The big pink disappearance/ADF&G graph

And the ocean taketh away

The 2026 commercial salmon season in Alaska is not yet over, but it can already be called a full-on disaster in Prince William Sound, the heartland of salmon farming in the nation’s northernmost state.

Of the close to 1.2 billion, immature pink salmon sent to sea in 2022, fewer than 10 million – possibly way fewer than 10 million – returned. At best, there has been a return rate of 0.8 percent, but it might be as low as 0.5 percent, maybe even lower.

It is the biggest farming failure in the state’s now 50-year history of farming the Pacific.

The leaders of this industrial-scale farming prefer to call what they do “ranching” rather than farming, but that’s a word game.  Alaska’s salmon are simply sent out to pasture, so to speak, instead of being fattened in feed lots.

This ranching was supposed to ensure steady and consistent returns of salmon. It worked so well in the early years that the Pacific Seafood Processors Association, an industry trade group, in 2010 approached the former state-run hatcheries that had largely been taken over by commercial fishermen with a proposal that they up their pink salmon returns to 70 million per year.

“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,” the processors said in an “Open Letter to Alaska Hatcheries.”

“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.”

They never got all that they wanted, but in the years that followed, odd-year returns reached 60 million, and the peak of even-year runs hit 41 million. Then, in 2024, after several years of cooling water in the North Pacific, the bottom fell out.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game declared it the “worst pink salmon harvest since 1993 and the second worst since the late 1970s when PWS hatcheries were established.” At 5.07 million pink salmon, the agency reported, the catch was ” 78 percent below the 22.82 million commercial harvest forecast.”

The hatchery runs by the Valdez Fisheries Development Association (VFDA) were to have produced a catch of 15 million, of which commercial fishermen were to get about 11.1 million after the hatchery took its cut for cost-recovery and brook stock.

The hatcheries run by the Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation (PWSAC) were to have provided for a harvest of 10.2 million with 6.4 million earmarked for hatchery needs. Less than half the pinks PWSAC needed for cost recovery – 3.1 million – returned to the hatchery.

Commercial fishermen got nothing out of that run. About 3.6 million VDFA pinks returned, of which commercial fishermen also got nothing. The commercial fishery, per se, was left with 1.42 million humpies, as Alaskans often call pinks, and a disaster was declared.

Another disaster declaration is expected this year, given that the 2026 catch is going to make the 2024 catch look good by way of comparison.

Editor’s note: This is the start of a story still in the works. The author sent a draft by mistake to subscribers. This is the cleaned-up start of that draft, which is and of itself, informative. But it is only part of the story. “The rest of the story,” as the late Paul Harvey used to say, will be following shortly.