Don't say “farmed fish” – say “artisan aquaculture”!

Abstract

Not long ago, I sat down to dinner with a group of devout environmentalists. When someone asked the waiter whether the salmon being served was wild, he sheepishly shook his head, after which no one at the table ordered it. My fellow diners were well-informed: salmon farming, which has grown explosively in recent years, has been a nearly unqualified ecological disaster. Raised mostly in open-net pens in the ocean, escaped farmed salmon have spread lice and disease among wild fish and fouled the surrounding sea with excrement. Nonetheless, San Francisco business consultant and long-time futurologist Tim O'Shea thinks my colleagues asked the wrong question. Instead of asking if the salmon was farmed, he says, they should have asked how it was farmed. “I'm trying to start a movement”, says O'Shea, the founder of a new company called CleanFish, which sells a variety of what he calls sustainable wild and farmed fish to high-class restaurants, including the Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York City and The French Laundry in California's Napa Valley. O'Shea dreams of doing for fish what the Fair Trade movement is still trying to do for coffee – establish cachet based on producers' good stewardship. He didn't invent this concept: Eco-Fish, in Dover, New Hampshire, has been peddling sustainable fish since 1999. But Eco-fish has yet to sell farmed salmon, a product that truly tests the limits of the notion of sustainability. Despite all its drawbacks, farmed salmon isn't going away any time soon. Already, more than half of the salmon Americans eat is raised industrially. If reformed, the farmed fish sector has the potential to be transformed from environmental villain to do-gooder, taking pressure off threatened wild salmon stocks and becoming a worthy supply of global protein. That's a really big “if”, of course, for those familiar with the issue. But O'Shea is already crafting the sustainable farmed salmon brand, in part by giving it the label “artisan aquaculture”. He insists it's already possible to dine well and conscientiously on such fare, as long as it comes from his favorite “artisan”, Loch Duart Ltd of Scotland. “They're the antithesis of what is being reported about farmed salmon”, O'Shea says. Rare if not unique among salmon farms, Loch Duart has won both the International Standards Organization 14001 accreditation for its environmental practices and recognition under the UK's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals' campaign for farm animal welfare. Its painstaking practices have already helped it achieve such status among consumers that the company is profitable, despite charging roughly 20% more than competitors. These practices include limiting the density of the salmon it raises in sea lochs to such a degree that production is just half of what it would be under less discriminating conditions. It also rotates salmon among the lochs, much like traditional rotation in land farming, leaving each loch fallow for one full year in every three. Salmon have clearly been the victims of their own success. The tasty, healthy fish – chock-full of healthful omega-3 fatty acids and, unlike tuna, low in mercury – is now a staple for middle and upper-income consumers throughout the world. And there's no way wild-caught fish could fulfill all that demand. Moreover, wild-caught salmon is hardly an environmental boon. As University of South Carolina environmental law professor Josh Eagle explains, it reduces the number of salmon that travel upriver, limiting the food supply for wildlife, such as bears. It also pollutes, since fish leftovers, such as guts and skin, are routinely ground up and discharged into the sea. Dom Repta, a spokesman for Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, a British Columbia-based coalition of environmental and indigenous groups, scientists, and fishermen, says there's still no such thing as sustainable farmed salmon. “Loch Duart hasn't solved the problem”, he points out, primarily because the company hasn't switched to escape-proof containers, an essential element of sustainable farming. Feed is another tricky issue. Salmon are carnivores, so farmers in past years have nurtured their stock with a high-protein diet, requiring as much as 5 lb of small fish to produce 1 lb of salmon. But most salmon farmers have greatly reduced that ratio, explains O'Shea, adding that Loch Duart uses a proportion of 1.2:1 lb. Still, net protein loss will always be a justifiable concern, and O'Shea is no fan of experimenters who propose to raise their salmon on soy based feed. “You can't just take a carnivorous fish, turn it into a vegan, and expect it to taste the same”, he says. Evidently, sustainable farmed salmon is still much more a vision than reality, but stay tuned: as consumers become more educated and more demanding, positive change may soon be coming to your dinner table. Katherine Ellison