Target achieved
The conventional salmon farming industry has never had it so tough.
In an unprecedented policy shift, the Target Corporation – one of the largest retailers in the United States and a direct competitor with Walmart – has just today announced the elimination of all farmed salmon products from its stores. Fresh, frozen, shelf-stable, and smoked items will from here on out exclusively be made with wild Alaskan salmon — no exceptions. Even its sushi department, which is notoriously the most stubborn part of this industry when it comes to change (thus the existence of this website), is in the process of phasing out the last bits of its farmed salmon.
While this act is truly staggering in its magnitude and its implications for the seafood retail industry, of equal importance are the reasons behind Target’s decision. The company does not mince words when it comes to why they have made this transition — Target’s communications department clearly states that the company is not interested in supporting an industry that has done such harm to our marine ecosystems. Their press release spells it out quite simply: “Target is taking this important step to ensure that its salmon offerings are sourced in a sustainable way that helps to preserve abundance, species health and doesn’t harm local habitats… Many salmon farms impact the environment in numerous ways – pollution, chemicals, parasites and non-native farmed fish that escape from salmon farms all affect the natural habitat and the native salmon in the surrounding areas.”
Preach on!
Wild salmon for the people
This move will undoubtedly shake the salmon farming industry to its very core. Target, after all, is not exactly a high-end gourmet market – rather, it’s a price leader that specializes in providing quality products for low prices. How, then, does a market that worships price-driven competition manage to eschew an item that embodies the very concept of bargain seafood?
With help from Greenpeace and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Target has opened the door to a new era of seafood – one that dares to question tired old paradigms that cannot withstand this kind of innovation. Retailers which have parroted the weary excuse of farmed salmon filling an otherwise unattainable price point will now be exposed as complacent rather than pragmatic. If a low-cost hypermarket like Target, which needs to sell salmon for $6.99 a pound, can manage to transition entirely to wild, sustainable product, how can the Whole Foods clones of the world defend their reliance on environmentally dubious farmed products that sell for over twice the price?
Off to the races
To make matters even more difficult for the industry, a new threat has arisen in the form of legitimate and economically viable closed-containment salmon. Earlier this month, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program took another swipe at the open-net nightmares that festoon the Canadian and Chilean coasts by giving the “Best Choice” green light to a new closed-containment salmon farm in Washington State. This operation, lovingly termed “Sweet Spring” by its proprietor Per Heggelund, raises coho (silver) salmon in a sealed recirculating system located many miles inland, far from the fragile habitats of the Pacific Northwest’s wild salmon populations. The feed component of this operation is still not perfect as it does exceed an even fish-in-to-fish-out ratio, but compared to the parasite-riddled, antibiotic-laden concentration camps that provide much of the world’s farmed salmon, Heggelund’s facility is a beacon of progress.
The horror... the horror
Conventional farmed salmon is caught between a rock and a hard place, and it is not a moment too soon. Salmon farms have been the source of countless problems over the past decade – diseases in Chilean farms rip through penned animals like hot knives through butter; parasite swarms in Canadian farms threaten the very survival of co-habiting wild salmon runs, not to mention the essence of Pacific Northwest cultural integrity.
Salmon are the backbone of who we are here on the west coast. It is the wild salmon runs that bring nutrients from the sea to the land, that fertilize the river banks and feed the yawning bears. If we allow this, our greatest legacy, to perish at the hands of a small group of cash-blinded eco-criminals, it is doubtful that we will ever find another source of such selfless bounty.
We need courage, innovation, and foresight if we are to create a wise and responsible seafood industry that can steward our oceans in the coming decades, and it’s companies like Target and entrepreneurs like Per Heggelund that are leading the charge. Remember this day — this was the day that we took our salmon back.
Tags: Alaska, coho, farm, sake, salmon, seafood watch, sweet spring, target, wild
Net full of problems
Anyone who has seen one of my presentations or endured my presence on a panel has probably heard me lambaste bluefin tuna ranching. I often employ a hackneyed analogy to describe this phenomenon by equating ranching bluefin to “farming tigers.” The reasoning behind this has to do with the position that bluefin occupies in the oceanic food web. Bluefin tuna are top carnivores in the watery realms, and thus are similar to the great cats and other apex predators here on terra firma.
The point here is simple: we don’t farm great cats. Not just because they don’t taste good (although I can’t imagine that they do), but because it makes exactly zero sense from the perspective of an agriculturist. A tiger farmer would have to raise or purchase grass or grain to feed herbivores (such as cows), raise and fatten the cows, and then slaughter the cows to feed the tigers. The amount of salable protein generated by butchering the tigers would be only a fraction of what the farmer could realize by butchering and selling the cows (not to mention how much more efficient it would be to simply sell the grain itself for human consumption.)
There are two differences between a bluefin ranch and a theoretical tiger farm from a markets perspective. The first is demand. Aside from a peripheral black market, based primarily in China, that values the penis and gall bladder of the animal for pseudo-medicinal purposes, there is no demand for tiger flesh. Bluefin, unfortunately, is struggling under the weight of tremendous demand driven by a rapidly expanding sushi industry.
Top cat
The second difference is the legal recognition (and a strong social awareness) of the animal’s plight. All of the world’s tiger subspecies are, lamentably, endangered at best. Ironically, the charisma of the tiger and the widespread awareness of its unenviable situation has earned it a tremendous amount of support in the form of global conservation effort. In fact, the tiger was voted the “world’s favorite animal” in a 2005 survey by Animal Planet (even defeating such lovable competitors as the dog and the dolphin.)
The bluefin tuna has no such succor. It is a migratory oceanic species and thus extremely difficult to protect through national legislation. International agreements such as ICCAT continue to fail to address the actual issues threatening the species (overfishing, bycatch, etc.) Moreover, while this animal is fascinating and extremely charismatic to those fortunate few who have interacted with it, the bluefin still suffers from the “it’s just a fish” veil of dismissal that keeps us at arm’s length from many of our ocean’s most awe-inspiring denizens.
Feeding food to food
The point of all this is to say that while we would never consider farming tigers as a protein source, we farm bluefin in great numbers, despite their relatively equivalent positions in their respective ecosystems. It’s an incredibly resource-intensive task to farm a bluefin. For every salable pound of tuna that comes out of a bluefin farm, up to twenty-five pounds of wild fish (often sardines and anchoveta from unmanaged fisheries) have gone in as feed. To make matters worse, bluefin are only very rarely reared ex ovo; traditionally, the juveniles are purloined from the wild and transferred to pens for fattening. Thus, every tuna that one purchases from a bluefun tuna farm is actually a wild tuna that never had an opportunity to breed. Needless to say, the world’s wild bluefin tuna populations are shadows of their former selves. The bluefin is, for all intents and purposes, an endangered species. Yet we continue to devour it without compunction.
Things seem bleak, indeed. And it is from this stark landscape that a new player has arisen, with a plan to ease the pressure.
Maybe.
Hawaii Oceanic Technology, a Honolulu-based company, is aiming to create a new tuna farm that instead of adding to the woes of the bluefin, will focus on one of it’s relatives: Thunnus obesus, the bigeye tuna. Ostensibly, this will lessen the overall pressure on bluefin by offering a similar fish to appease market demand.
Net pen aquaculture
While bluefin is generally fattened in inshore net pens, Hawaii Oceanic intends to construct an offshore farm, located about three miles off the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. One of the potential advantages of offshore aquaculture is that it is thought to reduce the impact of waste by allowing effluent to diffuse through a much deeper water column. The revolutionary Kona Blue operation, similarly located in Hawaii, utilizes this principle in its production of Seriola rivioliana, which it markets as “Kona Kampachi.”
While there is still a pronounced paucity of evidence regarding this hypothesis, it seems to be based on reasonable assumptions, and I don’t want to dwell on it as I feel there are three other, more important issues at stake. Additionally, the prototype “Oceanspheres” that Hawaii Oceanic are developing for use as fish enclosures are really quite impressive — especially their use of OTEC (ocean thermal energy conversion) technology, which is a virtually untapped renewable energy resource. I’m very interested to see where this leads.
Anyhow, back to the issues at hand.
Sexy sexy tuna belly
First off: market demand. Bigeye tuna, known as mebachi in Japanese, is indeed a source of tuna fillets, fatty belly cuts, etc. But to be frank, mebachi toro is simply not as alluring as honmaguro (bluefin) toro. As a matter of fact, the best replacement that I have found for the buttery, supple taste and texture of bluefin belly is high-quality shiromaguro toro – a belly cut from the albacore, bluefin’s much smaller cousin. I am not alone in my beliefs here. Sure, mebachi is still a much-demanded fish, but will it really affect the demand for bluefin?
The second issue is feed. As I mentioned before, farming bluefin is a protein-hungry business. Why would farming bigeye be any different? Hawaii Oceanic states that their goal is to eventually replace the fish used in the feed process with soy or an algae-based protein source, but that they will need to use fish meal at first.
Certainly one has to begin any new venture in stages… but how long are we talking about? There is no need for another fish-based tuna farm. There was never any environmental benefit to these operations in the first place. If indeed it were a farm fed entirely from sustainable sources, that would potentially change the equation — but there’s a big word between now and then, and that word is “eventually.” The lack of a hard timetable here casts some doubt on the rosy picture that Hawaii Oceanic has painted.
The final issue is the sourcing of the fish itself. One of the major problems with bluefin farms is that the fish are taken as juveniles from flagging wild stocks. Hawaii Oceanic pledges to surmount this obstacle by hatching bigeye from eggs in a controlled facility. These fry would then be transferred to the offshore pens for rearing.
"Mommy, where does tuna come from?"
This is a good plan, if it can be achieved. In essence, by allowing the company to breed tuna from a small clutch of broodstock rather than abducting wild fish, they can produce tuna without major detrimental impacts to the local populations (at least from a sourcing perspective.) But can they do it?
The A-Marine Kindai bluefin operation in Japan has managed to create a system where they hatch their fish in a similar manner. This type of aquaculture, known as “closed life cycle farming,” is certainly a step in the right direction. But is it missing the point?
Wow! Four pounds of fish in a convenient three-ounce package
Even if this kind of thing ends up working, we’re still dealing with an apex predator, and thus eating very high on the food chain. When trophic dynamics are considered, it becomes clear that the amount of energy demanded from natural (or, in this case, quasi-natural) cycles to produce something like a farmed tuna dwarfs the actual amount of protein received by the consumer. Farming this kind of animal is reinforcing a negative paradigm that has been held as gospel in the North American diet for far too long. Moreover, tuna do not have the fish oils and the omega-3s that many smaller, cold-water fish (such as mackerel and sardines) do, nor do they reproduce as quickly. Not to mention that this type of aquaculture is never going to “feed the world” — it’s simply too expensive.
Now that's progress!
While Hawaii Oceanic may be attempting to build a better mousetrap with this theoretical bigeye farm, we may be swapping tigers for lions. It we want a harmonious and sustainable relationship with the world’s oceans, it will take more than finding a way to create larger amounts of what the market currently demands. We need to be willing to significantly alter the way that we think about food, and I’m not sure how much of a change a bigeye farm really represents.
Tags: a-marine, albacore, animal, bigeye, bluefin, china, farm, hawaii, ICCAT, kampachi, kanpachi, kindai, kona, lion, mebachi, oceanic, oceansphere, OTEC, protein, ranch, sardine, shiromaguro, technology, tiger, toro, trophic
Aquaculture (a.k.a. fish farming) involves fish or shellfish that is taken from cultured populations rather than form the wild. Sustainable Sushi uses the methods developed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program to appraise these operations.
The methodology is based on the analysis of five criteria:
1) Use of marine resources: What kind of drain is the farm on our natural resources? Many fish farms use wild fish as food for their farmed product. How many pounds of fish go into the farm to get one pound of salable fish out? Is the food fish drawn from sustainable sources? Are endangered species being used as food?
2) Risk of escaped fish to wild stocks: Fish farms are always going to have some level of escapes. What is the likelihood that this could be a problem? Does the same species already exist in the waters around the farm? Could the fish thrive in the local area, and establish a population? Is there the potential for cross-breeding?
3) Risk of disease and parasite transfer to wild stocks: Is the farm acting as a disease or parasite incubator? Could these pathogens and parasites potentially transfer to local wild populations? How is the farm controlling the potential disease problems?
4) Risk of pollution and habitat effects: Many fish farms discharge effluent into the natural environmental around them. Is this being mitigated at all? What are the chemicals and particulates that are being discharged? Is they having a deleterious effect on the local environment? How is the farm effecting the environment as a whole?
5) Management effectiveness: Some farms are very well-managed, while others are slipshod operations that pose a severe threat to environment. This criterion examines the strength of the management protocols under which the farms are operating and evaluates the effectiveness of their precautionary measures.
These five criteria are appraised and averaged to generate an overall ranking.
Tags: aquaculture, farm, farming, seafood watch
