Where most salmon comes from today

Mother of all changes

Part 2 of a 4-part series

For hundreds of thousands of years, change has been an undeniable and unavoidable constant for the human species. Sometimes it has crept into our lives as easily as the wheel of ancient times or the smart phone of today.

Other times it has sparked conflicts, some of them long and bloody. Democracy was born of a history of wars in which the masses rose up against the idea that those who think themselves smarter than everyone else deserve to rule.

It is that aspect of human nature that makes socialism so potentially dangerous and led Scottish philosopher Adam Smith and, before him, Hegel to accept capitalism despite the inevitability of economic losers as well as winners.

In Alaska, the commercial salmon industry witnessed these winners and losers ever since Charles Vincent Baranovich built a salmon saltery near Kasaan in what is now the state’s Panhandle sometime in the 1860s.  The salmon salters were the first winners, and almost as quickly the first losers.

The Baranovich name lives on today only as a footnote in Dictionary of Alaska Place Names due to its connection to “Baronovichs Bay, near (the) head of Kasaan Bay…Named for…Baronovich, who established a fishing station here” in 1869, according to a report at the time from the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey at the time.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s official history of “The Commercial Salmon Fishery in Alaska,” dates that saltery to 1868 and says that “a year later the first cannery was established.”

The canning business quickly killed the salting business for obvious reasons. Canned salmon keeps longer and tastes better than salted salmon. The canning business also started what would prove to be a decades-long economic boom in the Alaska Territory.

Between 1878 and 1950, a National Park Service history records, 134 canneries were built in the state. They spanned the coast from the southern tip of the Panhandle north to the eastern end of Cook Inlet and west to the north shore of Bristol Bay.

In 1938, a Historical Outline of the Canning of Fishery Products reported that of 15 species of fish “canned regularly on a large, commercial scale” in the U.S., salmon was “the most important canned fishery product, its value in 1938, amounting to 50.8 percent of the total value of all canned fishery products.”

Hello Charlie

Salmon’s dominance would not, however,  last. By the end of World War I, the canned tuna that fed U.S. soldiers in the trenches of Europe was on the rise, and by 1950 it would have taken over the canned fish market.

By the end of that decade, the Park Service history records, all but 37 of the Alaska salmon canneries were out of business, some abandoned, some burned down. The rise of tuna played a big role, but it wasn’t solely responsible.

Alaska canneries died for the various reasons that businesses die. Some couldn’t obtain enough salmon to sell.  Some produced an inferior product that couldn’t compete with better brands of salmon. Some were badly managed. And some couldn’t produce salmon at a price low enough to compete with tuna in a whole new market for canned fish.

“Chicken of the Sea and Starkist…emerged as brand names in the 1950s, backed by aggressive marketing campaigns in magazines and even television,” economist Michael Link wrote in a 2003 report prepared for the Bristol Bay Economic Development Corporation. “Canned tuna was abundant, inexpensive, and marketers stressed quality. A bumblebee, a mermaid, and a beatnik fish named Charlie the Tuna became advertising icons for parents of the postwar baby boom.

“Unable to compete with volume or price, Alaska salmon saw the domestic canned market built over the (previous) 50 years slowly erode.”

By the 1970s, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations would note that “the largest consumer of canned tuna…was by far the United States. Europe, and especially the United Kingdom, had by then become a key market for the also-ran salmon from Alaska.

Luckily for both salmon processors and commercial fishermen in the north, the salmon industry had by then begun another change with a heavy shift toward the production of frozen rather than canned salmon. Ironically, this was thanks to the Japanese, who would later be accused by many commercial fishermen of taking advantage of the 49th state.

“After the establishment of 200-mile exclusive economic zones in the mid-1970’s, imports became an increasingly important source of salmon for Japan,” Alaska economist Gunnar Knapp wrote in a 1993 industry analysis. “Large fishing companies could no longer rely on their own harvests as a source of supply. Instead, they had to purchase salmon from suppliers in other countries. The volume of salmon imported to Japan grew very rapidly in the late 1970s and early 1980s. To help guarantee access to supply, some Japanese fishing companies invested in processing plants in Alaska.”

With this market change coinciding with a steady increase in the size of Alaska salmon harvests in Alaska, 49th-state fishermen and processors would witness the mother of all booms with prices for sockeye salmon soaring to a 2025, inflation-corrected equivalent of $7.81 per pound in 1988.

Commercial fishermen were then flying high, but the stage had already been set for the mother of all busts.

A salmon tsunami

A monumental shift in the global production of salmon was about to take place, and it might now be best documented by the history of Mowi, a Norwegian company founded in 1964 by a group of Norwegians experimenting with growing salmon in their backyards at a time when salmon were in short supply everywhere.

It would take five more years for the fledgling company to move those backyard fish into saltwater net pens, and it would be a full decade before Mowi became a recognized brand even in Norway – a small, Scandinavian country with a population about half that of Greater London.

Mowi, unfortunately for the Alaska salmon industry, wouldn’t stay happy with its Norwegian success. Fifteen years after its formation, the company rebranded as “Marine Harvest” and began a global expansion.

Marine Harvest steadily increased production through 2018 when it changed its name back to Mowi. By then,  what began as a backyard business in Norway had expanded to salmon farms in Scotland, Canada, Chile, Iceland, Ireland and the Faroe Islands.

But the company wasn’t done expanding.

Mowi this year announced its biggest move yet, the acquisition of Nova Sea, another major salmon farmer, which, according to a Mowi media statement, is expected to boost Mowi’s harvest of salmon to “597,000 tonnes in 2025. Of that, 372,000 tonnes will be in Norway, including 161,000 tonnes in Northern Norway, one of the world’s best regions for farming Atlantic salmon.

“In just a few years, Mowi has gone from producing 400,000 tonnes globally to producing nearly 600,000 tonnes.”

Alaska’s statewside salmon production?

It peaked in 2015 at just short of 500,000 tonnes – 83 percent of Mowi’s expected production next year – and has been generally creeping downward ever since, despite years with catches in excess of 200 million fish.

Numbers up, pounds down

Much of the decline in Alaska poundage is believed to be linked to warmer North Pacific waters that began producing more but smaller fish in the 1990s, although the situation is complicated by the massive production of hatchery pink salmon, the smallest of the species, in Alaska and Russia.

Some fisheries researchers contend that the unprecedented number of pinks now feeding in North Pacific waters compounds the shrinkage of other salmon species.

Alaska’s Bristol Bay saw a return of the smallest sockeye ever in 2024. Bay sockeye compete with Russian pinks for food in the Bering Sea where they appeared to have at least held their own on the pastures of 2023.

Russia in 2024 saw a harvest of approximately 220,000 tonnes, about 30 tonnes shy of the Russian forecast harvest, while the Bay witnessed an unexpected return of 51.6 million sockeye, way over the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s forecast of 37.9 million.

Still, the Bay sockeye were so small that the 31.6 million harvest weighed only about 65,000 tonnes, about 28,000 tonnes less than a similar-sized catch in 2017. And the overall harvest, which had been forecast to be short of the previous years to begin with, was more than seven million salmon shy of the five-year average harvest.

Sockeye have a complicated life history. They are born only in river systems with lakes, and after being spawned in streams draining into those lakes or along the lakeshore, they spend one to three years feeding in the lake before heading to sea where they spend anything from one to five years. 

Pinks have a much simpler and more efficient history. Spawned in the gravel of rivers, streams and hatcheries (or hatchery incubators pens) in the late-summer or fall, they spend one winter in freshwater, emerge in the spring, and head straight to sea where they feed aggressively in order to grow from less than an ounce in weight to two to five pounds before returning to spawn a year and a half later.

“Once they reach the ocean,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says, “they feed voraciously and grow rapidly.” And though pinks are the smallest of the Pacific salmon at maturity, they have come to dominate the annual poundage of the Alaska salmon catch because of the size of their modern returns to Alaska waters.

Poundage-wise, they comprised about two-thirds of the state record harvest of 272 million salmon in 2013, an odd-numbered year.  It is in odd-numbered years that pinks return in the greatest numbers with even-numbered years producing only a quarter to a third the number of fish.

The 2023, odd-year catch of pinks totaled 152.4 million, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, with the 2024 catch falling to 40 million. The size of these annual swings between returns has only grown greater since the 1990s when the state began boosting pink numbers by adding hundreds of millions of hatchery fish to the natural flood of pinks going to sea every spring. 

This being an odd-numbered year, the state forecast a pink return big enough to allow a harvest of 138.4 million pinks or about three and a half times as many as in 2024. If that forecast had been met, the 2025 harvest of pinks alone would have topped the 2024, all-species salmon harvest by almost 35 million fish.

The actual pink harvest, however, came in about 24 million short. Biologists are not sure why, but despite the pink slump, Alaska had a good season with an all-species catch of 194.8 million salmon of which pinks comprised 61 percent.

The volume was the good news. The value was bad news.

The 122,000 tonnes of pinks caught in the state amounted to only 21 percent of a statewide, all species harvest valued at $541 million, according a state summary released this week. And the entire Alaska harvest weighed in at only 360,000 tonnes or approximately two-thirds of what one, single, Norway-based salmon farming company – Mowi – is now capable of producing in a year.

Success and failure

There is no doubt that Alaska’s foray into the open-ocean farming of salmon has been a high-volume success. Without the state’s hatchery fish, this year’s harvest would likely have been closer to 125 million salmon than 195 million.

Alaska has taken advantage of nature to produce large numbers of chum salmon and previously unimagined numbers of pink salmon. But the business problem the Alaska fishing industry faces is that the net-pen farming of salmon has proven far, far more successful.

The basic story here is as old as domestic agriculture in general. The latter long ago trumped the production of wild resources.

Wild resources simply cannot be managed to produce the yield of farmed products.  Even if the 30 million to 60 million bison once believed to roam the Great Plains were still doing so today, U.S. wildlife could not begin to supply the 28.7 billion pounds of beef the U.S. Department of Agriculture says Americans ate last year along with 27 billion pounds of pork..

More than 36 million cattle and 124 million pigs are killed every year to produce this volume of meat, and then there are the estimated 8.1 billion chickens sent to the butcher. Wild resources simply cannot be sustainably harvested at these levels.

Before 1900, America experimented with harvesting wildlife like it harvests fish. Market hunting was a big business in the late 19th century. It ended in 1900 with passage of the Lacey Act prohibiting the interstate trafficking of wildlife. The law was enacted to prevent elk, deer, moose, sheep and other wildlife from being hunted to extinction.

The nation’s whitetail deer population was at the time reported to have fallen from an estimated 30 million to about 300,000, according to the National Audubon Society, which reports, that thanks to conservation efforts in the years since 1900, there are now “more than a million in New York State alone.” 

U.S. fish fared better than wildlife through time, and Alaska fishery biologists eventually proved they could game the natural order of things to produce more salmon than the state had ever before seen. But as a business venture, the state hatcheries now play second fiddle to the farmers who decided to go all the way down the road to domestication and do with salmon what earlier humans did with goats, sheep, cows and a variety of fowl.

And what the Norwegians did to make this happen revolutionized everything. Farms have now quadrupled the volume of salmon available for sale, and new salmon farming businesses continue to sprout up.

The latest report on expansion comes from Japan with Undercurrent News, a trade website, on Oct. 31 reporting that “Japanese seafood giant Nissui Corp. has decided to start full-scale salmonid farming in Rikuzentakata, Iwate prefecture.”

Net-pen salmon farms – and the newer, land-based, recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) farms that sprang up as the salmon-farming business grew – now span the globe and grow salmon in once unimaginable locations such as Saudi Arabia and Florida.

Net-pan farms from Australia to Norway and Chile to Iceland combined to pump out most of the almost 2.8 million tonnes of high-value Atlantic, coho and Chinook salmon produced last year, but the RAS operations and other salmon-farming innovations are on the rise everywhere.

“Amid the arid expanses and dramatic landscapes of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, a quiet transformation is unfolding beneath the waters of its rivers, lakes and even reclaimed salt-alkali land. Once considered an unlikely frontier for aquaculture, the region has rapidly emerged as a national leader in cold-water fish production, pioneering techniques that not only meet domestic demand but also set new benchmarks for sustainable inland fisheries,”  the state-run China Global Television Network reported in September.

“Xinjiang’s aquatic output reached 74,800 tonnes, marking a 6.49 percent year-on-year increase. Among the various species, salmon has become the star performer, with production surpassing 5,000 tonnes.

With the global production of farmed salmon approaching 3 million tonnes, 5,000 tonnes is chicken feed, but the salmon output from that one aquaculture operation is approaching the approximately 8,000 tonnes of Chinook, sockeye and coho produced in 2024 by Alaska’s 30 ocean-farming hatcheries. 

And the problem illustrated by the Chinese is not in the production of a mere 5,000 tonnes of salmon, but in the “pioneering techniques” that illustrate the continuing and growing adaptability of the salmon farming businesses. This does not bode well for Alaska’s wild-caught salmon going forward, especially given Alaska’s annual fluctations in production.

The Alaska wild-caught fishery that produced on the order of 360,000 tonnes this year had a yield of only about 210,000 tonnes in 2024.

These sorts of swings in volume are not a good thing in global markets now built around “supply chain” reliability, and it appears that nothing can be done about these fluctations under Alaska’s existing salmon management scheme. The general thinking among fisheries biologists is that the reason Alaska pink salmon returns are so small in even-numbered years is that massive numbers of odd-year pinks gobble up so much of the North Pacific’s prey base that even-year pinks struggle to find enough food to flourish.

The 2024 harvest of pinks was so small it fell more than 18 million salmon short of the previous year’s harvest of 58.1 million pinks in hatchery-filled Prince William Sound alone.

The state’s open-ocean farming operations have been economic successes in the Sound and in Southeast Alaska. They were credited with 30 percent of the 2024 catch and 35 percent of the harvest the year before.

But as seen this year, they don’t produce high-value salmon. The state summary of the 2025 harvest that came out this week reports an average, statewide price of 30 cents for pinks and 60 cents for chums, approximately a quarter to half of what was paid for sockeyes and approaching a fifth to a third of what was paid for coho.

And there are indications, though no concrete proof, that the high-volume production of low-value pinks is reducing the size and abundance of those higher value salmon capable of  that competing with the high-value salmon the net-pen and RAS farmers are producing in ever greater volumes almost every year.

Alaska would be in a better position if the hatcheries were pumping out Chinook, sockeye and coho salmon, but they’re not because they can’t.

Hatchery costs

The problem for Alaska’s open-ocean farmers, or ranchers as they call themselves, is that Chinook, coho and sockeye are so expensive to feed in the years before release into the ocean that most of them would have to come back to Alaska after years at sea to make hatchery-cost numbers pencil.

Unfortunately, they don’t. Alaska biologists studying hatchery-raised coho smolts released to provide for adult salmon for fishing in Resurrection Bay return at the rate of 2 to 10 percent with a three-year average of 5.2 percent. This sort of return won’t cover the cost of a hatchery’s operations.

Pinks and chums are a different story because they don’t need to be fed until they grow from fry to smolts. Though pinks often have a return rate of less than 5 percent, they cost so little to produce and can be released in such large numbers that they can make hatcheries profitable even if the returning fish are only worth 75 to 90 cents each.

And the approximately 1,400 seiners boosting their harvests of wild pinks chums with some of these hatchery fish can make enough money to stay in business even if the sale of four of five pinks produces less revenue than the net-farmers are getting paid for a pound of their salmon, which is today wholesaling at about $3.39 a pound.

Wholesale prices, of course, reflect the value of fish that have been processed, and in the bigger economic picture are not really comparable to the prices paid fishermen for raw fish, given the costs incurred in processing that fish. Alaska Fish and Game data indicates that the value of pinks big enough to produce marketable filets increases to near $1 per pound at wholesale or about 29 percent of the value of a pound of farmed Atlantic salmon once processed.

Those pinks are, in general, headed and gutted and shipped to Asia for processing into filets. Silver Bay Seafoods, an Alaska fishermen-owned company formed in 2006, pioneered this idea and experienced great early success thanks to cheap Asian labor.

Silver Bay company founder Rob Zuanich, in testimony prepared for presentation to a U.S. federal trade agency in 2019 (the testimony can be found at regulations.gov), said that the company had to make this move to compete in a “low-price environment…SBS would ship its salmon products (to) Chinese facilities for secondary processing by hand at a fraction of U.S. labor costs.”

Zuanich was, at the time, arguing against tariffs on salmon processed in China and then shipped back to the U.S. for sale. Silver Bay, he said, was hoping to invest in “new equipment and processing methods to conduct these activities in Alaska or elsewhere in the U.S. or its territories,” but added that “this transition and associated investment will take time and in the interim Alaska pink and chum salmon products must continue to enter the U.S. through China for SBS to maintain economic viability.”

SBS has been a big winner for the approximately 600 permit-holding commercial fishermen who bought into the company, but in some respects a big loser for the state of Alaska. State data shows that canning low-value pinks, chums and undersized sockeye still greatly boosts the in-state value of those fish.

The state reported a pound of pink salmon canned in Prince William Sound in 2023 had a wholesale value of $2.92 while a pound of sockeye canned in Southeast the year before was reported to be valued at $5.48.

As shelf-stable product, canned salmon sees only a small markup at retail, but sales are minimal given consumer preferences for fresh and frozen salmon. Unstable farmed salmon wholesaling at $3.39 per pound jumps to a supermarket price of $10 or more primarily due to the costs of handling and spoilage.

“Retail waste, referred to by the industry as ‘shrink” has been estimated at “rates of 21.3 percent for fresh fish and 24.1 percent for fresh shellfish,” according to a 2021 study in the journal Foods. 

Waste is rampant in the “fresh” seafood business in general, and yet fresh is what customers want. Seventy-three percent of the salmon sold in the U.S. is reported sold as “fresh,” even when it’s something called “fresh frozen” to reflect a frozen fish that has been thawed. 

Consumer dictates

The simple reason for fresh-fish dominance is money. Consumers are willing to pay a lot more for those fish.

“…There was a $5.70/kilogram (about $2.60/pound) premium for fresh salmon compared to frozen salmon,” an Overview Of Retail Sales Of Seafood In The United States, 2017-2019 published in the journal Reviews in Fisheries Science and Aquaculture reported in 2021.

Net-pen salmon farmers enjoy this premium on a year-round basis while also facing lower operating costs than do processors working in remote areas of Alaska where the cost of fuel and electricity are high, and where they must provide food and housing for the workers they each summer import to process salmon.

When these costs are added up, they lead to the shocking reality that the farmers – despite the high costs of feeding their fish – can produce high-quality salmon at such a relatively low cost that by the time an Alaska processor covers the costs of creating a product from the wild-caught salmon that nature fed for free, there isn’t all that much cash left to pay the people catching the fish.

The state’s commercial fishermen have long had a hard time accepting this. Many refuse to believe it’s possible for Norwegians or Chileans or others raising salmon in pens to produce those fish as cheaply as Alaska salmon that graze for free on the pastures of the North Pacific. Some have long clung to the belief that Alaska processors have to be hiding profits somewhere.

Approximately 4,500 fishermen with the latter mindset went to court near the start of the new millennium to accuse Alaska salmon processors and  Japanese importers Okaya, Nichirei, Nichiro, and Nippon Suisan Kaisha of price fixing.

The lawsuit came “after prices began dropping” in the 1990s, the Associated Press reported when the case went to trial in 2003. The suit “accused Seattle-based processors and Japanese importers of conspiring more than a decade ago to lower prices paid in the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery (in Bristol Bay).

“Processors argued it was world market conditions that lowered prices to fishermen. A long recession in Asian markets lowered demand, and competition from farmed salmon boosted supply, according to defense attorneys.

“Jurors took about six hours to sift through nearly four months of sometimes nasty, sometimes numbing testimony to decide that fishermen weren’t cheated.”

That jurors spent only six hours in deliberations to consider four months of testimony says a lot about how bad they thought the fishermen’s case, and jury foreman Michael Nourse sort of summed this up when he told AP reporter Dan Joling that “there wasn’t a smoking gun. There wasn’t even a smoldering gun.”

Nothing has changed in the years since. Operating costs in Alaska are still holding down the prices processors can afford to pay for fish. And the consequences for processors who pay fishermen too much have proven deadly.

Most of the processors who fought the price-fixing lawsuit – some processors negotiated low-cost settlements and bailed out – have gone out of business or drastically scaled back their operations since 2003 because the profit margins in the 49th state were so slim despite the relatively low prices paid for the fish.

Those still in business in the 49th state are now struggling to stay alive while Alaska politicians scramble to come up with a plan to save them. And this is all in large part due to the technological progress that today makes it possible for a farmer to raise to saleable size some 90 to 95 percent of the salmon put in pens while Alaska’s “ranchers” operate at the other end of the scale.

Ninety to 95 percent of the young salmon they send to sea never return. Those fish take a sizeable bite out of the prey base of the Pacific, and then they die. The Alaska ranchers like to claim their operatoins are environmentally friendlier than the net-pen farms, but there is now a debate about how much those hatchery fish reduce the production of Alaska’s most valuable salmon, along with their effects on the other fish and wildlife compete with which they compete for food.

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