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 2024, 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 North Pacific Ocean, and illustrative of the farmers magnifying, rather than moderating, the historical and natural yo-yoing of pink salmon returns between even and odd years. 

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.

Ranching salmon was supposed to ensure steady and consistent returns. 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 brood 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.

As of today, Fish and Game is reporting a total Sound harvest by seiners, gillnetters and hatcheries of fewer than 2.5 million pinks. The agency opened some limited areas for seining in the Sound today, but the waters around PWSAC hatcheries remain closed.

The last opening resulted in the harvest of but 13,400 pinks, according to Fish and Game. There is no reason to believe the harvest will be significantly bigger going forward, but seiners still scratching to make a living did benefit from the harvest of 8,750 far more valuable cohos and chums during the last opening.

That said, this is not how Alaska ocean-farming plan was supposed to work out. It was supposed to provide bounty and consistency.

How we got here

To understand where the Alaska commercial salmon fishing business is today, you have to go back to a 1960s-era, state-funded effort to save an industry that was once the backbone of the state economy.

It ceased to be that backbone only a decade later. The 1968 discovery of an elephant of an oil field near Prudhoe Bay on the state’s North Slope was destined to change Alaska forever in from the mid-1970s. But even as oil became the backbone of the state’s economy in the 1980s and on, efforts to prop up the state’s failing fishing industry with hatcheries rolled on.

A massive, state hatchery program began after the state’s then income-tax-paying residents approved $3 million in bonds in 1968 (about $28 million in today’s dollars).  There was a simple logic behind funding those first, fledgling hatcheries.

Alaska salmon runs were low because they had been overfished. As a result, inadequate numbers of salmon were making it back to the rivers and streams of their origin to spawn, and statewide salmon production was low.

The state could have fixed this problem easily enough by banning all salmon fishing for a few years, but with salmon fishing then a key part of the state economy, that sort of move wasn’t realistic.

Neither was converting the industry to the domestic salmon farming destined to take over global salmon production.

As the 20th century drew to a close, net-pen salmon farming remained experimental. The first salmon smolts intended to be raised in net pens were put in them in 1968, according to a history compiled by Salmon Business, but “a storm hit the farm site, the wire that held the net bag broke, and the smolts escaped out to sea.”

Norway’s Mowi, now the world’s largest supplier of salmon, wouldn’t harvest its first salmon until 1971. And at that time, few envisioned the net-pen farming of salmon becoming a big business.

When Alaska’s still income-tax-paying voters approved the last state hatchery bond program for $29.2 million in 1976 (roughtly $168 million in today’s dollars), the global volume of farmed salmon production was estimated at a mere 1,500 to 2,000 metric tonnes.

And today?

Today, Mowi alone produces 559,000 metric tonnes of salmon per year. Alaska had a very good season in 2025 – odd-numbered years being big producers of pink salmon – and the state’s entire, all-species salmon harvest totaled about 360,000 tonnes.

The total, global harvest of net-pen farmed salmon in 2025?

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations pegged it at 3.4 million tonnes. That was almost 10 times the volume of wild-caught salmon harvested in Alaska in the same year, and, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, 61 percent of the Alaska salmon were pinks.

Pinks are the cheapest to produce hatchery salmon. They are also the smallest of the salmon species and the least valuable because their small, light-colored filets are not what most 21st-century consumers want.

As a result, a considerable number of the fish still go into cans, which sell better in the Third World than in high-income countries, or are shipped from Alaska to Asian processing plants to be processed into thin filets that are then sold as budget-product back in the U.S.

Forget any crazy, political advertising you’ve heard in the run-up to November elections trying to sell you the idea that Alaska’s “wild caught” salmon compete with the net-pen farmed salmon. It’s pure propaganda.

In the big picture of the global markets of today, Alaska wild-caught salmon compete with net-pen salmon about as much as 7-Eleven, still the nation’s largest convenience store, competes with Walmart because they both sell groceries.

Walmart is a $713 billion-per-year business whose product pricing dictates market pricing. 7-Eleven is a roughly $ 60 billion-per-year business that can charge you a few extra cents on your bag of chips for saving you the trouble of driving to a Walmart, Target, Fred Meyer or the like, but can’t push prices too high or you will drive to a Walmart, Target, Fred Meyer or the like.

Bad marketing

There is, undeniably, a niche market for Alaska sockeye, coho and Chinook sold as truly “wild” fish.

One could think of these as the fine wine of culinary salmon, but Alaska salmon technically aren’t supposed to be sold as “wild” because labeling them as such amounts to false advertising given that Alaska hatcheries make it largely impossible to separate Alaska’s wild salmon from its wild-caught salmon.

Bristol Bay commercial fishermen should be outraged by this, but few appear to have caught on to the fine points of markets. The Bay has no hatcheries and is home to the world’s largest fishery for wild sockeye.

Some premium retailers, such as Omaha Steaks, do push “wild Alaska” salmon, but if you read the fine print you’ll find them covering themselves by explaining the fish are “sustainably wild-caught from icy Pacific waters surrounding Alaska.”

Unless someone is dealing with a direct-to-consumer sales business such as Pride of Bristol Bay, there is no way of knowing whether the fish being bought is wild or actually ocean-farmed.

Pride pitches the “ultimate in traceability,” promising that “every case of our wild salmon is labeled with the name of the Bristol Bay Fishing District in which the wild salmon was harvested.”

Oh, if only all Alaska fisheries could offer this sort of wild salmon – a rare commodity in the market today – but they can’t.

The Alaska salmon industry is now so tangled up in hatcheries that in most places it is hard to separate the “wild” from the “wild caught.” And in some places the “wild caught” – more accurately described as “ocean farmed” or “free ranged” salmon now dominate harvests.

Yukon River chum salmon were once a big selling “wild” fish. But most chums – now often marketed as “keta” – these days come from hatcheries in the Sound and Southeast Alaska.

Meanwhile, some sketchy games get played with the fish branded as “Copper River” king and sockeye salmon. The former, Copper River kings, are pound for pound the most valuable fish in the state.

“Often referred to as ‘the Wagyu of salmon,’ Copper River king salmon can reach $120 per pound,” Business Insider proclaimed in 2022. “Sought after by chefs for its rich, buttery flavor, this salmon is not easy to come by. To reach its final destination in Alaska’s Copper River, it has to swim 300 miles between glaciers. It’s a tiring journey in which the fish builds up its strength and muscle.”

The Business Insider story appeared only a year after a Fish and Game genetics study of the Copper River catch discovered that 43 percent of the Chinook caught in the commercial fishery off the mouth of that river in 2021 were actually ocean-farmed salmon that came from  hatcheries in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest.

The parents of those fish didn’t “swim 300 miles between glaciers” in Alaska. They weren’t genetically programmed to accumulate more fat at sea to fuel them to make that journey – fat being the key element in the argument about which salmon taste better.

Copper River kings, according to Vital Choice, a wild and organic seafood marketing business, are “superior from other king salmon populations in Alaska due to a distinction in their genetics.

“What makes the salmon unique is their relative abundance of omega-3-rich fats. Because the river is so long and challenging, the fish have evolved to pack away extra fat during their time in the sea so they have enough ‘fuel’ to make the arduous journey upriver to spawn. This lends them the delicious, rich flavor so many crave.”

Flavor is, of course, a very subjective thing, and Vital Choice writer Brad Lemley didn’t exactly do the fish a favor when he compared them to “beloved Beaujolais Nouveau wine.” No one would put Beaujolais Nouveau among the great wines of the world.

It is closer to MD 20/20, a fortified wine produced by Mogen David that earned the nickname “Mad Dog 20/20, than a box of Kirkland Signature cabarent sauvignon, a drinkable table wine, that The Reverse Wine Snob described as “legit good stuff and an insane value” in its 2023 vintage, while posting the warning that “we’ve seen…a lot of variation in this wine by vintage, so pay close attention to which you are buying.”

Beaujolais Nouveau, unfortunately, doesn’t vary much by vintage. The International Wine of the Month Club goes so far as to claim the reputation of the Gamay grape used to make the wine has been “maligned by the ocean of Beaujolais Nouveau that inundates consumers each fall.”

Suffice to say, Alaska Copper River king salmon wouldn’t be selling for $120 per pound if marketed as “the Beaujolais Nouveau of Alaska salmon” or if marketed as fresh “Spring Creek National Fish Hatchery Chinook caught in Alaska.”

Alaska commercial fishermen, both off the mouth of the Copper River and in Southeast, have long gotten away with selling other people’s fish as  “fresh Alaska” catch, but traceability is quickly becoming a big deal in the seafood business, and real-time genetic traceability appears to be on the horizon.

“Canadian firm WildTechDNA…has developed a portable, ultra-rapid DNA detection platform that can identify targeted species in just 15 to 20 minutes,” the Global Seafood Alliance reported in June. “Already piloted in Canada and Japan for eel, the technology can detect targeted genetic signatures directly from processed products, enabling identification at the species level, with the flexibility to differentiate genus, populations, or even sex depending on the markers used.”

So what happens when a curious chef somewhere, or an activist special interest group, decides to have a filet of pricey Copper River king tested only to find out it’s not a Copper River king at all?

The state could, of course, solve this problem pretty quickly and easily by moving the fishery back into the river where fish wheels have operated for years. Using those wheels would also allow for a more refined harvest of Copper River kings and sockeyes, but it would run counter to the interests of the commercial fishing industry in the state today.

And what has been obvious in the 21st Century is that the now little tail of that business still does a great job of wagging the big dog of state government.

Having spent decades devaluing the state’s salmon and steadily decreasing the revenue the commercial fishing business leaves in the state, the industry still has enough influence on Alaska politics that one candidate for governor is running on a platform of ensuring it an even greater say over state fisheries management policy.