The war of words has been something to behold.
This year may be remembered as the year when only wind farms could match salmon farming as a magnet for controversy in Nova Scotia.
Now, maybe it’s time for the flag of truce.
Sure, there are issues, in some cases big ones. But aquaculture makes sense because we need jobs for our coastal communities and the world needs a new source of seafood now that so much of the ocean’s wild bounty has been depleted.
So, for the foreseeable future, saltwater fish farming is here to stay in Nova Scotia.
Therefore, maybe it’s time to start thinking about how to do it better — in a more sustainable way that creates jobs without spoiling our ecosystem and environment — rather than whether we need it at all.
Aquaculture, remember, is a young industry. And the will to improve exists for the simple reason that it is in the interest of every stakeholder.
Consider the contentious question of feed. Those concentrated pellets sprayed into offshore pens are the single biggest cost for farm operators. They are also the source of all that fish waste that piles up under the saltwater cages.
Tuesday, we discussed the avalanche of conflicting science about what the fish poop does to the environment. But the debate is about the degree of harm, not whether or not tonnes of salmon waste has some kind of negative impact on the ecosystem.
Fish farm operators, regardless of their motivations, are trying to mitigate the damage. When Brian Rogers, a Halifax-based aquaculture consultant, got in the business 20 years ago in New Brunswick, it took roughly two kilograms of feed to grow a kilogram of salmon. Now, farm operators like Cooke Aquaculture Inc. say the ratio is getting close to 1.1-to-1.
(That kind of conversion ratio means that when Cooke grows a five-kilogram fish, it uses approximately 5.5 kilograms of feed. By the company’s estimation, the same fish would excrete 0.8195 kilogram of feces.)
Technology has helped lower that ratio, as underwater cameras and better feeding techniques help reduce feed waste.
Diets are also changing. Cooke Aquaculture owner Glenn Cooke says ground-up seafood and fish oil comprise only 20 per cent of the feed made at his company’s Truro feed plant, rather than the 80 per cent that segment of the food chain once accounted for.
Fish products are being replaced by local alternatives like grains and poultry meal (the latter a source of consternation to many local aquaculture critics). In keeping with the worldwide trend toward more plant-based feeds, Cooke’s company is even experimenting with seaweed as a feed source.
The goal is producing higher-efficiency feeds that allow more of the food to be converted to fish flesh and less excreted from the fish as waste.
“That’s where science has been sexy,” Rogers said in an interview. “The industry is using less raw material. And because the salmon are feeding less, the waste has decreased dramatically.”
Using less fish as feed also helps salmon farming companies work toward that all-important sustainability label that high-end consumers increasingly want affixed to any food item they buy.
But aquaculture companies know they can’t stop there. Coastal dwellers regularly complain about noise from farm feeding systems and other activities.
Consequently, Cooke says that it has installed mufflers and silencers on its feed blowers and instructed feeding crews to position the blowers away from shore when the grazing occurs.
The company also says that it hopes to develop a research project with local universities and engineering staff to create better long-term solutions for working on the water with minimal sound impact.
Yet the onus isn’t just on the operators. Nova Scotia’s new aquaculture strategy calls for the government to beef up initiatives around “farming responsibly” and “regulatory safeguards.”
The government has promised to increase monitoring, auditing and enforcement and to commit more resources so that Roland Cusack, the province’s chief veterinarian for aquatic animal health, can do his job.
“The reality is that if there is farming, there is illness,” Cusack said in a recent interview. “Fish is kind of the new guy on the block which means that there are things we have to learn about fish medicine.”
Just as there are things that have to be learned about coexisting within finite waters. Lobstermen say they’ve been sold out for the ascendant new industry. Not so, contends Greg Roach, Nova Scotia’s assistant deputy minister of fisheries and aquaculture.
“In Nova Scotia, the lobster fishery is No. 1,” he told The Chronicle Herald. “But we’re not picking one over the other. If the government didn’t think the two could co-exist, we would take a different approach.”
The government will be vigilant, he promises. The province, according to the aquaculture strategy, will partner with industry to “implement site-selection criteria.”
“If size and density are an issue, then we will have to look at that.”
No matter what the government does, it may take a while for the bad blood around salmon farming to disappear. Glenn Cooke says jobs will help.
They did in Harbour Breton, N.L., where the unemployment rate was running around 85 per cent before Cooke opened its salmon processing facility.
Now, some 400 people — coincidently, the same number of jobs promised as a result of the Nova Scotia expansion — cash paycheques there.
“What’s going to be happening in the Shelburne area in the next couple of years is going to be very exciting,” Cooke said last week.
An entire province will be the judge of that.