Saving Seafood

Regulators say Cooke’s Washington trout farming plans unlikely to impact water quality

September 14, 2020 — The C announced this week it will be holding public hearings on Cooke’s draft permits to switch from farming Atlantic salmon to rainbow trout for four existing netpens in the state.

The permits are for Cooke’s Clam Bay, Fort Ward, Orchard Rocks and Hope Island netpens.

Washington state has already held one public comment period where citizens were able to review Cooke’s permit applications to switch species.

“We considered all comments, then evaluated the water quality impacts around the change in species, and developed updated draft permits,” Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Aquaculture Specialist and Permit Coordinator Laurie Niewolny told IntraFish.

Read the full story at IntraFish

Cooke gets draft revised permits for steelhead trout farms from Washington’s Department of Ecology

September 11, 2020 — Cooke Aquaculture Pacific has received drafted revised water quality permits from Washington’s Department of Ecology, another step forward in its effort to shift from farming Atlantic salmon to steelhead trout in its net-pens in Puget Sound.

Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick, Canada-based Cooke has already received a five-year permit from the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife (WSDFW) to farm steelhead trout in at one site near Hope Island in Skagit Bay and three net-pen in Rich Passage.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Pacific Ocean Aquafarms launching offshore yellowtail farm project in California

September 9, 2020 — Long Beach, California, U.S.A.-based Pacific6 has filed a permit application to build an offshore yellowtail farm four miles off the coast of California.

Pacific6 is the same group that purchased the assets of Catalina Sea Ranch, the only permitted aquaculture facility in U.S. federal waters, in May 2020. It has since formed a collaborative group with Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute (HSWRI), a San Diego, California-based nonprofit research institute that works in cooperation with, but is independent of, SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

LOUISIANA: Trump administration moves forward with Gulf fish farming plan despite court decision

September 9, 2020 — Floating cages with fish by the thousands may be popping up in the Gulf of Mexico after all.

President Donald Trump’s administration is pushing ahead with a controversial plan to start an offshore aquaculture industry in the Gulf despite a federal appeals court ruling last month that appeared to block it.

The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans decided on Aug. 3 that the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration does not have the authority to set rules for offshore fish farms. Environmental and commercial fishing groups celebrated the decision, calling it a landmark victory in a long battle to prevent aquaculture in federal waters.

But NOAA and other federal regulators say the ruling won’t halt plans they are carrying out in accordance with an executive order Trump signed in May that aims to remove regulatory barriers impeding aquaculture. The Trump administration says offshore fish farming will broaden markets for the seafood industry and help meet growing demand for fish.

Read the full story at NOLA.com

MARYLAND: Land-based salmon farm proposed for Chesapeake’s Eastern Shore

September 3, 2020 — The Chesapeake Bay is known to many for the seafood it produces: blue crabs, oysters and striped bass.

In a few years, though, the Bay region could become a major producer of an even more popular seafood that doesn’t come from the Chesapeake. A Norwegian company, AquaCon, has unveiled plans to raise salmon on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

AquaCon executives intend to build a $300 million indoor salmon farm on the outskirts of Federalsburg in Caroline County. By 2024, they aim to harvest 3 million fish a year weighing 14,000 metric tons — an amount on par with Maryland’s annual commercial crab catch.

If that goes as planned, the company expects to build two more land-based salmon farms on the Shore over the next six or seven years, bringing production up to 42,000 tons annually. That’s more than the Baywide landings of any fish or shellfish, except for menhaden, and more valuable commercially.

AquaCon’s announcement comes amid a rush by mostly European aquaculture companies to supply Americans with farmed salmon. Another Norwegian company is preparing for its first full harvest later this year from a facility south of Miami, and plans have been announced to build big indoor salmon farms in Maine and on the West Coast. Two small U.S.-based salmon operations in the Midwest also are moving to expand production.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

MAINE: Portland Fish Exchange looks to shore up its future with aquaculture

September 3, 2020 — The Portland Fish Exchange is launching a new oyster sorting and bagging operation inside its cold, cavernous auction warehouse in hopes of growing the state’s aquaculture economy and diversifying a business plan that’s taken a beating since local ground fish landings collapsed.

On Wednesday, the Exchange received the first of what it hopes will be many oyster deliveries. Two employees measured, sorted, bagged and tagged five 100-count bags of Eastern oysters harvested by Running Tide, a two-year-old aquaculture company that operates a hatchery in Harpswell and grows oysters, clams and scallops at three coastal Maine locations.

“Ground fish landings have been going down, down, down for years,” said Bert Jongerden, the longtime general manager of the exchange. “The numbers told us we had to find something else. So we thought, let’s do for aquaculture what we’ve done for ground fishermen. Give them the shoreside support they need to focus on harvesting instead of chasing down sales.”

The pearly white shelled oysters, which measure from 2 ½ inches to 5 inches from hinge to outer shell fan, have rounded edges created from being tumbled, or stirred, to avoid being chipped when shucked, and deep pockets that hint at the plump meat inside. This first harvest is bound for The Shop, a raw bar on Washington Avenue, to be served up on Friday.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Deep-water fish farming in the Gulf of Mexico: Who benefits?

September 1, 2020 — The long, choppy quest to open up the Gulf of Mexico to large-scale fish farming began, in a way, some 30 years ago on the black pearl diving docks of Micronesia. That’s where the Australian businessman Neil Anthony Sims first met the American marine biologist Kevan Main.

Their paths diverged – his to Hawaii to develop deep-water fish farming, hers to Florida to head the Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium in Sarasota – but the two remain key figures for a project that could transform not just the American dinner table, but also the economies of fishing ports from Alaska to Florida.

Velella Epsilon – the first fish farm in federal waters off the contiguous United States – would operate in the Gulf of Mexico, about 40 miles from Florida’s coast. Globe-shaped pens would hold fingerling almaco jack, a member of the amberjack genus, that would grow into 4-pound market fish within a year. If scaled with corporate investment, the project could eventually yield 64 million pounds of sushi-quality meat a year, enough to dramatically reshape the world’s seafood trade.

Read the full story at The Christian Science Monitor

What It Takes to Feed Billions of Farmed Fish Every Day

August 31, 2020 — The air inside the greenhouse is abuzz with flying insects. They rise and fall above endless trays teeming with their larvae. Here at Enterra Feed Corporation’s research facility near Vancouver, British Columbia, the farmers don’t grow flowers or vegetables. Instead, they farm soft-bodied, legless consumers of decomposing matter. My guide, Andrew Vickerson, prefers that you not call them maggots.

Call them what you will; they appear to be little more than a mouth and trailing rolls of fat. Once they’re past the larval (or grub) stage, during which they can grow as long as a paper clip, they metamorphose into winged adults. With their bulbous eyes, wasplike antennae, and loud buzz, the adults seem intimidating—but, lacking mouths, they can’t bite or eat. They live only to mate and lay eggs for the next generation. Their entire life span is about 35 days. They are best eaten while still young.

Vickerson waves the air in front of his face, chasing away escapees of the nearby breeding pens. He was the first employee hired by Enterra back in 2009, when he was 25. Environmentalist David Suzuki and Enterra CEO Brad Marchant (recently retired) had founded the company on a hunch. Insects play an important role in the diet of fish in the wild, they reasoned. Why not of farmed fish? While Enterra considered using other insects early on, all the research kept pointing back to a single species: Hermetia illucens, the black soldier fly.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

Trump Eyes Aquaculture Boom, but Environmentalists Dig In

August 31, 2020 — President Donald Trump wants to dramatically expand aquaculture production in the United States, but a coalition of environmentalists believes his plan would be bad for the oceans, unnecessary for food security and difficult to implement.

Trump’s bid to grow fish farming is designed to address the so-called “seafood deficit,” which refers to the fact that nine-tenths of the seafood Americans eat comes from overseas. The seafood trade gap with other countries approached $17 billion in 2017, according to one federal government report.

The president issued an executive order in May that promised broad changes in how the U.S. regulates fish farming. It included provisions to expedite the development of offshore aquaculture in deep federal waters. That sector of the industry has yet to emerge in the U.S., where most aquaculture takes place near shore where farmers grow salmon, oysters and other popular seafood items.

The Trump administration and the aquaculture industry said the order, which is being implemented now, represents common sense steps to ease the burden of rules on fish farmers. But environmental groups said it threatens to increase pollution and over-development in the ocean at a time when many consumers aren’t buying seafood.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Northwest Aquaculture Alliance elects new officers

August 27, 2020 — The Northwest Aquaculture Alliance (NWAA) has announced the election of two new officers who will serve in leadership roles for the organization.

Cooke Aquaculture Pacific General Manager Jim Parsons has been elected to the role of president of the NWAA, and Jamestown Seafood CEO Kurt Grinnell has been elected to serve as the vice president. The NWAA is an advocate for aquaculture in the northwest region of the United States, and parts of Canada.

Read the full story at Seafood Source