UAA Institute of Social and Economic Research graphic
As the Alaska commercial salmon fishery, once a mainstay of the 49th state economy, trundles along bound by decades-old rules designed to maximize inefficiency, the world keeps moving forward in the name of efficiency.
Researchers at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research say they have now found ways to use CRISPR gene-editing to create sterile salmon, and believe they might be on the verge of being able to genetically modify salmon to help protect them from sea lice.
Farmed salmon escaping net pens to possibly breed with wild salmon, along with lice infestations, have been two of the biggest problems facing farmers, and a focal point for those critical of salmon farming.
In Scotland, salmon farmers have faced protests from environmentalists who think chemicals used to treat the fish to protect them from lice are polluting surrounding waters.
In Canada, where salmon returns have been going down for decades while they are going the opposite direction in Alaska, Alexandra Morton – a scientifically trained, long-time critic of open-net pen farms – has charged that young, wild fish swimming past farms on their way to sea are being attacked by lice and because of this their ocean survival suffers.
Earlier this year, she provided The Narwhal, a publication based in Victoria, British Columbia (B.C.), with government documents indicating that sea-lice counts at a Cermaq salmon farm “in Clayoquot Sound were roughly five times the legal limit during a critical window for out-migrating wild salmon.”
Escaping salmon, meanwhile, have been a concern almost everywhere salmon are farmed except in Alaska where the farmers, who prefer to call themselves “ranchers,” largely forego net-pens and turn their young fish loose into the ocean to grow.
They then hope the fish return.
Returns to date have largely been good, though there have been disappointments from time to time. Overall, however, Alaska salmon ranching has been hugely successful. Hatcheries have driven a bonanza in Prince William Sound southeast of Anchorage, the state’s largest city.
“Before the program was initiated in 1974, pink salmon catches were very low, averaging 3 million fish per year between 1951 and 1979,” a pair of state fisheries biologists observed at the turn of the century.
No-net farming has drawn relatively little criticism compared to net-pen farming. The main criticism has come from those who fear the hatcheries are helping to drive an overabundance of smallish pink salmon, the shortest lived of the six salmon species, now taking over the North Pacific.
Fear of farmed fish
Net-pen farmers, on the other hand, have often run into firestorms of opposition despite the fact that on the West Coast at least, ecaping Atlantic salmon have shown little success in trying to breed with their Pacific cousins and none whatsoever at taking over wild salmon habitat to produce feral runs of their species.
The Norwegians, the world leaders in the production of farmed Atlantic salmon, can only wish they were so lucky. They are fighting a plague of Pacific pink salmon that began with an Eastern Russia stocking project on the Kola Peninsula in 1956.
By the 1960s, straying pinks were showing up in Norway, but it wasn’t until the late 2010s that the population began to explode apparently thanks to a warming ocean. Norway nows consider pinks a dangerous invasive species and has been trying to wipe them out.
There have been no reports of Atlantic salmon grabbing a foothold anywhere around Puget Sound in the wake of a high-profile escape of about a quarter-million of those fish there in 2017 after a poorly built salmon farm in the San Juan Islands broke apart.
The disaster at a Cooke Aquaculture farm killed the salmon farming business in Washington state. It is to be phased out by 2025 in the wake of a 2018 decision by the state government to follow the lead of Alaska, which banned net-pen farming at the start of the 1990s.
The wishful thinking turned out to be wrong, and Alaska’s market share of salmon has been shrinking ever since.
The state looks on track to supply about 7 percent of the world’s supply of salmon this year. Norway – a smallish, Scandinavian country that drove the global bloom in farmed salmon – now annually outproduces Alaska, but the Norwegians are well aware of the criticisms environmentalists have levied against net-pen farms.
“Escapes and salmon lice are currently the two major sustainability challenges for salmon farming,” the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research admitted. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) put the issue more bluntly:
To date, attempts to solve those problems have largely focused on land-based farms using recirculated water to grow fish in sterile tanks where their waste is sometimes collected to fertilize neighboring greenhouses and on experimental “closed containment” farming systems.
But breakthroughs in the genetic manipulation of farmed salmon could shift more of a focus back on net pens. NTNU called gene manipulation a possible “game-changer in salmon farming” as was hybridization in traditional agriculture. This news technology could be poised to spark a tech war between the growing number of land-based farms employing recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) and traditional, open-ocean net pen farms.
Markets settle such battles by awarding bigger profits to whoever finds the most economically efficient way to produce the product. Alaska is, at this time, the world’s most inefficient producer of salmon.
Seasonality
Alaska production is highly seasonal. It requires the annual importation of large numbers of migrant workers to staff processing plants that sit idle in the winter. It is risky for processors in that harvests are unpredictable, leaving them to worry about hiring too many workers who then sit idle or hiring too few and being forced to turn away fishermen for lack of processing capacity.
But that’s not all.
The fish arrive at the processing plant in surges, which makes quality control difficult, and must be frozen or canned both because wild fish harbor parasites and because the flood of them is more than the fresh-fish market, which provides the premium price, can absorb. Freezing and canning are also energy-intensive operations which require yet more fuel.
All of these production costs end up reflected in the prices paid the state’s commercial fishermen for their catch.
Norwegian farmed salmon are now trading at about $4 per pound, but it’s hard to make direct comparisons between Norway’s farmers, who work year-round with nearby processors who might be part of the same company, and Alaska fishermen who are independent businessmen dealing with processors who run costly seasonal operations in the north.
The costs of those operations trickle through to consumers as well as reducing the earnings of fishermen.
Farmed Atlantic salmon filets were selling for $9.99 at the King Soopers in Denver on Friday. The Alaska competition – “wild-caught sockeye, previously frozen” – was $5 per pound more expensive despite the low prices paid Alaska fishermen for their catch.
Alaska sockeye hit its price peak at the $2.37 per pound paid fishermen in 1988, according to Fish and Game. The U.S. inflation calculator says $2.37 in 1988 equals $5.93 in value today. Alaska commercial fishermen will be lucky if the statewide price ever hits $2 again although there are bright spots where market niches have been established.
Copper River sockeye, which is marketed as if it were a fine wine, brought fishermen $2.56 per pound last year, according to Fish and Game data. But even that is a long way from the $5.93 per pound equivalent in the heyday of Alaska commercial salmon fishing.
Those days are simply over due to international competition. This is what competition does. It drives down prices. And Alaska has now a lot of competition in the salmon marketplace and ever more appears on the way in a world where it is never wise to bet against tech because tech is what drives the human species.
.
Jesus H. Christ.
The historical average of pink salmon harvests is not 3,000,000 fish.
You have Cherry picked your data. During the 1940’s harvests in excess of 80,000,000 pink salmon were not unheard of.
All salmon, including pink salmon were over-fished and populations declined continuously until 1975 when the state implemented escapement goals and severely restrained harvests until escapement goals were assured.
You cherry picked your numbers from this down cycle which DOES NOT REPRESENT THE NATURAL PINK SALMON PRODUCTION IN ALASKA.
Additionally Prince William Sound, Kodiak, and the Alaskan Peninsula were hit with a massive earthquake and tsunami in 1964 which blocked many pink salmon from reading their spawning grounds for 15 years. You included these years in your erroneous statement of 3 million historical pink salmon harvest in Alaska.
Western Alaska every 500 years or so have these massive earthquakes and the land always rises causing up to 12 foot waterfalls at the mouths of the small creeks that pink and Coho salmon prefer to spawn in. Often these waterfalls are impassable to pink salmon and the runs die off until water naturally erodes these waterfalls. Then the miracle happens. Pink salmon which were unpacked, stray into these creeks, which do not have crowded spawning grounds. These straps are a biological blessing and not the curse you make them out to be. Mother Nature designed pink salmon to stray. Human biologists may not know why, but Mother Nature does.
Your statement “a fifteen fold increase over historical harvests” is clearly misleading and erroneous.
Doug: You need to read more carefully. The 3 million was a reference to PWS.
“Hatcheries have driven a bonanza in Prince William Sound southeast of Anchorage, the state’s largest city.
‘Before the program was initiated in 1974, pink salmon catches were very low, averaging 3 million fish per year between 1951 and 1979,’ a pair of state fisheries biologists observed at the turn of the century.”
That is a fact. You’re 80M is statewide catches, not PWS catches.
And pink salmon don’t “die off” because of newly created waterfalls in this state. Intertidal spawning is common all over the place. If they can find somewhere freshwater is running through the beach gravel, they will spawn.
In Alaska, “many of these streams are short with steep gradients that provide few or no accessible spawning areas above the high-tide level. As a consequence the pink salmon, which spawn in large numbers in streams of the latter type, are limited to riffles within the intertidal zone, i. e., the stream sections between the lower low-tide and higher high-tide levels. Many of the nests made in the
gravels of the intertidal zone are covered with salt water for a substantial part of the fall and winter incubation period.”
This is a long known and well documented fact. You can read all about it in this 1954 report: https://arc.lib.montana.edu/robert-behnke/objects/2491-21-19.pdf
But it’s kind of irrelevant, too, given that you missed the main point of the story.
I did not see that I apologize. Having said this though you should not have include the 15 years where the pink salmon returns were destroyed by the 1964 earthquake.