Time for Change Argyll and Bute
We are all familiar with the circular cages of salmon farms.
In 2021, Argyll’s fish farms employed 340 full-time staff and contained about 36,000 tonnes of salmon (more than seven million fish), but their future is looking bleak because climate change is also changing our seas.
Wild salmon are cold water fish, spending most of their lives in the Arctic.
Keeping large numbers in cages here exposes them to problems that their wild relatives rarely face: unnatural levels of parasitic sea lice, disease and blooms of tiny jellyfish that injure their gills.
These problems are increasing, especially during warm spells in the second summer the fish spend at sea.
Fish Health Inspectorate data shows that nearly 15 million salmon died between January and November 2022, compared with 8.58 million in all of 2021.
In September alone 2.8 million salmon died.
The following month, more than a third of the fish died in the Scottish Salmon Company/Bakkafrost’s farm near Gigha.
Overall, “incident-based losses” (deaths due to jellyfish on top of gill disease) cost the company £14.2m in the third quarter of 2022.
They cost Mowi 7.6 million euros in the same quarter.
Mowi is one of several companies to slash their harvest forecasts. Disease killed more than half a million fish in its Bagh Dail Nan Cean farm, near Craobh Haven, just in November and early December, while 270,000 died at its Poll Na Gill farm nearby at the same time.
Even in a normal year, around a quarter of all the farmed fish put to sea die before harvest, a Scottish Government statistic that excludes 2022’s annus horribilis.
Already, one company (Greig Seafood) has given up farming salmon in Scotland, after jellyfish killed three quarters of a million fish in its farms around Skye in 2020.
These figures only hint at the horrendous welfare problems that exist in the farm cages.
As a result, antibiotic treatments are rising fast.
Every farm uses pesticides to treat sea lice, then dumps them all into the sea, along with millions of litres of hydrogen peroxide a year.
Global warming is also making storms stronger and more frequent.
These can break nets, allowing farmed fish to escape, as 49,000 did at Carradale and 74,000 at Colonsay in 2020, and 24,700 at Helisay, near Barra, in 2018.
Four large feed barges sank as well, containing hundreds of tonnes of feed, chemicals and diesel fuel.
Escaped fish introduce genes that make wild salmon less able to migrate and farmed fish grow faster too, outcompeting wild fish in their breeding rivers.
There is almost nothing the industry can do to adapt to warming seas, except to move north (fish farming is expanding quickly in Iceland), so surely climate change is at the top of the Scottish Government’s worry list?
They should be planning how to support the coastal communities that rely on fish farming jobs, once the sea is too warm in summer for healthy salmon to be grown humanely, but there is no sign that this enters official thinking at all.
Planning applications for new farms make no mention of fish welfare, or that climate change is pulling the rug from under this industry; it’s just the same blinkered argument that each new farm will create a few more jobs.
No one seems to care that they will most likely all be gone in a few years.