Ranch, not a farm/Prince William Sound Aquaculture Association

Only in Alaska where black is white

With fisheries scientists now describing expanding populations of pink salmon as ecosystem disrupters across nearly the whole of the Northern Hemisphere, it is time someone asks a question that should have been asked long ago:

“Where can one buy that much-talked-about ‘ocean-ranched’ Alaska salmon?”

Ocean ranching was and is, as some know, Alaska’s answer to the Norwegian-spawned, net-pen salmon farming that now produces about three out of every four salmon eaten around the globe. Ranching has long been billed, and still is, as an environmentally friendlier way to farm salmon.

So if it’s better, why isn’t the Alaska Seafood Marketing Insitute promoting it? Why no advertisements proclaiming, “Alaska ranched salmon, it’s better than anything you’ll find raised down on the farm!”

Google “ranched salmon” and what do you get?

“Wild Alaskan Pink Salmon Fillets” from Albertson’s, “Wild Caught Pink Salmon Fillets Frozen” from Kroger’s/Frey Meyer, “Wild Arctic Keta Salmon” from Vital Choice, “Wild Caught Sockeye Salmon” TFillet again from Albertsons, and various kinds of farmed salmon.

“Wild-caught” is the Alaska euphemism for ranched. Alaska ranched salmon appear to get sold this way because Alaska commercial fishermen and Seattle-based processors want to have things two ways.

They want to artificially propagate a couple of billion salmon per year, transfer those salmon to net pens to be fed so they will be bigger and fitter than their wild cousins before they are released into the ocean, and then tag the same fish as in some way “wild” when they return to be caught in front of the fish factory in the belief the term “wild caught” carries some cash-producing cachet in the marketplace.

What the term mainly does is cause some hilarious confusion in that already confused marketplace.

Bon Appétit magazine, for instance, describes wild-caught salmon as those from fisheries where “fishermen take their boats, usually in places on the Pacific Ocean like Alaska or New Zealand, and head out to catch these fish in their natural habitat.”

New Zealand has no such salmon fishery, but does have plans for an “open ocean salmon farm,” which is how some people have described ranching in the past. In New Zealand’s case, however, the open ocean farm is to compromise net pens located about five miles offshore in which 10,000 tonnes (slightly more than 22 million pounds) of Chinook salmon are to be raised each year, according to Fish Farming Expert, a trade publication. 

For those following salmon markets, 22 million pounds of Chinook, or what Alaskans commonly call “king salmon,” is close to 10 times the statewide harvest of Chinook in Alaska this year, counting both wild and ranched fish.

Call them what you want

How the Kiwi fish will be marketed is anyone’s guess. The labeling of salmon is poorly regulated. Albertson’s “wild” pinks might be wild, but there’s about a three in 10 chance those were ranched fish if they were caught last year when the state estimated the hatchery pink salmon harvest was 31 percent of the statewide pink harvest.

The term “wild caught” first originated to prevent the mislabeling of large quantities of Alaska salmon as “wild” because about a third of the Alaska catch every year isn’t. According to the state’s annual hatchery report, only the commercial fisheries of far Western Alaska – those of the Alaska Peninsula, Bristol Bay and the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim – are hatchery-fish free.

Bristol Bay happens to be the site of the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world. This makes it likely that Albertson’s “wild-caught” sockeye is actually wild, not wild-caught. The odds there are good given that less than 2 percent of the sockeye caught in Alaska in 2023 were hatchery fish, according to the state report, and more than half of those hatchery sockeye came from Prince William Sound, where it appears some get sold not as “wild caught” sockeye but as “Copper River” sockeye because the latter brand carries an even bigger cachet than wild-caught.

As for the Vital Choice ”keta” salmon – or chum to Alaskans and many others – the labeling is likely accurate if, as advertised, the fish came from “Kotzebue Sound” above the Arctic Circle in Northwest Alaska. One is left to trust the seller though the trustworthiness of the salmon business has been questioned.

“A meta-analysis of seafood species mislabeling in the United States” published in the peer-reviewed journal “Food Control” in 2015 reported that nearly 40 percent of salmon sold in the country was mislabeled and another 31 percent had “unacceptable market names” that made it impossible for consumers to tell what they were buying.

“Wild-caught” could be considered among those unacceptable names given that it doesn’t tell anyone what they are buying but only how what they were buying was caught. If a Norwegian fish farm were to witness a major salmon escape because some net pens broke open only to have most of the fish caught by fishermen in a Norwegian fjord, it could fairly sell those as “wild-caught” Atlantic salmon.

But mislabelling isn’t the only problem with wild-caught Alaska salmon. The bigger issue stems from their competition with wild salmon in the war for survival in warming oceans. This is especially true when pink salmon, the fish now taking over the North Pacific and invading the Atlantic Ocean are involved as the new study published in the peer-reviewed ICES Journal of Marine Science makes clear.

Pinks, like invasive species, are masters at colonizing new habitats, the study notes.

“For instance,” the authors write, “all five Laurentian Great Lakes were colonized by pink salmon within 23 years (12 generations) of an accidental introduction into Lake Superior in 1956,” and though that population initially lacked for genetic diversity, it “exhibited rapid genetic adaptations, which made them physiologically better suited to their new environment.”

Pink salmon first introduced to the Barents Sea by Russian hatchery operators have now broken out of there and are on the march in Finland, Norway, Iceland and the United Kingdom.

In northern Norway, where pink salmon control efforts are underway “out of concern for the threats they pose to native salmon and ecosystems,” the study says, “the abundance of pink salmon far outnumbered native Atlantic salmon in 2021 and likely also in 2023.”

“It is only recently that global concern about the impacts of pink salmon on species and ecosystems has greatly increased,” the study adds. “In the North Pacific Ocean, during recent years of naturally higher pink salmon abundances that were amplified by industrial-scale hatchery releases, there has been evidence of widespread impacts of pink salmon on other salmon species and top-down effects of pink salmon on numerous pelagic species, food webs, and ecosystem function.”

The hand of man

With salmon ranching as with salmon farming, it is becoming obvious – though it should have been obvious all along – that there can be environmental consequences. This is one of the realities of industrialized agriculture whether on land or at sea.

For the salmon farmers – who pioneered a new form of industrialized agriculture now feeding the world – the big issue has always been with the concentration of fish and waste.

All natural processes create waste. When this waste is widely dispersed, it goes largely unnoticed. When it is concentrated, however, it creates what humans have come to call “pollution.”

As everyone today knows, pollution is bad, but humans accept it to greater or lesser degrees depending on any variety of factors ranging from living conditions to economic tradeoffs. The term “London fog,” now the name of a popular drink, originated with the dirty air that covered London due to smoke from coal burning as early as the 13th Century because burning coal was better than freezing in the dark.

“Rapidly increasing industrialization that began in the late 1700s made conditions even worse,” the Britannica encyclopedia records. “This variety of fog later came to be known as smog (a merging of the words smoke and fog), a term invented by a Londoner in the early 20th century.”

The English solved this problem by restricting how much coal could be burned in and around the city, shifting to oil and natural gas for the production of electric power, and gradually dispersing power plants of all sorts into the countryside so as to dilute the sources of pollution.

History did not record which chemist first made the observation that “the solution to pollution is dilution,” but the phrase has been around a long time and remains partially, though not wholly true, as the Gulf of Mexico “dead zone” nicely illustrates.

The dead zone, “an area of low to no oxygen that can kill fish and marine life,” this year covered approximately 6,705 square miles of the Gulf, rendered  “more than 4 million acres of habitat potentially unavailable to fish and bottom species, an area roughly the size of New Jersey,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The dead zone is caused by the northern Gulf’s inability to process the nutrient-rich runoff from the farms and cities of middle America draining into the Mississippi River. These nutrients are diluted enough that when they enter the river they don’t cause a major pollution problem there, but as they concentrate in the Gulf where tides are small this changes.

“Think of the Mississippi River as a drainage system for your street, except it connects 31 U.S. states and even parts of Canada,” NOAA explains. “When farmers apply fertilizer, the excess nutrients – such as nitrogen and phosphorus – can run off during a rainstorm or snowmelt and end up in waterways that feed the Mississippi River. 

“And farms aren’t the only source of excess nutrients or nutrient pollution. Urban runoff, such as fertilizer from lawns and golf courses, and discharges from sewage treatment plants, also feed into the Mississippi.

“These nutrients are ultimately funneled into the Gulf…to start a chain of events in the Gulf that turns deadly. The nutrients cause plants known as algae to grow out of control, fueling large blooms that then sink, decompose, and consume oxygen in the water. This is hypoxia, when oxygen in the water is so low it can no longer sustain marine life.”

There is a parallel here with Alaska’s ocean ranching in that the problem caused materializes far from the source of the little fish dumped in the ocean by the billions, and thus the problem is easily ignored by hatchery operators.

The problems with farmed salmon, hypoxia among them, are more easily noticed. Hypoxia is a particular problem “where recirculating water systems (RAS) are used, as well as in sea cages with large stocking densities,” noted Chilean scientists who published in Frontiers in Marine Science last year. 

Normally, however, the problems with raising salmon in “sea cages” or net pens are those associated with raising any significant number of animals in close quarters – waste and disease. The farmers regularly struggle to control sea lice, a common parasite found on salmon almost anywhere, and the waste the fish themselves help generate.

“One of the problems is that the high density of fish in small cages produces a lot of excrement and undigested feed,” Norway’s Jon Olaf Olaussen has observed. “A carpet of sludge may cover the bottom floor, both beneath and around the aquaculture facilities.”

Norway, the world’s largest salmon-farming nation, has historically tried to solve this problem with dilution.

“In Norway, salmon farms are placed strategically to dilute feed residues and feces (i.e. fish sludge) in the sea, thus deliberately wasting phosphorous with land-based origin,” Norwegian researchers Eva Brod and Anne Falk Øgaard wrote in the journal Waste Management in 2021. “Aquaculture can only expand sustainably if fish sludge is recycled in biological cycles, e.g. as fertilizer in agriculture.”

Better solutions

Since that paper was written, Norway has witnessed increased efforts to recycle salmon farm waste. Easy Mining, a subsidiary of the Norwegian waste recycling company Ragn-Sells, in November, won a government-sponsored prize for developing “a patented technology for the recovery of pure phosphorus and nitrogen from sludge originating in aquaculture,” Fish Farming Expert reported.

“Phosphorus is a non-renewable resource that is currently extracted through resource-intensive mining, for example in Russia, Western Sahara and China. Extraction requires high consumption of water, energy and transport” in those countries.

Ragn-Sells, Fish Farming added, sees salmon waste as “a resource with huge potential” not only for phosphorous production but for biogas.

“If you look into Norway, there is enough sludge that is produced every year to provide energy for 600,000 households,” Ragn-Sells Aquaculture chief executive Irja Sunde Roiha told the publication.

The response to ocean-cage/net-pen sludge in Alaska has been to try to ignore it. Alaska technically banned net-pen salmon farming in 1989, but nearly all Alaska hatchery operations now use net pens to hold young fish for feeding and fattening to maximize their chances of survival upon going to sea.

The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation has reported sludge building up beneath those pens – many of which are poorly sited from a pollution standpoint – and wants the problem monitored, but most Alaska hatchery operators are fighting the state over the issue.

Juneau-based Douglas Island Pink and Chum (DIPAC) is the only major exception. The Juneau Empire in 2018 reported DIPAC had dredged the “fish poop” and sediment beneath its pens because, a spokesman said, “the nets had been touching bottom and the bottom couple feet might have touched the bottom. That reduces the size of the net which could be detrimental to the rearing of the fry.”

Net pens on the bottom prevent the tides from flushing away fish waste. But waste isn’t the biggest problem related to Alaska’s hatcheries, feed is. And there one can find a parallel with the net pen/ocean cage farmers who have come under fire for their heavy use of so-called “forage fish” – anchovies, sardines, herring and the like.

“In the case of carnivorous fish,” the environmental group Greenpeace said in a 2024 report,…”the input of wild-caught fish exceeds the output of farmed fish by a considerable margin, since conversion efficiencies are not high. For example, each kilogram (kg) of salmon, other marine finfish or shrimp produced may use 2.5 to 5 kg of wild fish as feed.

“Thus, farming of carnivorous species results in a net loss rather than a net gain of fish protein.”

The report did note that the farmers have been doing an increasingly better job of replacing fishmeal with plant-based proteins as feed. “The quantity of wild fish required as feed to produce one unit of farmed salmon reduced by 25 percent between 1997 and 2001,” the report said. “but the total production of farmed salmon grew by 60 percent, eclipsing much of the improvement in conversion efficiencies.”

The percentage of fish meal that is fed farmed salmon has, however, continued to decline since 2001.

“In Norwegian production, salmon feed now contains on average 70 percent plant-based ingredients, including soya mainly imported from Brazil,” Brod and Øgaard reported in 2021.

Soya, corn, insect larvae, microalgae, fermented CO_2, biotech single-cell proteins or other alternatives to forage fish for feed are now options for the farmers, but not the ranchers who, just like the farmers, are affecting populations of forage fish. This has gone little noticed, however, because ranched salmon consume forage fish naturally beneath the surface of the sea and it seems that what happens beneath the sea stays beneath the sea.

What is known, however, is that humans have added a lot of hungry, little mouths to the North Pacific over the past 50 years.

According to the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, a treaty organization, hatchery releases that first topped 3 billion in 1980 are now over 5 billion with Russia and Alaska accounting for nearly 70 percent of these young salmon.

Stan Moberly, one of the key players in the now-defunct Fisheries Rehabilitation, Enhancement and Development (FRED) Division of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game that kickstarted the hatchery business in Alaska in the 1970s, long ago warned of the potential for over-stuffing the Pacific with salmon with the aid of massive ocean-ranching operations, and Alaska’s ocean-ranching operations are now massive.

“Between 2018 and 2023, commercial fishermen harvested an annual average of 170 million
pounds of hatchery-produced salmon,” hatchery operators now report. That is near the 172- million-pound, statewide harvest of wild salmon in Alaska in 1972, and greater than 135-million to 144-million-pound harvests from 1973 through 1975, according to state data. 

Historically, all-species, commercial “harvests of 100 million Alaska salmon or more had happened in six years (1918, 1934, 1936 to 1938 and 1941) only 6 percent of the years prior to 1980” according to a Fish and Game history.

Since then, thanks to better fisheries management, warmer ocean waters and hatcheries, harvests have fallen below 100 million only once (96.5 million in 1987), reaching a peak of 280.3 million in 2013. The hatchery harvest that year topped 107 million.

“To put the magnitude of (hatchery)…production in historical perspective,” the Alaska Salmon Fisheries Enhancement Annual Report for 2017 bragged, “the hatchery harvests alone in both 2013 and 2015 were greater than the entire statewide commercial salmon harvests in every year prior to statehood except for seven years (1918, 1926, 1934, 1936, 1937, 1938 and 1941).

These increases have not come without consequences.

As the size of Alaska salmon harvests has increased, driven largely by increases in pink salmon both hatchery and wild, the numbers of larger and more valuable salmon species have decreased in both number and size.

Scientists from the University of California, the University of Alaska, Canada’s McGill and Simon Fraser universities, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and GKV & Sons, an independent consultancy in 2020 reported significant declines in the size of Chinook – the big fish Alaskans call “kings” – coho, and sockeye salmon in the new millennium.

“Intriguingly, the shared acceleration of size declines post-2000 occurred during a period of unusually high (though variable) pink salmon abundance in Alaska, suggesting high pink salmon abundances could be accelerating or exacerbating size declines,” they concluded in their peer-reviewed study published in Nature Communications. “Our results provide further evidence that wild and hatchery-enhanced pink salmon abundance in the North Pacific has reached such high levels that they appear to be exerting an influence on ecosystem structure and function.”

The situation has now reached the point where a growing number of scientists are of the belief that the salmon carrying capacity of the North Pacific has been reached, and that hatchery production has become a zero-sum game wherein adding more hatchery fish only serves to displace and eliminate wild fish not only in Alaska but in Canada and the Pacific Northwest as well.

A pair of fishery researchers in Idaho this year linked pink salmon abundance in Alaska to declines in steelhead and salmon in the Snake River drainage in that state. The Snake is a major tributary to the Columbia River where returning salmon already struggle to navigate what has become a long system of lakes behind hydroelectric dams. 

The Idaho researchers reported to the NPAFC that their analysis of available data showed “that pink salmon abundance has a significant negative impact on adult returns of both spring Chinook salmon and summer steelhead returning to the Snake River basin in Idaho. These impacts are concerning given that these runs are not only Endangered Species Act (ESA) listed, but also considering the cultural, ecological, and economic importance of these returns to the region.”

This decline in wild salmon and the defacto theft of Lower 48, wild salmon resources is exactly the sort of problem of which Moberly warned in the 1980s.

“As we approach that time (of maximum carrying capacity),” he said, “the salmon-producing countries of the North Pacific will be negotiating for…‘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.”

Unfortunately for the salmon – especially the wild Chinook, sockeye, coho and steelhead of Canada and the Lower 48 – no one paid much attention to that prediction. Instead, declines in wild fish numbers were blamed on dams and habitat losses, and Alaska went on filling the ocean with more and more hatchery fishery without anyone noticing because, well, “ranching” salmon, unlike farming salmon, is supposedly a good thing, not a bad thing.

Which brings this back to the question of why it is impossible to find Alaska salmon being marketed as ranched or “free-range salmon” as chicken and beef is marketed to the dismay of one The Washington Post columnist.

“To save the planet, stop eating free-range beef,” Eduardo Porter opined earlier this month. “Organic agriculture is much worse for the environment than industrialized factory farming.”

Porter’s opinion is debatable, but what is clear is that free-range beef like free-range salmon is not without consequences, especially in a warming environment that now appears to be favoring the production of the smallest, not to mention least valuable, of the Pacific salmon.

Increasing evidence points to the possibility that Alaska’s “wild-caught” pinks might now be a greater threat to most wild Pacific salmon than farmed salmon kept safely caged in their pens until harvest.

Unfortunately, there has been very little public discussion of this, and most consumers remain in the dark.

Seafood Watch, a rating service run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium,  does not rate Alaska salmon specifically but lists  “U.S. wild-caught salmon” as generally “acceptable” for consumers concerned about salmon and nature. Its top “Best Choice” is, however, Atlantic salmon raised in recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) and Chinook (king) salmon raised in net pens in New Zealand and other specific locations.

The Aquarium once led a push to boycott farmed salmon. A statement from retailer Target in 2010 said that the company was eliminating “all farmed salmon from its fresh, frozen, and smoked seafood offerings in Target stores nationwide…..in consultation with the Monterey Bay Aquarium.”

Target went all in on wild-caught Alaska salmon for eight years but then brought back the farmed fish. Target now says it sells any salmon the Aquarium rates as “green” or “yellow.” Those ratings include a variety of farmed salmon.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), another group once opposed to farmed salmon, says it is now working with the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) in the belief that salmon farming is “an industry that has tremendous potential to feed more people with fewer resources than required for other protein sources.”

WWF says it is cooperating “with salmon farmers across the globe to help them meet…rigorous standards in order to become certified. We urge retailers to purchase only farmed salmon that has been produced in accordance with the ASC standards. Seeking to drive continuous improvement in responsible production, we remain committed to engaging ASC in improving the standards over time in order to incorporate new science and technology.”

Both groups say they want to encourage the consumption of “sustainable” salmon with Seafood Watch going so far as to express support for salmon harvested with selective fishing gear.

Among its “Best Choice” salmon these days are pink or sockeye salmon caught with “lift nets” in the state of Washington, Chinook raised in marine or freshwater net pens in New Zealand, and RAS-raised Chinook, coho, sockeye or Atlantic salmon from anywhere.

Alaska has no lift-net fisheries, although there were experiments conducted in the Inlet last summer with selective beach seines and dipnets, and no RAS farms. RAS-farmed Atlantic salmon are, however, available from Canada and from a number of producers in the U.S. although the largest of them – Florida-based Atlantic Sapphire – is struggling. 

RAS systems, which use recirculated water and can ensure the salmon are exposed to no chemical contaminants while fed organically certified food, are considered the future of fish farming for salmon and other species, but the operations have struggled to perfect the technology.

In a thorough analysis published on The Fish Site in November, Nitzan Unger wrote that “there have been successful cases where fish have grown to around 3-5 kg (6.5 to 11 pounds), but significant technical challenges have arisen in facilities aiming for large production volumes.

“Additionally, a notable number of mass mortality events have occurred that were associated with systems design or equipment failure. These incidents are not a big surprise (as one experienced farmer once told me, “You have to kill a million fish in order to raise a million fish”), but they have certainly contributed to skepticism about the feasibility of large-scale RAS facilities.

“Despite these issues, RAS production is still considered promising, with steady growth trends evident across various regions, although most are still in the planning or construction phases.”

Japan, which pioneered the ocean-ranching Alaska copied only for its ranchers to find themselves struggling with ocean-related declines in productivity in the warmer waters common in recent years, is now moving into the RAS business with Proximar Seafood harvesting its first fish in October.

“Proximar is the only supplier of domestically produced Atlantic salmon in Japan, years ahead of competition,” Proximar CEO Joachim Nielsen told the trade publication Seafood Source. “We have since October 2022 proven great production capabilities and fish growth.”

It is, however, expecting competition. The world is an ever-changing place where competition plays a role in economics and biology with one rule the same everywhere: compete or die. The issue facing Alaska today is whether the state’s industrial-size hatcheries should be boosting a salmon species that already seems to be putting other salmon species to the sword in a warmer ocean.