“Calling fish farming a potential boon for consumers and the economy,” reports the Seattle PI, “the Bush administration yesterday proposed to massively expand the practice to waters as far as 200 miles offshore.”
“It’s the equivalent of having a hog farm in a city park flushing its wastes into the street,” said Anne Mosness, a “crusader for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.”
More, including the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico:
Critics answered that the aquaculture build-up is a get-rich-quick scheme destined to leave taxpayers subsidizing an industry that would pollute the ocean, serve up substandard fish and, ultimately, center its economic activity in Third World nations.
“The Gulf of Mexico is widely viewed as the most readily exploitable U.S. waters from a commercial standpoint,” reports the Seattle PI, “because the Gulf is relatively shallow and fish tend to grow bigger faster in warm waters.”
My quick take on that bright idea: It’s nuts.
What about the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico — the size of New Jersey, reports the National Geographic:
Scientists have identified agricultural fertilizers as a primary culprit behind the phenomenon. Researchers are now focusing on shrinking the zone.
Dave Whitall is a coastal ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment in Silver Spring, Maryland. He said the dead zone forms each April and lasts through the summer, adding that the zone “generally grows throughout the summer, reaching a peak in late July.”
At its peak, the nearly lifeless water can span 5,000 to 8,000-plus square miles (13,000 to 21,000 square kilometers), an area almost the size of New Jersey.
The dead zone is the result of oxygen-depleted water. Fish, shrimp, and all other marine organisms that require oxygen to survive either flee the zone or die.
Whitall says the phenomenon is triggered by excess nutrients in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya River Basins. Streaming into the Gulf of Mexico along the Louisiana coast, the rivers drain about 40 percent of all U.S. land area and account for nearly 90 percent of the freshwater runoff into the Gulf. …
FarmedAndDangerous.org has more on the controversy.
I just got a bumper sticker. It reads:
I’m Pro Salmon and I Vote!
Woohoo…. from the wildsalmon.org people, who I’m sure are sick about this story today.
And (!) those bastards want to put up these deep-water fish farms on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Now they’re messin’ with me and Sybil (on Vancouver Island).
To do salmon farming, you need very strong tides to scrub the ocean floor. There are pens off Swans Island, off the Maine coast, and I hear they’re not too bad. But a few years ago, someone wanted to put salmon pens in Blue Hill Bay, which drains about as fast as the average bathtub. The argument then was that the bay was the farthest-west point with the water cold enough for the fish.
That got shot down pretty quickly by the summer boating people and the fishermen. Then, the salmon proponents tried to put pens in Penobscot Bay, which drains a bit faster but still doesn’t have the scourging tides necessary and is farther west than the first location, with water perhaps a tad warmer. Last I heard, local lobstermen were making it pretty clear that if anyone put pens out in the bay, the moorings would suffer inexplicable and sudden failure, and all those salmon would go slip-sliding away.
One of the big marketing points for farmed salmon is that fish flesh is healthy, full of good essential oils and so on. However, if you eat salmon that’s been raised in pens and fed a diet of grain and hormones, it’s like eating seagoing feedlot animals. Not healthier at all.
Wow. You know the topic.
And I’ve noticed a difference in taste. Have you?
Yes, a distinct difference in taste. And as others say downthread, salmon farming introduces all manner of deleterious conditions and diseases to wild salmon areas, as well as making the waters distinctly yukky.
The lobstermen around here work very hard, under conditions and weather that would make most of us curl up and whimper. They put up with summah sports who think nothing of cutting loose a $125 lobster trap if its lines get caught in the rudders of their expensive toy boats (something that good seamanship makes easy to avoid), huge amounts of government regulation, and a vulnerability to increases in oil prices. They are tough men and women, and I sure wouldn’t want to mess with them over salmon pens.
Sometimes I swear that there is a secret worldwide conspiracy to keep me in as poor physical shape as possible. Why must they take away or ruin all of the healthy things that I love? Grr.
We are always pressed for time. We commute an hour or more each way to work. Eat in the car because you either can’t depend on mass transit (late/not dependable, not enough options, not enough parking) or don’t want to be seen as some closet Marxist using “public transportation.”
We settle in for our 8, 9, 10, 11 hour day. Of course we’re not getting overtime, we’re getting comp time…except there’s never any time to TAKE all this extra time. Anyway, like drinking Budweiser to get drunk, we drink nasty, standard-issue coffee for the caffeine to fuel our day. We don’t taste our food–and perhaps it’s better that we don’t–we gobble it down at a “lunch hour” usually spent at our desks.
Then we leave, bringing along our cell phones, lap tops and crackberries so we can “check in.” Gee, what’s for dinner? I don’t know, but I’m too tired to cook, so I’ll just stop by some restaurant and go through the drive through. Take out or homemade, what’s the difference: they all have a ton of pesticides or are farm raised or have hormones some sort. But, hey–at least if you cook it yourself you won’t add a shit load more fat and sugar–unless it’s the pre-packaged processed stuff. Tonight, however, is not an option since you’re stressed out.
Generally, some of us in this society would sooner drive across the street than walk it. And even if the local strip mall IS within walking distance, there’s no place to walk or to bike without getting killed.
You finally walk into the house. It’s a friggin mess! Well, you decide, I’ll clean up on the weekend, when I can get some rest.
Who’s on the phone? Mom? Oh? Dad is sick? OK, I’ll run home on the weekend–maybe I’ll leave early and clean up when I get back.
You do this long enough and then you get sick. High blood pressure. High blood sugar. Can’t control your weight. So here are these nice pills. Oh, and you exercise more and stress less.
You vow to do just that until you look at how much the pills cost–WITH INSURANCE. Damn. What to do? You need your job for health insurance, because maybe your spouse isn’t covered through his/her job. Perhaps you two have kids? Or perhaps you’re not married, but you do have kids? Or maybe you can’t get legally married and your partner doesn’t have the fabulous job that will cover you, too.
And so there you are, stuck in the car, commuting to work, trying to figure a way out, since you don’t have the trust fund to just stop. Your mind races from solutions to lottery fantasies and back to solutions. Until the cell phone rings…
Now, do I think there’s a conspiracy. Probably not. But it just seems damned close to it.
Is there no end to this idiot admin’s assault on the environment? Encouraging this will just foul our waters and it may endanger our health.
My Dad (no raging environmentalist) has already forbidden farm-raised salmon. Lord, what to do, what to do–I LOVE salmon. The whole family does. The hubby jokes that we all have salmon swimming up our blood stream.
The more I info I gather, the more this seems like a bad idea.
in Washington is pushing this. Let me guess — Republican?
Here’s some good insight from an essay on Patagonia’s web site:
Salmon farms are anchored in coves protected from storms where there is only moderate tidal flow. Aside from a fish pellet diet, the salmon are not able to swim freely, so there is little development of muscle tone – the result being a product lacking in flavor, character and nutritional value. Were it not for a chemical added to their feed, these fish would be an awful gray color, which perfectly reflects their circumstances.
The sea floor under these pens is covered with offal, creating an environment for disease to breed. Sailing past a salmon farm is enough to gag a maggot. Some escape from the pens is inevitable, and when these fish crossbreed with those in the wild – which they do – it has the effect of diluting, or even poisoning completely, the genetic specificity all salmon have. At the same time, it introduces to innocent natives diseases they are unequipped to fight off.
Farmed fish: Blech.
Wow. Good for Patagonia, and thanks to you for telling us about what they’re putting on their site.
Who does the fish-farming lobby represent, by the way? Would I be correct to surmise that this lobby represents not small “mom & pop” fish farmers — if such creatures exist — but rather a few large & growing business concerns? As I see it, we’ve got the following processes going on:
agriculture giving way to agribusiness
aquaculture gving way to aquabusiness
with all that entails: not just the detrimental health & environmental aspects, but lost lifeways & broken communities. Perhaps we’ll need to see an organic seafood market rise as we’ve seen organic produce take off.
Fish farming, in addition to being now a political operation, seems to be one more manifestation of the American approach to industrializing everything in order to support our overly consumptive lifestyle.
Part of the cause for the huge amounts of illness and disease in this country is that too many people eat a diet of processed foods, high in various no-nos and animal products. Both sugar and fat suppress the immune system. Less of those, and immune systems can work more efficiently.
Eating lower on the food chain–rice and beans, whole/unprocessed foods–is healthier for people and the planet. Good way to lose weight, too.
So don’t mourn the loss of farmed salmon, but eat it only once in a while, as a rare treat.
A fish farm is not like a hog farm, it’s like a wolf farm.
All the mammals we eat are grazers because the restrictions of free land and private property limit our ability to feed them. We farm grazers because we can grow their food underfoot, and easily harvest more as needed.
Most of the fish we eat seem to be predators as salmon and I think cod are. So we have to go out and harvest ocean fish in order to feed the “farmed” fish.
Imagine having to go out across the country catching deer, rabbits, squirrels, raccoons etc. to feed to hypothetical livestock wolves.
Shellfish on the other hand are grazers. I’m in Puget Sound myself, I see the Straits of Juan de Fuca most days. On the other side of Whidbey Island from them is Penn Cove, home of world-famous mussels which are grown cheaply and passively (I think) from ropes hung in the water. As far as I’ve heard, mussels, clams, and oysters are farmed with a lot less adverse environmental impact than salmon farms. I know from experience that the shoreline around the mussel farm has plenty of mussels growing on it, and an impressive variety of sea life for this Lake Erie refugee. [“Erie” is the native word for “Lake of the 5-Eyed Tumorfish”].
So all you environmentalists and aquaculturists, are there grazing fish species that could be farmed much more environmentally sensitively than these predators?