Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Copper River fleet lands kings and sockeye salmon between troughs

June 2, 2021 — The Copper River commercial fishery in Cordova, Alaska, has had three 12-hour fishing openers. Between weather, ice upriver, and cold water temperatures, catches have been a bit on the skinny side — as the high price per pound has reflected.

Those are the reasons so far, as opposed to chalking it up to a poor run like last year. Having said that, the 2021 predictions are not stellar.

The cumulative sonar count of fish up the Copper River through May 24 was 4,813 fish versus a projected 39,911 salmon.

The May 24 12-hour opener brought in 2,000 kings and 32,700 sockeye salmon compared with an anticipated harvest of 56,100. Though the kings were few and far between, they are such bright, beautiful fish. Kings are bright silver with black spots and the reds are silver with an iridescent blue green back.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Early-season prices for Copper River salmon sky-high

May 24, 2021 — Prices for sockeye and king salmon out of the Copper River, Alaska, were sky high after the first couple openers of the season last week. Jon Hickman, Peter Pan Seafood’s vice president of operations, said in a news release that his company paid USD 12.60 (EUR 10.30) for sockeye and USD 19.60 (EUR 16.05) for king salmon.

Hickman said Peter Pan’s markets could handle the high ex-vessel prices, a welcome development for Copper River fishermen after an abysmal season last year.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Seafood tech companies demonstrate a leap forward in freshness monitoring using sensors and blockchain

April 6, 2021 — The following was released by Seafood Analytics:

Sustainable seafood company Envisible is teaming up with Certified Quality Foods, Inc. (dba Seafood Analytics) to capture product quality data on Envisible’s blockchain-enabled Wholechain traceability system. The initiative is starting with sockeye salmon coming from Northline Seafoods in Bristol Bay, Alaska, demonstrating an innovative commitment to transparency in seafood supply chains.

Northline is capturing product quality metrics at the point of harvest using Seafood Analytics’ handheld Certified Quality Reader (CQR), which measures the salmon’s electrical properties. Electrical properties are measured at the cellular level and are related to degradation, heat abuse and quality. The resulting quality data is then seamlessly uploaded into Wholechain, which logs this and other supply chain data on Mastercard’s provenance blockchain from the source all the way to grocers nationwide under a private label brand available at over 12 regional stores.

While the entire line of Envisible’s Frozen Seafood launched in 2019 is fully traceable and sustainably sourced, Northline’s sockeye salmon is the first of its kind to take traceability a step further with transparent quality readings. In fact all three companies – Seafood Analytics, Envisible and Northline Seafoods – have been recognized for their leadership in sustainable seafood at the Fish 2.0 Global Innovation Forum held at Stanford University.

About Northline Seafoods. Northine Seafoods, which is Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certified, has been lauded for innovations such as ultra-low freeze technology used on its floating processor directly on fishing grounds, and began utilizing the CQR method in 2019. Seafood Analytics feeds the objective quality measures into a customized data dashboard for its customers, enabling food companies to take actionable steps to improve their products and processes. The method has been implemented beyond seafood in poultry cultivation, and in many cases allows companies to bypass expensive and inefficient lab testing.

About Envisible. Envisible brings this technology and story to market with its robust distribution channels and focused mission of bringing traceability and transparency to traditionally opaque food systems. In addition to the Quality Index, Envisible has also committed to capturing Key Data Elements outlined by the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability, an industry-wide standard launched in 2020 to eliminate environmental and labor abuse in seafood supply chains. Not only does the technology ensure responsible sourcing, but Wholechain’s storytelling feature means a QR-code at the point of sale educates consumers about the sustainability and quality initiatives behind their seafood.

About Seafood Analytics. Seafood Analytics provides state of the art technology to measure and monitor seafood quality. The objective, science based technology measures science based technology measures fish quality instantly and provides a cloud based data platform that enables users to track quality and build supplier report cards. Seafood Analytics is based in Dallas Texas. For more information – info@certifiesqualityfoods.com.

ALASKA: Big sockeye runs and struggling kings leave Bristol Bay managers with a complicated balancing act

April 2, 2021 — Fifty-one million sockeye are forecast to return to Bristol Bay this summer.

If that holds, commercial fishermen will be able to harvest around 37 million reds. That’s 13% more than the average harvest of the past decade.

But concerns remain about the numbers of chinook salmon in the Nushagak District on the west side of Bristol Bay — which leaves the biologists who manage the fishery with a complicated balancing act.

Faced with another huge sockeye run this summer, managers in the Nushagak District say they will try to allow fishermen to harvest the sockeye and also conserve chinook.

Tim Sands, the district’s area management biologist, describes the job as trying to walk a fine line between “getting as many kings up the river as we can, but still provide opportunity to harvest sockeye salmon.”

For years, biologists around the state have wrestled with declining numbers of chinook, fish that are central to subsistence ways of life across Alaska, and also targeted by sport fishermen. Since 2007, the state’s chinook runs have consistently declined, forcing managers to restrict or close fishing in certain areas.

Read the full story at KTOO

2020’s Southeast salmon harvest among worst on record, according to Alaska Fish & Game data

April 1, 2021 —  Last year’s salmon harvest across all species in Southeast Alaska was one of the worst in 50 years. Here’s what Southeast’s regional commercial fishery supervisor had to say about the terrible season, and about his hopes for the coming year.

A special report released in March paints a stark picture of 2020’s salmon harvest in Southeast Alaska.

“Overall, it was one of the lowest harvests we’d seen, I think since the ’70s,” says Lowell Fair. He’s the Southeast regional supervisor for the commercial fisheries division of Alaska Department of Fish and Game. It was already clear from preliminary reports that last year’s salmon season was a rough one. But just how rough?

For sockeye, the harvest was the second lowest since 1962 — that’s just a couple of years after the Department of Fish & Game was formed and started collecting data.

King harvest was in the bottom five harvests since the early 1960s as well.

Coho and pink harvests came in stronger than kings and sockeye, but were still among the lowest years in recent memory, ranking 48th and 53rd since 1962, respectively.

Read the full story at KNBA

ALASKA: Copper River Forecast Still Off from Historical Returns

March 15, 2021 — State research biologists expect the famed Copper River salmon fishery to rebound from what was nearly a lost season in 2020, but runs for the river’s high-value species are still expected to fall well short of historical averages.

Just more than 1.3 million sockeye are projected to return to the Copper River this year for a corresponding allowable commercial harvest of 672,000 fish, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game‘s 2021 Prince William Sound and Copper River Salmon Forecast.

Read the full story at Seafood News

ALASKA: 2 Pebble appeals, 2 different outcomes

March 3, 2021 — Two requests to appeal the decision to deny a key permit for a proposed copper and gold mine in Southwest Alaska met different fates.

The Army Corps of Engineers didn’t accept the state’s attempt to appeal a November 2020 decision to deny a permit for the proposed Pebble Mine, a long-controversial effort to place an open-pit mine near the headwarters of the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world.

Meanwhile, Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., the Vancouver-based parent company of Pebble Limited Partnership, reports that a Feb. 24 letter indicated the corps accepted Pebble’s request for an administrative appeal.

Mike Heatwole, a spokesperson for Pebble Limited Partnership, said Saturday in an email Pebble looks forward to having the appeal fully vetted.

In an email, Luciano Vera, deputy chief of public affairs for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Pacific Ocean Division, said the division engineer determined that the state does not meet the definition of an “affected party.”

Read the full story at the Juneau Empire

ALASKA: What is going on in Bristol Bay?

March 2, 2021 — Despite record retail prices and a consistently strong demand, Bristol Bay salmon fishermen saw a nearly 50 percent drop in their base ex-vessel price in 2020 — from $1.35 a pound in 2019 to $0.70 in 2020. That’s a 65-cent drop in a single year.

The Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association published a new report that lays out likely reasons for the low base price. It also offers the region’s fishermen a range of solutions to consider for the future, and is seeking feedback from stakeholders to help set goals for the association.

“Demand for Bristol Bay sockeye is very high. Retail prices are at record levels. Anecdotally, wholesale prices are flat to up compared to last year — significantly so for once-frozen fillets,” says the BBRSDA’s white paper, released Monday, March 1. “When consumer prices are high or increasing for a product, the underlying raw material price usually goes up, not way down. In short, 2020 should have been a terrific season for Bristol Bay fishermen and ex-vessel prices, but it wasn’t (or at least it hasn’t been thus far).”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

As most Alaska salmon fishing regions face another season of mediocre runs, Russia hikes competitive pressure

February 24, 2021 — Alaskans are preparing for another salmon season of poor to average runs in most regions.

The big exception once again is at Bristol Bay, where another massive return of more than 51 million sockeyes is expected. Managers predict that surge will produce a harvest of over 36 million reds to fishermen.

Bristol Bay is home to the largest wild sockeye salmon run in the world and typically accounts for 42% of the world’s sockeye harvest. Those fish and all wild salmon compete in a tough worldwide commodities market, where Alaska salmon claims 13% of the global supply.

Farmed salmon production, which outnumbers wild harvests by nearly 3 to 1, is Alaska’s biggest competitor; the other is Russia.

According to global seafood trading company Tradex, Pacific salmon catches from Russia are projected to top 1 billion pounds in 2021. As a comparison, Alaska’s 2020 catch of nearly 117 million salmon weighed in at just over 500 million pounds.

The Russian catch breaks down to more than 700 million pounds of pinks, nearly 206 million pounds of chum salmon, 70.6 million pounds of sockeyes, over 24 million pounds of coho salmon and 8.8 million pounds of Chinook.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News