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FROM THE EDITOR
Aquaculture’s time is
Fish farming was front-row seat at recent international events tackling the problems of a warming planet. While there’s no quick fix to the situation we find ourselves in, the events are yet another reminder for all of us to take meaningful actions to address it. Another upshot is that these events are helping raise the profile of aquaculture on the world stage.
At the Food Systems Summit in New York in September, where more than 150 countries committed to adapt their food systems to a changing climate, the recognition of the industry’s role was unmistakable. The summit was followed by the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow in November, where industry representatives in panel discussions honed in on aquaculture’s role as part of a global food system.
In his keynote speech at the conclusion of GOAL 2021 conference in November, Árni Mathiesen marvelled at the recent attention the blue aquatic food system garnered.
“In my time, I have not felt that the blue aquatic food system has gotten as much recognition as it got during this Food Systems Summit,” said Mathiesen, who led the Fisheries & Aquaculture Department of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization for 10 years until
The editorial deadline for the March/April issue is January 25th. Contact Liza Mayer at lmayer@annexbusinessmedia. com for details. Material should be submitted electronically with prior arrangement with the editor. TO ADVERTISE CONTACT
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BY LIZA MAYER
December 2020. Previously, “people had to be reminded that the sector is there, but people are now responding to it,” he said.
“You could hear that echo through in the UN Secretary General’s concluding speech at the summit. You could feel that the marine and freshwater aquatic food system was included in everything he was saying when talking about food systems.”
Venture capitalists and tech investors are also now responding to aquaculture. It was only three years ago when we reported that the industry lagged in attracting tech investments compared to other animal protein producers because VCs and investment firms were unfamiliar with the sector. Our report on aquaculture technology on page 18 shows they are now showing up, pouring in resources that are helping make the industry more efficient and climate-friendly overall.
Our report on page 9 shows technological innovations to improve the sector is one of the rare topics the media portrays positively. So let’s get the word out and engage the wider community.
British Columbia salmon farmers slam ratings downgrade
The ratings downgrade defames the hard-working and dedicated people in the sector who grow sustainable food in the ocean and care deeply about the marine environment and wild salmon, says the BC Salmon Farmers Association
California-based Seafood Watch has downgraded the rating of Atlantic salmon farmed in British Columbia from “good alternative” to “avoid” because of poor performance in terms of chemical use and disease, but salmon farmers have slammed the new rating as an utter disregard for science-backed findings and shows the pressure from activists is working, it said.
“Seafood Watch has stated that the downgrade of BC farmed Atlantic salmon is due to concerns around antibiotic use, sea lice, and disease outbreaks. However, the weight of science does not support this concern and ignored submissions from several respected Canadian scientists. In fact, nine government-directed, peer-reviewed scientific studies conducted by the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat concluded that salmon farms do not pose more than a minimal risk to wild salmon. Unfortunately, the Seafood Watch process has disregarded these and other findings by credible scientists. Frankly, their approach damages their program credibility when compared to the recent Collier-FAIRR report,” said the BC Salmon Farmers Association (BCSFA).
Trays
The Seafood Watch program, run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, acknowledged that half of active salmon farms in the province are not treated with antimicrobials each year, but the other half is treated three times per year on average, it said. In terms of sea lice treatment, the use of chemical pesticides is currently less than once per year per site.
BCSFA said “BC salmon farming is a highly regulated industry. All fish are vaccinated against important diseases before they enter the marine environment. Antibiotics are only administered in cases where fish are ill, just like humans, and their use is under the supervision of registered veterinarians. Antibiotic use has significantly declined over the years, and salmon farmers strive to eliminate antibiotic use with continuous vaccine research and development. Sea lice are a natural parasite of wild salmon that infect farmed salmon. Levels on BC salmon farms are regulated with 90 percent of monthly averages below the regulated threshold.”
While Seafood Watch acknowledged it is difficult, in fact, “largely impossible” to clearly tell apart between the “speculation” that viruses from Atlantic salmon farms are contributing to the declines of wild salmon and the recent scientific findings that pathogens are of “minimal concern” to wild salmon in BC, it took the position that it is better to err on the side of caution.
“It is clear that pathogens or parasites from salmon farms have not caused the widespread decline, but given the importance of wild salmon (considered essential to life by Indigenous communities in BC), any substantial contributions to their declines or inhibitions of their recovery must be considered,” it said.
The BC farmers group lamented the decision to downgrade farmed salmon from BC defames “the hard-working and dedicated people in the sector who grow sustainable food in the ocean and care deeply about the marine environment and wild salmon.” It is also an example of activist pressure trumping science-based decision-making, it added.
Vancouver politician named as Canada’s new fisheries minister
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has named politician Joyce Murray as Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard.
Murray has been a Member of Parliament for Vancouver Quadra since 2008, and was previously the Minister of Digital Government.
Vancouver Quadra is one of the City of Vancouver’s six federal electoral districts; it includes the University of British Columbia and Shaughnessy, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city.
The Liberal politician’s own website describes Murray as having spent 25 years building an international reforestation company before venturing into politics.
She championed and helped lead the development of the Centre for Greening Government, a federal initiative mandated to make federal government operations more environmentally friendly.
Murray replaces Bernadette Jordan as fisheries minister. Jordan lost her re-election bid in her electoral district in Nova Scotia during the federal election this past September. Under her term as aquaculture regulator, Jordan made decisions that puts into question the future of salmon farming in British Columbia. Farmers are hoping the new fisheries minister will find a path that will save the thousands of jobs that will be lost due to Jordan’s decisions.
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Joyce Murray, Canada’s new Minister of Fisheries and Oceans
PHOTO: JOYCE MURRAY FACEBOOK PAGE
Science proves claims of antisalmon-farming activists wrong ‘Don’t use salmon farming as a scapegoat for political goodwill,’ industry tells government
The reduced production of Atlantic salmon in the Discovery Islands of British Columbia has done nothing to change the level of sea lice recorded in the area over the past five years, contrary to claims by anti-salmon farming activists that the ongoing removal of the farms since December 2020 has already decreased sea lice levels in the area by 95 percent.
“Independently collected biological assessments demonstrate that the removal of salmon farms from the Discovery Islands region has not changed the low levels of sea lice on out migrating salmon in the region,” said the BC Salmon Farmers Association.
The association regrets that the claim of anti-salmon farming activists has been taken up by multiple media and social media sources and used to justify the December 2020 decision
Bipartisan aquaculture bill resuscitated in US Senate
A bill introduced way back in 2018 to shore up US aquaculture has been re-introduced to the US Senate this past October.
Over the past three years, the bill has seen multiple revisions, the latest being the addition in 2019 of a provision to create a National Standard for Aquaculture.
“AQUAA Act” (short for Advancing the Quality and Understanding of American Aquaculture), as the bill is called, was sponsored by US Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss) to streamline the permitting process in aquaculture in US federal waters.
The legislation would also direct NOAA to harmonize the permitting system for offshore aquaculture for farms in federal waters, and direct the agency to lead an R&D
Sea lice levels in BC island remains low despite the reduced number of farms
to decommission salmon farms in the area by then Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan.
The unchanged levels of sea lice in the area – which have remained below the strict thresholds of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) – further confirms the point that the industry has always made: parasitic sea lice are part of the natural ecosystem and have co-evolved with salmon over millions of years.
The industry association also reiterated a number of scientific findings, including those of the DFO itself, showing sea lice was not a concern for out-migrating Fraser River Sockeye salmon. Other research have shown that
Net pens of Blue Ocean Mariculture, the only offshore farm in the United States. The AQUAA Act aims to advance the ‘offshore’ aquaculture sector, defined as ocean waters between three and 200 miles offshore
PHOTO: BLUE OCEAN MARICULTURE
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juvenile salmon spend very little time migrating past salmon farms.
The decommissioning of salmon farms in the Discovery Islands is ongoing. Once the process is complete, BC will see its Atlantic salmon production reduced by 24 percent. It will also result to job losses in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous rural coastal communities.
Salmon producer Mowi Canada East expects to reduce its workforce by 200 employees by the time its sites in the Discovery Islands region are out of operation by the end of the year.
“As salmon farmers, we call on DFO and our political leaders to look deeper and focus efforts on climate action and habitat restoration rather than use salmon farming as a scapegoat for political goodwill, which science has demonstrated will not provide tangible benefits for wild salmon populations. The solution is complex, and like we saw at the recent COP26 climate change conference, will require the cooperation of many industries, including salmon farmers – to support the solution,” says John Paul Fraser, Executive Director for the BC Salmon Farmers Association.
grant program to spur innovation throughout the industry.
US Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Roger Wicker (R-MS), and Brian Schatz (D-HI) reintroduced the bipartisan Advancing the Quality and Understanding of American Aquaculture (AQUAA) Act in September 2020, and yet again this past October.
“Marine aquaculture presents an enormous opportunity for Florida’s economy and for the food security of our nation,” Rubio said. “Unfortunately, the absence of a federal permitting and regulatory framework has hindered American aquaculture industries. This bipartisan legislation would establish a transparent permitting process and provide regulatory certainty for this important industry to promote new domestic seafood supply chains.”
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PHOTO: BCSFA
NEWS AND NOTES
Seafood farmers outperform other protein producers
Aquaculture scored better than all other protein producers on all risk factors in an assessment of world’s largest meat, fish and dairy companies.
The Coller FAIRR Protein Producer Index said aquaculture continues to outperform other animal protein producers on environmental, social and governance factors. For the third year in a row, Mowi topped the ranking, beating meat and dairy farmers and other farmed fish producers.
“This shows again that Mowi is at the forefront of sustainable food production. I am proud and humbled to lead a company and an organisation that is a recognised leader in sustainable food production. Importantly, the Index highlights that aquaculture and salmon farming is part of the solution toward shifting to a green economy,” said Mowi CEO Ivan Vindheim.
Mowi is joined in the top five ranked companies by fellow aquaculture companies Grieg Seafood ASA and Lerøy Seafood Group ASA, both headquartered in Norway, which are ranked 2nd and 4th respectively. (Canadiian consumer packaged meats company Maple Leaf Foods and Brazilian beef protein producer Marfrig Global Foods took the 3rd and 5th spots, respectively.)
The firms are ranked against 10 environmental, social and govern-
For the third year in a row, Mowi is No. 1 in the sustainability ranking of the world’s 60 largest publicly listed protein producers
While the Founder & Chair of the FAIRR Initiative, Jeremy Coller, cautioned that aquaculture’s expansion will sharpen three risks – biosecurity, animal welfare and community resistance – he said that he is encouraged overall that protein producers “now have science-based emissions reductions targets compared to 2020” and some are “investing in sustainable feed ingredients or production to de-risk their supply chains.”
“While there are pockets of good practice and positive movement, some of the fundamental dynamics of the sector are being challenged
PHOTO: MOWI
Media is kinder to farmed salmon sector when discussing its use of technology
Innovations meant to improve the sector are one of the rare topics the media portrays positively, says study
Researchers at Dalhousie University who analyzed how salmon aquaculture has been portrayed in the media in Atlantic Canada have found that one of the rare times there was a “positive tone” in the articles about the industry is when discussing its use of technology to improve its sustainability and potentially reduce environmental impacts.
The team studied industry news published in the region over a span of 15 years starting from January 2005. The team categorized them according to political, environmental, social and technological angles and identified the “tone” of the articles. They found that positive tones were least represented.
“Environmental risks and how they are managed have been consistent factors influencing how the industry has been portrayed by the media,” said lead study author Paul Kraly. The team, which includes Jenny Weitzman and Ramón Filgueira, concluded that perceived environmental effects of salmon farming is a major driver affecting acceptance.
But “over time, there has been an increase in the discussion of the technological attributes of aquaculture within the Atlantic Canadian media,” the study noted. “Technological attributes were predominantly portrayed in a positive manner.”
Among the innovations that were “commended” was data collection through the use of artificial intelligence to help track certain diseases on farms (The Chronicle Herald, 2019).
The media also reported positively the instances of innovative research, for instance, when salmon waste has been turned into biodiesel at Memorial University in Newfoundland (The Telegram, 2014).
The few cases where technology and research was portrayed negatively often highlighted concerns over conflicting scientific results, for instance the industry’s effects on lobster fishers or potential scientific bias (The Chronicle Herald, 2014), the study found.
“As a result, the increasing positive portrayal of such technological advancements in the media may help communicate the industry’s benefits and improvements, influencing how individuals view the industry,” the authors suggested.
The study inferred that the age of the industry may have influenced media’s portrayal: the more established the industry, the fewer problems, the less negative the media.
News coverage of the industry also emphasized “public involvement and consultation,” which “suggests a lack of communication between governmental decision-makers, industry and local community can create negative attitudes and actions towards projects.”
Strengthening community involvement in the industry’s decision-making process and increasing its transparency in order to increase farmed salmon’s social acceptance, it said.
Media’s increasing positive portrayal of aquaculture’s technological advancements may help communicate the industry’s benefits and improvements, influencing how individuals view the industry, say researchers
“Public perception of the industry influences the implementation of new aquaculture operations. As aquaculture attempts to expand, tension between industry and communities may emerge, thus increasing the need for social acceptance,” it said.
The study was published online in ScienceDirect.com in September 2021.
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Supply chain gridlock brings headwinds to aquaculture
Strengthens case for North American industry’s expansion BY LIZA MAYER
Players in North American aquaculture are reporting the supply chain crisis is affecting operations, from increased logistics costs to raw material shortages, making a stronger case for domestic aquaculture and a local ecosystem to support it.
Increasingly frequent shipment delays on containers, escalating costs of fuel, warehousing and raw materials threaten the industry’s ability to deliver products and services, profitability and growth.
Canadian seafood producers on both coasts truck the bulk of the salmon production into the United States, somehow sparing them from port-congestion problems, at least for now.
“Currently, there are no supply chain interruptions with market delivery on either Canadians coast,” says Ian Roberts, director of communications at Mowi for Scotland, Ireland and Canada.
Farmers are not entirely off the hook, however.
“Because most of the elements of supply chain both upstream and downstream of our operations are contained within North America, there is very little disruption to schedules. However, worldwide transportation problems do affect some costs, for example fuel costs,” says Rocky Boschman, managing director, Grieg Seafood BC.
Impact on feed
“Fuel prices have nearly doubled over the same period last year,” says Brad Rude, regional risk management and sourcing director at animal nutrition specialist, Cargill. “Container prices have skyrocketed, in some cases five times or more than historical normal and streamlining of shipping routes has cut movement to smaller ports. In the aqua feed business in particular, we are no longer able to ship South American ingredients directly to port in Vancouver (because of the congestion).”
He said the availability of critical specialty ingredients, such as vitamin, amino acids, fishmeal and fish oils, has been very challenging and they’ve been difficult to replace with alternatives.
“Normally upcycled byproducts of meat processing like meat meals have also been challenging to source. In general, all ingredients that have to ship long distances are affected to a varying degree,” he says.
The mounting costs arising from the supply chain disruption make fish farmers vulnerable to potential increases in prices of feed, which already account for at least half of production costs.
“Raw material prices have been high for over a year now and are expected to remain so in the coming period. Sea logistics have become very expensive – five to six times compared to 2019 prices, unreliable and with limited availability,” said Robert van den Breemer, procurement director at Skretting.
Brad Hicks, a partner at Taplow Feeds of British Columbia, says suppliers of feed raw materials are losing the ability to buffer the effects of supply and demand on pricing. Whereas ingredient suppliers used to be able to re-direct supply toward regions with limited supplies – thus keeping prices in check – this is less and less the case, he says.
“With the increasing severity of ocean freight congestion, the ability to buffer the supply/demand equation is being hampered, resulting in increased pressure on prices for some ingredients locally.”
For Virginia-based Blue Ridge Aquaculture, the delivery of raw materials is the biggest concern. The company, known as the world’s largest producer of indoor-raised tilapia, started making its own feeds in 2017 in order to save an estimated 25 percent in feed costs per year.
“The challenge is making sure our domestic suppliers have the ability to deliver. Because of these concerns, we have increased the amount of raw material inventory we keep on hand,” said Martin Gardner, vice-president, business development.
Impact on equipment suppliers
Aquaculture equipment manufacturers are also feeling the sting of the supply chain bottlenecks. Delivery times for new equipment or parts are being stretched, causing major headaches for farmers.
“We do not have any issues with selling our oysters but we have had delays in ordering equipment parts. The cost of everything has risen, which increases expenses. In the event that we need major parts to continue to operate, those could set us back if the wait times are extensive,” said Greg Martino, co-founder of Cottage City Oysters on Martha’s Vineyard.
PHOTOS: LIZA MAYER
Technology and equipment firm ScaleAQ North America acknowledged parts deliveries are getting delayed.
“It is slowing down our servicing of cameras for returning them to operation, we are hampered in shipments from Chile – stopping at many ports along the way with long queues to offload/pick up. We are seeing extremely long lead times on all orders which means that some biological deadlines for fish are not met,” said Genny West, general manager.
“We are having to tell our customers to expect very long lead times. We are having to revamp the way we plan our inventory and start carrying much more inventory, which is expensive. We are not able to secure parts we need, when we need them.”
Local strategy
Gardner of Blue Ridge Aquaculture says the disruptions in the industry has exposed the fragility of global supply chains and makes the case for expanding local supply.
By value, the United States imports approximately 90 percent of the seafood consumed domestically.
“This validates the need for the US seafood model to transition to domestic supply. We have always believed that the US should supply its own seafood and have been positioning our company as a solution to this problem,” said Gardner.
“We can do this, and we must,” says Jeanne McKnight, executive director, Northwest Aquaculture Alliance.
“As we learned during the pandemic, when much-needed seafood supplies were halted at the border, the United States absolutely must –state by state and at the federal level – commit to building a thriving Blue Economy that includes aquaculture, the farming of finfish and shellfish as well as sea vegetables,” she says.
“This means tapping into our natural resources and technical know-how to create the necessary frameworks that investors seek, and companies need: the right to farm finfish and shellfish, a guarantee of dedicated space in which to farm, and the authorization to do so.”
Hudson Valley Fisheries CEO Paul Wong says a local strategy makes a lot of sense especially during these times.
“Our RAS operation allows us to operate our farm close to demand. So far no delays in bringing products to market. But if the supply chain continues to deteriorate, in the end, we may experience issues at the supply side, such as feed supply. But so far, we have not experienced such issues.”
Experts appear to have reached a consensus that the bottlenecks will take time to resolve. Gardner of Blue Ridge Aquaculture shares the view.
“We are certain the disruptions will continue, the question is how long will they last,” he says, nor does he expect “a sudden end to COVID.”
“The effects will linger in the short term. Our sales in 2021 are on par with 2019, and pricing has been consistent. We do anticipate that US consumers will have a higher preference for domestic/fresh products with lower food miles, and we are positioning ourselves to meet that shift.”
Positioning to meet rising demand means expanding operations, but again, worries over the availability and delivery of much needed supplies cloud those plans. “Our concerns are in respect to building materials and equipment for new capital projects,” says Gardner.
Wong of Hudson Valley Fisheries adds: “The deteriorating supply chain will hurt the recovery of the overall economy that we are part of. However, we will continue to enjoy the benefit of being local as we see buying local as a sustainable growth trend.”
Opportunities for innovation
The situation has presented industry players the opportunity to rethink their supply chains. Many are developing relationships with local sources so they are able to deal better with similar predicaments in the future.
“We, as a global company, are being as pro-active as possible by adding new supplier contracts and trying to plan ahead as much as possible,” says West of ScaleAQ.
“Our supply chain managers are looking to source items locally –steering away from Asia as much as possible to, ideally, as close to the end user as possible, i.e. here in Canada. We are building up our inventory, we are writing letters to our customers warning them of the delays and are securing orders with our raw material suppliers prior to orders arriving.”
Many are streamlining operations to become more efficient.
We have made efforts to simplify our incoming supply chain by using alternative ingredients that come from North American origins that can be sent to us with a more reliable and forecastable transit method and lead time,” says Rude of Cargill.
“We can’t predict what will happen, but we have a long history of helping our farmers and customers successfully manage risk, no matter the challenge.”
At Skretting, continuous connection and collaboration between operations, procurement, formulation, quality assurance and sales continues so that it can formulate diets tailored to customer needs with the available raw materials, it said.
“Nowadays that (raw materials) is unfortunately not always the same as desired. This is not easy, but we are a very strong team with great connections which means we can overcome the challenges,” says van den Breemer, adding that despite major market turbulence and shortages in several ingredients, it has been able to meet the demand of our customers in North America, and for all global Skretting customers.
As the pandemic has done, the supply chain is testing the industry’s resilience. In the end, ingenuity and innovations would boost its agility.
Surveys on fish farms make pandemic relief possible
BY ARSENIA KING
Surveys on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on fish farmers and the farmers’ participation in those studies have helped US farmers receive much-needed government relief as the industry struggled with abrupt loses of sales, income, and opportunities during the period.
Dr Carole Engle, author and a nationally recognized aquaculture economist in the US, said US fish farmers may not have had access to relief funds were it not for the efforts of individuals who pushed hard to generate systematic data documenting the losses incurred by US aquaculture farms during the pandemic.
“Aquaculture was not initially deemed eligible for many of these relief programs because there is insufficient data from US aquaculture compared to other forms of agriculture,” said Engle, who spoke at the plenary session of Aquaculture America 2021 held in San Antonio, Texas.
One of the grants Engle mentioned as having leveraged survey data was the Coronavirus Food Assistance Programs (CFAP 1 & 2) of the US Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency (USDA-FSA), which provided direct relief to producers who faced price declines and additional marketing costs due to COVID-19. Most of the beneficiaries of the grant are agriculture farmers.
Engle related how Matthew Smith, program director from Ohio State University, decided early in the pandemic that a survey was
needed to measure its effects on fish farms and how Jonathan van Senten of Virginia Polytechnical Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) designed and launched a national survey in record time. (Results of those surveys were published in Aquaculture North America as they were released.)
She also lauded the fish farmers’ willingness to send confidential and hard-to-obtain price and inventory information at the request of the National Aquaculture Association (NAA) for USDA-FSA to calculate accurate payments for affected farmers.
The government relief has been a lifeline for most farmers. Data derived on the performance of small to large and well-stablished farms during the pandemic has been gloomy. Ninety percent of respondents reported various impacts on their business: 80 percent reported loss of sales, 33 percent admitted to having laid off employees and 26 percent said they would do so, soon. In addition, nearly half of the respondents said they experienced other challenges beyond labor, such as difficulty obtaining inputs and supplies, repairs, and accessing financial services.
Opportunities to thrive
Despite the pandemic, Engle sees a brighter future for the industry as she believes there are opportunities to thrive if individuals involved in the industry commit to assisting and supporting fish farmers.
She believes the increased understanding of Aquaculture by the USDA should encourage engagement by the community in both federal and state levels to increase representation.
She also emphasized the importance of education and the use of science-based and research-based information to help farmers take
advantage of opportunities that may have already been there.
For instance, she noted that disruption in supply chain has driven renewed emphasis on the importance of strengthening supply chain particularly for local food supplies to ensure food security and to meet emerging trends such as increase in home cooking or demand for recreational stocking.
Engle said everyone involved in the industry must be poised to exploit opportunities today while waiting for the pandemic crises to resolve.
She urged farmers to join and be active in aquaculture organizations, respond to requests for survey when asked, engage with state and federal agencies, and learn and prepare records needed to be eligible to relief and other programs.
Likewise, she encouraged researchers to join farmers organizations, listen to farmers and their problems and design research to address them. She cautioned against focusing only on trendy topics and limiting studies within the lab environment. “Test your work on actual farms and under commercial conditions,” she added. Addressing extension specialists, Engle said they also needed to join farming organizations, listen to farmers, and design their extension program to tackle their needs. “Extension program is not just a matter of writing fact sheets, it is tacking problems and finding solutions which may mean recruiting researchers and taking the results of the study back to the farmers,” Engle concludes.
Aquaculture economist Dr Carole Engle says increased understanding of Aquaculture by the USDA should encourage community engagement
Consumer behavior is changing, so is aquaculture
The time when consumers can simply scan the QR code on a package of fish to find out its carbon footprint per serving size is not too far on the horizon.
“This is coming,” says George Chamberlain, president of the Global Seafood Alliance (formerly called Global Aquaculture Alliance), whose Best Aquaculture Practices standards aim to build consumer trust in seafood.
Consumer shopping behavior is changing, with many now shopping consciously and demand for sustainable brands is rising, he says.
“In the early days, most consumers have not been very aware of sustainability issues, they were more of a B2B issue. Major buyers, like Walmart, set sustainability goals; from their chairman to their board of directors and down to their buyers, they are very aware of the issues and they work directly with certification programs to make sure the products they offer meet their criteria. But this is now moving toward the point where the eco-labels are recognized by consumers.”
Chamberlain’s observation squares with various consumer surveys pointing to shifting consumption behaviors. In one of them, over 60 percent of consumers surveyed by consultancy Accenture said they are now making more environmentally friendly, sustainable or ethical purchases.
He said future QR codes on the final packaging, when scanned, will enable the consumer to see the full provenance, sustainability credentials and more importantly, the
product story: “Here’s a picture of the farmer, here’s how it was raised, here’s a map of where it came from. All that stuff is coming, even to the point where the nutritional label says the total fat, carbohydrate and sugar, cholesterol and greenhouse gas emissions per serving size.”
Chamberlain was speaking at an online forum this past fall, called Aquaculture: Seafood, hosted by Nonprofit Report founder Mark Oppenheim. Chamberlain and fellow panellists, Sebastian Belle, executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association, and Jim Parsons, president of the Northwest
Results Beyond Expectation
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Aquaculture Alliance, discussed the state of US aquaculture, with particular focus on the regulatory environment and consumer perception of farmed fish.
Belle noted that seafood is the only category of animal protein not farmed domestically as widely as other proteins, such as turkey, poultry or beef or swine, leading the United States import 90 percent of seafood from other countries. The emergence of international standards, he said, levels the playing field “because it essentially helps us compete and it raises the bar for farmers in other countries.”
Parsons acknowledged that the cost of regulations on US aquaculture represents a high percentage of the cost of doing business in the country. As Aquaculture North America reported earlier, a 2019 study on the regulatory costs on US salmonid farms showed annual regulatory costs per farm averaged $150,506, and $1.23 per pound. Small farmers are burdened the most – around 16 to 18 times more than large farms.
But it is because of these regulations that “there’s almost no better certification in the world than saying our aquaculture products are ‘US-Farm Raised’,” said Parsons.
Looking ahead, although the common approach to development has been to scale the industry, the three industry officials agreed it shouldn’t come at the expense of the environment.
Said Chamberlain: “I think that there’s a consensus that the way we do things now can’t be directly scaled; food production systems already account for 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. We’re already seeing that climate change is advancing and that we aren’t moving quickly enough. We can’t just scale what we’re doing. We have to find a different way, a greener, more efficient way. We can probably double (current production) but we need to do it in a way that generates a lot less impact per unit.”
“Eat seafood,” Parsons told the virtual audience. “Be aware of what’s in your seafood case. Ask questions about it. Ask if it’s local, get to know some of the local aquaculture farmers in your area. Go, visit an aquaculture farm. We keep hearing this misnomer that we all have ‘factory farms’ out there and actually that’s very far from the truth. Aquaculture farmers are right in the water or down in the mud with their products. Get to know what we’re doing now.”
In closing, Belle encouraged young people to get into the industry and help the industry innovate further. “Study math, and engineering and science. We need young innovative people to get into our field and to help us evolve over time in the direction that we’ve all talked about here,” he said. – Liza Mayer
New data show Canadians support salmon aquaculture
Who is the Canadian salmon consumer? What do they think about salmon farming methods? A survey of over 10,000 Canadians conducted this past summer sought to answer these questions and got some surprising answers.
Researchers at Dalhousie University found that Canadians support salmon aquaculture and, across age groups, there’s more support for ocean-based farming than for land-based. The results are in contrast to a federal government report that said Canadians prefer land-based farming and that they’re also willing to pay premium prices.
Dr Stefanie Colombo, lead researcher for the project and Canada Research Chair in Aquaculture Nutrition at Dalhousie University, said the diverging findings point to how “confused and misinformed Canadians are about salmon production.”
“While the federal government often listens to interest groups, it appears Canadians see ocean farms as a very sustainable method of
production, in addition to land-based production,” she said.
Phasing out ocean-based salmon farming and moving production to land-based, as the Canadian government plans to do in British Columbia, will have dramatic implications. For consumers, it will mean higher prices, making salmon less accessible. The Dalhousie study found that the typical Canadian salmon consumer who can afford to eat salmon at least once a month earns more than C$75,000 a year ($59,251). That figure is above the “most typical” earning of C$59,307 ($56,853) in the country, per data from averagesalarysurvey.com Those who do not eat salmon, accounting for 11 percent of respondents, said price is a deterrent.
“Salmon is very much part of Canada’s new Food Guide, so affordability should be a priority. If we motivate the industry to produce more salmon using land-based farms, we could potentially make salmon less affordable in the immediate future for a growing number of Canadians,” said Dr Sylvain Charlebois,
director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab.
The authors recommend that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which regulates aquaculture, considers all options based on scientific merit before enticing the industry to embrace one method of production versus another.
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Shopper checks out farmed salmon on sale at Costco in Vancouver, BC PHOTO: LIZA MAYER
Maine builds foundation for developing a better qualified aquaculture workforce
State is first in the US to have occupational standards for the fish farming industry
BY LYNN FANTOM
Maine’s new occupational standards were created to help educators build a workforce for the growing aquaculture industry, including the future needs of land-based producers. But it won’t take years for their benefits to be felt.
“Right now, a lot of people want to move to Maine to work in aquaculture because they think it sounds romantic and idyllic. But, in our experience, few of them have any idea of the skills required to actually do the job. Nor do they realize how hard the work can be,” says Briana Warner, the chief executive of kelp aggregator Atlantic Sea Farms.
Maine’s recently announced occupational standards help tackle that now. Not unlike job descriptions, they provide a comprehensive list of “duties” as well as the “knowledge and understanding” to carry them out. They are customized for shellfish and sea vegetable farms, marine finfish farms, land-based recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS), and land-based shellfish hatcheries.
The heavy-lift to develop them was undertaken by the Maine Aquaculture Association (MAA) in collaboration with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI), Educate Maine, and with support from FocusMaine.
“I think this project helps the industry make it clear what it is looking for. And people who want to be part of the industry can have a better understanding of the skills they need to learn in order to be hired and succeed,” adds Warner.
MAA’s Christian Brayden led the year-long project. Starting with a review of global literature and job descriptions, it was “a collaboration among us, the producers, and the educational community—all three at the same time,” he says. “We really went for a ground-up approach.”
The “very iterative process” involved 30 farms.
One partner was Tom Sorby, operations manager of Kingfish Maine, which now has permits to build a RAS facility to grow yellowtail kingfish in Jonesport. “I made suggestions of things to add and change to help round them out. It was clear that a lot of time and effort had been put into formulating the standards,” Sorby says. (An aquaculture veteran with a master’s degree in sustainable aquaculture from Scotland’s University of Stirling, he counts raising sablefish in British Columbia among his credentials.)
The new standards are “cumulative,” Braydon says — with skills building upon each other as a worker advances, for example, from deckhand to manager at a finfish farm or from technician to phycologist at a shellfish hatchery.
If someone dreams of owning an oyster farm, key knowledge areas (vessels/vehicles, shellfish culture, compliance) become manifest early on in the specific duties of a farm hand (trouble shoot problems with a boat’s gas engine; harvest, sort, count, and bag shellfish, adhering to health and safety requirements; follow schedules for tasks).
For entry-level workers, the standards also highlight emotional competencies, such as timeliness, teamwork, and working through fatigue, hunger, and varied weather. Timeliness, for example, is presented in the context of understanding its importance to farm operations and coworkers.
Chris Vonderweidt of GMRI also had the big idea to create a Shellfish Aquaculture Career Pathway to map how workers with the
“right intangible skills (most notably work ethic)” can master tasks and climb the career ladder. It even provides how long someone might spend on each rung of the ladder.
Nick King, a former Skretting executive who now leads operational quality control in the US for Nordic Aquafarms (NAF), says, “I’m especially excited about these standards being utilized by CTE [career and technical education] schools throughout Maine and not only those located near the coast.” After joining NAF in 2020, King had reached out to Vonderweidt of GMRI, who put him in touch with Brayden and the standards project.
“There is no doubt in my mind that a high school student anywhere in the state will find some aspect of RAS farming very interesting and become enthusiastic about the potential career path that gives them the option to stay in Maine, work elsewhere in the US, or even go abroad,” he adds.
The third key partner in the process of developing these standards were educators, among them Washington County Community College (WCCC). Located in northern Maine bordering New Brunswick, Canada, WCCC had been involved early on in the aquaculture workforce development strategy that was the impetus for the standards. Having just launched a coastal fisheries and marine technology program, the college will now use the new standards to develop the curriculum of an aquaculture-focused certificate and associate degree program targeted for the fall of 2022.
But that’s not all. They will be used to develop badges/micro-credentials and registered apprenticeships. The big plus of having this set of “formalized competencies,” as WCCC notes, is that it allows the college to create programming that is “industry-driven” and “relevant.”
The new WCCC program “aims to serve the growing need for entry-level workers in aquaculture with an eye toward the future of innovation within the industry,” WCCC president Susan Mingo adds.
And that’s an important point. From these standards, which are the “first of their kind” in the US, producers can extract job descriptions for their own farms right now. But, Brayden says, the standards are “a lot more in-depth” in order to aid curriculum development and training. As forward-looking documents, they feature three sets of skills: required now, suggested, and potential. After all, aquaculture is an evolving sector, Brayden emphasizes.
Analytics, genetics tech chart new direction for aquaculture
BY NESTOR ARELLANO
Analytics software, networked sensors and even new gene editing tools will continue to transform the aquaculture industry. For some fish farming operations, technology adoption could mean the difference between thriving and just surviving.
As aquaculture companies navigate a post-pandemic world, technology will become a key partner in meeting various challenges along the way, say industry experts.
Economics, environment drive adoption
In the last decade, technology has helped fish farming operations boost productivity and efficiency. Emphasis on the use of technology to lessen the impact on the environment, is now coming to fore, according to Dr Stephanie Colombo, Canada research chair in aquaculture nutrition and assistant professor at Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University.
There will be more pressure on farmed seafood producers to be more accountable for their impact on the environment, she says. In the next decade, she sees technology playing a greater part in assisting these operations reduce their carbon footprint as well as help them deal with the rapidly changing environment.
“Overall, the use of new and emerging technology will continue to have a positive impact in the industry,” says Colombo. “The
key drivers are going to be economic and sustainability in nature.”
It’s a sentiment shared by Susan Farquharson, executive director of Atlantic Canada Fish Farmers Association (ACFFA). She says Atlantic Canada salmon farmers invest millions of dollars annually in R&D to help them deal with the region’s diverse environment.
Some of the technologies ACFFA is seeing on fish farms these days include Artificial Intelligence-driven systems that monitor fish and the marine environment in real time. These systems can track various parameters such as oxygen levels, algal blooms and water temperatures, estimate fish biomass, fish health, tide and wind conditions, as well as tension on mooring lines and the strength of currents. Other areas of development are remote feeding systems that enable trained personnel to feed the fish and monitor multiple farms from on-land location; fish-transfer and parasite detection systems.
Sensors and predictive tools
Equipment that gather data, technology that makes sense of that data and software that predict potential outcomes are going to be the focus of R&D efforts, according to Jonathan Grant, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council – Cooke Industrial research chair and professor of oceanography at Dalhousie.
“We are going to see more improvements and continued interest in networked sensors that provide real-time data on factors such as water temperature and oxygen levels. The Internet of Things (IoT) will see further implementation in aquaculture facilities,” he says.
“Sensors will not only become better at telling us about the environment of the fish but will also tell us how it is affecting the fish and how the fish are reacting to it.”
He cited Innovasea Systems Inc as one of the leaders is this field. The company is one of the trailblazers in the use of acoustics telemetry in gaining insight into aquatic animal behaviour.
“Networked sensors used on land typically employ Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology to transmit data. But Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals do not travel underwater. In contrast, water is a good conductor of soundwaves,” Grant explains.
Innovasea has a range of acoustic tags that track fish movements. Its aquaMeasure environmental sensors monitor water temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity, blue-green algae, and dissolved organic matter, among others.
“The tags detect how the fish are behaving and the environmental sensors tell the farmer why they are behaving that way,” says Grant.
The tags also enable fish farmers “determine when and where the oxygen is low. So, this tells you when and where you should turn on or turn off the O2.”
Equipment that gather data, technology that makes sense of that data and software that predict potential outcomes are going to be the focus of R&D efforts
PHOTO: COOKE AQUACULTURE
AI-enhanced feeding
With fish feed accounting for at least half of a farm’s expense, it’s critical that operators get it right.
“Thankfully there are now AI-enabled tools that help farmers monitor fish weight and size, feeding behaviour, and also help determine just how much to feed the fish,” says Colombo.
ReelData AI, a Nova Scotia-based startup, has joined the bandwagon in developing AI-driven solutions that help operators of land-based fish farms to more accurately calibrate their feeding regimen.
ReelData cameras placed inside fish tanks gather data on fish waste and fish behaviour. ReelData identifies uneaten feeds in real-time. The tool calculates the “appetite of a tank” and then interacts with a facility’s application programming interface (API) to adjust feeding.
The product also reports on feeding patterns and provides farmers insight on over- or underperforming tanks and the patterns that cause such performance.
Disease management
Sea lice and other aquatic parasites costs the aquaculture industry billions of dollars each year. An infestation can start out as a minor inconvenience affecting fish health but it can rapidly evolve into something that causes a massive die off.
The control of sea lice and other pathogens is an area where technology can certainly help, according to Colombo.
Scottish company Ace Aquatech has developed a modular, mechanical lice-removal system. The system is currently being tested and is planned for release in 2022. It uses a low-voltage electric field and water jets to re move lice and eggs as tiny as 50 microns from the fish. It combines low-voltage electric fields, water jets, and a minimal thermal treatment in the final stage de-waterer.
Housed in a containerized design, the system can be attached to small workboats. This makes the system ideal for localized deployment or deployment of several units in different locations.
Meanwhile, ocean-based fish farmers may soon have access to improved tool against harmful microalgal blooms.
Underwater microbubble barriers have been used to block microorganisms and algal blooms from entering fish farms. However, there has been no publicly available data on the method’s effectiveness.
For some fish farming operations, technology adoption could mean the difference between thriving and just surviving
Bruno Lopez, general manager at PSP Solutions, believes the experiment will enable his company to further improve the system’s design.
Another emerging technology to watch out for, according to Colombo, is the use of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique in fish. The technique involves cutting a cell’s genome at a desired location. This allows undesirable genes to be removed. Using the same technique, new genes can also be added.
“There will likely be interest in using this gene editing technique in enhancing fish size and weight,” says Colombo. “However, I am more interested in finding out how CRISPR can be used to improve fish resilience.”
She says development in the area of how gene editing can be used to edit out weakness to diseases is something worth looking out for.
Prepping for a tech revolution
Prepare for more technology innovations to
Panelists at Global Seafood Alliance’s recent GOAL 2021 event noted growing interest in the aquaculture space.
“We’re starting to see venture capitalists and tech investors showing up for aquaculture, technology companies proving themselves and farmers adopting more technology,” Amy Novogratz, founder of the sustainable aquaculture fund Aqua-Spark, remarked during a panel discussion.
Anthony Fadell, co-inventor of the iPod and iPhone, says in a session during the event:
“There will be early adopters, laggards and people in the middle, but at the end of the day everyone cares about return on investment.”
In an interview with The Advocate, Fadell, who is principal at global advisory and investment firm Future Shape, says there will be successes and failures among these adaptors but “now is the right time for this
Recently, Plancton Andino and the Universi dad Austral de Chile conducted and experiment using a microbubble barrier system developed by Low O2 and PSPO Solutions. Their tests showed that the system achieved more than 80 percent effectiveness in blocking microalgal bloom.
PHOTO: NAIA
iFarm, a technology being developed in partnership between salmon producer Cermaq and technology company BioSort, is now being tested on a full scale at one of Cermaq’s sea sites in Vesterålen, Norway.
iFarm allows the individual monitoring of each fish for factors such as growth, sea lice, disease, lesions and others aspects that affect fish health and wellness.
The focus on the “individual” is key in the technology and is what makes it particularly unorthodox. Because only the sick fish is treated and not the entire stock, the cost of treatments and stress on the fish are dramatically reduced.
For the technology to work, each fish has to go to a chamber where a sensor can quickly scan, recognize and record data on that specific fish using recognition data based on each fish’s unique markings and structure.
The team behind the project followed the fish’s behavior in phase one of trials in the spring of last year and observed how they reacted to the presence of new equipment in their pens. They have incorporated learnings from that phase into the full-scale field trials now underway.
“We are dependent on the fish choosing to swim through the sensor house, so in this (second) phase we are putting out six different sensor houses with different geometric designs, to test which houses the salmon prefer,” says iFarm project manager Karl Fredrik Ottem.
There are challenges, he noted: “Even though the fish seem to thrive and grow well, not everything runs completely smooth in such
When the fish rise to the surface to refill their airbladders, they are guided through the “sensor house” (pictured) where a sensor can quickly scan, recognize and record data on that specific fish using recognition data based on each fish’s unique markings and structure
Diagram shows where the “sensor house” is positioned in the pen
an innovative development project. With so much equipment down in the net pen, it has been demanding to find good solutions for both camera cleaning and equipment maintenance.”
The fish are kept 10 meters down in the net pen with iFarm and the team has observed fewer lice in that depth. “We reckon that we have saved a minimum of one de-licing operation on the iFarm fish during phase one at Martnesvika, even though we only have iFarm set-up in single net pens there,” says Ottem. “At Langøyhovden we have iFarm set-up in all the net pens, and it will be very interesting to see what effect it will have on lice levels eventually.”
Researchers look to RAS to climate-proof oyster culture
As the effects of climate change bite deep er, research is underway to explore the potential of recirculating aquaculture systems in climate-proofing oyster culture.
The initiative is a collaboration between industry and academics aiming to break the dependence of oyster culture on unpredictable seawater quality.
Michael Congrove, president and majority shareholder at Oyster Seed Holdings in Mathews County, VA, is the private-sector participant in the project. He and experts from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) and the Virginia Tech Seafood Agricultural Research and Extension Center are now exploring the potential benefits of RAS technology in the early part of the oyster larvae’s life cycle.
“It would be ideal to run (the hatchery) on ambient water part of the time and then switch to recirculating system when that water became sub-par for producing larvae,” says Congrove.
He recalled that Chesapeake Bay’s water salinity has gone down to detrimental
levels because of unusually heavy downpours in 2018 and 2019.
While oyster hatcheries have become very good at solving water-quality issues with the use of traditional single-pass filtration type methods, those climate events made them helpless, he says.
“We couldn’t adapt a way to put enough salt back into the water to stay at our normal scale of production.”
Not to mention all that freshwater brings all kinds of upland runoff and associated pollution into the watershed.
While salmon farmers already know the weak points in a RAS system and are addressing them, Congrove says there are still many unknowns in using the system in oyster larvae culture. As he and the team continue to figure out these unknowns, he underscores the importance of collaboration between industry and academics as well as financial support for such transformative initiatives.
“The good thing about an industry-driven grant program is it reflects how important a research question is to Industry,” he says.
The study is funded by the Virginia Sea Grant Fisheries Resource Grant.
Tech, human insight help farmer grow ‘new’ farmed species
Pacifico Aquaculture was the first to bring farmed non-hybrid or “true” striped bass ( Morone saxitallis ) to the market.
The company raises striped bass from egg to harvest in the deep waters off Baja California. Also known in the wild as rock fish or striper, the fish sports distinguishing black stripes running along its silvery metallic sides.
Starting out as a tuna ranching operation in the early 2000s, the company switched to farming non-hybrid striped bass in 2017, eventually making a name for itself as builder of the world’s first commercial striped bass hatchery.
“One of the biggest challenges we face is the
fact that we are first to market with this species. This means we have to develop every process and system ourselves. We are bringing a new species to market and have all the challenges that come with it. This is also what makes it such a rewarding and exciting work. We are solving and will continue to solve these challenges and develop this market and species,” says vice president of sales, Guy Lott.
The company has five- to 10-year-old broodstock that spawn throughout the year, ensuring regular supply of fingerlings and full traceability of its product. Fingerlings are transferred to the sea after staying roughly 110 days post hatch in land-based tanks.
Innovation eases backbreaking aspect of oyster farming, wins award
Asemi-automated method for flipping oyster-growing cages has won the top prize at the 9th Annual Global Aquaculture Innovation Award given by the Global Seafood Alliance .
Called FlipFarm Systems, the technology developed by New Zealand company FlipFarm features Hexcyl Pro oyster cages attached to a conveyor belt that transports the cages toward the side of a harvesting vessel to
Long before “precision farming” trended up in aquaculture, the company has embraced technology to enhance operations.
“Every day, there is more and more technology out there, especially for RAS system, which is relatively new in the industry,” says Lott. “This technology helps alleviate a lot of the labor needed in day-to-day operations. But, more and more, we find integrated solutions that gives fish farmers real-time information that improves overall fish rearing.”
But as applications of automation and artificial intelligence in fish farming become wider, human insight will remain vital, says Lott. “Considering that farmers are working with live organisms, in the end, the fish will tell you what they need,” he says.The company plans to expand its nursery to increase capacity to 8 million fish/year as well as to delivering bigger fish – 80-100gr – to sea. The new facility will be equipped with new technology, much more automated, ensuring better yields.
The US is Pacifico’s biggest market by far, but there are plans for market expansion in the coming years. Regular, fresh shipments to both Spain and the UK have started recently.
– Julia Hollister
Oyster farming can be a labor-intensive task but an award-winning innovation from New Zealand eases the backbreaking aspect
PHOTO: FLIPFARM/YOUTUBE
be manually flipped one at a time with just a slight push.
Growers have traditionally flipped cages manually – some as heavy as 200 to 300 pounds when the oysters are near harvest. Flipping exposes all sides of the cage to the sun and kills the parasites that have attached themselves to it.
The system is adaptable to diverse growing environments and is now used by more than 70 farmers in 12 countries worldwide, said the company.
The finalists were selected from a pool of 39 applicants from 24 countries. The winner was selected by the participants at GSA’s.
PHOTO: PACIFICO AQUACULTURE
Improving feed offers hope in limiting climate change
Animal nutrition company Cargill has set out an ambitious target of reducing the farmed salmon industry’s carbon footprint by 30 percent per tonne of fish produced by 2030, a goal it likens to removing more than 400,000 cars from the road in one year.
Feed raw materials singlehandedly contribute 50 percent of emissions in aquaculture. How they are produced and how their production affects the land, such as deforestation, accounts for much of that.
Feed’s contribution to aquaculture emissions goes up to as high as 90 percent when feed performance is factored in, such as the how many tons of feed are needed to grow one ton of fish and how much of the feed goes to the water or wasted.
The animal nutrition giant is harnessing its power to effect change.
“Our goal is to help reduce the industry’s footprint by working with our individual customers,” said Dave Robb, sustainability program lead of Cargill’s SeaFurther sustainability program and co-author of the study, “Quantifying greenhouse gas emissions from global aquaculture.”
“As Cargill, we have a real clear role in supporting sustainable development of salmon farming and all fed aquaculture to help our customers set and achieve bold climate goals. If we can manage on the raw material, we can affect at least 50 percent in the footprint of the final animal. And if we can manage on the feed performance, we can manage at least 75 percent, or possibly even more, of the footprint of the animal. So that’s the combination of the feed and using the feed. Those together will of course impact the on-farm inputs and the effluents impact as well,” said Robb.
Aside from quantifying each component of salmon aquaculture up to the point of harvest, the 2020 study found a rather surprising finding: transportation of raw feed materials to the feed mills and transportation of the finished feed to the farm account for just a very small portion of the farming emissions, it said.
“This may be surprising to many people that despite using global supply chains, the overall transport footprint for the raw materials inbound is very small – about two or three percent of the overall footprint of the raw materials,” said Robb, who spoke at the Global Seafood Alliance’s GOAL Conference in November.
Cargill plans to manage footprint of feed and maximize its efficiencies by working with existing suppliers to reduce the footprint of the raw materials that they provide the company; identifying new supply chains and new raw materials; and bringing the nutrients that’s needed to produce healthy fish.
“By doing this at scale with salmon alone, we see that we can save 2 billion kilograms of CO2 between the start of the program (in March 2021) and 2030; that’s equivalent to removing more than 400,000 cars from the road in one year,” said Robb. “We’ve set ourselves a midpoint goal in 2026, when we will have already achieved a 15-percent reduction in greenhouse gases.”
The SeaFurther sustainability program started with the salmon industry first because it is a sector it knows very well, said Robb, but it will roll out the sustainability program to other fed aquaculture species eventually.
“Seventy percent of consumers surveyed across 22 different countries want to know about the seafood they are purchasing, to see that it was produced sustainably. As we scale up our production to help feed the world going through the growing population in 2030 and 2050, we’re going to play an increasing part of the overall footprint of food production,” he said.
How aquaculture is restoring wild endangered Atlantic salmon species
Much has been said about aquaculture’s supposed risk on wild salmon but little is known about its role in helping restore them. Guest columnist Joel Richardson of Cooke Aquaculture discusses how aquaculture technology is key to restoring wild Atlantic salmon populations in Canada’s maritime provinces.
ild Atlantic salmon populations in the Inner Bay of Fundy are at risk of extinction but with the help of the world’s first wild salmon marine conservation farm, they are making a comeback.
This past July, the Resource Conservation team at Fundy National Park recorded over 100 salmon in park rivers, the highest number of returning salmon counted since 1989.
The Bay of Fundy winds its way between the Canadian provinces
of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Wild Atlantic salmon populations in the Inner Bay of Fundy – used to be around 40,000 – have dropped to less than a hundred in recent years. They have been listed as endangered under the Species at Risk Act since 2003.
The Fundy Salmon Recovery project aims to save them from extinction and regrow their population. The marine conservation farm affiliated with the project was founded in 2014 in Dark Harbour, Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick and is operated
Juvenile wild Atlantic salmon collected from their native rivers are raised in the conservation farm run by Cooke Aquaculture until the fish are ready to be released back to their home rivers, as pictured here
by Cooke Aquaculture Inc. Cooke supplied and installed the custom farm and we are the daily caretakers of the wild salmon through feed and nutrition, health monitoring and equipment maintenance.
Biologists from the Fundy Salmon Recovery Project collect juvenile wild Atlantic salmon from
their native rivers of Fundy National Park and the Petitcodiac watershed and transport them to Dark Harbour, where they are raised in the ocean on the conservation farm until they are mature adults.
Trained Cooke Aquaculture staff use their knowledge and technology to ensure appropriate feed is used at the right time, that
PHOTO: COOKE AQUACULTURE
fish transfers back to the wild are conducted with as little stress as possible for the fish, and onsite farm infrastructure provides the appropriate care until the wild salmon are ready to be released back to their native rivers.
Once mature, the adult salmon are then transported back to their home rivers to spawn naturally. The hope is that once these salmon spawn, they will travel back out to sea to feed and return again one year later to continue the cycle. Atlantic salmon can do this migration and spawn two or even three times in their lifetime.
We are seeing high numbers of salmon returns in the rivers at Fundy National Park through the program. By returning salmon at the adult stage, their offspring are spawned and hatched naturally in the wild which allows them to avoid compromises to wild fitness of being produced in captivity.
Advances in ocean aquaculture technology and science have allowed us to reduce the many unknowns around marine mortality for this important species. We are very pleased to be using our fish farming innovations to be a key contributor to the increasing numbers of wild salmon returns.
Fundy Salmon Recovery’s partners and collaborators include Cooke Aquaculture, Parks Canada, the Atlantic Canada Fish Farmers Association, University of New Brunswick, Fort Folly First Nation, New Brunswick Department of Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fisheries, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Village of Grand Manan, SIMCorp, Crime Stoppers and the Atlantic Salmon Law Enforcement Coalition.
Fort Folly Habitat Recovery, a partner since 2014, leads the Atlantic salmon conservation and recovery efforts on the Petitcodiac river system, which historically produced 20 percent of the overall inner-bay population.
Fort Folly Habitat Recovery Manager Tim Robinson says the aquaculture industry makes an important contribution to salmon conservation by helping teams safely rear larger numbers of Atlantic salmon in their natural marine
environment and return them to multiple rivers.
“One river isn’t going to restore a population, but the more rivers that we can return adult salmon back to, the more chance that there’s going to be larger smolt runs resulting from that in subsequent years. The more smolt going out to sea, the better chance that more are going to survive to return again,” explained Robinson.
He adds that Fundy National Park has been seeing increasing
returns throughout the year and estimates this year they could see their highest number of returns in decades. Petitcodiac, a younger sister project to that in Fundy National Park, has now counted 30 adult salmon returns in 2021, compared to a few years ago where it was void of any inner bay Atlantic salmon.
“The overall growth and success of the Fundy Salmon Recovery collaboration has been extremely exciting,” said Robinson. “This is something that none of us could
have ever dreamed of being able to do on our own, and the way that we work with one another and complement each other’s efforts all for a common objective is really the best thing about the whole project.”
Joel Richardson leads public and government relations for Cooke Aquaculture Inc, a family seafood company in New Brunswick. Working with partners from government, academia and First Nations, Cooke invests heavily in conservation projects including as a founding partner in Fundy Salmon Recovery.
Salmon made in the lab evokes mixed reactions
Alternatives to wild and farmed fish may have their own problems BY
JULIA HOLLISTER
Wildtype, a San Francisco-based startup, has big plans: to save the dwindling salmon population while enabling Americans to continue to enjoy their favorite salmon or sushi dish.
“We have the opportunity to create seafood that has all the things we love and eliminate things that we don’t love,” said Ben Friedman, head of product at Wildtype.
Friedman is talking about “fish-less” fish proteins made in the laboratory, a process known as “cellular aquaculture” because the proteins are made directly from fish cells.
“There are three core reasons why we started Wildtype,” he says. “The first is environmentally: the wild salmon population is declining. The second reason is aquaculture: there are many challenges, such as its dependence on wild fish (as feed material), and we hope to alleviate some of them. The third reason is removing the many containments among our wild fish population and to stop using the ocean as dumping ground.”
This Aquaculture North America correspondent seized a rare opportunity to taste cell-based salmon sushi with Friedman and co-founder and practicing cardiologist Aryé Elfenbein in the San Francisco lab recently.
Freidman explained that the salmon cells were collected three years ago from a small fish. (The taste was very subtle.)
“We’re particularly proud of how our product performs in sushi applications like rolls and nigiri, where Wildtype salmon is front and center on the plate,” he said. (Nigiri means “to grasp,” and references the way the rice is pressed into shape by hand.)
“We make salmon with a clean ocean flavor that people love. Our society tells us the fresher the better. Most questions involves about how we make it. Most caught salmon has been out of the water for a long time. Besides, we don’t need to send lab-based salmon to a processor to cut. Cultivated salmon takes between four to six weeks to produce as compared to three years for farmed salmon.”
Wildtype considers cell-based salmon to be environmentally better than caught salmon. For example, industrial trawling accounts for more carbon emissions than the airline industry. “The nutritional value is nearly the
Lab-created salmon from Wildtype that this writer tasted at the company’s San Francisco lab
same, and in many ways better than wild-caught or farmed salmon because it does not contain the heavy metals, microplastics, or antibiotics found in most salmon at the grocery store,” claims Wildtype co-founder and CEO Justin Kolbeck. “The product has slightly less protein than alternatives but a very similar fat composition, including levels of healthy Omega-3 fatty acids.”
Katherine Torres, who’s with Wild Alaskan Company, agrees with that assessment.
“It is true that overfishing is a huge problem in many places around the globe,” she said. “However, Alaska proactively maintains some of the world’s best sustainably managed fisheries. Our wild fisheries are heavily regulated by the state. That basically means fishermen and women are permitted to fish only when there is enough fish to sustain the wild populations.”
“Justin (Kolbeck) and I founded Wildtype in 2016 and started to build a team in 2018,” Elfenbein said. “The salmon can stand on its own and does not hide behind sauce or dumped in a deep fryer. We want to be as transparent as possible because we want people to know how it (the lab-created salmon) is made; that is the key to opening up this market.”
Questions raised
In the lead up to COP26 held in Glasgow in November, Chris Elliot, a professor of food safety at Queen’s University Belfast expressed his doubts as to whether artificial fish or meats are the answer to achieving a healthier planet and population.
Without much information available about the nutrition content and how they compare in sustainability to their livestock-based equivalents, Elliot wrote in New Food Magazine that he is “far from convinced” that plant- or cell-based foods are the answer to climate change.
Indeed, among the questions raised by Eric Muraille, a biologist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, is the environmental cost of sterilizing the stainless-steel culture tanks in order to ward off bacterial contamination of the cell cultures. He compared the labs where cell cultures are carried out to highly controlled and sanitized “clean rooms” in the pharmaceutical industry.
In an article titled: “‘Cultured’ meat could create more problems than it solves” published in The Conversation in November 2019, Muraille wrote:
“Animals have an immune system that naturally protects them against bacterial and other infections. This is not the case for cell culture, and in a nutrient-rich environment, bacteria multiply much faster than animal cells. To avoid producing a steak made up of more bacteria than meat, it is essential to avoid contamination, and that requires a high level of sterility.”
As such, the pharmaceutical industry’s carbon footprint may be 55 percent higher than that of the automotive industry, wrote Muraille, citing data available at that time.
Kolbeck has acknowledged the need for a Life Cycle Analysis to measure the environmental impact of their product in order to give consumers a factual analysis of their sustainability.
“If we’re going to say that we are a cleaner and a more sustainable option, we better do a Life Cycle Analysis and show those data and be transparent about that. Because, otherwise, what are we talking about?” he said earlier (see ANA Jul/Aug 2021, p33).
A factual analysis of their nutritional value should also be disclosed.
The term “cultured salmon” has also raised some questions. Aquaculture North America surveyed 36 members of a San Francisco fitness studio whether they would taste or order salmon made in a lab. The responses were mixed: 15 said “No;” 13 said “Yes” and 8 responded “Maybe.”
The studio’s manager, Margaret Lovallo, said many members were very interested and needed a definition of “cultured salmon.” She described it as similar to “Beyond Beef,” which is grown in a lab, but the members were unsure if the salmon is technically vegetarian.
“I wouldn’t put GMOs or anything in my body that was made in a lab,” said one of the survey respondents, Rob, a trainer at the gym.
However, Andrew, a tall trainer on a stationary bike was more welcoming. “I would definitely eat cultured salmon. It will be a real taste adventure.”
And what about the price point?
“This past year we’ve dramatically reduced the cost of our product and the opening of our new pilot plant has allowed us to continue to reduce production costs,” said co-founder Elfenbein. “We anticipate by the time we go to market our price point will be comparable to other sushi-grade salmon.”
Wildtype is building a new value chain from the ground-up. It will be bringing on additional launch partners as it continues to expand production capacity in the United States and abroad.
As with the entire industry, Wildtype has faced challenges with some raw materials, including the stainless steel for the production
tanks. These shortages are directly linked to COVID-related supply chain disruptions, and the company continues to work to source the needed materials.
On the heels of the launch of its demonstration facility in San Francisco, Wildtype expects to complete a tasting room – “The Dock” – this year. The site will enable visitors to sample Wildtype salmon, and learn how it is made.
Wildtype is currently developing a restaurant partner program so that once the consultation with the US Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) is completed customers will be able to taste Wildtype salmon at the participating restaurants.
“Wildtype is not yet available to the public as we are still in consultation with the US FDA; but we’re getting closer,” said Kolbeck. “If pre-market interest is any indicator, we think consumers are going to be very excited when we launch our products. We’ve started with Coho salmon and consumers who like Coho salmon will love Wildtype.”
With files from Liza Mayer
Biosecurity: critically important or just another dirty word?
Fish farmers are familiar with the concept of biosecurity, and although it is embraced by many producers, it can still be a bit of a dirty word. Biosecurity may feel like an overly restrictive and exaggerated response to an invisible foe – all this fuss to minimize the risk of introducing a potential pathogen to your farm. Understandably, unless you have experienced a serious infectious disease outbreak, it may seem overblown or an unnecessary investment of time and resources, not to mention those annoying footbaths. However, all it takes is one or two significant outbreaks to demonstrate how critically important biosecurity can be to producing consistently healthy and productive fish. Understanding the principles of biosecurity is important but knowing how to apply it on your farm is what will ultimately make the difference.
Biosecurity refers to procedures and strategies used to prevent the introduction and spread of biological agents to, or between, a population of animals. In many ways, applying biosecurity principles is “common sense”, as long as you have an appreciation for how pathogens can be spread. Pathogens can spread directly between fish via the water, feces, excretions, and direct contact; they can also spread indirectly, entering the surrounding environment via the water, predators, other fish, excretions from other animals such as birds, equipment, personnel, and transport vehicles.
The ultimate goal of biosecurity is to prevent potential pathogens from entering a facility or the environment in which a facility is located. Although this is theoretically possible depending on the facility, it is nonetheless a challenge and one that may not be reasonably achieved. In a practical sense, we want to reduce the opportunities for pathogens to enter a farm.
The first step in developing a biosecurity plan is to conduct a thorough risk analysis of your farm. Go through your physical facility as well as the production flow and processes of your farm to identify where pathogens could enter your facility or spread between groups of fish. Biosecurity plans need to be catered to specific facilities; what works for one farm may be of little to no use at another. A risk analysis also allows producers to target their efforts, maximizing the bang for their buck. Biosecurity is about minimizing risk, and what is considered acceptable risk will depend in part on the producer, the facility, and the regulator, among other factors.
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Once you have completed a risk analysis, critical control points can be identified and utilized to develop biosecurity protocols and standard operating procedures (SOPs). Establishing and implementing SOPs is vital to ensuring that adequate measures are in place and being upheld. It is important to develop useful SOPs by ensuring they are achievable and reasonable; staff need to be comfortable with the protocols and understand their value. If you need assistance with conducting risk analyses or SOP development, your veterinarian would be happy to help.
A good place to start implementing biosecurity protocols is the front door. Limit visitor access to your farm when possible and ensure visitors do not pose a significant risk – did the visitor just arrive from another fish farm? Were they recently in contact with sick fish? Did they swing by a river to cast a line on the way over to your farm? Establish a visitor log, including names, contact info, and a list of any other fish farms or places the visitors may have recently come into contact with fish. A visitor arriving directly from another farm does not necessarily constitute a hard “you cannot enter our facility” – it depends on the situation but it does carry risk with it. Putting up physical barriers such as fences, gates, and locking buildings can also help keep out unwanted visitors, both two-legged and four-legged.
The front door is also where disinfection plays an important role. Admittedly, it is difficult to know exactly how much benefit a two to three second dip of your boots in a footbath provides; however, it certainly has value in the biosecurity awareness that it instills in staff and visitors. Having site specific gear and equipment is a key element of biosecurity. It is also important to have gear and equipment that is specific to certain buildings, systems, and tanks. Should a pathogen enter your facility, this will help keep it contained, allowing for more effective management of
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any resulting issues. In cases when equipment needs to be shared between sites, thorough disinfection, including adequate drying time, is a must. Another aspect of biosecurity is maximizing health and minimizing stress on your fish to limit their susceptibility to infection and disease. Considering the relative susceptibility of your livestock is also very important – in general, the youngest fish are most susceptible to disease. If you must travel to multiple farms in a day, or if you are in contact with different groups or year classes of fish at a facility, move from the youngest to oldest fish. When possible, having single year-class sites with an “all-in, all-out” production model is a powerful strategy to employ. Fallowing a site or system, along with thorough disinfection of fish rearing equipment is also valuable. Ensuring gametes are free of disease is another important step in maximizing biosecurity. By no means was this an exhaustive list of on-farm strategies and applications of biosecurity, but it is a highlight of some important steps to ensuring you limit the introduction of pathogens to your farm. Speaking from experience, things always seem fine until they are not, and some biosecurity lessons come at a great cost. Best to learn from the mistakes of others and build a robust fish health management and biosecurity plan for your facility to prevent issues, rather than having to react to them.
Dr Mykolas Kamaitis is a private practice aquaculture veterinarian and owner of Belwood Lake Veterinary Services in Ontario, Canada. He previously worked in the salmon industry in British Columbia as a vet and Fish Health Manager with Mowi Canada West. During his time at Mowi, Mykolas developed a strong background in production medicine and continues to take a preventative and production-focused approach to fish health management. He was named president of the Association of Aquaculture Veterinarians of British Columbia (AAVBC) in 2018 and continues in the role to this day.
Opportunity knocking on Minnesota’s doors
Farming fish for human consumption accounts for only a quarter of the state’s aquaculture industry. That’s about to change
Aproposed rewrite of Minnesota’s aquaculture regulatory regime will give local fish farmers the opportunity to partake in the benefits of the world’s fastest growing food production system.
The state’s aquaculture industry is currently very small, valued at roughly $5 million (compared to neighboring Wisconsin, where aquaculture is valued at $21 million). About half of that is farming fish for bait, while fish for stocking and fish for human consumption each account for a quarter.
Industry insiders believe the state’s current “aquaculture plan,” which was developed in the late 1980s, is out of kilter.
“A ‘plan’ is supposed to have goals and action steps and monitoring systems and timelines and so on. That was never there,” says Clarence
Minnesota Sea Grant’s Donald Schreiner says advances in fish-farming technologies is a factor behind the push to expand the state’s aquaculture industry
Donald Schreiner, a fisheries and aquaculture specialist with Minnesota Sea Grant, explains that “food fish aquaculture really wasn’t in vogue at the time the plan was developed, especially in Minnesota.”
“Given our northern climate we were at a real disadvantage compared to southern states as far as the growing season goes.”
If Bill HF 2391 is approved, $100,000 from state funds will be allocated to the
Department of Agriculture for it to come up with a “comprehensive and well-documented state aquaculture plan.”
Department of Agriculture Commissioner Thom Petersen believes there is a real opportunity for aquaculture to expand significantly within the state.
“I think it’ll provide opportunities for farmers,” says Petersen. “There’s a need for new types of protein sources and I think there’s a chance to take the food market from just a niche to a bigger player.”
Minnesota Department of Agriculture
sees a chance to take the food market from just a niche to a bigger player
Bischoff says aquaculture will allow wildcaught fish populations to recover.
“Wild caught cannot meet the demand, especially with the way the population is growing,” he says. “I would like to leave the wild population alone and leave it for nature lovers and sports people. We can do the food production in the controlled environment systems that we’re developing.”
Key considerations
Advances in fish-farming technology in controlled environments, for instance, recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS), could play a role in the industry’s expansion, sources say.
Petersen, Schreiner and Bischoff all noted how RAS would be more palatable to some Minnesotans who have concerns about open-net pen farming. State Representative Ginny Klevorn, one
Bischoff, president of the Minnesota Aquaculture Association (MAA).
Commissioner Thom Petersen
Clarence Bischoff, president of the Minnesota
ture
of the sponsors of Bill HF 2391, says she hopes the new aquaculture plan will address such concerns.
“We still have some pieces in this legislation that we really need to make sure that we work out, such as protecting our indigenous aquaculture and our $2.3-billion fishing industry,” says Klevorn. “I want to make sure that we don’t disturb that. I’m really excited to think that we could find a way to do this and protect our natural resources and our water.”
Due to those concerns, social licence becomes a key consideration, notes Schreiner.
“If aquaculture is going to move forward, it has to move forward in an environmentally acceptable and sustainable manner. The last thing we would want to see is aquaculture potentially impacting our wild fish stocks or our public waters. That’s something people really cherish in this state.”
Given the ideal scenario they long for, Minnesota would likely be better off producing species that are well-suited to closed-loop recirculating systems, such as walleye (Sander vitreus). (The first indoor walleye farm in the United States is being planned in Minnesota by Blue Water Farms, founded by Bischoff, the MAA president.)
“People in this state go crazy over walleye,” says Schreiner. “It brings in big dollars when you can purchase it.”
Shrimp and trout farming are also popular within Minnesota’s small food-fish farming sector.
A need for education and promotion
While there is room for the industry to expand, selling fresh seafood to people less accustomed to it, such as those outside of the coastal communities, is seen as a challenge.
“One of the problems is here in the Midwest, everybody eats hamburgers and pork sausages,” says Jesse Preiner, trout farmer and mayor of Columbus, MN.
“Fresh seafood isn’t a big thing, unless you’re ordering shrimp for Christmas or something like that. It’s fallen on a few of us producers to teach people the value of good fresh fish. We make progress, every year it increases a little bit. Once they become a customer, they are customers for years,” says Preiner.
“A more robust conversation” and a vote on Bill HF 2391 will take place when the House begins the next session in late January. Rep Klevorn says that after an out-of-session com mittee meeting on the topic, she expects the bill will be passed.
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Biological issues in Canada impacts
Mowi’s bottom line Mowi’s operations in Canada continue to suffer from biological challenges, putting a damper on the Group’s otherwise stellar overall performance in the third quarter of 2021.
The Norwegian salmon producer said a low oxygen incident in its operations in Newfoundland and a plankton bloom in the Quatsino-area farm in British Columbia raised farming costs and fetched for the Newfoundland operations lower prices for the untimely harvested fish.
Mowi said it will temporarily pause growth ambitions at its Newfoundland farming region following the recent biological issues.
address the issues.
“We’ll make a decision about 2024 based on how we do over the next two summers. Once we find a system that works consistently, we’ll go back into growth mode,” he said.
Today, more women are graduating in aquaculture from higher education institutes and gender parity has been achieved in some cases. More women are entering highly skilled employment.
Yet, women are still more commonly seen participating in small-scale aquaculture production, post-harvest industrial and artisanal processing, value addition, marketing and sales. Few women are senior staff, owners, managers and executives in the larger enterprises.
Aquaculture North America (ANA), in partnership with Merck Animal Health, is launching a new project celebrating women in the North American industry.
Women in North American Aquaculture, or WINAA, aims to understand the road to gender equality in the industry. A new month-ly podcast series and newsletter subscription will launch in January, featuring influential women and how they’ve made an impact.
ANA will also host a live virtual event on 8 September 2022 to gather together men and women in the North American aquaculture industry to tackle solutions for equal pay, entrepreneurship, innovation, training and mentorship.
“As our industry continues to grow, so does its workforce, and women are an important part of the equation,” said Jeremy Thain, associate publisher of the aquaculture division at Annex Business Media.
“Our goal for the WINAA program and event is to spotlight influential women, sharing their stories, achievements, challenges and wisdom with industry through our Aquaculture North America media channels.”
Stay up to date with the WINAA program and all aquaculture news updates on www. aquaculturenorthamerica.com.
“We’re going to continue growing fish, just the expected pace of growth has been slowed,” says Mowi Canada East Managing Director Alan Cook. “Effectively, we had planned to scale up to three farms according to the Bay Management Area (BMA) in the Bays West region over the next years. For the next two years, we will stock two farms.”
He said the unit is testing a variety of methods, such as in-feed, bath treatments, freshwater, hydrolicers and thermolicers to
Mowi said the decision regarding its eastern Canada unit does not impact the organization, “however, we reserve the right to make adjustments if and when it’s required.”
Overall, the Group had an overall exceptional performance, with revenues reaching a record high of €1.03 billion ($1.19 billion) in 3Q. Operating profit was up 64 percent in 3Q over the same period in 2020.
The salmon industry giant attributed the growth to the improvement in foodservice activity and sustained retail demand.
Mark Lane leaves Newfoundland industry association
After seven years as executive director of the Newfoundland Aquaculture Industry Association (NAIA), Mark Lane is moving over to the Northpine Foundation, a philanthropic organization that aims to invest in Canada’s underserved communities so they could thrive.
Lane takes on the inaugural role of Impact Manager for Rural Newfoundland and Labrador for the Toronto-based foundation. He brings to the new role his leadership and organizational skills as well as the deep relationships he’s built with rural communities during his tenure as an aquaculture industry official.
‘Together, we are going to build one of Canada’s largest privately funded foundations. I also have the privilege of managing the investment portfolio for my home province that you all know I love,” Lane said in his farewell email to industry colleagues in November.
Jamie Baker replaces Lane as the executive director of NAIA.
According to the association’s statement, Baker gained experience in the seafood sector through communications, news media and industry representation. He now hopes to use his skills as NAIA’s advocate for the growth of the aquaculture industry through sustainable sea farming.
Atlantic Sapphire enters deal to secure its feed supply
Florida-based Atlantic Sapphire is set to have its own local supply of feed for its salmon RAS operations under a deal signed in November with feed manufacturer Skretting.
Under the agreement, Skretting will construct and finance a feed plant in Florida that will cater to Atlantic Sapphire’s salmon feed needs over a 10-year period.
Feed is Atlantic Sapphire’s largest cost component. Due to the specialized production requirements needed to produce salmon feed, the company is currently transporting its salmon feed from Canada, at a considerable cost disadvantage.
Removing the need for feed transportation secures the company direct savings of approximately US$0.30/kg HOG of production cost and cuts the carbon footprint of the feed significantly, said the company.
Mark Lane
The slowdown in Mowi’s Newfoundland unit will not affect the growth strategy of the Mowi Group, says the company PHOTO: ALAN COOK
Aquaculture North America, in partnership with Merck Animal Health, is launching a new project celebrating women in the North American industry PHOTO: MOWI
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