An Alaska salmon salmon factory, fish-farm not/NSRAA
The downside of salmon factories
The time has come for Alaskans to accept the reality that a state-backed program began in the 1970 to use salmon hatcheries to farm the sea was a mistake.
Not because it has failed to produce salmon, as was the case with similar salmon programs begun in Oregon at about the same time. Some big businesses – British Petroleum, Union Carbide and Weyerhaeuser Co. – got involved there, but had the business sense to give up on free-range salmon “ranching,” as some like to call it, after a dozen years of economic failure.
All these years later, a similar economic failure has come to Alaska. The hatcheries the state built or funded today produce a lot of salmon, but most of them are not the salmon that consumers want to buy.
All of this has helped to devalue the salmon harvested in Alaska while at the same limiting the production of the state’s most valuable salmon. Some solid scientific research now links hatchery salmon to decreases in both the size and number of the state’s more valuable salmon.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game, which started the hatchery program and has embraced it for five decades as if it were the Department’s beloved child, has dismissed this research as nothing but a demonstration of “correlation, not causation.”
The same can be said for cigarettes and lung cancer. Eighty to 90 percent of smokers never develop the disease, and scientists are still trying to identify exactly why some smokers get cancer while most don’t, genetic factors now being the reason cited.
Despite this scientific uncertainty as to cigarettes causing cancer, it was long ago accepted that the correlation between cigarettes and cancer is strong enough that cigarette packaging to be labeled with the “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is now pushing to put even more graphic warnings on cigarette packaging, because some diseases show up more often in smokers than non-smokers. This could all be a coincidence. But whatever the direct relationship between smoking and these diseases, it matters because correlations often point to problems that should not be ignored.
Alaska’s effort to farm the seas with massive, industrial-scale hatcheries has become one of those problems because of the linkage between the rise of the hatcheries and the economic decline of the Alaska commercial salmon fishing business.
About the only business in the state that has been as greatly devalued in the 21st century is the newspaper business, which once supported highly profitable newspapers in Alaska’s largest cities. Those still hanging on today are shrunken, barely profitable relics of what they once were.
And the story is much the same in the commercial salmon fishing business.
Follow the money
The extent to which the state’s “wild-caught salmon,” as the Alaska fish are now called so as to avoid misleading consumers into believing they are buying actual “wild salmon,” is shocking if you go back and look at that 1975 harvest.
The approximately 139.8 million pounds landed in ’75 amounted to about 18 percent of the 793 million pounds harvested this year. But what really matters in economic terms is not measured solely in the weight of the catch, but in the value of the harvest measured in dollars.
An exact number for the value of the 1975 catch is not easy to find, but figures compiled in 2019 by Gunnar Knapp, professor emeritus of economics at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Alaska Anchorage, would indicate the value of the state’s 1975 salmon catch was on the order of $115 million.
When this is corrected for inflation using the online calculator of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, that $115 million value from 1975 turns out to be the equivalent of $718 million in 2026 dollars, or $177 million more than the $541 million the state of Alaska reported as the value of the 2026 harvest.
This is a major financial loss, but it gets worse when you recognize that it would be far, far greater if not for global warming, which has greatly boosted the productivity of Bristol Bay. The Bay is home to the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world, and the harvest of those fish last year accounted for nearly 40 percent of the ex-vessel value for the entire Alaska salmon fishery.
That Alaska salmon have devalued so badly since 1975 seems hard to believe, but the huge drop is largely confirmed by a report prepared by the Norwegian Seafood Council in 2022. Thanks to Norway’s success in net-pen farming salmon, as opposed to ranching them on the open ocean, the smallish, Scandinavian country is now the world leader in salmon production.
Norway’s salmon farms, without question, played a key role in the post ’75 price decline as they ramped up net-pen salmon farming and made farming ever more efficient.
On an annual basis, the volume of salmon produced in Norway is now two to five times the volume produced in Alaska. More importantly, Norway produces the same volume of salmon year to year – something today’s supply-chain oriented markets prefer to the big odd-year, even-year swings in production in Alaska.
Norway’s production is also focused on Atlantic salmon of six pounds and larger, which produce the filets most Western-world cooks desire. The bulk of the Alaska catch, on the other hand, is dominated by pink salmon of four pounds or less. Those fish don’t make great filets.
All new market
Norway’s success in net pen farming in the 1970s, it needs to be noted, also led to net-pen farming in Chile, Scotland, the Faroe Islands, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Ireland, Denmark, Japan and elsewhere. As a result, net-pen farmed salmon now dominate the global market and compete with each other, all of which has served to drive down prices paid for the filets consumers want.
The world today looks nothing like it did in 1975 when Alaska’s still largely wild, as opposed to wild-caught, salmon owned the market. Ironically, the high prices then paid for those salmon helped keep the fledgling Norwegian farmers in business until they could perfect their farming techniques and begin to produce salmon as tasty as Alaska’s at lower prices.
Ever more farms subsequently led to ever more competition, and when farmed salmon started winning blind tastings more than a decade ago, Alaska’s salmon industry found itself in real trouble. It’s hard to attract fine wine prices from consumers when they are being told better wines can be found for half the price.
But this wasn’t all that was going on in the 49th state, where the product mix of salmon was also steadily changing. In 1975, almost 65 percent of the Alaska catch was comprised of filet-size chum, coho, sockeye and Chinook salmon of six and a half pounds or more.
Pink salmon, the smallest and lowest value species in the harvest, made up less than 30 percent of the 1975 harvest volume, and nearly all those fish went into cans. Few, marginal-quality pink filets made it into the market to undermine the Alaska salmon brand.
Now, the production numbers have nearly flipped, and you can go online in today’s internet world and read some horrific reviews of “wild caught pink salmon” from Alaska. One on the Kroger website describes the product as “gross. Worst quality I’ve ever had. Skinless and limp, falls apart when you try to cook it. Avoid.”
Pinks, unfortunately, now make up the bulk of the Alaska salmon harvest despite the booming sockeye fishery in the Bay. The 2025 pink salmon harvest of 119.1 million was more than nine times larger than in 1975.
Overall, pinks comprised more than 61 percent of the Alaska salmon catch last year, while the state’s highest value salmon – the Chinooks that most Alaskans call “king salmon” – continued to fade away. The 2025 king catch was reported at a mere 181,892 fish, and the average weight was down to 10.7 pounds.
The 1975 catch was three times larger, and the fish caught that year were about 60 percent bigger, with an average weight of 17.24 pounds.
The loss of value in the Alaska commercial fishery these days is partially due to competition from net-pen farmers. There is no doubt about that. But it is not solely due to competition from net-pen farms.
When you produce a product for which the market demand is low, selling it is always going to be difficult. The Alaska Congressional delegation, which still gets significant contributions from commercial fishing interests, would like Alaskans to believe the money problem here is competition from pinks from evil Russia, but even if Russia quit selling pinks, the market demand for the fish is so slow that it’s possible the price might not go up all that much.
As it is, the processors still stuffing pinks in cans in Alaska have sort of become the welfare queens of the American fishing industry with the government repeatedly jumping in to buy their fish to keep their businesses afloat. A well-meaning Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, will tell you this is all about improving the diets of poor Americans and school children, but if she was really interested in helping those folks, she’d be first in line to restructure national food assistance programs to prevent the poor from buying ultraprocessed and other inherently unhealthy foods.
Still, the Alaska Congressional delegation isn’t responsible for the biggest part of the problem. That responsibility rests on the shoulders of a long list of state officials who helped set in motion the plan to farm the sea, and then turned it over to commercial fishing interests to do with as they wished.
The state Board of Fisheries, which is supposed to oversee the behavior of the bureaucrats who manage the fisheries, has long refused to do anything to fix this, and it sidestepped the issue again just last month while promising it might do something in a future that never seems to come.
Forgotten promises
Once the math is done there, the “remainder” comes to 16.2 million pinks – salmon now worth less than a dollar each to the fishermen who catch them. Last year – despite salmon returns to Prince William Sound, Alaska’s hatchery heartland, coming in significantly below forecasts – the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported that the Sound alone produced more than twice that number of the hatchery pinks, the fish Alaskans commonly call ‘humpies.”
The hatchery return to Kodiak Island, according to Fish and Game, added another 9.7 million pinks to the ocean farming total, bringing the total harvest of hatchery pinks close to 50 million. That is about three times the number of low-value pinks that were supposed to be produced, and near the total number of ocean-farmed salmon of all species the hatcheries were supposed to crank out.
The original goals for higher value king, sockeye, coho and chum salmon all fell short in 2020, as they historically have almost every year.
Coho did better, rising to about two-thirds of the promise, and chum came in at about three-quarters of the original goal, thanks largely to hatcheries in Southeast Alaska where the state has managed to transform what was once a wild salmon fishery into a hatchery-salmon fishery.
Good-bye wild Alaska chum; hello “wild-caught” Alaska keta salmon, the now preferred marketing label for the fish commonly known for decades in Alaska as “dog salmon.”
Alaska salmon aren’t considered to be farmed, at least not in the 49th state, because they are “ranched,” meaning that instead of being fed entirely in feedlots, as with net-pen salmon, they are fattened in feedlots and then sent to sea to compete with wild fish in the fight for survival.
Eat, eat, die
Given that 90 percent of young salmon, and sometimes a lot more, that go to sea are destined to die there, this competition is significant, especially when one considers that the Alaska hatcheries fatten their young salmon in net pens just like those used by the net-pen farmers.
The reasons for this net-pen feeding is simple. Fattening salmon smolts increases their odds for survival at sea. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost to wild fish.
A wide variety of studies have now documented the “correlation” between hatchery releases and reductions in both the number and size of wild salmon returning not only to Alaska streams and rivers, but to streams and rivers all along the West Coast of North America.
One of the most telling of these studies looked at the growth of sockeye salmon based on the tree-like rings found in their scales.
They could not determine how many young sockeye died at sea because they were undernourished, but undernourished animals of any sort are naturally more vulnerable to predation and, in some cases, death by starvation.
But ignore that and just consider the endgame consequences from the decline in size. The average Alaska sockeye weighed 5.75 pounds in 1975. The weight was down to 5.1 pounds this year, which was itself a notable improvement from the year before when shrunken Bay sockeye averaging a mere 4.5 pounds dragged the statewide average down to 4.7 pounds.
Still, the weight difference between the sockeye of 1975 and those of 2025 cost Alaska commercial fishermen about $1 million.
Losses involving coho, which have also been shown to be affected by competition from Alaska’s booming populations of hatchery and wild pinks, were even greater. The coho commercial fishermen caught in Alaska last year were more than a pound and a half smaller on average than the 7.58-pound fish of 1975.
This is another big financial loss for commercial fishermen, although not as big as for sockeye because coho prices paid in Alaska were this year down to 49 cents per pound. The reason for this appears to be tied, in part, to net-pen farms in Chile providing a more consistent and higher-quality supply of coho than Alaska now does.
This is also to be expected because the net-pen farmers, who don’t lose 90 to 95 percent of their product at sea, can promise consistent supplies, and because their operations allow them to move live fish straight into a processing plant.
Prompt processing is important because the main factor affecting the quality of salmon flesh – forget everything you might have been told about taste being an issue of the where the fish came from – is the time between when a salmon dies and when it is processed.
“Competing in today’s marketplace requires a top-quality product,” the California Salmon Council warned commercial fishermen in that state as the net-pen farming business was only beginning to take off. “The seafood business is no different. Competition from pen-raised fish has enhanced the level of quality to include uniformity and consistent supply. Delivering high-quality, troll-caught salmon takes skill, determination and collective efforts from all
sectors of the fishery.
“The importance of good practice at sea cannot be overemphasized because fish begin to spoil the minute they die. Neglect on board, even on short fishing trips, can result in poor-quality fish after only a few hours. The time the fish is on board the vessel is often longer than the time on shore between landing and consumption. Therefore, the fisherman bears much of the responsibility for the freshness of fish reaching the consumer.”
In troll fisheries, including those that operate in Southeast Alaska but nowhere north of there, salmon are caught by hook and line and hauled in to be immediately killed, bled, gutted and put on ice or, in the very best-case scenario, flash frozen.
Troll-caught salmon, unfortunately, comprise a tiny, tiny fraction of the Alaska salmon harvest. More than 90 percent of Alaska salmon are caught in gillnets or purse seines and hours, often tens of hours and sometimes days, pass between when they die and the when they are bled and gutted.
As a result, quality suffers. Fishermen in the Bay have tried hard to get around this problem, and processors have encouraged them to do so by offering bonuses for salmon chilled to 39 degrees or colder before delivery to processing facilities. Chilling to such temperatures significantly lowers the rate of decay in salmon, or any other fish, and that improves the quality of the flesh.
The quality of Alaska salmon would improve if all the fish were handled this way, but in a fishery now driven by pink salmon, quantity trumps quality. When the market judges your product to be worth only 30 cents per pound to begin with, as was the statewide price for Alaska pinks in 2025, there is no reason to believe that marginally improving the product’s quality is going to do much to boost the price.
And as long as those 30-cent-per-pound salmon dominate the Alaska salmon harvest, the value of the industry will remain low. Not that the hatchery operators care. Pinks are cheap to raise, and there is no cheaper way to harvest salmon than in front of a hatchery where the state allows “cost-recovery” fisheries to pay for hatchery operating costs.
This is another thing that wasn’t supposed to happen when the state began its hatchery program. The original plan was for the hatcheries to produce “common property” salmon with the costs of hatchery operations paid by an assessment, a fancy name for a tax, imposed on the commercial fishermen catching nearly all of said common-property salmon.
The assessments, however, never came close to covering costs, and as a result, the cost-recovery harvests were permitted to turn Alaska’s commercial fishermen-run hatcheries into self-supporting fish factories. But no one calls these factories what they are because in Alaska salmon farming is technically banned and calling the state’s hatcheries “fish factories” would make it sound a lot like Alaska is engaged in “industrial agriculture,” a form of farming that could undermine the survival of wild salmon in the much the same way industrial agriculutre in the Lower 48 ensured the bison that once roamed the Great Plains would never return.
Categories: Commentary
A conclusion offered in a white paper prepared for the recent Statewide Board of Fish meeting on the topic of fishery enhancement: “… since the legislature created the salmon fishery enhancement program in the 1970’s, the program has provided 1.7 billion salmon to the fisheries of the state, resulting in substantial economic value to coastal communities of the state without apparent negative effect on statewide harvest of wild salmon”. The chart referenced shows aggregate catch of all ‘wild’ salmon, with a remarkable, dominant odd year pattern since around 2000. Go figure!
Great reporting. We can live in a lie or live in reality. Time for Alaska salmon industry to belly up to the reality bar and have a stiff drink of the modern world.