
An aerial view of the Main Bay hatchery operated by the private Prince William Sound Aquaculture Association. Though net-pen farming of salmon is technically banned in Alaska, private hatcheries are allowed to rear the fish in pens when fattening them up for release. Main Bay is one of the few hatcheries producing sockeye salmon in the state/Google map
A news analysis
With advocates for Alaska salmon hatcheries once again singing their praises, the time has come to revisit what was promised when the now massive 49th state hatchery program was begun and what has actually been delivered.
There is no denying Alaska hatcheries provide big benefits for a small number of salmon processors, nearly all of them Seattle-based, and a larger, but still small, collection of Alaska seiners. But Alaska Department of Fish and Game records show the number of fish produced for other fisheries – including commercial gillnet and troll fisheries – comes nowhere close to meeting the original promise of what hatcheries would deliver.
Here is the promise as recorded by Fish and Game in 1983 when Alaska’s open-ocean farming of the sea was just beginning:
Over the course of the last 39 years, the goal has been met once for coho, which is way better than the performance on the goals for chum, sockeye, and Chinook, the most valuable and desired of Alaska salmon. Those goals have never been met.
But the goal has been hugely exceeded for pink salmon, the least valuable and least desired of Alaska salmon, and a species that in the view of some scientists is now so plentiful in the North Pacific Ocean that it is by sheer numbers affecting the size and number of other salmon species.
The state hatchery plan called for the state’s free-range salmon farms, or ranching operations as advocates prefer to call these businesses, to produce 16.2 million pink salmon per year. They have produced far more.
The 2021 harvest was three times that, and 2021 was nowhere near a record year for hatchery pinks.
In 2013, according to Fish and Game, Alaska hatcheries produced 91.79 million pinks – more than five and half times the original goal. Salmon processors, or at least those in that business who make their money off pinks, and commercial fishermen, or at least the minority of commercial fishermen who make their livings on the backs of pinks, couldn’t have asked for more.
Humpies everywhere
Pinks, or “humpies” as they are more often called in the 49th state, are “Alaska’s most hated fish,” according to YouTuber Emily Reidel from Homer, but that’s an overstatement.
The fastest growing but smallest of the Pacific salmon, humpies have long been a mainstay of the canned salmon industry in the north, and though they aren’t considered the best salmon to toss on the grill, they aren’t exactly hated.
Sometimes detested might be a better description, given that they return, especially in odd-numbered years, in such numbers that they can get in the way of anglers, dipnetters, and even commercial fishermen targeting sockeye, coho (silver) and Chinook salmon.
The latter are what Alaskans call kings. They are the biggest and most prized salmon in the state. Were hatcheries producing kings as Alaskans were promised in 1983, the production of 300,000 per year would have exceeded last year’s commercial catch of 265,000 of the big fish by 35,000, and come up just short of the combined commercial and sport catch of about 350,000.
The catch by anglers is now down to slightly less than 85,000 kings per year. That’s less than 75 percent of the average catch of about 114,000 kings per year from 1985 to 1990 when the state hatchery program was still in its infancy.
Because of the state’s success in creating a manmade, hatchery-driven king salmon fishery in Ship Creek in downtown Anchorage, a lot of 49th-state anglers live under the illusion that hatcheries are a boon for sport fishermen. The data indicates otherwise.
The fewer than 1,500 hatchery kings caught in Ship Creek in the best of years are a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of thousands of kings now missing from other fisheries and the unfulfilled state promise of producing 300,000 per year on top of natural, wild production.
As hatchery production has gone up and up and up in Alaska, the reality is that sport and commercial catches of Chinook have gone steadily down. The numbers look even worse in a historical context than they do in a modern context.
Back in the bad, old 1970s when Alaska salmon production was considered horribly depressed, the average annual commercial catch of Chinook was 569,000 kings per year, according to state Fish and Game data. The commercial catch alone was then nearly 40 percent bigger than the combined sport and commercial catch today, and there was then almost no hatchery production in Alaska.
Hard times
The salmon crash of the 1970s is what led 49th state voters to approve an amendment to the Alaska Constitution that allowed for the creation of limited entry in the commercial fishing business, and to their willingness to support spending almost $75 million (about $263 million in today’s dollars) to build salmon hatcheries in that decade.
The fishing permits were handed out free to experienced fishermen and became their personal property to hold or sell.
The limited entry program has proven a bonanza for some fishermen who made a lot of money when salmon prices were high in the 1980s and then sold their permits at prices that allowed them to comfortably retire. The hatchery program, which the state likewise established to benefit the commercial fishery, proved to be a gold mine for an even more limited number of commercial fishermen.
Prince William Sound seiners were the biggest winners. Thanks to massive salmon production in the Sound, their harvests grew from millions of pinks per year to tens of millions of pinks per year. Unfortunately, pinks are so low in value that most other commercial fishermen ignore them.
For a commercial gillnetter, who must pluck fish from a net rather than brail them into the hold of a boat, it makes a lot more sense to focus on sockeye salmon worth an average $1.77 per pound last year than pink salmon worth an average 42 cents, according to state Fish and Game documents.
Not only are humpies worth less than a quarter of sockeyes on average, they are about half the weight, meaning that just to get the same poundage of fish a fisherman has to spend twice as much effort yanking gilled salmon out of monofilament mesh.
Twice the work for a quarter of the value is not a good business model.
The situation is, however, different for seiners who surround the fish with a huge net, capture them in it, and then dump the whole load into their boat’s hold. They have been the big beneficiary of the hatcheries which, as the University of Alaska’s Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) has noted, were “transferred to private non-profit regional aquaculture associations” controlled by commercial fishermen after the state decided it couldn’t afford the high cost of operating hatcheries.
To help alter the economic situation for the new operators, according to ISER, “the s state supported hatchery development by loaning money to private non-profit organizations for hatchery construction and operations,” subsidized hatcheries to the tune of $5 million to $9 million per year to produce salmon for sport fisheries, and most importantly allowed them to engage in so-called “cost-recovery” fishing to finance their operating costs.
According to Fish and Game, the average pink caught in 2021 weighed three pounds. At that weight and with pinks going for 42 cents a pound, 8 million of them would be worth something around $10 million. With chums at an average of 6.3 pounds and 92 cents per pound, 2.3 million of them would be worth about $13 million.
In its 2021 Alaska Salmon Fisheries Enhancement Annual Report, Fish and Game is honest about what the hatchery program ha become in Alaska – a profit-making scheme for some commercial fishermen and processors.
“Some salmon species are more economical to rear,” the report says. “Pink salmon are the most economical to rear because they have a short rearing time – one winter in the hatchery – and have the shortest life cycle of Pacific salmon, two years.
“This means pink salmon provide a quick return on investment and provide the highest economic return for the production costs. Chum salmon have the same rearing time in the hatchery but have a longer life cycle (three to four years); therefore, they have a longer return on investment. Pink and chum salmon are the bulk of Alaska hatchery production because they have the highest return on investment for the cost of production.”
Chinook, sockeye and coho are harder and more costly to rear, and thus very few of them are produced. And the promises made to Alaskans?
Whether that is a problem or not has caused much debate, but what is clear is that Alaskans have not gotten what they were promised when the Alaska hatchery program began in the 1980s. State fishery managers have instead allowed the hatcheries to largely paint the production pink.
Interesting Anchorage-Centric point of view. There are many fact left out of this article specifically contributions to Ocean Fisheries of SE and Sockeye released into the Copper River Basin.
It’s got nothing to do with Anchorage. It’s a simple recounting of what was promised and what was delivered. The low-budget sockeye farming in the Copper River basin started off with amazing success. In 1993, Ken Roberson, who started that Gulkana operation, estimated it was producing more than $5 worth of sockeye for every dollar it cost.
It was a huge success story. Possibly the state’s biggest hatchery success story. Back in the day, it was sometimes providing 20 percent or more of the Copper River harvest. Now?
Well, let ADF&G take it away: “The number of wild sockeye salmon in the Copper River District commercial
harvest was 572,000, or 97% of the total. Gulkana Hatchery commercial harvest was the third lowest in the last
20 years, contributing 16,400 sockeye salmon, or 2% of the total commercial harvest.” http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/static/applications/dcfnewsrelease/1442856406.pdf
What was once looked to be a gold mine has turned into something far less. But the pink farming is going gang busters.
Yet another topic for the ConCon to consider, should it pass tomorrow. Cheers –
I don’t know much about how we got here, and why. I can refer only to a subjective feeling of a small screw in a big system. In the last 20 years I saw the change from a nonprofit organizations who truly believes they are helping the communities they are in, to a different kind of animal where the communities are a weight around your neck. The nonprofit part is no more, and most of the revenue being collected leaves the state before the fleet even manages to get home.
“Limited Entry Permits” are not permits. Rather, they are exclusive franchises on resources owned by the citizens of Alaska, given exclusively to a few who identified as legacy players in an industry formerly open to all. This exclusive franchise system was designed and promulgated by politicians who so happened to be fishermen themselves (Hammond, Tillion, etal). Of course, rather than simply allowing existing players the right to continue operating for the remainder of their lives, their franchises can be sold. Make no mistake, limited entry permits are not government licenses; rather they are privately-held franchises on public resources. They are an abomination upon the vast majority of Alaskans locked-out of a profitable enterprise. Imagine if the state only allowed previous permittees to hunt moose; and, if those permittees could sell them to the highest bidder. This is what we have for commercial fisheries. Those of us without limited entry permits are second-class citizens.
Yep, good time for the legislature to rethink their statutes on hatcheries. While they’re at it they should do the same thing about considering repealing the ban on fish traps.
Nothing more sustainable than a well managed salmon stream with a fish trap at the head of it. Reduce the carbon footprint of the drift fleet for sure.
I admit to being a little surprised the carbon footprint issue of our salmon fisheries has never become an issue with one of the environmental NGOs. By regulation, we’ve specifically shaped fisheries to burn way more fuel than necessary to harvest the fish. And just think, there was a time when Bristol Bay was fished with little use of fossil fuels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtOxmlleV5I
The climate footprint report done for the pollock trawlers, if it can be believed, claims “the mean fuel use intensity for catching activities across sectors is 16.7 gallons per metric ton of catch; note that this includes fuel used to process fish aboard Catcher-processors, and therefore it overstates the amount of fuel used for catching only. According to Parker and Tyedmers (2014), the median fuel use intensity of global fishery records since 1990 was 639 litres (168.8 gallons) per metric ton of catch.”
At last year’s average sockeye weight of 5 pounds in Upper Cook Inlet, it would take about 440 of them to make a metric tonne. I doubt anyone brought that haul home on 16.7 gallons, even on the best day. ADF&G this year reported about 3,400 landings by drifters to harvest 900,000 sockeye, which works out to about 265 fish per delivery on average. So figure a trip and two-thirds to land a tonne of sockeye.
According to some data the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council pulled together, UCI drifters are burning about 156 gallons per day on average during 18-hour district wide openings. https://meetings.npfmc.org/CommentReview/DownloadFile?p=4fd28a19-956e-4c10-a953-c89aa3414e9c.pdf&fileName=Upper_Cook_Inlet_Drift_Gillnet_Vessel_Costs.pdf
So figure 156 gallons for one opening and two-thirds of that, 103 gallons, to get the rest of the sockeye to make a tonne, and you’re looking at about 259 gallons per tonne of fish. Be interesting to see the numbers for the Bay.
Who in Hell needs 25 million chum salmon?
Think “keta,” not chum, Reggie. There’s an interesting backstory to this part of the hatchery business. They largely stole the Yukon River chum/keta fishery by undercutting prices with hatchery fish.
There’s also a story there in the power of advertising. What we old-time Alaskans know as chum/dog salmon is now keta retailing frozen today at Target here in Anchorage for about $15 per pound: https://www.target.com/p/alaska-keta-salmon-skinless-fillets-frozen-24oz-good-38-gather-8482/-/A-14673133
“Think “keta,” not chum……..”
Well, there’s another failed Alaska salmon marketing scheme. They never learn.
Chum/Keta is all about marketing. Same thing happened with the Patagonian Toothfish. That name doesn’t sound appetizing on a menu, but Chilean Sea Bass sure does.