Salmon Archives - Page 124 of 135

Sustainability rising for farmed salmon, says GSI report

May 16, 2017 — Farming salmon is more sustainable than growing land animals in several key ways, according to the Global Salmon Initiative’s (GSI) latest sustainability report.

And some of the biggest future improvements in sustainability will likely result from more efficient feed, say salmon industry experts.

The third annual GSI sustainability report, released in late April, contains four years of data and tracks 14 indicators determined by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC). It was the first to include data verified by independent auditors.

The 12 GSI member companies account for roughly half of global farmed salmon production. Nearly a quarter of all GSI farms have been certified by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, an increase of 60 percent from 2015. GSI has a goal of having all farms certified by ASC by 2020.

Compared to other sources of animal protein, salmon did well on sustainability indicators such as fresh water use and carbon emissions.

Salmon also have a low – and falling – feed conversion ratio, meaning that farmers efficiently retain the protein and energy in feed while converting it to food for people. That ratio is now 1.3 to 1. By contrast, the ratio for chicken is 1.9 to 1, while for pork it’s 2.8 to 1, and for beef it’s 7.5 to 1.

Still, less total weight of salmon is farmed than other major protein sources, with 3.1 million metric tons produced annually, compared to 96.1 million tons of chicken, 113 million tons of pig products, 64 million tons of cattle products and 8.6 million tons of sheep products.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Brasil’s Swift Launches Latin America’s First Certified Sustainable Seafood Product Line

May 4, 2017 — SAO PAULO, Brazil — The following was released by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council and the Marine Stewardship Council:

JBS, through 54 Swift shops in the Sao Paulo region of Brasil, have launched the first Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) and Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certified retail seafood product line in Latin America.

The initial product line includes a variety of ASC certified salmon products from Chile as well as tilapia from Brasil.

Further ASC certified products are planned, including trout and bivalves. Shrimp, either from Brasil or from Ecuador, is a priority.

The ASC is also planning to introduce Brazilian native species standards next year that will make it possible to have certified tambaqui, pirarucu, pintado and pacu available.

For the MSC, Alaskan pollock and chum salmon are part of the launch. Alaskan Pacific cod will soon be added and Atlantic cod products are at planning stage.

Paulo Christofani, the project Manager at JBS, said “we are extremely proud to be the first retailer in Latin America to launch an ASC/MSC product line. Sustainability is a priority for JBS and we aim to engage with our customers with marketing materials to inform and promote this initiative”.

Laurent Viguie, Latin American Manager for the ASC: “JBS/Swift have showed real initiative to launch this product range in Brasil. They are being very pro-active in encouraging their suppliers to achieve ASC certification. We hope that this will encourage more retailers in the region to follow their example”.

Brian Perkins, America Regional Director for the MSC said: “When people purchase MSC certified seafood, their choice supports fishermen around the world who are working hard to meet the world’s most rigorous standard for environmental sustainability of wild-capture fishing.”

IKEA’s best kept secret? Its affordable, sustainable salmon.

May 2, 2017 — Salty, silky and rich, salmon is truly a versatile protein. Smoked salmon shines when placed upon a bagel with schmear or stirred into an omelet. Grilling, poaching or broiling salmon results in a delectable entree. Ah, this fish.

But eating sustainable salmon can burn a hole in your wallet. Responsibly farmed salmon or wild caught salmon often come with a hefty price tag — salmon at Whole Foods, for example, can cost up to $25 a pound.

The good news: One national chain is a low-key secret, affordable salmon purveyor. IKEA, that Swedish furniture factory and veritable maze of a store, sells salmon that’s sustainable both for the planet and your bank account. . Three different smoked salmon packs are priced at $8 for a pack of 7 ounces, meaning they’re all under $16 a pound.

Beyond its Malm dressers, you may know IKEA for its Swedish meatballs, but the furniture store made headlines in 2015 for becoming one of the largest sellers of sustainable seafood. IKEA, which sells fish in 47 countries, only sources seafood that is certified by the Marine Stewardship Council and the Aquaculture Stewardship Council.

Read the full story at Mic.com

US legislators push for fisheries disaster relief in federal spending bill

April 28, 2017 — Congressional and White House negotiators made progress Tuesday on a must-pass spending bill to keep the federal government open days ahead of a deadline as President Donald Trump indicated that U.S. funding for a border wall with Mexico could wait until September.

“We’re moving forward on reaching an agreement on a bipartisan basis,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said, adding that he hoped that an agreement to fund the government through September can be reached in the next few days.

But a big stumbling block remains, involving a Democratic demand for money for insurance companies that help low-income people afford health policies under former President Barack Obama’s health law, or that Trump abandon a threat to use the payments as a bargaining chip. Trump’s apparent flexibility on the U.S.-Mexico wall issue, however, seemed to steer the Capitol Hill talks on the catchall spending measure in a positive direction.

Arriving in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, California 2nd District Congressman Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) said he will not be leveraged into supporting “bad policies” such as funding for a border wall, increased military spending and cuts to Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies.

“I am not going to vote for a government funding bill that includes overreaching poison pill provisions,” Huffman told the Times-Standard. “If we have a clean government funding bill, I will support it. But I am not going to be bullied into supporting bad policies in a sort of hijacking exercise with government funding.”

Huffman and a bipartisan group of 16 other legislators are urging congressional appropriation committees to include fisheries disaster funding in the spending bill for fishing fleets in Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California, which includes the California crab fleet and the Yurok Tribe salmon fishing fleet.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Eureka Times-Standard

Congress working to prevent government shutdown; fishery disaster funds up in the air

April 26, 2017 — Congressional and White House negotiators made progress Tuesday on a must-pass spending bill to keep the federal government open days ahead of a deadline as President Donald Trump indicated that U.S. funding for a border wall with Mexico could wait until September.

Read the full story at the Eureka Times-Standard

Conservation group boosts alewife restoration efforts

April 25, 2017 — If Maine’s once enormous population of alewives is ever to be restored, it will take the continuing efforts of a dedicated group of volunteers.

That was the message last week to more than a dozen people concerned with the health of the alewife runs in Surry, Penobscot and Orland from Brett Ciccotelli, a fisheries biologist with the Downeast Salmon Federation.

Ciccotelli spoke at a meeting at The Gatherings in Surry aimed at increasing the number of volunteer monitors who will count alewives as they return to Downeast streams in the coming week.

Ciccotelli talked about the importance of the alewife to the Maine ecosystem and briefly reviewed how Maine has managed the alewife resource in recent years.

He also explained how the Downeast Salmon Federation was collecting data with an eye to increasing the number of the small river herring that make a successful journey from the sea to their freshwater spawning grounds each spring and then return to the sea again in fall.

Anadromous alewives return from the ocean each spring to travel up Maine’s rivers and streams to lay their eggs in lakes and ponds. Schools of tiny young fish migrate out at summer’s end, to spend some time in the estuary and the ocean maturing, before returning three to four years later to the river they were born in to start the cycle again.

Alewives play an important role in the food web, serving as a forage species that feeds small mammals, birds and larger fish. The decline in the alewife population, Ciccotelli said, “probably contributes to the loss of groundfish” such as cod and haddock in the Gulf of Maine.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

MAINE: ‘It’s a part of life here’: Down East smelt fry a celebration of spring, local foods

April 19, 2017 — If he peeked around the corner from where his fish-frying station was set up, Evan Emerson could see the place where he and others caught the fish in the first place.

The smelts — small, silvery fish that can be caught in great abundance each winter and early spring in the Pleasant River in Washington County — are the star of the show at the yearly Columbia Falls Smelt Fry, held by the Downeast Salmon Federation for the past 17 years.

Emerson, 28, has been frying up smelts at the event since he was 15 years old. He has always at the end of an assembly line of volunteer cooks who line up outside the Columbia Falls Community Center to shake the pre-cleaned, whole fish in a light cornmeal breading, drop them with a satisfying crackle of hot fat into their specially made fryer and, after six to seven minutes, pull them out, hot and ready to eat.

Emerson makes the call as to when the smelts are done. It’s his watchful eye that judges when they’ve gone from merely cooked to a perfectly crispy golden brown. By the end of the day, more than 300 pounds of smelt caught and quickly frozen in the weeks leading up to the event are cooked.

“We add just a little bit of olive oil. That’s what gives it the golden brown color,” said Emerson, whose smelt camp lies just a few hundred feet from the town center. “Some people remove the bones, some people don’t. Everybody’s got their way of eating it. … I’ve been cooking them for years, but I’ve been fishing for them for as long as I can remember.”

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Letter calls for approval of fishery disaster funds

April 6, 2017 — A bipartisan group of congressional representatives sent a letter to House and Senate leaders Wednesday urging them to include disaster relief funds for nine West Coast crab and salmon fisheries in a government spending bill this month.

“The closures of commercial and recreational fisheries along the West Coast during the 2014, 2015, and 2016 fishing seasons caused severe economic hardship in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California,” the letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer states.

The House and Senate are set to vote on a government spending bill in the coming weeks that they must pass by midnight April 28 to prevent a government shutdown.

California 2nd District Congressman Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) is among the 17 members of Congress who signed the letter. Huffman is asking Congress to approve millions of dollars for the North Coast crab fleet and the Yurok Tribe. In January, the former Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker issued disaster declarations for nine fisheries along the West Coast, which allows Congress to appropriate relief funds.

Read the full story at the Eureka Times-Standard

CALIFORNIA: Capitol Tracker: Area reps take stand on landing fee hikes

March 28, 2017 — Both of the state’s North Coast legislators, Sen. Mike McGuire and Assemblyman Jim Wood, are vocal in their opposition to a proposal put forward by the governor to increase fishing landing fees.

The plan from Gov. Jerry Brown to fill a $20 million shortfall in the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife budget would increase landing fees for the state’s commercial fishing fleet. The increases would raise an additional $12.4 million.

“Currently, revenue from the commercial fish landing fees support less than one quarter of the Department’s program costs,” the budget summary states, adding that landing fees have not been adjusted for 20 years.

According to McGuire, the increase in the fees “exceeding 10,000 percent” is “simply unacceptable.”

“We have to protect and preserve California’s fisheries, and we’re deeply concerned about the future based off of threats from the federal government and the exorbitant fees being proposed by the Governor’s Office,” McGuire said in a statement.

Wood reacted similarly.

“As Vice Chair of the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture and a member of the Assembly who represents nearly one-third of California’s coastline, I am adamantly opposed to the Governor’s proposal to increase landing fees on commercial fisheries,” Wood said in a statement.

He added that the fishing industry has not had it easy the past few years with toxic algae blooms halting the crab fishing season on the North Coast last year and salmon populations declining significantly.

“Exacerbating the financial hardships of an industry that has so recently suffered these crises in order to address the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s budget concerns is unconscionable,” Wood wrote in a letter to the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture, which he co-chairs.

Read the full story at The Times-Standard News

Commercial disasters declared for nine West Coast fisheries

March 21, 2017 — The Commerce Secretariat determined that nine salmon and crab fisheries in Alaska, California and Washington experienced commercial failures, which will enable fishing communities to seek disaster relief assistance from Congress, NOAA Fisheries Division reported.

The decision was taken by US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker due to the fact that in recent years, each of these fisheries experienced sudden and unexpected large decreases in fish stock biomass due to unusual ocean and climate conditions.

The fisheries deemed to have experienced commercial failures are the following:

Gulf of Alaska pink salmon fisheries (Alaska/2016)
California Dungeness and rock crab fishery (California/2015-2016);
Yurok Tribe Klamath River Chinook salmon fishery (California/2016);
Fraser River Makah Tribe and Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe sockeye salmon fisheries (Washington/2014);
Grays Harbor and Willapa Bay non-treaty coho salmon fishery (Washington/2015);
Nisqually Indian Tribe, Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, and Squaxin Island Tribe South Puget Sound salmon fisheries (Washington/2015);
Quinault Indian Nation Grays Harbor and Queets River coho salmon fishery (Washington/2015);
Quileute Tribe Dungeness crab fishery (Washington/2015-2016);
Ocean salmon troll fishery (Washington/2016).

“The Commerce Department and NOAA stand with America’s fishing communities. We are proud of the contributions they make to the nation’s economy, and we recognize the sacrifices they are forced to take in times of environmental hardship,” said Samuel D. Rauch III, deputy assistant administrator for regulatory programs, NOAA Fisheries.

Rauch stressed their commitment to helping these communities recover and achieve success in the future.

Read the full story at Fish Information & Services