The home beehive model of fish farming/Ken Roberson, Ecotrust

Grow your own wild salmon

Wild and crazy legislators in Alaska – a state that banned net-pen fish farming in 1989 in part because of fears some of the fish might escape the pens and interfere with wild fish – now want to allow Alaskans to start their own salmon farms or what some in Alaska prefer to call “ranches.”

State Reps. Mike Cronk, Sarah Vance and George Rauscher have proposed a law that would allow “a qualified person”  to obtain a “fisheries rehabilitation permit” from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game authorizing him or her to “remove anadromous or freshwater finfish from water of the state, collect gametes and fertilize and incubate eggs taken from the fish, and place the fertilized or incubated eggs, larvae, or unfed fry in the same water of the state.”

The trio of Republican lawmakers apparently have missed the scientific discussion of how there are now record numbers of salmon in the North Pacific Ocean and how the proliferation of easy-to-ranch pinks and chums salmon might be reducing the production of salmon most desired by Alaskans – king, red and silver salmon.

Part of this appears to be due to warming Pacific waters that have left much of Alaska awash in pink and chum salmon while British Columbia, Canada, and Lower 48 states have suffered. But it appears the desire for evermore – and for the nature tampering that has defined the human species throughout its existence  – runs deep.

As for kings (Chinook), silvers (coho) and reds (sockeye), there has been a massive boom in Bristol Bay, where the sockeye face no competition from pinks and chums, while Gulf of Alaska runs have slumped. Chinook, meanwhile, are in such bad shape that the Wild Fish Conservancy has petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the fish as endangered in the 49th state.  

And yet the newly proposed legislation says the Commissioner of Fish and Game should help add more salmon to the sea by issuing permits to put salmon in  streams where “there are no established escapement goals and local stakeholders have identified a decline in the number of the species of fish, or the population of the species of fish is limited.”

Never enough

This would make just about every stream in the state eligible for a new salmon farm given that there isn’t a stream in the state where someone doesn’t remember, or claim to remember, when “this creek used to have 10 times as many salmon as it does now.”

Not to mention that the number of fish is always “limited” because the human desire for fish is unlimited. The number of desired salmon is invariably N + 1 until the salmon are packed so thick they suck all of the oxygen out of a stream and suffocate themselves.

With human demand what it is, some will always make the argument that no matter how high the production at point X, 1.5X or 2X or 3X would be better. This is written in the history of fish hatcheries in America.

“The National Fish Hatchery System was established by Congress on June 10th, 1872,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service records. “Originally, the hatchery system was created to raise food fish for commercial fisheries and to feed families.”

The federal agency now contends that “over the years, the system has evolved to meet the changing needs of conservation,” but admits that “some national fish hatcheries still raise fish for food and to support commercial fishing.”

Unlike the federal system, Alaska’s system of hatcheries – by far the biggest in the country and one of the largest in the world – never “evolved” to begin fretting about conservation. Alaska hatcheries started as an effort to support commercial fishing, have never wavered from that task, and have succeeded brilliantly in producing salmon for those commercial fishermen who make their money by killing pinks and chums.

Commercial fishermen dependent on Gulf of Alaska Chinook, coho and sockeye salmon might have paid a price, but it’s been a relatively small price. Overall, Alaska commercial salmon harvests have exploded in the hatchery era.

Fish, fish and more fish

Thanks to a combination of hatchery production, better fisheries management and warmer waters in the North Pacific Ocean, Alaska commercial salmon production went from an average annual harvest of 47.1 million per decade from 1950 to the end of the 1970s to the 122.4 million salmon harvest of the 1980s, which was just the beginning of the salmon boom which hit an average of:

• 157.5 million per year in the 1990s.
• 167.4 million per year in the 2000s.
• And 181 million per year in the 2010s.

Existing hatcheries now crank out so many pink salmon that commercial fishermen can’t catch them all and have some fishery researchers arguing that the volume of prey they consume is one of the reasons for the decades-long decline in the size and number of the Gulf of Alaska Chinook, sockeye and coho salmon with which pinks compete for food. 

Those two species now make up the bulk of the annual harvest. Seventy-six percent of last season’s harvest was comprised of pinks and chums, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Pinks and chums are the most farmed Alaska salmon for a simple reason: they are the cheapest and easiest to produce. They require none of the rearing time in freshwater needed by king, red and silver salmon.  Those fish are raised in very limited numbers because it is expensive to hold them in freshwater ponds and feed them until they grow to a size that allows them to be released into the ocean.

Legislation allowing for backyard farmers to start growing salmon in the 49th state is unlikely to increase the number of these species because of these costs.

Alaska’s private, nonprofit, commercial-fishermen-controlled hatcheries – which are allowed to harvest tens of millions of salmon each year to cover their costs in raising fish – don’t even raise many kings, reds or silvers, and in some cases where they do, they do so only because the state pays them to raise the fish for release in places where the fish support sport fisheries.

The state itself still runs two hatcheries that raise fish for rod and reel fishermen, but it largely got out of the hatchery business in 1995 when it did away with the Division of Fisheries Rehabilitation, Enhancement and Development (FRED) because state hatcheries were too costly to operate. For that reason, the state turned the FRED hatcheries that had been funded by bonds approved by Alaska voters over to private, nonprofit business associations run by commercial fishermen. 

Fish and Game was left with the responsibility of overseeing the newly privatized hatcheries, but that hasn’t always worked out so well.

Oops

As Jenny Neyman reported in the now-gone Redoubt Reporter in 2010, the Cook Inlet Regional Aquaculture Association’s “crop of bad luck” that year had  “the potential to be a recurring problem. The IHN outbreak at Trail Lakes Hatchery this summer means the Resurrection Bay net pens won’t be stocked next spring, so those fish won’t return for the cost-recovery fishery in 2013 and 2014.”

IHN is the acronym for infectious hematopoietic necrosis, a viral disease known to deform and kill salmon. The state of Alaska links it to hatchery failures to maintain a “virus-free water supply, rigorous disinfection, isolation of egg and fish lots and “containment of diseased fish. There is an effective DNA vaccine used in Canada that is also licensed in the US but has been restricted commercially due to unlikely safety concerns regarding GMO products.” 

As Neyman noted in 2010, the outbreak wasn’t “the worst (CIAA) has seen, but it comes at a particularly bad time for the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association, which operates the state-owned hatchery through contract with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.”

CIAA has struggled since its inception and is now facing blowback from the commercial fishermen on which it levies a 2 percent tax on harvests that helps – along with cost-recovery fisheries and state loans – to keep the organization afloat.

Commercial seiner Tom Buchanan in September launched a petition aimed at stopping the assessments or, as he put it, stopping CIAA from “digging me deeper into debt with more loans for worthless, often detrimental projects.

“Because the loans CIAA takes out are my responsibility to repay – yes, they really are a financial burden to me – I need to stop their continuing loan debt. At $20 million dollars IN DEBT, with no viable revenue, they need to be stopped. I’m on a mission to return control to the people who LIVE IN SEWARD and depend on our local salmon.”

Buchanan charged that “the Trail Lakes Hatchery is a disaster, destroying more fry than it supplies.”

Renegade CIAA board member Nancy Hillstrand has charged that part of the problem with CIAA and other regional aquaculture associations is a lack of Fish and Game oversight of hatchery operations.

She was this fall reprimanded by the CIAA board for pointing out that when CIAA began stocking Shell and Whiskey lakes in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough with sockeye salmon declines in returns to those lakes accelerated rather than improved.

She has since appealed to the state Board of Fisheries to find out why “once CIAA manipulations begin…the populations plummet.”

Fish and Game’s 2023 oversight management plan for the Trail Lakes Hatchery made no mention of CIAA involvement in sockeye declines in the two lakes but did report that “disease screening (has now) revealed the presence of two microsporidian parasites which may be negatively impacting the sockeye salmon population at Shell Lake.”

The plan did not say where those parasites came from, but did add that “in 2014, 80,000 sockeye salmon smolt were released into Shell Lake as part of (a) rehabilitation effort. (And) in 2018, 46,000 smolt were stocked into Shell Lake.”

Administrative issues

Officially, the state Department of Fish and Game hasn’t taken a position on the new legislation, but privately, some with the agency say it lacks the staff to supervise yet more hatcheries run by who knows who.

The proposed legislation defines a hatchery “qualified person” as “a state resident under Alaska Statute 43.23.295 or a corporation organized under laws of this state.” The cited statute is the one that defines who qualifies for an Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), the annual payment to Alaskans from the earnings of the oil-revenue-created Permanent Fund.

Simply stated, that requirement is that someone establish residency in the state and maintain it by spending more than half the year in-country.  The statute defines no specific professional or licensing criteria as do other state laws governing more than 40 jobs from acupuncturists through lawyers and doctors to underground storage tank workers and veterinary examiners.

Determining who is qualified to run a home hatchery is largely left up to whoever happens to be in the appointed positions of the Commissioner of Fish and Game when the permits start rolling in.

The proposed law does limit egg takes to 500,000 or less, a drop in the bucket compared to the 2.6 billion eggs existing private hatcheries are permitted to take, according to Fish and Game. 

And the newly proposed law does mimic the intent of the original state hatchery program in stating that “fish released into the water of the state under a permit issued under this section are available to the people for common use and are subject to applicable law in the same way as fish occurring in their natural state.”

But that doesn’t appear to rule out cost-recovery operations for a backyard salmon farm, given the cost-recovery law itself designates “terminal harvest areas” beyond the limits of “common property” fisheries.

“A hatchery permit holder may, by a majority vote of the membership of the hatchery permit holder’s board, elect to harvest surplus salmon produced at a facility in a terminal harvest area established for that facility through (ie. beyond) the common property fishery,” the law says.

“At the request of the hatchery permit holder and if the Commissioner of Fish and Game determines that there are no allocative issues involved, and after reasonable consultation with affected commercial fishermen and the organizations of affected commercial fishermen, the commissioner may adopt regulations governing the harvest of surplus salmon in a terminal harvest area when the hatchery permit holder elects to harvest surplus salmon produced at a facility through a common property fishery.”

Given that most commercial fisheries in Alaska take place in the marine waters of the state, and given that there is no provision for consultation on cost recovery with anyone other than commercial fishermen, it would appear that if a mom-and-pop ocean ranching business set up shop on Alaska salmon stream, it might be able to get permission to capture fish for cost-recovery at its hatchery.

Cost recovery itself gets into interesting issues of what constitutes enough revenue for operation of a private, non-profit operation in that a lot of “profit” can be hidden in the “costs” of business by, for instance, paying inflated salaries to staff, providing compensation for board members of a corporation, overpaying contractors working for the hatchery, or more.

Still, cost recovery would seem to hold the potential to ensure this a made-for-Alaska, rural business of the sort some one envisioned for net-pen salmon farming in the state where it can be said that if you can’t go farming, go ranching.