobile telephones have no reception.
It is a region that even Icelanders prefer to move away from. It was once populated by whalers, and in recent years, the Westfjords have counted among the most sparsely populated regions of Europe. Despite the lack of residents and the challenging weather, though, the sheer number of trucks plying the roads of the peninsula is difficult not to notice – transporting their refrigerated payloads of farm salmon to southern Iceland, from where the product will be exported around the world.
"We are modernizing the Icelandic economy," says Bjørn Hembre, the CEO of Arnarlax, the market leader in farmed salmon in the country. Hembre has agreed to lead a tour through his company’s semi-automated fish slaughterhouse. Currently, in the offseason, the factory – where 50 people normally work – is clean and empty. Hembre shows the machine used to automatically kill the fish, an industry-standard model from Germany. Right behind it is another high-tech apparatus that cleans the salmon using a kind of vacuum. At another spot, there are six metal buttons that workers can use to remove fish from the conveyor belt as they pass by should imperfections be noticed. The buttons are labeled with words like "machine fault," "wounds" or "deformed."
In a foyer stands a rack full of white Crocs, each shelf labeled with the names of people who work here. Many of those names are Polish or Spanish. "Our opponents criticize us for only bringing in young, single male foreigners," says Hembre. "But we are repopulating the Westfjords. The communities surrounding our factory are growing."
The fish farms he oversees, he says, also help meet the rapidly growing global demand for salmon, which is rocketing upwards annually twice as fast as supply. Already, 70 percent of the fish come from aquaculture. Hembre himself is from Norway, as are his company’s investors and those of Arctic Fish, a large competitor. A small handful of large companies control the industry in the fjords of Norway, and their founders are today among the wealthiest people in the country.
Hembre leads the way into a darkened hall where 1.2 million young salmon spend a year before being transferred to the holding pens off the coast. The fish are given feed made of soya, the remains of marine animals and 5-6 percent fish oil. "It's all about amino acids and fatty acids," he says.
The fish are vaccinated, but they still succumb to illness more often than their wild cousins since they live in extremely crowded nets. Following a severe sea-louse infestation in October 2023, a million salmon from Arnarlax and its biggest competitor Arctic Fish had to be extracted and killed using a specialized ship from Norway.
The danger for the surrounding ecosystem begins as soon as the farmed salmon are transferred to the sea. They are enclosed in nets, but escapes are hardly uncommon. In October 2022, 81,000 salmon broke out of a single Arnarlax net into the wild. In August 2023, 3,500 animals escaped from Arctic Fish, some of them sexually mature. Soon thereafter, they were found in numerous rivers in the area. In September 2023, experts in Ísafjörður counted more farmed salmon than wild salmon....
....MUCH MORE
It is such a serious issue that if the fish farms don't get it together, now, they should be shut down. Previously on this point:
December 2021
"Farmed fish breeding with wild fish is changing the life cycle of wild fish"
This
is exactly what you don't want and the reason this blog gets borderline
hysterical when discussing farming genetically altered fish....
And it is accelerated maturation—also known as the egg-to-cash-in-the-bank-cycle—where the loudest proponent of genetically engineered salmon is focusing.
You Know Big Oil and Big Pharma But Are You Familiar With Big Salmon?
AquaBounty’s first commercial harvest of its GE salmon will be this month"
I'm
not sure that this is the best way for me to get my omega-3 fatty
acids. The genetic engineering was not focused on nutrition but rather
on getting our finny friends to grow faster....
Genetically Modified Salmon Producer, AquaBounty to Sell Shares as Losses Deepen
AquaBounty’s Genetically Engineered Salmon is Coming
AquaBounty Is Now Selling Their Indiana-Raised Atlantic Salmon (but not the genetically modified fish, yet)
FrankenFish: "AquaBounty unveils 50,000 tonne target"
Here Come the Frankenfish: GMO Salmon Coming to a Store Near You
They absolutely must not allow these things to get anywhere near ocean salmon (or Great Lakes salmon for that matter)."The Rise of the Land Salmon"
And though the writer takes a blithely upbeat look at this development, we are posting it for information purposes only....
No, not some evolutionary quirk like the walking sharks of Australia but rather an update on the Norwegian fish farming company, Atlantic Sapphire, which looks to own half the U.S. market.
Half the market.
"Scottish Fish Farm Rejected after Campaigners Warn Fishermen Could be Lured to their Deaths by Fairies"
"Salmon surge helps Norway shatter seafood record"
There are still a couple types of Norwegian farmed salmon on the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch - Avoid - list but the industry has made great strides in the last ten years on the different areas of concern, diseases spread by overcrowding, impact on other species used as fishmeal food for the salmon, escapes and interbreeding with wild salmon, pesticide residue, antibiotics etc, etc.
Additionally one Norwegian brand grown onshore rather than in marine net pens garners MBSAW's highest rating:
"Atlantic salmon farmed worldwide in indoor recirculating tanks and the Nordic Blu brand produced by the Salten Aqua Group in Norway is a 'Best Choice.'"While another is a very highly rated "Good Alternate":
Norway - Nordland, Northeast Atlantic Ocean (Blue Circle Foods® brand)For what it's worth I was speaking to a Russian lady on Friday who said she would only feed her cat Norwegian salmon, the one the cat preferred was smoked in Germany.
I asked if she would adopt me.
September 2019 (we're no cassandras-come-lately)
Almost 9,000 Tuna Escaped From Spanish Fish Farm During the Storm
Yes, it was a big storm but that is no excuse. You have a population with exposure to one set of pathogens, and a developed resistance to same, mixing with a population that has no resistance and you end up killing the free-range critters.
That's not even looking at the GMO varieties we were ranting about a couple weeks ago....