Whole in the Water
Well-Known Member
https://thenarwhal.ca/bc-salmon-farming-transition/?mc_cid=a70cd9ca0e&mc_eid=40977b7a71
Fish out of water: How B.C.’s salmon farmers fell behind the curve of sustainable land-based aquaculture
Public and political pressure to remove open net pens from the province’s coastal waters has grown steadily in recent years with farms now being forced out of wild salmon migratory routes. So, as terrestrial fish farming takes off globally, why hasn’t the industry been more receptive to rearing salmon on land?
Sarah Cox Dec 28, 2020 18 min read This is the third part of The Narwhal’s three-part series on the future of sustainable salmon.
Eric Hobson, a Calgary-based businessman with family roots in British Columbia, used to eagerly await Vancouver Island fishing trips with his father and brother. Salmon were plentiful, and he loved to catch coho and spring, grilling them fresh on the barbeque with a spatter of pepper and salt. But then gradually in the 1990s, everything changed.
“We used to fish for salmon in Cowichan Bay, off Vancouver Island, and then there were no salmon left in Cowichan Bay,” recalls Hobson, whose parents and grandparents were from Victoria. “And then we’d fish from an island on the inside around Parksville. And the fish started to disappear from there, so we moved to the west side. And the fish got less and less plentiful, and smaller and smaller.”
Once he had money and time, Hobson created the SOS Marine Conservation Foundation to try to figure out why wild salmon populations were in such steep decline. (The foundation later merged with the science-based charity Watershed Watch Salmon Society.)
“People that I fish with had told me that wherever the salmon farms go, the wild salmon perish,” says Hobson, who worked in the energy pipeline business as an electrical engineer, also co-founding an energy market trading company, a telecommunications company and a multi-media company.
He flew to Gilford Island in the Broughton Archipelago on B.C.’s central coast, the home of biologist and wild salmon advocate Alexandra Morton. It was there Morton offered to take him out in her boat to count sea lice on smolts around the salmon farms tucked into bays in the archipelago, a major migration route for juvenile salmon heading to sea.
“There were millions of smolts in these bays during the out-migration to the sea, and now we had trouble finding two dozen fish,” Hobson says in a telephone interview.
“And the two dozen we found were covered with lice and were in various stages of dying. That really drove the problem home to me. When you have an open [net pen] system like that, it’s a breeding ground for parasites and pathogens. You have unprotected juveniles leaving the rivers, and the farms are located right on their migration paths.”
Hobson promptly formed another group — the SOS (Save our Salmon) Solutions Advisory Committee — to seek ways to mitigate any damage that fish farms were having on wild salmon populations.
“It became pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that the only way you could solve the problem once and for all was to put a solid wall up between the wild fish and the farmed fish. And so we started the whole process of developing the land-based closed-containment business in British Columbia.”
Kuterra, the first commercial sized land-based salmon farming facility in North America, was constructed one kilometre from the ocean in Port McNeill on northern Vancouver Island, after the SOS Marine Conservation Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding with the ‘Namgis First Nation. Designed and built by a Nanaimo company — and funded by the ‘Namgis First Nation, the federal and provincial governments and philanthropic individuals and organizations — the facility produced its first full-sized salmon for market consumption in April 2014.
Owned by the ‘Namgis First Nation, Kuterra harvested about 90,000 Atlantic salmon a year, which were sold in Safeway grocery stores and served for dinner in upscale restaurants such as Yew Seafood in Vancouver’s Four Seasons Hotel.
“If you balance swimming speed with the right feeding regime you get this well-exercised fish that is well muscled but still has a fairly high fat content,” Hobson says. “They’ve got a very, very nice mild taste and flaky texture. It’s absolutely delicious.”
Fish out of water: How B.C.’s salmon farmers fell behind the curve of sustainable land-based aquaculture
Public and political pressure to remove open net pens from the province’s coastal waters has grown steadily in recent years with farms now being forced out of wild salmon migratory routes. So, as terrestrial fish farming takes off globally, why hasn’t the industry been more receptive to rearing salmon on land?
Sarah Cox Dec 28, 2020 18 min read This is the third part of The Narwhal’s three-part series on the future of sustainable salmon.
Eric Hobson, a Calgary-based businessman with family roots in British Columbia, used to eagerly await Vancouver Island fishing trips with his father and brother. Salmon were plentiful, and he loved to catch coho and spring, grilling them fresh on the barbeque with a spatter of pepper and salt. But then gradually in the 1990s, everything changed.
“We used to fish for salmon in Cowichan Bay, off Vancouver Island, and then there were no salmon left in Cowichan Bay,” recalls Hobson, whose parents and grandparents were from Victoria. “And then we’d fish from an island on the inside around Parksville. And the fish started to disappear from there, so we moved to the west side. And the fish got less and less plentiful, and smaller and smaller.”
Once he had money and time, Hobson created the SOS Marine Conservation Foundation to try to figure out why wild salmon populations were in such steep decline. (The foundation later merged with the science-based charity Watershed Watch Salmon Society.)
“People that I fish with had told me that wherever the salmon farms go, the wild salmon perish,” says Hobson, who worked in the energy pipeline business as an electrical engineer, also co-founding an energy market trading company, a telecommunications company and a multi-media company.
He flew to Gilford Island in the Broughton Archipelago on B.C.’s central coast, the home of biologist and wild salmon advocate Alexandra Morton. It was there Morton offered to take him out in her boat to count sea lice on smolts around the salmon farms tucked into bays in the archipelago, a major migration route for juvenile salmon heading to sea.
“There were millions of smolts in these bays during the out-migration to the sea, and now we had trouble finding two dozen fish,” Hobson says in a telephone interview.
“And the two dozen we found were covered with lice and were in various stages of dying. That really drove the problem home to me. When you have an open [net pen] system like that, it’s a breeding ground for parasites and pathogens. You have unprotected juveniles leaving the rivers, and the farms are located right on their migration paths.”
Hobson promptly formed another group — the SOS (Save our Salmon) Solutions Advisory Committee — to seek ways to mitigate any damage that fish farms were having on wild salmon populations.
“It became pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that the only way you could solve the problem once and for all was to put a solid wall up between the wild fish and the farmed fish. And so we started the whole process of developing the land-based closed-containment business in British Columbia.”
Kuterra, the first commercial sized land-based salmon farming facility in North America, was constructed one kilometre from the ocean in Port McNeill on northern Vancouver Island, after the SOS Marine Conservation Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding with the ‘Namgis First Nation. Designed and built by a Nanaimo company — and funded by the ‘Namgis First Nation, the federal and provincial governments and philanthropic individuals and organizations — the facility produced its first full-sized salmon for market consumption in April 2014.
Owned by the ‘Namgis First Nation, Kuterra harvested about 90,000 Atlantic salmon a year, which were sold in Safeway grocery stores and served for dinner in upscale restaurants such as Yew Seafood in Vancouver’s Four Seasons Hotel.
“If you balance swimming speed with the right feeding regime you get this well-exercised fish that is well muscled but still has a fairly high fat content,” Hobson says. “They’ve got a very, very nice mild taste and flaky texture. It’s absolutely delicious.”