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Is there a future for salmon farms in Canada?

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Experience is the best teacher
Canada can learn a thing or two from Norway’s salmon farmers
By Chris Mason

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. Still, there are times when a lesson learned from someone else is just as good.

Researchers are calling for Canada’s salmon farming regulators to increase their international awareness. The thinking is that Canada’s 30-year-old salmon farming industry can benefit from the improvements and mistakes that have been made elsewhere.

“There’s something to be learned from what other countries have gone through,” says Ian Fleming, director of the Ocean Sciences Centre at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He points to Norway, where he studied salmon farming for 10 years, as a prime example of a country that has much to offer a place like Canada, where regulators are struggling to control an industry whose growth threatens to outpace research and development.

Of all the leading salmon farming countries, Norway stands out, both for the immense size of its industry (the world’s largest, it is nearly five times bigger than Canada’s) and for its continuous research into environmental impact and methods of reducing the use of antibiotics to treat farmed salmon. New methods are a necessity in a country where farms are packed along a shoreline less than a tenth of the size of Canada’s.

LAND-BASED FARMS RESEARCH

Several hot issues plague salmon farming in Canada and around the world. Both Canada and Norway have experimented with land-based salmon farms, for one. But Norwegian researchers concluded the system couldn’t work under current market conditions. “If a farmer changes to a land-based production plant he has no hope of competing with production prices from net-caged salmon,” says Arne Kittelsen, senior consultant at the Akvaforsk Institute of Aquaculture Research in Norway.

One British Columbia salmon farmer is trying to prove that theory wrong. Rob Walker runs the only completely land-based salmon farm in Canada. Although he remains optimistic, Walker admits the experiment is “a real economic struggle. The general sense [among salmon farmers] is that this’ll never work.”

Kittelsen says there are concerns beyond the energy costs associated with pumping water to and from the site. The infrastructure of pumps, filters, piping, land prices and oxygen regulators is too expensive. “Working with land-based plants, there is always a risk of stoppage of new water or new oxygen,” Kittelsen says. “[Lose] oxygen for 30 minutes and the farm is out of business that year.”

Although salmon farmers around the world are keeping an eye on Walker’s experiment, Norwegian researchers are working on improving conditions in the traditional offshore net cages, a strategy they believe is more realistic because salmon farmers have continued to rely on them.

FIGHTING FOR SPACE
Ian Fleming explains that Norway has created a divide between areas for aquaculture stocks and areas that hold wild stocks. In Canada, by contrast, salmon farms are often located on wild-salmon spawning routes, where the current and water temperature are ideal. But the wild and the farmed salmon clash: Stocks of wild salmon on the west coast of Canada have continued to plummet, mostly due to sea lice and the increasing presence of escaped Atlantic salmon in British Columbia’s rivers. The next stage of Rob Walker’s experiment could solve this problem of site selection. He plans to use floating concrete tanks to contain his fish and the waste. The system would also allow the farms to be placed far away from wild-salmon spawning routes.

ANTIBIOTIC USE
In the late 1980s, Norway was injecting its farmed salmon with 50 tonnes (mt) of antibiotics a year. New techniques and antibiotics reduced that figure by 99.5 percent in the last decade alone. “Norway has been a real leader in limiting antibiotic use,” Fleming says.

In 1996, Norway used one mt of antibiotics to produce nearly 300,000 mt of farmed salmon. British Columbia alone needed six times more antibiotics to produce one-eighth as many salmon. The number of antibiotics used by both Norway and Canada are in decline, but Canada continues to lag behind.

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