Today in the global fishing business: The two biggest, young stars in Alaska’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race hookup with a Norwegian sponsor which built its business on producing food for fish farms, and an “eco-friendly” farmed salmon from New Zealand is labeled the “Wagyu beef of the seafood world.”
Which to chew on first?
How about that “Ōra king salmon from New Zealand…rapidly becoming a chef’s favorite,” according to Bloomberg, which headlined Ōra as the aforementioned Wagyu.
This is a salmon aimed squarely at the premium, branded market that was the last stronghold of Alaska’s most valuable wild salmon. It also happens to be a salmon with a big market advantage. Customers don’t have to wait patiently for the opening of a May fishing season as is the case with Alaska’s best-known salmonid – Copper River king.
The fish were flown back to Alaska’s mothership amid the usual annual fanfare featuring what has “become a recent KIRO 7 custom in the last few years, our reporter, this year Rob Munoz, kiss(ing) the first king salmon off the plane.”
But why wait for what KIRO billed as “a culinary and cultural celebration (that) didn’t even exist just a few decades ago” if you can order a comparable product when and where you want if, of course, you can afford it.
“For 25 years New Zealand King Salmon Co. has been breeding Ōra King salmon from stock first imported from California in the 1900s,” wrote Bloomberg’s Kate Krader. “The result is an especially fatty fish with strikingly marbled meat and a sumptuous melt-in-your-mouth texture, like Wagyu beef of the ocean. Chefs compare it to the luxuriousness of raw fatty tuna. The cost is at least twice the price of commodity Atlantic farmed salmon. It’s available in specialty food stores where it costs $30 a pound….”
It is cheaper than wild Alaska king by about $4 a pound and regularly available.
“TAK Room’s chef de cuisine Jarrod Huth chose the salmon because he can get it all year, unlike wild salmon, which is seasonal and available for less than six months,” wrote Krader in a story that reads more like “paid content” than news:
Pesticide-free “Ōra King has scored a “best choice” from the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch….
“Playing into the breed’s richness and clean taste is the pristine water it’s raised in. Ōra King eggs are hatched in the South Island’s Takaka Valley in Golden Bay, refreshed with water from Te Waikoropupu Springs, some of the clearest in the world…. (raised) sea farm pens in Marlborough Sounds, where there’s a 98% ratio of water to fish. The roominess (some farms pack up to 50,000 fish in two acres of water) cuts down on waste, sea lice, parasites, and the need for chemicals and antibiotics that have given aquaculture a bad name—and its products an inferior flavor.”
That last line reflects the pitch fans and backers of Alaska wild fish have been trying to spin for decades now in an effort to maintain a niche in the market as the world’s “premium” salmon. The idea took a beating when Alaska fish lost out to farmed fish in a blind taste test among top seafood chefs in the nation’s capital.
The Wagyu beef title hung on a Kiwi farmed fish isn’t going to help with the Alaska industry already facing a market problem because of the lack of a year-round supply of fresh fish, as Krader notes and, in the case of kings (or Chinook), a limited volume of product.
Commercial fishing remains a major state industry, but the Wagyu comparison only adds to the problems for Alaska salmon fishermen.
Thanks to global warming, Alaska salmon harvests skyrocketed in the 2010s but can’t begin to match farmed production. Three of every four salmon sold in the world today are farmed and Norway, the world leader in salmon farming, is looking to increase it’s production five to sixfold in the 30 years.
Farmed salmon is already a $5.4 billion per business, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Wild fish are comparatively small potatoes.
In 2017 – a monster year for Alaska with a catch of more than 224 million fish, the third-highest in state history – wild-caught salmon in the U.S. generated total revenues of $688 million, according to U.S. Commerce Department report.
Salmon producers have generated total shareholder returns of 45 to 60 percent since 2012, The Financial Times has reported, which might help explain why the Alaska Permanent Fund has invested significantly in farmed salmon despite a general Alaska contempt for salmon raised in pens.
Farming mushers
Aquaculture has become big business, which makes it only natural that an aquaculture feed supplier with the money available to sponsor mushers in the niche sport of sled-dog racing and a desire to sell “specialty animal nutrition products” to upscale pet owners is sponsoring a couple of the Iditarod’s most successful.
Qrill is a subsidiary of Aker Biomarine – a $155 million dollar per year, image-conscious, Norwegian company with four massive trawlers and two support ships mining the Antarctic Sea for krill, a small, shrimp-like crustacean. Oslo-based, the company began dragging for krill in 2003 to sell as aquaculture and agriculture feed.
It has since expanded operations, especially sales of krill oil, into the supplements market for humans and pets.
The company has taken great pride in modifying its operations to create “eco-friendly” netting. Traditional trawls, the company says, catch non-target species “such as fish and seals. In the Antarctic’s fragile marine eco-system, (this) unwanted by-catch represents a significant challenge.”
To go “eco-friendly,” Aker turned to a “submerged trawl module (that) minimizes by-catches.” The move has helped shine the companies eco-friendly image.
After being criticized by Greenpeace last year for fishing near penguin breeding areas, Aker agreed to create large buffer areas closed to krill trawling. So far the company has led an industry effort to find peace with environmental activists.
Aker now bills its fullscale entry into the mushing scene as “a journey to investigate the sport of dog mushing. The brand had a fantastic experience with a pilot sponsorship over the last years with Sigrid Ekran, Thomas Wærner and Joar Ulsom, helping to improve their dogs’ overall endurance and well-being.”
It is already pushing krill supplementation as the next big thing in the sport.
“In a study with five weeks of 8 percent krill meal inclusion in diets for Alaskan Huskies prior to the 2016 Iditarod dogsled race – a thousand mile endurance exercise known to induce muscle damage and inflammation – showed that the 40 percent increase of the Omega-3 Index in the krill group decreased muscle damage and inflammation when compared to the control group,” it says.
“Now, QRILL Pet wants to take the sponsorship to the next level and thrive further research to improve the health and well-being of sled dogs, while building the sport and reaching more awareness globally.”
The company’s media would indicate it hopes to supercharge sled-dog racing the way it claims to have boosted salmon farming.
Norway is the world leader in farmed salmon. It last year exported about 760,000 tons of the fish. It’s stable farm production annually produces two to three times the volume of Alaska’s seasonal, hatchery-boosted, wild-caught fishery, and a story on the Aker website notes that “in Norway there is ambition to grow aquaculture to a five or six fold increase by 2050. This growth clearly needs to be kept healthy and sustainable for the fish, the human consumer and the capacity of our oceans in terms of marine feed ingredients.”
The ever-increasing production of farmed salmon in Norway, Chile, Scotland and elsewhere has effectively capped prices for wild-caught Alaska salmon.
“Given the rapid growth of farmed salmon supply to the U.S., European Union and Japanese fresh and frozen markets, and the high share of farmed salmon in total
supply to each of these markets…it seems reasonable to expect that growth in farmed salmon supply would have had a negative effect on wild salmon prices in all three of these markets,” the University of Alaska’s Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) concluded years ago.
The report found the canned salmon market the bright spot for Alaska “given the very small contribution of farmed salmon to world canned salmon supply,” but cautioned that “canned markets may have been indirectly affected by farmed salmon. By depressing markets for fresh and frozen salmon, farmed salmon may have caused wild salmon
producers to can a relatively larger share of wild catches, leading to greater supply of canned salmon and lower canned salmon prices than would otherwise have occurred.”
Salmon farming was banned in Alaska in 1990 in the belief the move would protect the existing industry from competition. The ban has not worked.
Competition has instead skyrocketed, and salmon farmers have taken over the market thanks to technological breakthroughs.
The company nows wants to bring innovation to the Iditarod.
The company believes a performance boost could come from modifying levels of choline, an essential nutrient necessary for maintaining metabolic functions.
“…In a long-lasting race setting…a drop in plasma choline is expected as seen in humans,” Lena Burri, director of research and development of animal health and nutrition for Aker said. “As choline is important for muscle function and nerve transmission, a decline might negatively affect the performance of these dogs.
Along with experiments with dogs, the company has been working with the Pure Science Triathlon team and Isklar Norseman Xtreme Triathlon to study Omega-3 fatty acids in athletes. Those studies found omega-3s levels that drop during high-intensity training could be reversed with high doses of krill oil thus speeding recovery times and helping to restore immune function known to decline in hard-working athletes.
The company also claimed athletes with high omega-3 indexes were 48 minutes faster on average on the Norseman triathlon bike leg than athletes with low omega-3 indexes, although the finding might be meaningless given the best indicator of performance differences between the athletes in that race was “exercise volume.”
As famed doper Lance Armstrong, the disgraced Tour de France cyclist, has noted, there are no magic bullets in the form of diets, supplements or even dope that will make a winning athlete out of a couch potato. Athletes, canine or human, still need to put in the time and do the work to become winners.
The benefits from tweaking or supplementing diets – or doping – come from allowing athletes to accumulate more training without suffering from injury or overtraining. It’s why professional athletes are constantly in search of the hot new diet or supplement, or dope.
The first two make the athletic community a prime target for supplement manufacturers in a global sports nutrition market now reported to be worth $44 billion per year, and many pet owners appear to be suckers for anything they think will make Fido healthier.
Internet has become a toxic mess of tangential and irrelevant BS. I wonder if the illogical thinking is a result of social media or it was present already in some form and was encouraged to develop here, or is it convergence?
Astaxanthin and omega 3 fatty acids are good!
https://everythingiknowaboutthatilearnedfrommysleddogs.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/astaxanthin-is-good-for-asta/
Steve, please explain how your thread from commercial fish-farming to sexual assault works.
Pretty simple for me, I like eating fish, especially when I’m the one who caught them. I probably eat fish caught locally 3 to 4 times a week. Ummmm good. 🙂
Craig,
What about the former Iditarod musher currently charged with Rape?
No interest in that story?
“Anna Sattler’s rape kit sat untested since 2001 as Alaska’s backlog got worse.
Now, an ex-Iditarod musher faces charges, and she’s speaking publicly about the attack for the first time.
The Alaska State Troopers on Thursday announced that rape and kidnapping charges had been filed in the case against 57-year-old Carmen D. Perzechino Jr.
A former dog musher who competed in the 2004 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, Perzechino was a longtime Sterling resident whom the U.S. Marshals Service extradited from the Philippines to face the new charges.”
(ADN)
Seems like this guy worked with Mitch Seavey’s kennel and ran sled dogs until 2009.
The crazy thing is this is the 2nd Iditarod musher charged with Rape in the last 10 years.
Several years ago it was reported :
“A Homer jury convicted a North Pole resident and former Iditarod musher Wednesday morning of raping a friend more than two years ago in Homer.
The jury took about a day to convict Jeffrey K…”
Maybe there is a pattern of animal abuse leading to human abuse or maybe these individuals are just plain sick to being with?
http://www.newsminer.com/news/local_news/former-iditarod-musher-convicted-of-rape/article_7dd25406-1600-11e3-b7ea-001a4bcf6878.html
Just because Alaska commercial fishermen decided not to compete in the global marketplace, does not mean that marketplace won’t continue to progress. Once again, protectionism in the form of the ban on fish farming in AK, has failed. The only people who failed to progress are Alaskan commercial fishermen who are about to see their businesses crushed into dust by fish farming from NZ to Chile to Scandinavia to Scotland.
Only solution is to get the commercial nets out of the water, and embrace the worldwide fish farming marketplace. The longer you wait, the farther ahead the rest of the world will be and the more difficult it will be to catch up. Somewhere along the line, you guys need to figure out how to grow the pie rather than engaging in increasingly bitter fights for a chunk of what is at best a static sized pie. And blaming your foolish economic choices on your in-state competitors for the resource (sport, personal use and subsistence) will only serve to embitter everyone in those user groups, yet another poor economic choice. Cheers –
My logic tells me this sponsorship and appearance of a big company is not about mushing. Norwegians are a brilliant resourceful culture with gritty men and women. They are not here to lift up Iditarod. They are here to market krill and change Alaska’s laws make money for their people back home . Norway has a long history with Alaska’s fishies . Statewide Our old canaries Carry their graves . Petersburg is founded by them . It’s simalar to why donlin sponsors Iditarod. They are trying to gain points with the locals and make us aware of the potential at our shores . I’m surprised they sponsor a doper like Dallas but I guess in Europe doping isn’t nearly as frowned on . Well if they change our laws and get Alaska back on track economically by diversifying our economy and allowing land based fish farms it’s a great opertunity for Alaska . Let’s see if Our poorly schooled citizens can make a smart move .