Comments on: Chilean Salmon Farming’s Amazing Comeback

By: Nancy Harmon Jenkins

Nancy Harmon Jenkins — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 15:13:41 +0000

Thanks for this update, Christian! (I think your earlier message was deleted in error.) For those interested, there’s a link to that Tacon & Metian report and to other interesting studies of the environmental impact of aquaculture at Lenfestocean.org, and specifically at this link: http://www.lenfestocean.org/project/competition-between-catch-forage-fish-fishmeal-and-human-consumption

By: CHRISTIAN PEREZ (Chilean journalist)

CHRISTIAN PEREZ (Chilean journalist) — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 13:30:14 +0000

Once again… (if you delete my message again, at least tell me why).

The feeder fish dependancy is measured in terms of Fish In Fish Out ratio or FIFO. According to one of the more well respected studies about it, conducted by Tacon & Metian in 2006, the numbers for salmon was 4.9:1.

Later on, the International Fish Meal and Fish Oil Organization (IFFO) conducted a study which shows a FIFO of 1.68:1 for salmon after a series of corrections and meaning that for every tonne of whole wild fish used it is possible to produce 0.595 tonnes of salmon (taking into consideration that more and more fish meal and fish oil are being obtained from the sub-products of the captured fish, such as heads, guts and filleting wastes or discards).

Finally, I suggest you to visit the website of Verlasso (www.verlasso.com) a venture between DuPont and the Chilean salmon producer AquaChile in which they are feeding salmon with diets formulated using a yeast product that replaces up to 75 percent of the feeder fish normally used. They claim to have a FIFO of 1:1.

Regards!
Christian.

By: Nancy Harmon Jenkins

Nancy Harmon Jenkins — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 19:17:18 +0000

Maria, thanks for your comment. It is so wonderful that Alaska and California are having a great year with wild Pacific salmon. Unfortunately it’s not so wonderful for wild Atlantic salmon, which is, in my view, a more delicious fish that is on the verge of extinction. Atlantic salmon’s problems have nothing at all to do with fish farming and really stem from too much human activity especially along the rivers that were their historic breeding grounds. So we can forget about eating wild Atlantic salmon (and we should–and in almost every place along the coasts of the North Atlantic where the salmon still run in pitifully small numbers, we do because it is illegal to harvest this noble fish).
That said, I should point out that the diseases you mention actually originate with wild fish; if the farmed fish are properly farmed and their health is maintained, as has been done in much of Maine, New Brunswick, and northwest Scotland, and is now done in Chile, then disease is quite controllable. (After the Chilean disaster, no farmer wants to see his stock wiped out by disease.)
Patrick, I don’t know where the figure of 10k of wild to 1k of farmed comes from–it does indeed keep coming up but it is mistaken. The situation is not ideal (ideal would be less than 1k of wild to produce 1k of farmed) but the industry is working on it constantly. There are a number of programs, including feeding farmed fish with soy (which, for my money, is as undesirable in all aspects as feeding pigs and cattle on soy), developing fish meal and oil from the discards of the fishing industry (heads, frames, fins, skins, etc.), to sourcing sustainable harvests of wild fish. Each of these options (apart from the soy) has its merits and its problems. The point is, however: the industry itself, or at least those conscientious members of it, like the SOTA people I visited in Chile, are working hard on the problem. We should not relax our vigilance, but we should applaud successful efforts to improve rather than simply turn our backs. And if every salmon on every farm across this great blue world were suddenly to be fed something other than meal and oil based on wild fish harvests, let me tell you the pressure on wild fish stocks would hardly notice. That’s because the bulk of the product (I’ve been quoted up to 80%) goes, not to feed salmon, but to feed pigs and chickens.

By: Patrick Watson

Patrick Watson — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 23:08:59 +0000

Nancy there is no reference to sustainability in your article. The figure of harvesting 10kg of wild fish to raise 1kg of farmed salmon keeps coming up. If this is true then fish farming like salmon is not environmentally sustainable. Do the Chileans do something different?

By: Maria Finn

Maria Finn — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 21:54:51 +0000

In regards to the “last wild fish” that will be a tragic day and no amount of fish farming could possibly make up for. In fact, fish farming often spreads disease to wild, native fish. In Alaska this year, the wild sockeye salmon harvest was 132 million. California is having their biggest wild Chinook Salmon run in 14 years, with an estimated 1.6 million expected in the Klamath River alone. With dam removal and stream restoration projects taking place through the US, hopefully the populations will rebound. And when visiting the headwaters of these wild runs, there’s no need to don protective gear.