No, it’s not Norway; it’s an Alaska salmon ranch/Facebook, VFDA

Alaska hatchery salmon gone missing

The grand vision of an Alaska commercial salmon fishing industry stabilized by the hand of man producing fish in hatcheries and sending them to graze the sea before returning to be slaughtered as silvery profit is today being threatened by what is happening in Prince William Sound, the heartland of the 49th state’s ocean farming business.

The Valdez Fisheries Development Association, a nonprofit that has been getting rich off ocean-ranched pink salmon in recent years, was Monday reporting itself 84 percent short of its “pink salmon revenue goal” to fund 2027 hatchery operations and forced to suspend salmon harvests to ensure the survival of adequate brood stock to supply the hatchery with eggs for next year.

There are those still holding out hope the fish have merely been delayed, but the hope is fading by the day. There has been little fishing for pink salmon in the Sound outside of Valdez Arm this year because there have been no fish to support it.

Thus the low return of pinks to Port Valdez cannot be blamed on interceptions of hatchery fish to a facility that should have reached its cost-recovery goal weeks ago based on past seasons. The latest date of cost recovery completion in recent years came on July 21, 2023.

In 2021 and 2020, cost recovery was reported complete by July 11. The date last year was July 14. The year before that, it was July 19.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has tried to put the best spin on faltering Sound salmon returns by reporting that “harvest levels and recent reports of increasing pink salmon abundance throughout PWS are encouraging…and escapement trends are improving. 

“Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation (PWSAC) staff at the Armin F. Koernig Hatchery, the Cannery Creek Hatchery, and the Wally Noerenberg Hatchery are currently reporting small schools of pink salmon at three facilities. The estimated numbers have been increasing over the last three days. If sufficient fish are available to harvest, cost recovery efforts will begin Saturday, Aug. 1.

PWSAC on Monday reported it did start cost recovery at Koernig on Aug. 1,  and at Cannery Creek on Aug. 2, but at Noerenberg, “cost recovery has not begun because sufficient fish are not available for harvest.” There was also a noticeable lack of females at both of the former hatcheries where PWSAC reported catches made up of 84 to 85 percent males.

As for cost-recovery, it reported reaching “11 percent of the cost recovery goal,” but provided no hint as to how many more fish might be available for harvest.

The most realistic view of the situation in the Sound at this time might have been best provided by Matt Bradley, the skipper of a salmon tender floating offshore.

Worst ever?

This has “got to be one (of) the worst seasons on record for the fisherman in Prince William Sound in history,” he posted on Facebook on July 28. “Our job on the Northwestern is to buy fish from the fishermen and bring it back to the processing plant. The goal is to keep the fishermen on the fishing grounds and keep things moving for the (processors).  But when the fish don’t show up, the fishermen have nothing to catch; the processors have nothing to process! (I) can always find something to do on this boat, but after 24 days in a row of not buying fish, starting to get a little stir crazy. Prayers up that the fish come for all of us.”

It has now been a month of “not buying.”

Miracles can happen, but they happen rarely, which is why they are called miracles.

Suffice to say that a lot has changed since the mid-2010s when the Sound helped power the state to record salmon harvests. The peak came in 2013 with an all-species catch of 219 million salmon. Ninety-one million of those fish were Sound humpies as Alaskans usually refer ot the smallest and least valuable of the Pacific salmon.

The big catch that year came as somewhat of a surprise to some fisheries biologists given that the warm waters of the Pacific from 2003 to 2006 had begun to cool. Booming pink production in the 21st Century has been thought to be tied directly to warmer water, but that idea uncoupled somewhat as temperatures fluctuated through the first decades of the 2000s.

There are now, however, indications of a recoupling in light of falling water temperatures that began going down in 2020 and have just kept going down, down, down. The Sound saw a sizeable pink harvest of 44.5 million pinks last year, but that was only about two-thirds the size of the forecast of almost 62 million.

Still, 2025 being an odd-numbered year when pinks flourish, the catch was almost three times the size of the 15 million pinks of 2024. Even-year and odd-year harvests of pinks have long yo-yoed in the northeast Gulf of Alaska, but the size of the swings has only increased since hatcheries were built, ostensibly to stabilize annual harvests.

The Pacific Seafood Processors Association, an industry trade group based in Seattle, was one of the big forces behind the push for ever more hatchery production in the 2000s. In an “Open Letter to Alaska Hatcheries” in 2010, it called for the commercial-fishermen-run facilities to go all in on farming the sea with the smallest and lowest-value Alaska salmon.

“From 2000-2009 the average statewide hatchery pinks returns were 32.6 million in even years and 55.9 million in odd years – in both cases about 40 percent of total pink returns,” they wrote. “We would like production to increase to 70 million in both even and odd years over the next five years, which would bring hatchery production to roughly 50 percent of that total.”

In the years that followed, it looked like the processors might get their wish. The 2013 pink harvest topped the 70 million mark. Two years later, the 2015 harvest turned out even better with 97.3 million pinks hauled to the processing plants.

And the following year, the Sound witnessed an even-year pink harvest that came in at close to 50 million for the first time. Since then, however,  the dream of 70 million per year has died despite the Alaska Board of Fisheries allowing increases in hatchery releases over the objections of conservation organizations.

The Sound saw its worst odd-year catch in 2017 when only 24 million pinks were landed. Odd-year catches improved after that and grew back to 65.6 million in 2021, but the trend since has been steadily downhill with the odd-year catches in decline – 65.6 million, 58.1 million, 45.04 million – and the even-year catches crashing – 28.4 million, 9.95 million and who knows how few this year.

Odd-numbered years are still wildy out performing even-numbered years, but the average of both for the last five years is down to 41.4 million per year. And, in all likelihood, by the end of this year, the new five-year average could drop to under half of what the processors wanted, with an ever-increasing percentage of the harvest value going to the hatcheries and an ever-shrinking percentage going to commercial fishermen.

Whether this will continue for years is an unknown. It could be a blip in time. Salmon processors and the small cadre of salmon seiners who saw bountiful success with both hatcheries and wild fish when the North Pacific Ocean was warm could be back in business in a couple of years.

Or they could again be begging for federal disaster relief as they have done regularly since 2020. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration eventually ponied up almost $16 million ” to address (2020) losses to the affected management areas,” as the Alaska Department of Fish and Game put it.

Four years later came a replay of 2020, and Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy asked for another disaster declaration, citing the “lowest Prince William Sound pink salmon harvest since 1993….The harvest of 9.95 million pink salmon and 1.7 million chum salmon were 75 percent and 57 percent, respectively, below the recent five-year averages….and estimated losses total over $85 million.”

He did not mention that those averages had been boosted by decades of hatcheries pouring hundreds of millions of little pinks and chums into the ocean, or that catches of 9.95 million pinks and 1.7 million chums would have represented a good catch for the Sound in the years before the state started farming the ocean.

The promise

What is now, in this year, is not the way that farming was supposed to work out, however.

When then tax-paying Alaskans started the hatchery program by approving millions of dollars in bonds to build state fish hatcheries in the 1970s, those facilities were supposed to produce salmon to benefit all Alaskans.

But the state didn’t stay in the hatchery business for long after recognizing the high costs of running hatcheries. Facilities and operations were subsequently turned over to non-profit corporations, most of them run by commercial fishermen, that were empowered to finance operations with revenue from the so-called “cost-recovery” fisheries.

This both violated the pact made with Alaska voters who approved and paid for bonds to build the hatcheries to produce “common property” salmon to be shared by all and ignored a later agreement made with the associations of commercial fishermen controlling the corporations that ran the hatcheries.

The original agreement between the state and commercial fishermen was that the latter would be taxed at a high enough rate to fund hatchery operations.  But it quickly became obvious this would require a way bigger tax than the fishermen – who don’t like to pay taxes to begin with – were willing to pay.

And unlike the oil industry, which has been forced to share at least some of the state’s resource wealth with all Alaskans, the commercial fishing industry has seldom been forced to share anything with anybody. Mainly what the industry has done is take.

This is not opinion. This is simple fact.

The industry mainly provides low-paying jobs filled by non-resident workers, many of them foreigners. The state Department of Labor reports that because of the seasonal nature of the work, and its “wet, cold and monotonous” nature, nonresidents now comprise 83 percent of the processing labor force,

A few fishing communities have benefitted from the taxes imposed on the industry, but the state has always lost money on the management and policing of the fisheries. This has meant that all Alaskans have subsidized the government operations needed to ensure commercial fishermen don’t harvest every last fish until the fisheries collapse.

Alaska commercial fishermen like to portray themselves as “conservationists,” and some are, but what they all are is businessmen. If they don’t fish, they lose money and possibly their business. This can make conservation pretty easy to overlook, given that the number of salmon returning in the future doesn’t matter much to someone no longer in the business of catching them.

How present declines in hatchery salmon numbers play out going forward only time will tell. But the late Wayne Alex, a commercial fisherman from Juneau who along with a few other commercial fishermen feared hatchery development as a fool’s bargain, worried at the start that once cemented in place, the hatcheries would come to replace fishermen when salmon runs fluctuated downward as they have off and on through Alaska history.

A very successful fisherman, Alex understood the hatcheries would become every bit as dependent on revenue as the fishermen, and thus, if hatchery production declined, the “common property” salmon the hatcheries were originally set up to produce were almost sure to become hatchery-owned salmon, and the fishermen would be cut out of the harvests.

This has already happened in Cook Inlet where the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association (CIAA) is scooping up nearly all of the salmon it produces in an effort to stay financially afloat. And despite this, it continues to sink. It is now $20 million in debt to the state, and there is no indication of how it might be able to repay state loans.

Last year, according to state reports, .CIAA forecast “a total run of 83,600 sockeye salmon to Resurrection Bay release sites with 76,400 fish needed for broodstock and cost recovery. Total cost recovery harvest
from this district was 10,934 sockeye salmon. There was no commercial harvest effort in this district.”

From cost-recovery fisheries there and elsewhere, the state reported, CIAA expected to collect $2.6 million in revenue, but it ended up catching only $750,000 worth of fish.

It had to borrow more money from the state to stay afloat this year, and its cost recovery operations for 2026 appear to have been even less profitable than those of 2025, despite salmon prices that have gone up because of scarcity due to what is happening both in Alaska and Russia, the other major producer of pink salmon.

A small, independent processor in Cook Inlet recently got an email from China tagged “Urgent raw material request for salmon…

The email came from Green Life Foods, a self-described “salmon processing factory with 22 years of production history,” it said. “We supply canned salmon to supermarket importers in Europe, North America and Australia, and our products sell well in chain retailers such as Walmart, COSTCO, Whole Foods, ALDI, LIDL and Farmfoods.”

About three dozen Alaska commercial fishermen in 2007 formed a company called Silver Bay Seafoods in Southeast Alaska and pioneered the use of cheap Chinese labor to process salmon caught, headed and gutted in Alaska. This means of doing business allowed Silver Bay to undercut the costs of in-state processors who were already relying heavily on migrant workers to minimize their costs.

Now the Chinese are getting a lesson in the biggest problem faced in trying to farm salmon at sea rather than in pens or ‘bluehouses” as is done in Norway, Chile, Scotland, the Fareo Islands, Florida and elsewhere. And the problem is that sometimes the fish just don’t come back, as the Weyerhaeuser Company learned in Oregon long ago.

It started ranching salmon at Coos Bay in 1972 and by 1981, the Christian Science Monitor was reporting that “the timber products company has been so successful with salmon that experts from many countries have come to Oregon to study the aquaculture venture.”

Weyerhaeuser was successful enough early on to lure two other major corporations – BP and Union Carbide – into the salmon ranching business. But only four years after the Monitor celebrated the timber company’s salmon ranching success, UPI reported that the “promise of big profits and a revitalized commercial fishing industry has been stranded by economics, biology and plain bad luck.

“After 12 years and investments of millions of dollars, none of Oregon’s 11 private salmon-breeding farms have made a profit.”

Alaska’s hatcheries have enjoyed a much longer and far more successful run, but there are now clear indications some of that bad luck is working its way north. And the risk with salmon ranching has always been that there is no way to control the young fish sent to sea, and no cowboys out there to save any threatened calves.