Yves here. Over and over in resource-exploiting industries, from oil wells to nuclear reactors and now aquaculture, shuttering operations so as to minimize environmental costs is neither cheap nor easy. Yet even in regulated industries, where it would be possible to require incumbents to have wind-down reserves and even demand phase-out friendly installations, little thought is given to their long tails.
By Larry Pynn, an environmental journalist based in British Columbia. He is the author of the nonfiction books “Last Stands” and “The Forgotten Trail.” Originally published at Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Cross posted from Undark
Aquaculture is big business in Canada. In 2023, open-net-pen salmon farming in British Columbia alone produced more than 50,000 tons of fish worth just over $350 million. But on June 30, 2029, the federal government’s long-looming ban on open-net-pen salmon farming is set to take effect. On that day, 63 operations will be forced to shut down.
For decades, British Columbia’s open-net-pen salmon farmers have faced criticism that their activities are harming the environment by promoting the spread of disease and fostering parasitic sea lice that can infect wild salmon. But closing a salmon or other kind of marine farm isn’t as simple as letting a field lie fallow.
Whether degraded by poor maintenance, battered by heavy storms, or beset by financial woes, aquaculture operations have gone under before — sometimes literally. And when they do, derelict equipment can find its way to the seafloor or become suspended in the water column.
“It’s pretty devastating,” said Ben Boulton, the program manager of British Columbia’s Rugged Coast Research Society, a charity that works with the provincial government and First Nations to clean up marine debris specifically from shellfish farms. These efforts have often involved smaller mom-and-pop oyster operations that lost gear to the ocean floor years or decades ago.
“You come upon a mound of gear that is seemingly infinite — a huge mess everywhere you look,” he said. Abandoned nets, ropes, buoys, concrete blocks, plastic buckets and trays, PVC pipes, generators, steel anchors, iron rebar, floats, gangways, docks, drums, tires, and polystyrene foam can all linger, threatening the marine environment.
During one disturbing stint at a derelict operation on northern Vancouver Island, for instance, workers with the nonprofit Ocean Legacy Foundation found that a group of river otters had started building dens inside the polystyrene foam from decaying floats and were eating the marine life growing on it.
The federal government is more optimistic that open net-pen salmon farmers in 2029 won’t leave an environmental mess.
Multinational companies dominate salmon farming in British Columbia and are “quite professionalized and generally highly compliant” with regulations, said Brenda McCorquodale, the senior director of the Aquaculture Management Division at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, or DFO, on the West Coast. “We’re not anticipating there’d be some sort of abandonment of infrastructure.”
Boulton’s experience with shellfish aquaculture, however, emphasizes the importance of vigilance. “There’s a need for oversight — a third party, for sure — on sites to supervise the decommissioning,” he said.
Nico Prins, the executive director of the British Columbia Shellfish Growers Association, said government oversight of marine debris issues at shellfish facilities has historically been lax. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said, “the level of enforcement probably hasn’t been what was required or what has been needed.”
“I know there are plenty of shellfish farms that are in a pretty bad state of repair,” Prins adds. “There’s a lack of … government regulators to achieve enforcement of the conditions.”
In recent years, the government has been trying to make a dent in the problem, working to clean up sites and prevent more farm owners across British Columbia from cutting their losses and walking away from nets, floats, and other equipment. But cleaning up ocean debris requires money — and lots of it.
British Columbia government regulations require licensed aquaculture operations, including salmon farms, to outline their future debris management plans and post a security deposit to cover cleanup. But the amount set aside, Prins said, can fall short of what’s required. In the past, some purchasers of farm sites have also inherited the costs of removing the accumulated mess. Otherwise, taxpayers can wind up paying the price.
In 2020, the province launched Clean Coast, Clean Waters, an initiative that has so far spent roughly $35 million to remove more than 2,100 tons of marine debris and 215 derelict vessels from the province’s coast. The program tackled the first two derelict aquaculture sites in 2024.
The Rugged Coast Research Society, said Boulton, specializes in cleaning up remote and hard-to-reach parts of the coast. The organization’s process of trash removal starts with using a remotely operated vehicle — equipped with a camera and grabber claw — to survey the site. Often, they’ll complement this visual search with side-scan sonar to identify hotspots of trash and map out targets. From there, four commercial divers work in limited visibility and at risk of entanglement to rig up gear for removal. Then, they’ll use a hydraulic crane to haul the material to the surface to be cleaned, sorted by type, and brought to shore. Typically, about half the haul is repurposed or recycled, with the rest going to landfill. Depending on the depth of the water, the weather, and the tides, divers may have only a few minutes to work.
“It’s a very challenging industry,” said Dylan Smith, the owner of British Columbia-based Deep Search Diving.
Since 2020, Smith’s company has been contracted by governments or private operators to survey 92 shellfish farms, half of which he’s already cleaned up. Typically, the company’s services cost between $7,000 and $35,000 — but they can climb as high as $70,000 if a lot of gear has drifted beyond the reach of divers.
The work is taxing but rewarding, said Boulton. “It takes months to get these projects going, then you end up in the field. It’s a lot of labor, very dirty. But seeing a barge fully loaded up with debris from a site — our crews feel a sense of relief and accomplishment.”
Tossing money at debris cleanup is one thing, but changing future behavior is another.
Over the past five years, DFO has launched several initiatives targeting marine debris, including a mandatory tagging program to more easily identify who owns aquaculture equipment that goes rogue, and containment measures to prevent foam flotation from breaking free.
One of the big game changers occurred in 2022 when federal regulations began forcing aquaculture operators to hire divers or use remotely operated vehicles to survey the seafloor for old gear within their operating areas and document its removal. The goal, said McCorquodale, is to make license holders “responsible for knowing what’s going on underneath their sites and keeping the area clean and free of debris.”
As the world increasingly turns its attention to the environmental woes caused by ghost nets, microplastics, and other forms of marine debris, increased scrutiny of the hidden costs of aquaculture on the ocean environment couldn’t come at a better time.
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Good article, thanks. Unsurprising government position. The Brenda McCorquodale quote ending with “We’re not anticipating there’d be some sort of abandonment of infrastructure.”, is a howler.
Anecdote, For the second time this month I could not source wild caught shrimp in the freezer sections of the local markets. I buy a lot of shrimp. You can taste the feed.
Here in the PNW we aren’t far from Alaska, but trying to find Alaska Spot Prawns nowadays is impossible. I guess they’re all being sold to Whole Foods?
When we lived in Thailand the farmed shrimp tasted better for some reason, maybe they were fresh instead of frozen.
There is a bumper sticker seen around here that says “Friends Don’t Let Friends Eat Farmed Salmon”.
So we should further deplete already dwindling ocean stocks?
I get the taste preference, but you have to be understandable to what pressure humans exert on wild fish stocks.
This is a good point. It’s easy to see the “that don’t work”, but so difficult to envision what does work. The concept of scale as a homogenous body of work (everything needs to come in a big box these days) gets in the way of real solutions. See iread’s comment directly below this thread.
I have read that the wild-salmon fisherfolk of the Pacific Coast supported the concept of limiting their wild catch to at-or-below the level where the uncaught salmon could reliably replace and maintain their numbers through reproduction. I believe the fishers all agreed to accept the data and conclusions of neutral salmon-scientists and accept the decree as to how many salmon could be sustainably caught in any one time-period and they then crafted a quota system to divide up the sustainably supportable catch among all themselves.
If that is really true, then buying wild caught salmon keeps in business the wild salmon fishers who remain a lobby for protecting the catchability of wild salmon as a renewable resource. Including protecting the wild salmon against aqua-feedlot pollution/infection aggression against the sea the wild salmon live in for part of their lives.
Quite different to how the Central Federal Canadian Government managed the Newfoundland Cod. Canada managed the Newfoundland cod as a mineral deposit to be strip mined . . . . ” the coal of the sea” if you will . . . . to the detriment of the cod itself, and the Newfoundland outports and their cod-fishers, and the wannabe-eaters of cod.
And there are examples all around the world of fishing industries managing the fisheries they live off of as mineral deposits to be strip mined. The Pacific Salmon Fishery offers a better counter-example for others to learn from or to dismiss and ignore as they so choose.
The population increasing contributes to the scarcity of fish, but so does the growth in wealth of the world population. The total tonnage of seafood consumed annually has grown at a pretty breakneck pace since the 1950s, putting a lot of pressure on wild stocks.
Turns out 8 billion apex predators eat a lot, who would a guessed.
so many things, from aquaculture to solar and wind, have a different profile deployed in decentralized contexts and evolved by individuals to solve specific needs and issues. So many inventions have been
removed from the field of further experimentation because they threaten to actually work.
Reminds me of the time when some flack (it might have been Julian Simon, I can’t recall exactly) said that massive population growth was not an issue, because if we have trouble growing enough food on land we can always build fish farms. Of course this is absurd, as fish farms are not a primary source of food, but only serve to convert (mostly) land-grown food into fish. It’s like saying if we run out of food we can just build more grocery stores.
Government regulators are always industry captured. They are touted by the government as corporate watchdogs but are in reality, corporate lapdogs. This will remain a wall to wall fact until government officials are no longer susceptible to corporate bribery, a.k.a. election contributions.
Any public office holder or wannabe public office holder that so much as hints at doing away with the present system will get the heave ho as quickly as Jody Wilson-Raybould or her supporter Jane Philpott got the heave ho: https://globalnews.ca/news/5123526/liberal-caucus-wilson-raybould-jane-philpott/
Perhaps we need some better ” truth-in-terminology” words and phrases for what is called “fish farming”.
Perhaps fish feedlots or aquaCAFOs or something. Soylent fish. Or soylent fysh.
” What do they feed the fysh in fysh farmz? Fysh fuud.”
Or one could catch 2 fish with one hook by saying things like ” Crypto is the fish farming of money.” Or “fish farming is the crypto of food.”
Soylent. You can taste that crap.
It seems that salmon like cows are not really designed to be living in confined areas. Perhaps we would do a bit better growing fish such as Talapia in “living machines”.
See John Todd’s work for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXMH5ZbNK8
John Todd is a hero that hasn’t been listened to for so many things, sad beyond words.
I’ve followed him for 30 yrs.
As long as his information can be found, it can still be spread around and listened to. Some of it would be highly suitable to Suburban Sustainability Initiatives . . . Permaculturize the Suburbs and so forth.
The feed conversion ratio for salmon or sablefish is about five times better than that of a cow (1.2 – 1.62 kg of feed per kg of fish, versus a FCR generally over 6 for cattle). I hate seeing net pens banned when they can be such a cost and carbon efficient way of producing protein. Particularly when nutrient loading is mitigated by cultivation of seaweeds and shellfish, and vaccination + disease testing is well regulated.
The protein feed fed to Net-CAFO fysh could be fed directly to humans without destroying some of it by feeding it through the fysh first.
Any figures for protein destroyed by feeding it to cows in CAFOs is irrelevant to cows kept strictly on multispecies diverse range and pasture. So just ban CAFOs for cows. And since wild salmon are “like” cows which graze freely on the wild pastures of the sea, we can ban net-CAFOs for fysh as well. The wild salmon are doing the work we cannot do in finding the little protein-creatures which are too diffuse through too much seawater for us to be able to concentrate and capture them. So we let the wild salmon concentrate them and then we eat the wild salmon. Net CAFO salmon pollute and destroy all the wild salmon within reach of their sea-pollution effluent zone.
Respectfully, there are 8 billion and counting humans on this planet. It would be great if we could sustain ourselves on hunting, fishing, and forage, but we need agriculture and aquaculture.
Read up on the state of wild fisheries and you will find that more than half of them are over harvested. Net pen aquaculture takes pressure off of wild stock, allowing them to replenish.
Every form of production, even forage, has environmental impacts, so it is worth evaluating each one rigorously, and weighing the pros and cons. Net pen aquaculture produces less carbon and wastes less feed than terrestrial agriculture to produce meat.
Sablefish in a net pen still convert food into nutritious weight more efficiently than free range cows grazing a diverse prairie.
As far as ‘Net CAFO salmon pollute and destroy all the wild salmon within reach of their sea-pollution effluent zone.’ goes, not really. Without mitigation they can eutrophy surrounding waters, but the excess nitrogen deposition from a bunch of fish grown in a small area can be absorbed by shellfish and seaweeds, which eat fish waste and grow more rapidly as a result. This is called integrated multitrophic aquaculture, or IMTA. Wild fish are not destroyed by the presence of caged fish. I know this because the Strait of Juan De Fuca has had net pens for decades, and we have a lot of wild fish too (and ‘bioinvaders’ that try to eat the penned fish).
One of the Indian tribes near me, Jamestown S’klallam, is very interested in net pen aquaculture to meet their own food/economic sovereignty needs. Unfortunately they are not able to pursue this, despite the OK of NOAA and Dept of Ecology, because of an overly activist Dept of Natural Resources administration.
Free range cows grazing a diverse prairie are eating plants which people cannot eat at all. So the question of ” how efficiently” they convert utterly inedible-to-humans plants into human-edible food is irrelevant.
If over half the wild fisheries are overharvested, that means that under half the wild fisheries are not overharvested. And those fisheries should be the model for the other fisheries.
” Every form of production, even forage, has environmental impacts, so it is worth evaluating each one rigorously, and weighing the pros and cons.” Yes, it does.
” Net pen aquaculture produces less carbon and wastes less feed than terrestrial agriculture to produce meat.” Oh? That belief deserves rigorous evaluation. Gabe Brown, Gary Zimmer and others report that their use of livestock in their operations does not produce any carbon at all. They report that their use of livestock in their operations net-consumes carbon from out of the air and net-stores that carbon into the plant-rootosphere and the soil around the plant-roots. If net-pen sablefish produce any carbon at all, then they are more carbon-production emmissive than Brown-Zimmer-etc. cattle on forage which produce no net carbon at all whatsoever. ( Of course I will look at any genuine non-lobby-based rigorously informed rigorous evalutions of Brown-Zimmer-etc. cattle on forage on soil to the contrary).
“The protein feed fed to Net-CAFO fysh could be fed directly to humans without destroying some of it by feeding it through the fysh first.”
Sure, but most people would rather eat sablefish than sea bugs.
Wild sablefish eat the seabugs. Then we eat the wild sablefish. Farmed sablefish don’t eat seabugs. They eat either corporate-farmed corn or soybean meal or just-as-likely they eat strip-mined anchovies from South America’s Pacific coast.
And those are the same kind of anchovies which you see for sale in East Asian Food Stores.
It is more efficient for people to eat those dried anchovies directly than to destroy most of their protein in order to eat the remaining residue of destroyed-anchovy-protein in the form of soylent sablefish.
And the same is true for soylent salmon
Farmed sablefish do eat sea bugs, the juveniles require live prey. As they grow older they eat wheat and anchovies, usually anchovies grown for the purpose.
You can argue that cows eating non-human edible plants are not a waste, while a sablefish eating wheat is a waste, but that overlooks the fact that if we pretend that only food edible by humans ‘counts’ we could use the land devoted to growing cow edible plants to grow sablefish edible plants instead, and the sablefish’s far superior feed conversion (5x-6x less required input per kilo of output) rate would be more efficient.
As far as your point on the fisheries, I think it is less that the kess depleted ones should be used as a model and more that humans haven’t gotten around to depleting them yet. We, collectively, eat a lot of protein. The amount is growing, and sourcing all of it from wild caught fish will be disastrous to those fish populations if current rates of consumption are maintained (and they are projected to grow, as they have steadily for decades).
I am dubious of any claim about carbon negative cattle, but Ill readily admit I don’t know enough about the operation to debunk it.
How much carbon would growing food for sablefish on current pasture-and-range sequester or emit?
How much carbon does growing pasture and range under livestock currently sequester or emit? Until all the data are rigorously gathered and analysed in a reality-based way, people may well be dubious about claims which are made. That is why doing the science on this is so very important. Till then , we just have a growing mountain of anecdata gathered in the field by professional agricultuists and agriculture observers which is certainly very suggestive to me and to others. But it needs to be scientifically nailed down beyond all dubiousity.
i wonder about something else. What is the level of multispecies biodiversity in multispecies pasture and/or range under livestock? As against, what is the level of multispecies diversity in a soylent corn plantation or a soylent soybean plantation? I think that is a relevant question because I assume that a soylent sablefood plantation would be run on the same monoculture principles as the soylent corn and soylent soybean plantations are run today.
Also, where the pasture and range is mounted on land too steep, broken or otherwise uneven to permit row-crop plant-based monoculture, then that makes that pasture irrelevant to considerations of whether using land for pasture under livestock or for soylent sablefood monoculture is more protein efficient. And any land flat enough to support sablefood monoculture can also support humanfood monoculture which means that a set amount of protein can be grown on that farmable land for direct human consumption or that food can be fed to sable at a net loss of protein so humans can eat less protein from sable instead of more protein from protein crops grown on that given land.
So aquaCAFO soylent sable-farming is still a net loss and net-destruct of protein and I still see no reality-based arguments to the contrary. And if the soylent-sable were as culinarily inferior to wild sable as soylent-salmon is to wild salmon, we should probably call it soylent saybull just as we should refer to soylent salmon as soylent samman.
I must apologize, I talked about farmed anchovies which is entirely incorrect. There is work being done at Manchester research station that suggests sablefish can grow well on low fish meal diets, however.
And I’ll also point out that wild sablefish are carnivores, and will gobble up anchovies (or other sablefish for that matter) with just as much gusto as penned ones.
Yes, and the wild sablefish can roam the seven seas and find their own anchovies or other sablefish even when those anchovies or other sablefish are diffusely spread around in the water. The wild sablefish can grow themselves without any waste of fossil or renewable energy on our part. All we have to do is catch them and kill them and eat them. And if we do that at or below their rate of sustainable reproduction and replacement, then we can keep doing that indefinitely.
Unless I am wrong, the Pacific Salmon fishery is run on exactly that kind of sustainable catch basis. It is not overfishing which is wiping out the wild salmon.
It is overlogging, overdamming, overfarming, overirrigating, etc. (And also global warming more and more and more. Eventually we will have to see if we can introduce salmon into the Arctic Ocean and hope they will spawn in the Mackenzie, Ob, Irtysh, Lena, etc. Rivers.)
The CONfinement is the issue.
Destroy the commons by restricting licences to fish for wild species, make farmed fish profitable.
Instead, we raise billions of tiny but viable codling etc and release to the wild. A low tax on fish landed will pay for all of that.
Restricting licenses to fish for wild species is what keeps the commons alive at all in today’s world. It is the” mutual coercion mutually agreed on” cited by Garrett Hardin in his Tragedy of the Commons but very rarely cited by people who want to dis-state and disrepresent Hardin as advocating “privatizing the Commons”.
The Pacific Salmon fishery shows how it can work. The salmon fishers get to preserve a sustainable living and I get to buy salmon to eat.
I would rather eat Copper River Sockeye Salmon once a year at $40.00/lb. (frozen from Krogers) than eat Soylent Saamaan once a week at ” always the low price, always.”
Of course, I could pay EVen MORE. . . . but I am not that rich.
https://www.great-alaska-seafood.com/Copper-River-Salmon/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=salmon&utm_content=great_alaska_seafood_main_homepage&msclkid=55b7e866ee161392ffcc8f02
And I would rather people have the option to acquire nutritious sea proteins at scale, cheaply, than only be able to acquire more scarce and expensive wild fish.
I like wild fish, don’t get me wrong, but I like farmed fish too. Humans have cultivated mussels for thousands of years, in my opinion cultivating dish and seaweeds makes just as much sense.
Is there any record that the multi-millenia cultivated mussels destroyed the habitat around them? Did it involve growing soylent musselfood on soylent musselfood monoculture plantations? If if did not/ does not, then multi-millenia-old systems of mussel cultivation are an example of beneficial non-destructive aquaculture in action. And so is seaweed growing if it is non-destructive and doesn’t require monoculture plantations somewhere else to grow feed for the seaweed.
Perhaps these things are examples of aqua-gardening or aqua-horticulture. And that would make them very different from aquaCAFO soylent fyshfarming.
( And by the way, I eat wild sea bugs myself. They are called “shrimp”. I haven’t taste-tested the difference between wild shrimp and farmed shrimp, so I am not able to say whether there is a taste difference there. But if I were to discover that farmed shrimp is to shrimp as farmed salmon is to salmon, I would do without farmed shrimp altogether and just re-chew my memories of wild shrimp).