Saving Seafood

Washington: 8 months after farmed-fish escape, lively Atlantic salmon caught 40 miles upriver

April 20, 2018 — Upper Skagit tribal fishermen caught a lively Atlantic salmon more than 40 miles up the Skagit River Tuesday, eight months after Cooke Aquaculture’s Atlantic salmon net pen collapsed at Cypress Island and sent more than 300,000 Atlantics into the home waters of Washington’s Pacific salmon.

The Atlantic caught Tuesday had bones in its stomach, indicating it had eaten some kind of fish.

“We are definitely concerned,” said Scott Schuyler, natural resources director for the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe. Schuyler caught the fish while out drift-netting for hatchery chinook intended for a ceremonial feast at the tribe’s upcoming blessing of the fleet.

He caught the Atlantic on the first set.

Read the full story at the Seattle Times

 

Cooke Aquaculture named to Canada’s Best Managed Companies list

April 11, 2018 — Cooke Aquaculture has secured a spot as a 2018 platinum-winning enterprise on Canada’s Best Managed Companies list, the New Brunswick, Canada-based firm announced on 10 April.

To qualify for the Best Managed Companies program, businesses must be based in Canada and generate a revenue of CAD 15 million (USD 11.8 million, EUR 9.6 million). Further, to achieve platinum status, a company must have been named to the prestigious list for seven or more years.

Each enterprise applicant is evaluated by a panel of judges in four areas for the program: strategy, as in the company’s vision and how that vision is communicated and managed; capability, with regards to whether the company has the ability – the people, processes, and systems – to execute; commitment, meaning does the applicant engage and align its culture effectively and appropriately; and financials, the numbers that prove the first three are driving results.

The program aims to reward well-run companies in Canada, including Cooke, which offer the country a healthy economic future, according to Lorrie King, who is a co-leader of the Best Managed Companies program.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Omega Protein to christen new menhaden vessel

April 3, 2018 — US fishmeal company Omega Protein is set to launch a new vessel to join its menhaden fishing fleet, said the firm.

The new vessel, called the F/V Vermilion, was purchased by Omega Protein in 2016 from the oil and gas industry and has been re-fitted to the tune of $5 million, the firm said. The F/V Vermilion was originally constructed in 1977 and called the Protector.

The vessel will be christened at an Omega Protein plant in Abbeville, Louisiana, by reverend Paul Bienvenu, on April 7.

Read the full story a Undercurrent News

 

Washington Governor Jay Inslee signs bill banning Atlantic salmon farming

March 23, 2018 — Washington Governor Jay Inslee on Thursday, 22 March, signed a bill into law that will phase out Atlantic salmon and other non-native fish farming by 2025.

Canada’s Cooke Aquaculture, the only company that farms Atlantic salmon fish farms in Washington state, was the target of the ban after more than a quarter-million non-native salmon escaped in August 2017 from a Cooke net-pen near Cypress Island, Washington.

“This bill will phase out non-native marine net pens in Puget Sound. These present a risk to our wild salmon runs that we cannot tolerate,” the governor said.

Inslee also vetoed a section of the bill that requesting that the issue of fish farming be revisited if new science for the industry is developed.

“The economic, cultural, and recreational resources of these incredible waters will no longer be jeopardized by the negligent actions of this industry,” Sen. Kevin Ranker, who sponsored the bill in the Washington State Senate, said. “We’ve invested so much in trying to recover our wild Pacific salmon populations, there is no sensible purpose for allowing non-native species into the Salish Sea. The day-to-day impact of invasive aquaculture – feces, disease, loose food pellets or lice –  could have serious impacts. The state ban is a strong stance to ensure the protection of our marine environment and native salmon populations in the Salish Sea.”

In response to the bill being signed into law, Cooke Aquaculture spokesman Joel Richardson said the company was considering its next steps.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Alaska: Cook Inlet salmon plan back in front of federal council in April

March 15, 2018 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council will continue its discussion of who should manage Cook Inlet salmon fisheries, and how, at its April meeting in Anchorage.

The council is continuing court-ordered work to develop a federal fishery management plan, or FMP, for the salmon fisheries currently managed by the state in Cook Inlet, including creation of a new salmon management committee.

From October 2017 to this February, the council solicited proposals regarding the membership of the new committee and the work it might do. Those are expected to be made public around March 16, and the council will discuss them at its April meeting in Anchorage.

According to information provided by the council, the comment period generated 33 responses, 25 nominations or applications for participation on the new salmon committee. Those nominations won’t be considered right away, however.

The council is also expected to issue the formal call for salmon committee members at the April meeting, and a decision on membership won’t come until after that comment period.

The committee and other work to re-tool Cook Inlet salmon management all stems from a lawsuit brought by the United Cook Inlet Drift Association, or UCIDA, that challenged the council decision in 2011 to formally remove the Cook Inlet, Alaska Peninsula and Prince William Sound salmon fisheries from the federal management plan.

The council is now working to write a Cook Inlet management plan at the directive of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed a U.S. District Court of Alaska judge’s decision to dismiss UCIDA’s lawsuit in 2016.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

 

NOAA is pro-aquaculture, but won’t weigh in on salmon farm ban

March 13, 2018 — BOSTON — Don’t look for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to challenge the recent decision by Washington state to end salmon farming off its coast. The federal government’s hands are tied, said a senior NOAA official at the Seafood Expo North America, in Boston, Massachusetts, on Sunday afternoon.

“We do have separation of powers in the United States between the federal government and the state government,” said Michael Rubino, NOAA’s director of aquaculture, when asked. “And this was largely a state government matter.”

Washington state governor Jay Inslee is expected to soon sign House Bill 2957, a bill passed by the state’s Senate, 31-16, on March 2 that would allow the leases for offshore aquaculture facilities there to expire by 2025. The state’s House voted roughly two weeks earlier to support the bill.

Washington state’s dramatic action followed the much-publicized escape, in August, of more than 250,000 Atlantic salmon from a Cooke Aquaculture facility near Cypress Island.

When asked if NOAA might weigh in, Rubino simply responded that NOAA doesn’t have a say in the matter.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

Cooke Aquaculture continuing to fight Washington ban even as it ponders next steps

March 9, 2018 — In an interview with SeafoodSource, Cooke Vice President of Communications Joel Richardson discussed his company’s efforts to convince Washington Governor Jay Inslee of the merits of the industry as the governor considers signing a bill that would phase out non-native finfish aquaculture in his state. Richardson also discussed the formulation of his company’s back-up plan in case it was unsuccessful in convincing the governor to veto the bill.

SeafoodSource: Is Cooke making any efforts to reach out to Gov. Inslee as he considers signing the bill?

Richardson: Yes, we will continue to reach out to Gov. Inslee over the coming days to urge him to veto HB 2957. Over the last few months we have provided Gov. Inslee and all legislators in Washington with evidence-based science from well-respected, credible fishery scientists to inform and educate on sea farming practices.  We are also aware that the Washington Fish Growers Association is now urging Governor Jay Inslee to veto the bill this week calling on a ban on Atlantic salmon aquaculture in state waters “Ill-conceived and politically motivated rather than based on the best available science.”

SeafoodSource: In what ways was science not taken into proper account by legislators as they considered the bill?

Richardson: You will have to ask the governor and legislators to answer that question.  However, in the aquaculture industry’s view, it’s appalling that that lawmakers have ignored calls to drop the ban from some of the world’s top aquaculture and fisheries scientists, including from the state Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, who refuted false and misleading claims made by anti-sea farming groups, tribes, and politicians that Atlantic salmon, when and if they escape, could interbreed with Pacific stocks or colonize rivers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that the science from decades of peer-reviewed research does not support the conspiracy theory that Atlantic salmon that escape from net pens will colonize our rivers and/or interbreed with native stocks.

Read the full interview at Seafood Source

 

Washington bans salmon farms

March 6, 2018 — A year ago, Cooke Aquaculture was a mainstay business in Washington state waters. The company had made a significant investment in nine local salmon farming sites when it purchased Icicle Seafood’s assets in 2016. As of Friday, March 2, the company’s open-ocean Atlantic salmon net pens are banned in state waters, to be phased out by 2025.

The impetus for the ban is the catastrophic failure of a pen near Cypress Island, Wash., on Sunday, Aug. 20. The pen contained 305,000 Atlantic salmon that were just about ready for market at 10 pounds each, making for more than 3 million pounds of invasive fish teeming at the edges of wild salmon territory.

In February, both houses of the state Legislature passed bills banning the practice of salmon pen farming, and Gov. Jay Inslee openly supported the legislation. On Friday, the Washington house and senate negotiated the discrepancies in those bills to finalize a ban they could pass to the governor’s desk. The bipartisan Senate vote was 31-16.

Before the final votes, Cooke Aquaculture CEO and Founder Glen Cooke made last-minute appeals to state lawmakers in person.  Last Wednesday, a collective of leading marine scientists penned an open letter to the Legislature in defense of the salmon farming industry.

Indeed, many stakeholders see the ban as a punitive response to a company that appeared to shirk its own responsibility in the immediate aftermath of the spill. However, the result is that it closes the opportunity entirely — not just to Cooke Aquaculture.

Though the response to ban an entire industry may seem extreme, the perfect storm of events leading up to the ban created extraordinary circumstances. Local response to the spill was considerably more swift and strong than the eclipse high tides on which the company first blamed the collapse.

Read the full story at the National Fisherman

 

Virginia: Time for bill runs out, higher menhaden quota remains

February 13, 2018 — A multi-state body says Virginians must catch fewer menhaden from the bay, but Virginia’s General Assembly didn’t listen — or, to be exact, didn’t really get a chance to hear.

A bill to bring Virginia’s quota in line with a steep cut demanded by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has languished for more than a month in the House Agriculture, Chesapeake and Natural Resources Committee.

The committee won’t meet again before Tuesday’s midnight deadline for the House of Delegates to act on bills sponsored by House members. Without a committee’s vote to recommend a bill, it couldn’t make it to the floor for all the delegates to consider.

And that means that the higher quota applies for the only fishery — Virginia’s biggest — that the General Assembly regulates.

Del. Barry Knight, R-Virginia Beach, wanted the General Assembly to agree to the cut in Virginia landings of menhaden from 87,216 metric tons to 51,000 tons that was approved in November by the regional fisheries commission.

That 41.5 percent cut came as the commission approved an 8 percent increase in the coastwide quota set by the commission.

The proposed quota cut is meant to protect a major nursery for menhaden and the striped bass that feed on them, said Chris Moore, senior regional ecosystem scientist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

While menhaden aren’t sold for human food, they are processed for fish oil, in food supplements, and for fishmeal, an important ingredient in livestock feed, as well as in pet food and to nourish farm-grown fish and seafood.

The striped bass that eat menhaden, on the other hand, have become an important food fish, as well as popular catch for recreational fishermen. Menhaden are also a vital food for marine mammals and osprey.

Moore said not enacting the regional commission quota puts Virginia, and the fishing crews and processing plant workers who depend on menhaden, at risk of sanctions.

That’s a big business. Omega Protein, the Texas-based fish oil and fishmeal producer whose Reedville operation, supplied by seven ships, is the fifth-largest U.S. port for fish landings, with 321 million pounds, worth $31 million, in 2016.

Read the full story at the Daily Press

Washington: Cooke not giving up after state senate votes to finish salmon farming

February 12, 2018 — International seafood producer, Cooke Aquaculture is vowing a fight as it attempts to hold on to its operations in Washington state.

The New Brunswick-based company suffered a major setback Thursday when the state senate voted 35-12 to end Atlantic salmon aquaculture operations as leases on cage sites expire over the next six years.

The bipartisan bill passed despite an all out effort by the company in support of an amendment proposed by one senator that would have allowed Atlantic salmon aquaculture to continue using only female fish. The amendment was designed to ensure non-native salmon could not breed should they escape into the wild.

“We‘re going to just continue to look forward, we‘re going to work with legislators,” said Joel Richardson, the company  vice-president, public relations. “We‘ve been advocating hard on behalf of our employees. We have 180 employees in Washington.

“We believe those employees‘ jobs are worth saving and we‘re going to do everything we can to save them.”

Cooke has found itself on shifting ground since the Aug. 19 collapse of a net-pen farm that allowed tens of thousands of Atlantic salmon to escape into Puget Sound, raising fears they would stress wild native salmon or otherwise contaminate the marine environment.

This photograph of a fouled salmon-cage net was included in a report prepared by a state investigative panel looking into the collapse of the Cooke Aquaculture salmon farm. (State of Washington)

State officials earlier said 160,000 fish escaped, but a report released this month by an investigative review panel concluded the real number is somewhere between 242,000 and 262,000 — numbers that Cooke disputes.

Read the full story at the Kaplan Herald