THE SHIPPING NEWS
Could Norwegian plans to farm salmon in huge ships at sea offer hope for the future of fish farming off Scotland’s west coast?
Could the future of aquaculture be all at sea?
Iworked out that I have been reporting on the impact of fish farms on Scottish salmon and sea trout for more than 20 years. You would have thought that over those two decades much would have changed and as a country we would have learned from our mistakes.
Looking back, t hough, I see that much of what I have to report today is not wildly different from all those years ago when the aquaculture industry was just beginning to take hold in the Western Highlands. In many ways, through successive administrations failing to face up to incontrovertible scientific proof of the damage these farms do to wild fish, we now see that the unacceptable has become acceptable and corporate profit continues to ride roughshod over environmental protection. Sea trout (which are the real victim of inshore pollution from fish farms) have become almost a side story, whereas salmon anglers now look first to the big East Coast rivers for their sport.
The industry, driven largely by demand from China, has a 30% expansion target by 2020 and councils on the West Coast are being inundated with applications f rom farming companies for licences for new sites. The largest Scottish company, Marine Harvest, announced it will invest £80m in building a new feed factory on the West Coast to service all of its farms.
Against this backdrop of expansion and industry ambition, repeated campaigns over
‘The opening of the first Marine Harvest open sea fish farms off the Isle of Muck was a welcome development’
the years by wild fish interest groups brought brief promise, but have fizzled out as anglers have become disillusioned – a recent petition raised by the Salmon and Trout Association, has only managed a few thousand signatures. But what can you do when the Scottish government refuses to accept that sea lice from poorly sited inshore fish farms kill wild salmon and sea trout, and that repeated escapes from these farms over the years have weakened the genetic strength of wild populations?
But, after 20 years of gloom, I am beginning to see a flicker of hope on the horizon. Sea lice – the tiny parasites that infest caged salmon in their billions and which are the real culprit in this story – are a major headache to the farmers themselves and cost an estimated £25m per year in lost production. There is a real economic driver to sort out this problem once and for all.
The larger of the fish farm companies have seen the writing on the wall and are generally setting their sights on expanding in deep-water or less sensitive offshore sites, where the impact of sea lice is thought to be much less because the farms lie away from the paths of migrating salmon and sea trout. The opening of the first Marine Harvest ‘open sea’ fish farms off the Isle of Muck in 2014 was a most welcome development. It is hoped more will follow.
Meanwhile, on t he existing inshore fish farms the use of so-called ‘cleaner fish’ (ballan wrasse and lumpfish that are grown alongside the salmon and which eat the parasites) has improved lice control and dramatically reduced pesticide use in some areas. The Marine Harvest farm in Loch Leven near Ballachullish has seen two full cycles of production in the last three years without any need for chemical treatment and near-zero lice burdens on stocks solely through the deployment of cleaner fish.
But it is a little-known Scandinavian development that is really exciting. Norwegian farmer Nordlaks plans to farm salmon in huge ships at sea from 2017. Each ship, known as a ‘havfarm’ (ocean farm), will be 430m in length and 54m wide and will cost around £50m to build. They will house 10,000 tonnes of salmon and will be able to withstand wave heights of 10m. Sea lice skirts will make the impact of these parasites history. They will be able to move over the open ocean between production cycles, but even when at anchor they will distribute waste products over an area 27 times larger than is currently the case with any fish farm.
Is this the future of fish farming off the West Coast of Scotland? Time will tell, but when environmental concerns combine with industry-driven economic necessity, you know that change will happen. I just hope that it doesn’t all take another 20 years.