Norway-like net pens in Southeast Alaska’s Crayfish Inlet/NSRAA

AK hatcheries oppose environmental monitoring

Alaska’s self-proclaimed salmon “ranchers” are protesting a state decision to treat their salmon-filled net pens the same as the salmon-filled net pens of salmon “farmers” around the world so as to protect state waters from salmon shit and food waste.

The hatcheries claim the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) overstepped its authority when it in May of last year ordered them to begin monitoring the sea bed beneath those pens. Such monitoring, they told an administrative law judge, would cause them “significant expense.”

DEC has already rejected a request for an “informal review,” But Aministrative Law Judge Lisa M. Toussaint in November ordered an “adjudicated review,” after concluding the hatcheries had raised some legitimate issues including “the important legal question of whether the discharge of residues on the seafloor for any length of time is prohibited” by law in Alaska.

The hearing has yet to be scheduled but is expected sometime this year.

Residues, ie. pollution, on the seafloor, are an issue the salmon “farmers” who raise fish in net pens have been dealing with for decades. In Scotland, “farm operators are required to monitor the seabed around the farm to ensure appropriate environmental standards are met,” according to the website of Scotland’s Environment Protection Agency (SEPA). 

“The monitoring requirements are outlined in individual farm permits and associated environmental monitoring plans, as well as our published performance standards.”

Norway, which produces nearly half of all the salmon farmed worldwide, has similar regulations, but that country is now trying to monetize the waste stream from its farms. Ragn-Sells, a company that has developed the technology for collecting the “sludge” that drops out of net-pen farms says “Norwegian fish poo” could provide enough “energy for up to 600,000 households and enough phosphorus fertilizer to cover the agricultural needs of many small nations.”

Norwegian SciTech News in September headlined “Sludge from salmon hatcheries will become a sought-after resource.” The story below said the sludge “is rich in nutrients and can be fed to organisms such as bristle worms, which represent a potential alternative to existing salmon feed ingredients.”

Sludge, the website argued, could also make “a key contribution towards consolidating the circular economy in Norway, which will be entirely in line with the government’s social responsibility initiative “Bærekraftig fôr til laks og husdyr innen 2030” (Sustainable feed for livestock and farmed salmon by 2030), which was launched earlier this spring.”

The Norwegians are big on social responsibility; Alaskans not so much.

‘Farming’ banned

Alaska in 1990 banned net-pan salmon farming of the style now in use around the globe. The move was largely driven by lobbying from Alaska commercial salmon fishermen and Seattle-based processors who believed they could continue to dominate the global market for salmon if salmon farming was outlawed along the Alaska stretch of the North American continent, an area full of prime sites for farms.

This belief was quickly proven foolish as the production of farmed salmon exploded. An Alaska effort to promote the idea that wild salmon are tastier than farmed salmon and better for the environment followed. That public relations campaign saw some early success but was quickly overwhelmed by the farmers.

They now produce about 80 percent of the salmon eaten around the world and dominate the high-end markets for fresh and restaurant-served salmon. Alaska fishermen have seen the value of their catches plummet because of this, and Alaska salmon processors are experimenting with new models for fish handling to try to compete in the global market for high-quality salmon.

Thanks to the ocean “ranching” program the state began in the 1970s, however, Alaska dominates the lower end of the market which sells salmon in cans and pouches and produces fishmeal for pet food, fertilizer and other uses.

Allied Market Research, which tracks trends in food sales, says the canned/pouch market “is expected to start growing,” but much of that growth is projected to come in countries where consumers are looking for cheap, high-quality protein. U.S. interest in canned and pouched salmon is low, and a once-strong market in the United Kingdom is fading.

Canned tuna remains the top choice of canned fish for Americans, but even the sales of tuna have been falling. The National Fisheries Institute (NFI) reported sales of 1.9 pounds of canned tuna per person in 2021, down from 2.6 pounds the year before.

Canned salmon consumption was so low it didn’t even make NFI’s top-10 chart which ended with clams consumed in the volume of 0.26 pounds per year, up 0.11 pounds since 2020.

“Canned products (now) account for slightly less than one-fourth of the seafood consumed in the U.S., and the amount has decreased steadily over the past two decades,” the Seafood Health Facts website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has noted.

Alaska has, however, held onto its position as the Norway of the salmon ranching business.

The 49th state’s production of hatchery salmon now dwarfs that of the rest of the nation and Canada combined. Alaska pumped about 1.9 billion young salmon into the North Pacific Ocean last year, according to the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, or about four times more than produced by all of the hatcheries of Canada and the rest of the U.S. West Coast combined.

Some, though far from all, of those Canadian and Lower 48 hatcheries are involved in trying to restore depleted salmon runs. All of the Alaska hatcheries are production facilities designed to make money for Alaska commercial fishermen and hatchery employees.

Most of the Alaska production is of low-value chum or pink salmon. Pinks, the smallest and fastest growing of the Pacific salmon species, now dominate the North Pacific with some scientists arguing that hungry little pinks put such a dent in the ocean’s natural food supply that they are harming other species of fish, seabirds and even their brethren.

Returns of pinks, or what Alaskans commonly call “humpies,” show a remarkable variation in number between even- and odd-numbered years. Some have theorized that this is due to odd-year pinks so depleting the ocean’s food supply that it remains depressed for months, leaving even-year pinks and other salmon struggling to find enough food to survive. 

The theory is far from proven, but scientists have documented a steady decline in the size of bigger and longer-lived salmon – most notably Chinook or king salmon and sockeye or red salmon – since U.S. and Russian hatcheries started pumping pinks into the ocean to boost what was already a growing supply of wild pinks. 

Grow out pens at an Alaska salmon ranch/Prince William Sound Aquaculture Association

‘Modern’ ranching

When Alaska hatchery-driven, ocean ranching of salmon began, most of the fish spawned and hatched under the watchful eyes of humans were either dumped straight into the ocean in the spring, in the case of pinks or chums which require no freshwater rearing, or planted in lakes, in the case of sockeye which do require freshwater rearing.

But hatchery managers eventually realized they could boost the survival of their fish by holding them in net pens to fatten them up before their release into the wild.

As hatchery operations now work, according to the Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation (PWSAC), “most fry are moved to saltwater rearing net pens and fed prior to release.

“Several factors determine how long the fish are fed in the net pens before they are released. To increase the survival rate, a key target size and release time is selected. But often, critical factors, such as the occurrence of ‘zooplankton blooms’ in the receiving waters, which provide natural feed for the fry upon their release, also influence the decision as to when to release the fry.”

Theoretically, the state could have banned these pens. The hatcheries run by the commercial-fishermen-controlled PSWAC, the Northern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association, the Southern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association, the Kodiak Regional Aquaculture Associaton and the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association – the organizations protected the requirement they monitor net-pen fallout – all operate under permits approved by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

And the legislation that banned net-pen salmon farms and set the standards for these ocean-ranching permits clearly states that “The commissioner (of Fish and Game) may attach conditions to a permit issued under this section that are necessary to protect natural fish and wildlife resources.”

Given that growing hatchery salmon to a “key target size” in pens to “increase the survival rate” means that the hatchery fish will have a fin up on wild fish in the ocean where tens of billions of salmon annually enter the fight to survive, an ecologically activist Commissioner of Fish and Game could easily argue that a ban on the pens is necessary “to protect natural fish.”

In a state where commercial fishermen wield political power far beyond their economic benefit, however, no commissioner to date has had the balls to even suggest such a restriction, and some critics of Alaska’s industrial-scale ocean ranching program said they were surprised when the DEC decided that hatchery operators should at least be required to monitor the waters in and around their net pens and on the seafloor beneath.

One of the consequences of fry being held and fed in these pens is that the uneaten portion of their food plus their waste drops out beneath, and depending on where the pens are placed, this waste can accumulate on the seabed.

The aquaculture associations appear concerned about what they might find there if they are required to begin looking for what is there. The proposed new DEC regulations would require the hatcheries provide a “visual assessment of the benthos (seafloor) under net pen facilities for detectable residues, defined as ‘any amount of observable residue deposits,’ within 60 days of the last release of aquatic animals each season,” according to the filings submitted to Toussaint. “Detectable residues would trigger the requirement for submittal of a noncompliance report absent an approved zone of deposit (ZOD).”

And, according to her decision to order the adjudicated hearing on net pens, the hatcheries expect to find “observable residue.”

“The requesters argued that the monitoring requirements for residues are based on a misinterpretation of the applicable water quality standards for aquaculture facilities and would effectively force hatcheries to apply for ZODs, at significant expense,” she wrote.

But as the proposed regulation itself clearly states, those costly ZODs would be required only if “observable residue deposits” were discovered beneath the pens, and thus the hatcheries wouldn’t be forced to do anything unless there were deposits of shit and wasted feed visible on the seabed beneath their pens.