Is Alaska next?

As if the Alaska commercial salmon fishing business didn’t already have enough problems, now some Michelin chefs have the knives out.

WildFish, a charity based in the United Kingdom, has launched a global campaign to “take ocean-farmed salmon off the table” and claims a bunch of prominent chefs have already signed on.

Alaska years ago became the world leader in ocean-farmed salmon. The North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, a treaty organization, reports the state’s 2024 release of approximately 1.9 billion hatchery salmon was 300 million more than the Russian hatchery release and 700 million more than the releases in Japan, the country that pioneered open-ocean farming.

Canada and the Pacific Northwest states are, by comparison, bit players with releases in the range of 192 million and 300 million, respectively.

The commercial fishermen now in charge of a hatchery program begun by the state in the 1970s prefer to call their open-ocean farming ranching, but that’s just semantics.

As David Courtney, author of “The Texanist” column at Texas Monthly magazine, noted in wrestling with this issue in 2022, “dictionary definitions of ‘ranch’ and ‘farm’ are both so semantically squishy…that the Texas hinterlands are peppered with cattle ranches, dairy farms, exotic ranches, cotton farms, goat ranches, sheep farms, emu ranches, ant farms, solar and wind farms, and lots and lots of dude ranches?”

Not to mention, he added, “those spreads owned by lucky Texans as refuges from the hurly-burly of the city, places to get away from it all and spend a weekend hunting, fishing, or sitting on the porch, shooting the breeze with family and friends. These properties are invariably referred to as ranches – perhaps because they once were working ranches, or were parts of working ranches, or remain, in some minimal fashion, working ranches, so that the owners might claim an “ag exemption” on their taxes. And then there are those who simply refer to their property as a ranch because in Texas ‘ranch’ has a mythical status that ‘farm’ just doesn’t.”

Alaska salmon “ranching” is similarly seeped in mythology, but in Alaska’s case, it was mythology created to promote the marketing of “wild-caught” salmon as opposed to “farmed salmon” even if the wild-caught salmon were raised for a time in net-pens just like the farmed salmon before being sent to sea to fatten and, hopefully, return.

Raising salmon in net pens in Alaska to make them bigger and stronger and thus better able to survive than the wild salmon they compete with at sea would appear to violate the state “wild salmon” policy that declares “wild salmon stocks…should be protected from adverse impacts from artificial propagation and enhancement efforts.”

But no one has ever sued to force the state to prevent hatcheries from growing bigger and stronger young fish with the intent of giving them a competitive advantage over wild fish at sea, and so the hatcheries keep feeding young fish in pens at their “ranches.”

These are called ranches because, as Courtney put it, “‘ranch’ has a mythical status that ‘farm’ just doesn’t,” and in the case of Alaska salmon, that mythical status is that a ranch is not a farm because everyone, or at least all Alaskans, know that farming salmon is bad.

Theoretically, this is also the view of the chefs who’ve joined the WildFish cause.

Ocean farmed

More than 50 are reported to have agreed to remove “ocean-farmed” salmon from their restaurant menus and advocate for sustainable food systems, according to a statement released on the PR Newswire. 

Chefs named in the statement include Alice Waters, Francis Mallmann, Dan Barber, Lisa Ahier, and Michael Howell.

Waters is a Berkley, Calif.-based chef and author who was a leader in the farm-to-table movement and a pioneer of California cuisine. Mallmann, an Argentinian, became known for his penchant for cooking over open fires. Google Arts & Culture says he is ” widely regarded as one of the most influential chefs in Latin America.”

Chefs for Impact describes Manhattan’s Barber as “more than ‘just a Michelin-starred Chef’; Dan is also an agronomist, an environmentalist, an activist, and a powerful agent of change, making him one of the most influential people in the world.”

British Columbia, Canada-based Ahier was a two-time winner in Top Chef Canada before losing out in the show’s sixth segment in 2024. And Quench Magazine describes Canada’s Howell as someone who joined “the vanguard of a new breed of fine chefs in Nova Scotia” after studying with Paul Bocuse, “the leading light of the Nouvelle Cuisine movement and widely acknowledged as one of the greatest chefs of the era.

Embracing wild salmon, now a comparably rare commodity with net-pen farmed salmon having taken over more than 80 percent of the market, is no doubt a good business move for all of these chefs. Rare commodities are generally always considered ‘better,” and thus pricier, than common commodities.

Whether the chefs are really embracing a ban on ocean-farmed salmon is, however, unclear. WildFish has long been a leader in efforts to restrict and eliminate net-pen salmon farming in the UK, and its latest campaign appears to be mainly directed at net pens in the ocean.

But its broad attack on “ocean-farmed salmon” still presents a problem for Alaska in that about a third of the annual harvest of 49th state salmon is now comprised of ocean-farmed fish, something that has been attracting increasing attention in North America.

A column in the Times Colonist newspaper of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, earlier this month took Alaska hatcheries to task on the sustainability front about which the chefs seem worried.

“…Alaska’s out-of-control hatchery programs are using the vital North Pacific as an open-ocean feedlot for the billions of juvenile pink and chum their hatcheries pump out every year,” wild-fish advocate David Mills wrote there. “By overpopulating the ocean with lower-value fish, they are tipping the ecological scales for their own benefit. Consequently, our wild Chinook, coho, chum, sockeye and steelhead are returning smaller and in fewer numbers.”

Mills suggested it was time for Canada to find common cause with Washington state and Oregon in ongoing renegotiations of the Pacific Salmon Treaty between the U.S. and Canada.

“Though commissioners representing Washington and Oregon are on the same side of the negotiating table as their counterparts from Alaska, their needs are more aligned with Canada’s,” he observed.

“Just like B.C., Oregon and Washington are impacted by the relentless over-harvest of their salmon stocks as they migrate through Southeast Alaska, and by Alaska’s excessive flooding of the North Pacific Ocean pasture with hatchery fish.”

Winners and losers

The politics here could do further damage to an already struggling Alaska salmon industry, or they could, in some cases, aid it.

Alaska’s hatchery-free Bristol Bay is home to the world’s largest returns of truly wild salmon. If international chefs are truly interested in salmon unaffected by open-ocean farming, Bay sockeyes are one of the few sources of supply to which they can turn.

The Bay boasts a sustainable and wholly wild salmon fishery capable of supplying the sort of filets that chefs desire.  And it already produces a product good enough to make it the state’s most valuable fishery.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported that a Bay harvest of more than 41 million sockeye this year was worth $214.3 million. Those fish accounted for about 40 percent of the value of the statewide salmon catch despite comprising less than 22 percent of a statewide, all-species harvest of 194.8 million salmon.

And this despite the devaluation of Bay sockeye in the new millennium.

If the prices paid for Bay sockeye in 1988 had carried forward to today, the fish would be worth $7.81 per pound to the fishermen catching them. Unfortunately for Bay fishermen, sockeye prices have not kept pace with inflation.

Instead, prices deflated rather than inflated over the years. The state reported Bay fishermen were getting an average $1.03 per pound for sockeye this year – less than a seventh of what they got paid back in the good old days when 2025 dollars are used to measure value.

Properly handled, these fish might be worth considerably more in the future if marketed to upscale restaurants looking to sell truly “wild” and sustainable salmon.

The same might be said for sockeyes from Upper Cook Inlet given that the financially sinking Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association (CIAA) stopped stocking fish in Hidden Lake, a Kenai River, tributary in 2023.

The commercial-fishermen-run, open-ocean-farming business continues to stock sockeye in Lower Cook Inlet, and though it could be argued a few of those fish might show up in the Upper Inlet harvest, the number is sure to be so small as to make defensible an argument that Upper Inlet sockeye are “wild,” not just “wild caught.”

Other Alaska fisheries, however, have problems if chefs actually go after all open-ocean farmed salmon because of the third or more of the average annual harvest of Alaska salmon being comprised of “ranched” fish.

Chum salmon harvests in Southeast Alaska are now so heavily weighted with ocean-farmed fish that nearly all chums caught there could be considered farmed, and Southeast sockeyes are so mixed in with wild sockeye that the odds of obtaining a “wild” sockeye from a Southeast “wild-caught” harvest aren’t great.

Meanwhile, the Chinook caught in the Southeast troll fisheries include both a fair number of Alaska hatchery fish and a significant number of salmon from hatcheries in British Columbia, Washington state, and Oregon. Thus, Mills’ complaint about Alaska salmon interceptions.

The Canadians and the two Lower-48 states are paying tens to hundreds of dollars per pound to raise these fish, according to an Oregon state study, only to have them picked off by Alaska fishermen on their way to back to the hatcheries of their origin.

It’s not just Southeast trollers catching these fish either.

A genetics study conducted by the state of Alaska found that in 2021, 43 percent of the Chinook caught in the Copper River fishery were open-ocean farmed fish from hatcheries in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest.  

These are the fish sold as “wild-caught, Copper River kings” at exorbitant prices. The now-defunct Peter Pan Seafoods was in 2021 paying Cordova-based gillnetters $19.60 per pound for Copper kings, according to Seafood Source.

The Copper River fish benefit from first-class marketing that dates back to 1982 when The Seattle Times credits “Jon Rowley, a former fisherman…who has a knack for marketing” for helping these salmon rise “from tin-can fodder to gourmet fare, doing for the humble fish what Starbucks did for coffee.”

Looking at the premium prices now paid for Copper kings and, to a lesser extent, sockeye, Rowley arguably did more for Copper River salmon than Starbucks did for coffee given the “Copper River” tag is more about cachet than taste.

Some consumers have caught on to this, Jerry Johnson, a consumer researcher at Cascade Strategies in Seattle told The Times more than 20 years ago, but he added that there are a great “number of people out there (who) still want fervently to believe that a branded product is better.

“There’s a healthy component of snake oil there,” he then added.

Others have made similar observations, but many continue to believe that “Copper River salmon” are special and taste better, even if some of them originated in hatcheries far from the Copper River.

State genetics data reveal a great deal of year-to-year variation in the origins of the fish caught and sold as Copper River king salmon. Some years, up to 90 percent of the fish trace back to the Copper. Other years, as few as 58 percent are truly Copper River kings.

The state has reported no new genetic data since 2021 when the percentage of non-Copper River kings caught and sold as “Copper River kings” hit 43 percent, but it is the opinion of most fisheries biologists that the number of non-Copper River kings in the Copper River harvest is likely to have gone up as the Cordova gillnet fleet has been moved farther from the mouth of the river, as has been done in recent years, to protect weak returns of Chinook to the Copper itself.

Copper River sockeye, which also attract a premium due to the branding, are even more tainted than Copper River kings given a fish farming operation along the river north of the community of Gulkana and a sizeable sockeye hatchery at Main Bay in nearby Prince William Sound.

The state this year reported that the “Gulkana Hatchery commercial harvest was the
fourth highest in the last 10 years, contributing 98,300 sockeye salmon, or 12 percent of the total commercial harvest. Main Bay Hatchery contributed 12,800 sockeye salmon or 2 percent of the Copper River sockeye salmon.”

For reasons unclear, the Main Bay hatchery harvest came in way below the 2025 forecast. Last year, the state reported that the Main Bay hatchery accounted for “13 percent of the Copper River sockeye salmon harvest” with the Gulkana Hatchery adding another 18 percent, meaning that someone who bought a  fresh, “wild-caught Copper River sockeye” had about a one-in-three chance of getting an ocean-farmed fish instead of a wild fish.

Whether this makes a difference to the chefs selling a meal with the Copper River cachet, who knows. But it can’t help sales to have anyone talking about “Alaska’s excessive flooding of the North Pacific Ocean pasture with hatchery fish.”

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