Pen farmers have always feared that moving to land – and into indoor tanks – would open them up to the same criticism animal rights and environmental activists aim at the meat industry. Indeed, Heim says the biggest obstacle faced by his company so far was to obtain a permit for its RAS facility in Norway, where open-pen farming is a major industry. Norwegian open-pen farmers have traditionally resisted RAS technology. Some use it for hydroponic farming but in Belfast the plan is to sell it to fertiliser companies and as biogas to energy suppliers. Different RAS plants can have various ways of recycling their waste. Some local people doubt this figure but government regulators have accepted it. Heim claims the Belfast plant will clean water to 99%.
Nordic Aquafarms plans to harvest 32,000 tons of salmon in its Belfast operation, and while it has not completely resolved the feed problem, it hopes to use algae oil as a source of nutrition. But they don’t seem to eat enough of them.Īlthough land-based fish farming does not solve all the problems faced by the industry, it does remove the issues of escapes and sea lice. Farmers have looked for solutions – including raising lice-eating fish. A few lice are to be expected, but pens containing millions of trapped salmon attract them like a deadly plague. These small crustaceans are a problem for the farmers and the wild fish population. Millions of salmon in close quarters are to sea lice what a honey pot is to ants. Even a small percentage of these escaping presents a real threat. According to the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, there are about 400 million farmed salmon in Norway alone. Norwegian scientists estimate that there only about 1.5 million wild Atlantic salmon left in the world, 500,000 of them in Norway. There are now many more farmed than wild salmon in the Atlantic. Farmed salmon, selectively bred for fast growth, lack the survival skills of wild salmon and when they interbreed they weaken the wild stock. The two biggest problems are escaping fish and sea lice. Open-pen farm-raised Atlantic salmon being harvested near Eastport, Maine. One substitute was soy, but even GM-free soy from Brazil isn’t sustainable when farmed in cleared rainforest. The farmers have struggled to reduce the fishmeal content. Nor was it sustainable because the salmon were fed fishmeal, ground-up catch from the most destructive factory trawlers in the northern seas.
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This was salmon that claimed to be sustainable, derived from the sea, very energy efficient and a high quality, inexpensive protein.īut problems quickly emerged, such as how to deal with huge quantities of fish waste. Open-pen salmon farming started in Norway in the 1970s as an alternative to the diminishing stocks of wild Atlantic salmon. “It is an emerging industry and there is a learning curve.” Many environmentalists, including the Maine chapter of the Atlantic Salmon Federation, an international conservation group, have welcomed the new technology because of concerns about traditional open-pen salmon farming.
It's an emerging industry and there is a learning curve Erik Heim, president of Nordic AquafarmsĮrik Heim, president of Nordic Aquafarms and one of the world’s most experienced operators in the sector, said that while many problems have been overcome he is ready for the unpredictable. In the case of the Belfast project, these would be housed in several two-storey buildings surrounded by greenery, which are being built on the town’s outskirts. There are also freshwater tanks for the young stock. Land-based farming using an RAS – recirculating aquaculture system – raises the fish with no exposure to the ocean other than fast-flowing, temperature-controlled water which is pumped in and out of the fish tanks round the clock. We are doing stuff that has never really been done before.” Factory-farmed fish “Its too big,” said John Krueger, a resident and activist who opposes the project. Welcomed by officials for its potential contribution to the town’s economy, there has been opposition from some local people wary of the effects of industry on their quaint community. A more ambitious project than that planned for Bucksport, the company hopes to create the second largest such farm in the world. Meanwhile, Nordic Aquafarms, a Scandinavian company with two farms in Denmark, one in Norway and plans for another in northern California, has chosen Belfast for its site. Bucksport, Maine, on the Penobscot estuary, planned site of a land-based fish farm.
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