Virgil Umphenour/Facebook

Fighting for Alaska wild salmon

Now 82 years old, Virgil Umpenhour has been at war with Alaska’s commercial salmon farmers, or ranchers as they prefer to call themselves, for most of his adult life.

For decades, he battled without success to stop their takeover of North Pacific pastures. But he has now, at last, managed to lob a bomb into the Alaska political process forcing the ranchers to show their true colors.

An Umpenhour-authored petition to the state Board of Fisheries calling for significant reductions in the production of some species of hatchery salmon has the ranchers admitting to having become the big businesses they are – industrial-scale, salmon-producing businesses not unlike those of Norway and Chile with the only real difference being that the Alaskans free-range their salmon on public pastures for free rather than hold the fish and pay to feed them in pens until they mature.

One of the state officials who helped get all of this started more than 40 years ago warned in 1982 that this was likely to surpass  the ocean’s (salmon) rearing capacity within a decade or so and then lead to international demands to establish grazing rights for the various Pacific Rim nations farming the ocean.

But more on that below. In the here and now,  Umpenhour’s proposal before the state regulatory body has ocean farmers threatening massive job losses, economic devastation and shrunken Alaska salmon fisheries.

They are, however, strangely silent about Alaska’s wild salmon, which still comprise the bulk of the Alaska catch, and are at the heart of the Alaska salmon brand. There are no white-tablecloth restaurants in the lower 48 states tempting diners with menus boasting “hatchery-fresh Alaska salmon.” And in the retail markets, Alaska hatchery fish are hidden behind a now standard industry label identifying them as “wild caught.”

No one seems particularly worried about the effects on the Alaska brand in this rush to protect the hatcheries, either. Local governments in Southeast Alaska and around Prince William Sound are already lobbying the Board in opposition to the Umphenour proposal.

“The proposed 25 percent pink and chum cut (Proposal 156) to hatchery salmon production threatens the livelihoods of all Southeast Alaska communities and the sustainability of salmon fisheries for all user groups,” claims Salmon Hatcheries for Alaska, a self-professed, non-profit entity that lacks any registration as such.

The group billed itself as a representative of The Alaska Salmon Industry Alliance, another seemingly non-existent entity, in an appearance before the Alaska Legislature in 2019. It appears to have since changed its affiliation.

When the same Alliance appeared before the Legislature in 2023, it called itself the Alaska Salmon Aquaculture Alliance. This might have had something to do with there being a state-registered organization known as the Alaska Salmon Alliance lobbying for commercial salmon fishing interests in Cook Inlet,

Speaking for the Aquaculture Alliance, Mike Wells, the executive director of the Valdez Fisheries Development Association (VFDA), identified the group as being comprised of “some” of the state’s largest hatchery operators. 

The Aquaculture Alliance appears to be yet another unregistered entity, but it is identified as connected to VFDA and PWSAC (the Prince William Sound Aquaculture Association) in the state’s 2024 Lobbyist Directory.  VFDA and PWSAC run some of the biggest pink salmon hatchery operations on the Pacific Rim.  And the directory shows them paying $60,000 to Anchorage-based Confluence Strategies Inc. to promote those hatcheries in the state capital.

Umpenhour’s battle with VFDA, PWSAC and the like traces all the way back to the 1980s when he was a fish buyer along the Yukon River watching the market for Yukon chum salmon collapse as Alaska hatcheries moved heavily into producing chums at a lower cost.

Alaska’s Empty Interior

Umpenhour was by then well-connected to many among the relatively few people trying to survive in tiny villages and small, private outposts along the Yukon.

A U.S. Marine in Vietnam, he left the jungles of Southeast Asia in 1971 to settle in a vastly different place – North Pole, a suburb of Fairbanks. Fairbanks was then and is now the largest city in central Alaska. In 1971, it was a community of fewer than 15,000 people shivering in the cold.

The winters of the early ’70s were brutal in Central Alaska with the temperatures regularly going to 50 degrees below zero and staying there for days. On January 23, 1971, Prospect Camp north of Fairbanks set the still-standing state record for cold with a temperature of 80 degrees below zero.

Record low temperatures were at the time front-page news in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Ned Rozell of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute has noted, adding that the “weather was worthy of news coverage. The average temperature in Fairbanks that month was minus 31.7!”

For people living remote in the region, these were especially difficult times. Most of those living outside of the city were poor and living what could only be described as a “frontier lifestyle.” Most kept warm by burning wood, and a fair number were still cutting it by hand.

Telecommunications had yet to reach rural areas. If a community had a phone, it was usually a community phone. There was no television and no satellite communications. Fairbanks radio stations connected people via the so-called “Bush telegraph,” which was no more than an announcer reading messages to people living in remote areas in the hope they would hear those messages.

The Food Stamp program designed to help keep poor Americans from starving was still in its infancy, though growing fast from 4 million participants in 1970 to 15 million by October 1974, according to a government history. The snowmachines that now provide reliable winter transportation between many Alaska villages were just arriving on the scene.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) that would eventually deliver oil from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez and fill state coffers with oil revenue that would forever change the state was still years in the future.

As the decade of the 1970s began, almost half of the state’s Alaska native population was reported to be living below the poverty line, most of them in rural Alaska. And it wouldn’t be until 1978 that the Bureau of Indian Affairs unilaterally labeled 229 rural, Alaska villages as American Indian tribes to open a pipeline of federal aid to rural areas.

Even Anchorage, today a bustling urban center little different from the country’s other urban centers, was a largely undeveloped area home to fewer than 136,000 people clustered around the downtown area in 1970. Now heavily populated South Anchorage was still mainly forest and swamp. The 728,000-square-feet Dimond Center shopping mall of today was non-existent. There was nothing there until 1977 when a 180,000 square shopping center was opened, anchored by a Safeway grocery store and a Pay ‘N Save selling hardware, sporting goods and more. 

Suffice it to say, Alaska was a tough place to survive in those years, and Umpenhour, a future member of the US/Canada Salmon Treaty Negotiating Team for the Yukon River and later the Alaska Board of Fisheries, knew personally many people for whom cash from the sale of chums was their lifeblood.

Thus when the market for their fish was undercut by hatchery fish, he took it personally.

Market alterations

The start of the hatchery-driven market disruption itself tracks to the opening of state-funded, coastal hatcheries run by the Fisheries Rehabilitation, Enhancement and Development (FRED) Division in the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The division would not, however, run the hatcheries for long.

FRED was dead in less than 15 years after its birth, killed, according to a Fish and Game history, by “continual budget declines and declining revenues across state agencies in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.”

It’s legacy, however, lived on. History records that when “the operation of state-run hatcheries for commercial production of salmon was eliminated in 1995 because of continual declines in vital state funding. Nearly all the state-owned facilities were transferred to private-non-profit (PNP) hatchery associations after the state ceased operations in 1995. The intent was to keep key programs going in order to sustain production needed (and depended on) by a myriad of users.”

Commercial fishermen-controlled PNPs quickly picked up where FRED left off after growing the chum egg-take from 182 million eggs at the start of the 1980s to more than 592 million eggs by 1995. The result was the devastation of the Yukon chum fishery.

By 1997, a state-appointed Yukon River Regional Planning Team was reporting that “despite good chum salmon availability roe harvests dropped dramatically due to a 60 percent drop in the wholesale and ex-vessel price.

“The market for Upper Yukon Area summer chum salmon in-the-round sales, although never a large market, is now practically non-existent with the exception of District 6 fish which are cheaper to transport.”

The hatchery chum business was then still growing thanks to a decision by the state, which had struggled to fund the FRED hatcheries, to allow the PNPs to conduct so-called “cost recovery” fisheries, which allowed the PNP hatcheries to fully finance and then grow their operations.

By the year 2020, Fish and Game would be reporting that a chum egg take that had tripled shortly before the start of the new millennium would have almost doubled again to 972 million eggs. The state at that time credited the hatcheries with the production of 32 percent of the year’s chum salmon harvest.

Umpenhour, meanwhile, watched many of the small-time fishermen he’d known along the Yukon in the 1970s and 1980s go out of business over the years while he waged a futile battle to reign in hatcheries now economically profitable despite being labeled non-profit operations.

By 2023, the Yukon commercial chum fishery would be gone, according to state harvest records, a victim of both shrinking salmon returns and shifting markets.

Its collapse rendered worthless the approximately 940 commercial salmon permits that had been issued for fishing in the drainage, permits that largely helped keep low-income Alaskans alive.

“Unlike (in) other fisheries in Alaska, Yukon River permit holders are primarily local residents of Yukon River drainage rural villages or the greater Fairbanks area,” the planning team of 1997 observed. “In 1994, 91 percent of the Upper Yukon Area fish wheel permits were locally owned, followed by 86 percent of the Lower Yukon Area gillnet permits, and lastly, 79 percent of the Upper Yukon Area set gillnet permits were locally owned.

“Permit holders who live in villages or towns outside the Yukon River drainage often are former residents of the drainage….Permit ownership by non-Alaskan residents in 1995 was negligible. Eight Lower Yukon Area gillnet permits, four Upper Yukon Area fish wheel permits, and three Upper Yukon Area gillnet fish wheel permits were owned by nonresidents.”

Never getting rich

None of those fishermen ever made much money. The state reported that on average from 1977 to 1997, 804 of the 940 permit holders who fished earned a combined $7,426,147 or approximately $9,236.50 per permit.

What Alaska hatcheries did to commercial chum salmon fishermen on the Yukon was a precursor to what Norwegian, Chilean and other net-pen salmon farms would eventually do to Alaska commercial salmon fishermen in general.

Commodities markets are driven by the law of supply and demand, and as Alaska learned after partially banning net-pen farming in 1989, the power of politics is limited. The ban didn’t slow the growth of net-pen farmed salmon. The net-pen farmers just kept expanding and by 2020 were providing about eight out of every 10 salmon eaten around the globe, according to a study published in the journal Aquaculture in 2023.

That number did not include the Alaska free-ranged hatchery salmon that also spend time in net pens. Alaska has theoretically banned net pens but treats the hatchery operations in the same way Washington state decided to treat them after it banned net-pen farming this year. That ban prohibits growing salmon to market size in open-water net pens but permits the grow-out of young salmon so as to give hatchery fish an advantage over wild fish when turned loose on the ocean’s open range.

Washington state grow-out operations are small compared to those in Alaska. Grow-out pen operations at hatcheries in the 49th state have reached the point where the state Department of Environmental Conservation believes they are polluting the seabed, a problem the hatcheries don’t want to monitor because of the costs. 

As is the way of most businesses, Alaska hatcheries are focused on their bottom line, which is, it should be noted, in line with the state policy established shortly after Alaska’s entry into the hatchery business.

As FRED’s Stan Moberly observed in a 1982 review of that division’s program, “another highly competitive area will be in the allocation of  ‘grazing’ rights of the North Pacific pasture. If the Japanese and Soviets adhere to their proposed schedule of (hatchery) production, we will begin to see the effects of surpassing the ocean’s rearing capacity within a decade or so.

“As we approach that time, the salmon-producing countries of the North Pacific will be negotiating for these ‘grazing’ rights and for the establishment of quotas for release of artificially propagated salmon. Alaska’s position at the bargaining table, no doubt, will be strengthened if we also have a history of stocking the ocean with large numbers of juvenile
salmon.

“Alaska’s salmon industry is the State’s largest employer and has an economic worth at first wholesale value estimated to be near $4 billion. If Alaska intends to secure its position in the world marketplace, the salmon rehabilitation and enhancement program must keep pace.”

Nuclear arms race

Some scientists now contend that the Alaska effort to “keep pace” has helped to overrun the Pacific with pink and chum salmon to the detriment of more valuable and popular salmon species – Chinook, sockeye and coho.

The state’s official position is that no one has proven this to be the case, and Alaska is not going to do anything to change the way the hatcheries operate unless someone can present absolute proof that the numbers of wild Chinook, sockeye and coho salmon have declined because of hatchery fish.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has taken a slightly different view. It is now considering whether Alaska Chinook should be listed as a threatened species under the terms of the federal Endangered Species Act because of the massive shrinkage in the size of the Alaska Chinook population. 

Bill Templin, the state’s director of commercial fisheries research, has admitted there are indications hatchery fish could be contributing to declines in Chinook, sockeye and coho, but in a 2018 appearance before the Board of Fisheries flippantly dismissed the observations and conclusions of other scientists studying this subject by proclaiming that “correlation is not causation.”

Templin at that time described the marine ecosystem of the Pacific as too difficult for anyone to fully sort out, which is true. The ocean presents an extremely complicated picture because  many, many species of fish prey on each other or compete with each other depending more on size than on species.

Herring, for instance, are considered a prime prey for Chinook, or what Alaskans usually call “king” salmon, but ecologists studying the species in the Salish Sea have also found that “herring diets overlap extensively with that of juvenile Chinook salmon regardless of the presence (every other year) of juvenile pink salmon….Estimates of population-level consumption via bioenergetics modeling indicated that herring consumed approximately 10 to 50 times more biomass of the major prey eaten by juvenile Chinook salmon.”

A 2024 Ecosystem Status Report for Alaska’s Eastern Bering Sea put together by NOAA notes that warming waters there have benefitted juvenile herring while working to the detriment of Yukon Chinook salmon. The report did not, however,  attempt to quantify the implications of these interactions.

On the other hand, it did observe that “Chinook salmon runs have been declining statewide since 2007. Size-dependent mortality during the first year in the marine environment is thought to be a leading contributor to low Chinook run sizes. Rising sea temperatures and loss of sea ice may be contributing factors leading to slower growth for juvenile Chinook salmon in the eastern Bering Sea.”

Whether competition with herring or other salmon are as important or more important than the bycatch of Chinook salmon in trawl fisheries there is an unknown.  The trawl fisheries are a favorite public target for blame despite any evidence to indicate they are causing population-level reductions in Yukon Chinook. The Chinook mortality in the trawl fishery could be additive or it could be largely compensatory. 

Much the same can be said of the salmon added to the ecosystem by hatcheries. They could be making up for wild fish that died, thus rendering them compensatory. Or, if the salmon carrying capacity of the North Pacific has been reached, they could be replacing wild fish, which would make them additive.

The latter possibility represents the “zero-sum game” to which some fisheries researchers have recently referred and which Moberly predicted 43 years ago.

“It is important to recognize that in the present era,” fisheries scientists Brendan Connors, Greg Ruggerone and James Irvine wrote in the ICES Journal of Marine Science last fall, “hatchery releases represent a classic ‘zero-sum’ game, where an incremental increase in hatchery releases results in some loss of growth and productivity of wild salmon through increased competition at sea.”

Alaska saw this possibility coming well before the new millennium and in 1993 enacted a law dictating that the “effects and interactions of introduced or enhanced salmon stocks on wild salmon stocks should be assessed; wild salmon stocks and fisheries on those stocks should be protected from adverse impacts from artificial propagation and enhancement efforts.”

But the Fish Boards since then have sidestepped the requirement to protect “wild salmon stocks…from adverse impacts from artificial propagation” by ignoring the indications of food competition or other hatchery-related problems and holding out for absolute proof, something science can almost never deliver, that there is a problem.

The end result has been that the program the state began as an attempt to “enhance” and “rehabilitate” Alaska salmon runs struggling due to over-fishing and the coldwater years of the 1970s that left Fairbanks freezing has abandoned enhancement and rehabilitation in the name of large-scale “development” in the form of industrial-scale salmon hatcheries that promise consumers “wild caught” salmon as if the fish were truly wild.

And with those hatcheries making enough money to pay high-powered lobbyists in Juneau, Umphenour’s petition is likley to go nowhere. But Alaskans now know what they are dealing with.