The salmon aquaculture industry in Maine and New Brunswick has been buffeted by environmental, economic and legal challenges in recent years. Things are not likely to get any easier, given some of the ongoing developments in ocean fish farming elsewhere in the world.
According to Leroy Creswell, an aquaculture researcher at the University of Florida Sea Grant office and a past president of the World Aquaculture Society, cheap imports, rising coastal property values, and increased resistance from environmentalists, property owners and some fishermen is forcing U.S. ocean aquaculture to abandon coastal waters. “Unless you’re raising shellfish, you’re just never going to get a permit to raise fish right along the coastline,” he says.
Globally, marine aquaculture has become a big business, more than doubling in size in the past decade and displacing wild caught salmon, shrimp and other species in many markets. But the industry has experienced growing pains as well. Asian shrimp ponds were implicated in the destruction of ecologically important mangrove forests, while escapees from salmon farms in Maine and Atlantic Canada are believed to be furthering the decline of wild Atlantic salmon. Concerns about pollution have driven resistance to proposed salmon farms in Blue Hill Bay and on coves on the Downeast shores of Perry, while outbreaks of diseases like infectious salmon anemia and Taura syndrome in shrimp have caused headaches for fish farmers from Thailand to St. Andrews. U.S. farmers are also having difficulty competing with low cost imports from less regulated salmon and shrimp farms in places like Chile and China.
Some types of operations have moved inland. Florida farmers have discovered that Pacific white shrimp grow well in the mineral-rich freshwater found beneath the interior of that state, allowing them to shift production to cheaper land. Creswell, who works with some of the operations, says they have essentially no environmental impact because they use intensive water recirculation systems. Moving inland has also allowed the farms to dodge resistance from coastal property owners. “Maine may be one of the few places in the country where somebody will look out from their porch at a fish cage and feel its a good thing,” he says. “Just try that in Fort Lauderdale.” The farms, he says, have lower production costs and might stand a chance of competing with Chinese farms, particularly if the U.S. presses for better environmental practices there.
But for many other species – including many commercial species from the Gulf of Maine – experts say the future lies offshore.
New fish cage technology – much of it developed here in the Gulf of Maine by researchers at the University of New Hampshire – allows fish and shellfish to be grown in fully enclosed cages that can be moored 30 to 50 feet below the ocean surface. Stationed in deep water with strong currents, pollution from feces or uneaten food falling from the cages is thought to have no perceptible environmental consequences, and the sturdy cages make fish escapes difficult. Lying beneath the surface, the farms would avoid storms and shipping hazards alike. Supplied and monitored by automated feed buoys, the farms appear to be cost effective.
“So far the demonstration projects that are going on show that there is virtually no environmental impact at any distance and that the wastes are not accumulating below the pens,” says Linda Chaves, aquaculture coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is preparing legislation that would allow fish farmers to lease cage sites from the federal government. “Offshore farming looks really promising.”
With NOAA funding, UNH researchers have been working with halibut, cod, haddock, summer flounder, and blue mussels in the waters off Portsmouth. Other researchers are growing cobia in submerged cages in Puerto Rico, while a commercial farm in Hawaii is growing Pacific redfin in cages that actually drift with local currents, further diluting wastes. Farmers in Norway are already growing hatchery-raised cod on a commercial basis using floating pens.
Environmentalists remain concerned about the offshore farms. While agreeing that such farms have fewer potential effects on water quality and other organisms, Rebecca Goldburg of Environmental Defense in New York fears the federal government will encourage vast industrial-scale fish farms that will cause problems based on their size alone. “Are we essentially going to be building a new North Carolina hog industry off our shores?” she asks.
Salmon – the principal species farmed in our waters – is an unlikely candidate for offshore farming, for various biological reasons. But Norwegian farmers have made some breakthroughs in reducing the farms’ impact and, therefore, resistance to their presence. Antibiotic usage – a controversial element of U.S. salmon farming – has been mostly eliminated from Norway’s farms because the salmon are now individually vaccinated before being placed in ocean cages. Improved attention to the siting of cages appears to have eliminated pollution problems, and improvements have been made in the feed given to the fish, reducing the amount of wild-caught fish that are ground up to feed salmon. Ole Torriseseb of the Institute for Marine Research in Bergen calls his country’s salmon farms “the most sustainable meat production” in Europe.
Norway’s most influential environmental group agrees. “If you compare salmon to other meat production it’s not bad at all,” says Marus Holm of the Oslo-based Bellona Foundation. “It’s the direction salmon farms in other parts of the world are going to go.”
Colin Woodard is the author of The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier, which will be released by Viking on May 24. He lives in Portland and maintains a website, located at www.colinwoodard.com.