NO MORE PRETEND FISH DESTROYING OUR ENVIRONMENT AND OUR FISH- USING NOVA SCOTIA TAX $$$$ -LIKE COOKE- 4 God's sake look at the mess of China- all political parties play this game.... NO MORE...
More than 400 call for new rules on fish farming in Nova Scotia
BILL POWER BUSINESS REPORTER
Published January 8, 2015 - 6:17pm
Last Updated January 8, 2015 - 11:00pm
A woman holds a sign in support of the recently released final report of the Independent Aquaculture Regulatory Review for Nova Scotia during a news conference at the Lord Nelson Hotel in Halifax on Thursday. Hundreds of people representing dozens of community groups and organizations from around the province attended the conference. (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)
More than 400 people from community organizations across Nova Scotia turned out for a rally in Halifax on Thursday to issue a joint call for aquaculture reform.
The head table at a news conference organized by the Nova Scotia chapter of the Atlantic Coalition for Aquaculture Reform included dozens of representatives of conservation groups, commercial fisheries organizations and even tourism operators.
It was a massive show of support for the final report of the Independent Aquaculture Regulatory Review for Nova Scotia panel, released Dec. 16.
“We do not want these critical recommendations to languish in some bureaucratic backroom,” Raymond Plourde, with the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax, told participants.
There were repeated calls from a series of speakers for the province to adopt all recommendations included in the report, which Dalhousie University law professors Meinhard Doelle and William Lahey wrote.
“This is government’s opportunity to demonstrate leadership in producing a world-class regulatory system,” said Gloria Gilbert of Coastal Community Advocates.
The Doelle-Lahey report recommended protection of wild fish and lobster from the negative affects of fish farms.
It included, among other things, a call for regulations favouring aquaculture operations with low environmental impact and high economic value to the province.
“The report attempts to balance environmental concerns with the need to have a strong economy, and we support its immediate implementation,” Wendy Watson Smith, with the Association for the Preservation of the Eastern Shore, told participants.
The coalition organized the rally as a prelude to a strategy session for the organization in Halifax on Friday.
Fisheries and Aquaculture Minister Keith Colwell said at the legislature a departmental review of the report was underway and due for completion in April.
“We’re very happy with the recommendations put forward, and we’re reviewing every item.”
Colwell said it was too early to comment on the coalition’s call for provincial adoption of all recommendations for regulatory reform recommended in the report.
The Doelle-Lahey report is available at www.aquaculturereview.ca.
With Michael Gorman,
provincial reporter
http://thechronicleherald.ca/business/1261721-more-than-400-call-for-new-rules-on-fish-farming-in-nova-scotia
http://www.aquaculturereview.ca/
------------------
JULY 28TH - NOVA SCOTIA CANADA- U BRING IN FRACKING... and u will never be re-elected ever... that's a promise..... No Fracking in Canada- USA IS RUINED AS IS MUCH OF EUROPE/ASIAS/AFRICAS... AND AUSSIES ARE GETTING THERE...AND LATIN AMERICAS... MEXICO- NOT OUR CANADA...
AUGUST 3 N 4TH..
August 3 n 4th??
SERIOUSLY????? BELOVED IDLE NO MORE – BREAKINGR HEARTS - FIRST NATIONS GROUP OF CANADA JUST SIGNED $$$BILLION WITH CHINA...SERIOUSLY... and ya all better be Canadians...because USA worst pollutants on the planet... and EU comes close second after China...
Pipeline protest pedals into town
Aug 3 2014 — Kelly Roche — Sun Media — A 10-week cycling journey protesting a massive pipeline project ended at the Human Rights Monument Saturday. “There’s a lot of different reasons that people are upset,” said Energy East Resistance Ride coordinator Alex Guest. Among their concerns: water, land, and climate change.
http://www.ottawasun.com/2014/08/02/pipeline-protest-pedals-into-town
---------------------------
Nova Scotia’s fracking
pioneer doubtful province will lift ban
MICHAEL
MacDONALD THE CANADIAN PRESS
Published August 3, 2014 - 10:12am
Published August 3, 2014 - 10:12am
About 25
people attended the first public session on the province's fracking review at
Cape Breton University last month. (TOM AYERS / Cape Breton Bureau)
The man
who pioneered hydraulic fracturing in Nova Scotia says he doesn’t expect the
province to lift a two-year moratorium on the contentious practice, mainly
because the government is afraid of upsetting a vocal but misinformed minority.
Peter
Hill, chairman of Denver-based Triangle Petroleum, says the industry could spur
Nova Scotia’s stalled economy and reduce its reliance on polluting, coal-fired
plants, but he believes fear-mongering by outspoken critics has spooked the
province’s politicians.
“There’s
a level of emotion that is out there that is very difficult to dampen down and
politicians will respond to that,” he said in an interview from Houston.
“The
politicians will be free to respond to the vociferous minority. … I don’t think
they want to solve this thing right now. It’s too difficult and politically
charged.”
Triangle
Petroleum drilled several test wells in central Nova Scotia in 2007 and 2008,
but only three involved hydraulic fracturing, a process that forces pressurized
water and chemicals into layers of rock to release trapped oil and natural gas.
The wells
were the first and only ones to be fracked in the province. They failed to
produce any commercial quantities of gas, and the company is still trying to
get rid of two holding ponds containing 30 million litres of fracking
wastewater.
Later
this month, an expert panel in Nova Scotia is expected to release a final
report on fracking, and the provincial government has promised to render a
quick decision on whether to lift the moratorium that started in 2012.
The head
of the panel, Cape Breton University president David Wheeler, has already said
the province should not proceed with fracking until a broader public discussion
is held and more studies are completed.
Hill says
he’s been impressed by the 10 discussion papers produced by the panel, but he
adds that it appears Wheeler has been cowed by hundreds of angry citizens who
showed up at a series of public meetings last month.
“I get
very disappointed when I hear it’s got to be a longer period (of discussion)
when under everyone’s feet sits a lot of gas that may be able to be pulled out
of the ground in a sustainable, commercial and environmentally safe fashion,”
Hill says.
Barb
Harris, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Health Association of Nova Scotia,
attended four of the public meetings, all of which drew big crowds.
“It was
overwhelmingly people who were opposed, and a few people who had come to learn
and one person at each meeting who was in favour of fracking,” said Harris, an
environmental health researcher.
The
province’s energy minister, Andrew Younger, has said he’s worried anxiety over
his pending decision is “tearing communities apart.”
Ken
Summers, a member of the Nova Scotia Fracking Resource and Action Coalition,
says the meetings may have had an impact on Wheeler’s thinking, but Summers
believes the real turning point came in April when an independent group of
leading Canadian scientists released a report on fracking.
The
report, produced by the Council of Canadian Academies, concluded that even
though fracking could produce big economic benefits across Canada, there is
significant uncertainty on the risks to the environment and human health.
Summers
says the Nova Scotia government wants to avoid repeating the mistakes made in
New Brunswick, where the provincial government has not only endorsed hydraulic
fracturing but has made the issue a main plank in its bid for re-election on
Sept. 22.
The New
Brunswick government’s stand has prompted numerous public protests, including a
violent demonstration last October near Rexton in which a half-dozen police
cars were burned and 40 anti-fracking protesters were arrested.
“They
made a miscalculation,” says Summers, who lives in Minasville, not far from
Triangle Petroleum’s wells.
“They
thought they could ease people into this and it’s not working. … You have a
government that went ahead and didn’t think it would be as politically risky as
it turned out to be.”
COMMENT:
Peter Hill, chairman of Denver-based Triangle Petroleum:"Triangle Petroleum drilled several test wells in central Nova Scotia in 2007 and 2008, but only three involved hydraulic fracturing ... The wells were the first and only ones to be fracked in the province. They failed to produce any commercial quantities of gas, and the company is still trying to get rid of two holding ponds containing 30 million litres of fracking wastewater"
Based on this record, Peter Hill "says the industry could spur Nova Scotia’s stalled economy and reduce its reliance on polluting, coal-fired plants"
As a similarly realistic conclusion, I'd suggest a solution to Mr Hills' six-year-old waste disposal problem (it takes six years to not find out what to do with the waste from just three wells ?????) I digress ... the solution is to construct a slightly larger than 30,000,000 litre donut-shaped moat around Andrew Younger's house. He could wade in and out each day, and invite all his friends and relatives over to swim laps. Or watch him swim laps. Or dump off unwanted goldfish ...
---------------------------
Canada - This land is my land... this land is your land- from the 60s... and she's still gorgeous
---------------
\\JULY 28TH FROM UK-\-
Well...
Cameron won’t get re-elected will he....
Government
pushes ahead with fracking plan despite wide opposition
Public Health England
and Natural England among groups against shale gas exploration in areas
including national parks
·
·
Overwhelming opposition to the
government's plans was expressed by interest groups during official
consultation
JULY 23RD...
CHECK OUT UNITED KINGDOM AND FRACKING- politics playing the same shitty games as Nova Scotia and Canada- No Fracking dammit! UK: New Environment Agency chairman has fracking links
Sir Philip Dilley was previously chairman of engineering firm that wrote environmental reports on fracking for Cuadrilla
Rowena Mason, political correspondent
The Guardian, Tuesday 22 July 2014 19.57 BST
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/22/environment-agency-chairman-fracking-links
AND.. ...NOVA SCOTIA- WE WILL VOTE U OUT- THAT'S A PROMISE- NO FRACKING IN NOVA SCOTIA- NO FRACKING IN OUR CANADA...
VOICE OF THE PEOPLE JULY 26 2014
VOICE OF THE PEOPLE -JULY 26 2014 F**KING FRACKING- ELECTION PROMISE....... we will vote u out if u allow fracking.......
BRING IN PERMANENT BAN
I was shocked to read that David Wheeler and the fracking review panel are unlikely to recommend a continued moratorium on fracking. He says this is a political decision.
We live in a beautiful province and I would like to think Premier Stephen McNeil and all political leaders would do everything in their power to keep it that way.
With fracking, our peace and quiet would be gone with the 24-hour constant noise from large trucks. Toxic chemicals are used when fracturing the rock and what to do with the poisoned water is a major problem. Fracking has been known to ruin wells and the use of all this water has been the cause of drought in some places.
The devaluation of properties also is a major concern, and in some places, people couldn’t give their homes away. Some fracking companies in the States had to settle with residents, with the understanding they wouldn’t discuss their problems with anyone. I wonder why.
Health problems, such as watery eyes, scratchy throats, nosebleeds and irreversible brain damage are also a major health concern due to breathing in these poisons.
When will governments wake up and realize money does not come ahead of preserving the air and water? In the best interests of this province, I hope, for all our sakes, a permanent moratorium on fracking will be put in place.
Carol Canning, Amherst
FRACKING WOES BUBBLING UP
Re: “We have a duty to embrace fracking," (July 22 Reader’s Corner by Adam Rodgers, president of the Strait Area Chamber of Commerce).
Mr. Rodgers seems to have a skewed image of a fair and fact-based decisionmaking process. His claim that fracking is obviously safe, and that we must accept it with due haste, borders on the absurd.
The last 18 months have seen a nearly constant stream of reports, studies and papers, all by independent sources, that paint an increasingly horrific image of fracking. Dangerously elevated toxicity levels in ground and surface water (even in sites deemed clean by industry testers), hugely exaggerated yields, waste-water contaminations and even geologic instability have all come up with alarming frequ ency.
Germany is implementing a seven-year ban on fracking because of this alarming new research, despite being dependent on natural gas. Clearly, the Germans are intelligent enough to realize that short-term economic gains are not worth the catastrophic damages caused by fracking. The question is, “Are we?"
Daniel Latham, Timberlea
LOUD AND CLEAR
The older I get, the more I expect clarity. Not so much with David Wheeler’s travelling show on fracking.
It is clear to me and anyone with their brain that it would be political suicide to give the OK to fracking in Nova Scotia. All the reaction at public meetings has been strongly — and I mean strongly — against it .
I know that Mr. Wheeler took this job on as an academic and that he doesn’t really have an axe to grind. I cannot see why Premier Stephen McNeil has not stopped this travelling show, thus saving taxpayers money on expenses, and said that there will continue to be a moratorium on fracking.
No politician in his right mind is going to stand up and say, “OK, everyone, we know 95 per cent of you are against it, but we are going to license companies to start fracking." They won’t ever be elected again.
Mr. McNeil has stuck his toe in the water to test the mood of the province. He should pull that toe out before he gets ptomaine poisoning.
Greg MacDonald, Halifax
----------------------
THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH TALKING: - NO F**KING FISH FARMS NOVA SCOTIA COASTS and NO FRACKING -or u won't make it past 4 years- that's a promise- we dumped the tories, we dumped the ndp and we will dump the liberals........ there is a glorious world of innovative and new things 2 do and 2 try.... Canada's beautiful nature is the last that God has left on this whole f**king planet and 8 billion people know it.....
THE FISH SITE...
National Geographic Investigates How to Farm a Better Fish
19 June 2014Blue Ridge Aquaculture is proudly the world’s largest producer of tilapia using indoor recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS).
The sustainable farming method, with a small ecological footprint, allows around four million pounds of tilapia to be produced each year in a clean and controlled environment that recycles 85 per cent of its water.
Despite the intensive production, the company assures that its fish are happy and healthy and that antibiotics and hormones are not used.
Speaking to Joel K. Bourne Jr. for the June issue of National Geographic, Blue Ridge Aquaculture president, Bill Martin, said that his model is based on the poultry industry. “The difference is our fish are perfectly happy,” he continued.
“How do you know they’re happy?” Mr Bourne asked, noting that the mat of tilapia in the tank looks thick enough for to walk on.
“Generally they show they’re not happy by dying,” Mr Martin said. “I haven’t lost a tank of fish yet.”
Each day Mr Martin sells 12,000 pounds of live tilapia to Asian markets from Washington, D.C., to Toronto, and he’s planning another farm on the West Coast.
Further Reading
You can view more sustainable aquaculture practices in the full National Geographic article by clicking here.----------------------
Solaiman Sheik shows off the
harvest from his father’s small pond near Khulna, Bangladesh: freshwater
prawns, a profitable export. The family also raises fish in the pond
and, in the dry season, rice fertilized by fish waste—a polyculture that
has tripled output with little environmental downside. Photograph by Jim Richardson
How to Farm a Better Fish
In a dark, dank warehouse in the Blue Ridge
foothills of Virginia, Bill Martin picks up a bucket of brown pellets
and slings them into a long concrete tank. Fat, white tilapia the size
of dinner plates boil to the surface. Martin, president of Blue Ridge
Aquaculture, one of the world’s largest indoor fish farms, smiles at the
feeding frenzy.
“This is St. Peter’s fish, the fish Jesus fed the
multitudes,” he says, his raspy voice resonating like a preacher’s.
Unlike Jesus, however, Martin does not give his fish away. Each day he
sells 12,000 pounds of live tilapia to Asian markets from Washington,
D.C., to Toronto, and he’s planning another farm on the West Coast. “My
model is the poultry industry,” he says. “The difference is, our fish
are perfectly happy.”
“How do you know they’re happy?” I ask, noting that the mat of tilapia in the tank looks thick enough for St. Peter to walk on.
“Generally they show they’re not happy by dying,” Martin says. “I haven’t lost a tank of fish yet.”
An industrial park in Appalachia may seem an odd place
to grow a few million natives of the Nile. But industrial-scale fish
farms are popping up everywhere these days. Aquaculture has expanded
about 14-fold since 1980. In 2012 its global output, from silvery salmon
to homely sea cucumbers only a Chinese cook could love, reached more
than 70 million tons—exceeding beef production clearly for the first
time and amounting to nearly half of all fish and shellfish consumed on
Earth. Population growth, income growth, and seafood’s heart-healthy
reputation are expected to drive up demand by 35 percent or more in just
the next 20 years. With the global catch of wild fish stagnant, experts
say virtually all of that new seafood will have to be farmed.
“There is no way we are going to get all of the protein
we need out of wild fish,” says Rosamond Naylor, a food-policy expert at
Stanford University who has researched aquaculture systems. “But people
are very wary that we’re going to create another feedlot industry in
the ocean. So they want it to be right from the start.”
There are good reasons to be wary.
Nature’s
own water filters, giant Japanese scallops thrive on fish waste at an
experimental farm off Canada’s Vancouver Island. The farm also uses sea
cucumbers and kelp to consume excretions from nearby pens of native
sablefish.
1 OF 6
Tilapia pens in Laguna de Bay,
the largest lake in the Philippines, are choked by an algal bloom they
helped create. The overstocked lake produces large numbers of farmed
fish, but excess nutrients trigger blooms that use up oxygen—and kill
fish.
The new “blue revolution,”
which has delivered cheap, vacuum-packed shrimp, salmon, and tilapia to
grocery freezers, has brought with it many of the warts of agriculture
on land: habitat destruction, water pollution, and food-safety scares.
During the 1980s vast swaths of tropical mangroves were bulldozed to
build farms that now produce a sizable portion of the world’s shrimp.
Aquacultural pollution—a putrid cocktail of nitrogen, phosphorus, and
dead fish—is now a widespread hazard in Asia, where 90 percent of farmed
fish are located. To keep fish alive in densely stocked pens, some
Asian farmers resort to antibiotics and pesticides that are banned for
use in the United States, Europe, and Japan. The U.S. now imports 90
percent of its seafood—around 2 percent of which is inspected by the
Food and Drug Administration. In 2006 and 2007 the FDA discovered
numerous banned substances, including known or suspected carcinogens, in
aquaculture shipments from Asia.
Nor have fish farms in other parts of the globe been
free of problems. The modern salmon industry, which over the past three
decades has plunked densely packed net pens full of Atlantic salmon into
pristine fjords from Norway to Patagonia, has been plagued by
parasites, pollution, and disease. Scottish salmon farms lost nearly 10
percent of their fish in 2012 to amoebic gill disease; in Chile
infectious anemia has killed an estimated two billion dollars’ worth of
salmon since 2007. A disease outbreak in 2011 virtually wiped out the
shrimp industry in Mozambique.
The problem isn’t the ancient art of aquaculture per se;
it’s the rapid intensification of it. Chinese farmers started raising
carp in their rice fields at least 2,500 years ago. But with that
country’s aquacultural output now at 42 million tons a year, fish pens
line many rivers, lakes, and seashores. Farmers stock their ponds with
fast-growing breeds of carp and tilapia and use concentrated fish feed
to maximize their growth.
“I was very influenced by the green revolution in grains
and rice,” says Li Sifa, a fish geneticist at Shanghai Ocean
University. Li is known as the “father of tilapia” for developing a
fast-growing breed that’s become the backbone of China’s tilapia
industry, which produces 1.5 million tons a year, much of it for export.
“Good seeds are very important,” Li says. “One good variety can raise a
strong industry that can feed more people. That is my duty. To make
better fish, more fish, so farmers can get rich and people can have more
food.”
Workers harvest channel
catfish at an America’s Catch catfish farm in Itta Bena, Mississippi
(left). The farm produces 30 million pounds of fish each year from its
500 ponds. The fish are vegetarians: their feed is made from soy, corn,
rice, wheat, and cottonseed meal, with no antibiotics. “We’re taking the
high road,” says owner Solon Scott. “This is a good, sustainable source
of protein.” A tilapia (right) reveals a mouthful of eggs that will be
extracted for hatching at a farm. Mouth brooding—along with rapid
growth, a vegetarian diet, and the ability to thrive in dense
populations—helps make the tilapia an easy fish to farm.
How to do that without spreading disease and pollution?
For tilapia farmer Bill Martin, the solution is simple: raise fish in
tanks on land, not in pens in a lake or the sea. “Net pens are a total
goat rodeo,” says Martin, sitting in an office adorned with hunting
trophies. “You’ve got sea lice, disease, escapement, and death. You
compare that with a 100 percent controlled environment, possibly as
close to zero impact on the oceans as we can get. If we don’t leave the
oceans alone, Mother Nature is going to kick our butts big-time.”
Martin’s fish factory, however, doesn’t leave the land
and air alone, and running it isn’t cheap. To keep his fish alive, he
needs a water-treatment system big enough for a small town; the
electricity to power it comes from coal. Martin recirculates about 85
percent of the water in his tanks, and the rest—high in ammonia and fish
waste—goes to the local sewage plant, while the voluminous solid waste
heads to the landfill. To replace the lost water, he pumps half a
million gallons a day from an underground aquifer. Martin’s goals are to
recirculate 99 percent of the water and to produce his own low-carbon
electricity by capturing methane from the waste.
But those goals are still a few years away. And though
Martin is convinced that recirculating systems are the future, so far
only a few other companies are producing fish—including salmon, cobia,
and trout—in tanks on land.
A diver nets a ten-pound cobia
for sampling before harvest in one of Open Blue’s dozen offshore pens.
Able to hold hundreds of thousands of fish, but less densely stocked and
better flushed than nearshore salmon pens, they produce little
pollution. Cobia contain as much healthy fish oil as salmon do.
Eight miles off the coast of
Panama, Brian O’Hanlon is going in the exact opposite direction. On a
calm day in May the 34-year-old president of Open Blue and I are lying
at the bottom of a massive, diamond-shaped fish cage, 60 feet beneath
the cobalt blue surface of the Caribbean, watching 40,000 cobia do a
slow, hypnotic pirouette above us. The bubbles from our regulators rise
up to meet them; one pauses to stare into my mask. Unlike Martin’s
tilapia or even the salmon in a commercial pen, these eight-pound
youngsters have plenty of room.
O’Hanlon, a third-generation fishmonger from
Long Island, grew up with New York City’s famed Fulton Fish Market as
his playground. In the early 1990s the collapse of the North Atlantic
cod fishery and the import tariffs imposed on Norwegian salmon
bankrupted the family business. His father and uncles kept saying that
the industry’s future was farmed fish. So as a teenager, O’Hanlon
started raising red snapper in a giant tank in his parents’ basement.
Now, off Panama, he operates the largest
offshore fish farm in the world. He has some 200 employees, a big
hatchery onshore, and a fleet of bright orange vessels to service a
dozen of the giant cages, which can hold more than a million cobia. A
popular sport fish, cobia has been caught commercially only in small
quantities—in the wild the fish are too solitary—but its explosive
growth rate makes it popular with farmers. Like salmon, it’s full of
healthy omega-3 fatty acids, and it produces a mild, buttery, white
fillet that O’Hanlon claims is the perfect canvas for picky chefs. Last
year he shipped 800 tons of cobia to high-end restaurants around the
U.S. Next year he hopes to double that amount—and finally turn a profit.
Maintenance and operating costs are high in
offshore waters. Although most salmon operations are tucked in protected
coves near shore, the waves over O’Hanlon’s cages can hit 20 feet or
more. But all that rushing water is the point: He’s using dilution to
avoid pollution and disease. Not only are his cages stocked at a
fraction of the density of the typical salmon farm, but also, sitting in
deep water, they’re constantly being flushed by the current and the
waves. So far O’Hanlon hasn’t had to treat the cobia with antibiotics,
and researchers from the University of Miami have not detected any trace
of fish waste outside his pens. They suspect the diluted waste is being
scavenged by undernourished plankton, since the offshore waters are
nutrient poor.
O’Hanlon is in Panama because he couldn’t get a
permit to build in the U.S. Public concerns over pollution and fierce
opposition from commercial fishermen have made coastal states leery of
any fish farms. But O’Hanlon is convinced he’s pioneering the next big
thing in aquaculture.
“This is the future,” he says, once we’ve said
goodbye to the cobia and are back aboard his orange skiff. “This is what
the industry is going to have to do in order to keep growing,
especially in the tropics.” Recirculating systems like Martin’s, he
says, will never produce enough biomass. “There is no way they can scale
up to meet the market demand. And to make one profitable, it’s like a
cattle feedlot, where you cram so many fish in you’re just trying to
keep them alive. You’re not providing the best environment possible for
them.”
Gustavo Valdez of Pesquera
Delly seafoods inspects shrimp grown in the Gulf of California, three
miles off Guaymas. His four cages (left) each produce 5 to 13 tons of
shrimp every four to six months. They have less impact than a
conventional shrimp farm, but they require Mexican government subsidies.
“We need to produce 30 tons per cage to be economical,” says Valdez.
Whether you’re raising fish
in an offshore cage or in a filtered tank on land, you still have to
feed them. They have one big advantage over land animals: You have to
feed them a lot less. Fish need fewer calories, because they’re
cold-blooded and because, living in a buoyant environment, they don’t
fight gravity as much. It takes roughly a pound of feed to produce a
pound of farmed fish; it takes almost two pounds of feed to produce a
pound of chicken, about three for a pound of pork, and about seven for a
pound of beef. As a source of animal protein that can meet the needs of
nine billion people with the least demand on Earth’s resources,
aquaculture—particularly for omnivores like tilapia, carp, and
catfish—looks like a good bet.
Pounds for Pound
Different sources of
animal protein in our diet place different demands on natural resources.
One measure of this is the “feed conversion ratio”: an estimate of the
feed required to gain one pound of body mass. By this measure, farming
salmon is about seven times more efficient than raising beef.
But some of the farmed fish that affluent consumers
love to eat have a disadvantage as well: They’re voracious carnivores.
The rapid growth rate that makes cobia a good farm animal is fueled in
the wild by a diet of smaller fish or crustaceans, which provide the
perfect blend of nutrients—including the omega-3 fatty acids that
cardiologists love. Cobia farmers such as O’Hanlon feed their fish
pellets containing up to 25 percent fish meal and 5 percent fish oil,
with the remainder mostly grain-based nutrients. The meal and oil come
from forage fish like sardines and anchovies, which school in huge
shoals off the Pacific coast of South America. These forage fisheries
are among the largest in the world but are prone to spectacular
collapses.
Aquaculture’s share of the forage-fish catch has
nearly doubled since 2000. It now gobbles up nearly 70 percent of the
global fish meal supply and almost 90 percent of the world’s fish oil.
So hot is the market that many countries are sending ships to Antarctica
to harvest more than 200,000 tons a year of tiny krill—a major food
source for penguins, seals, and whales. Though much of the krill ends up
in pharmaceuticals and other products, to critics of aquaculture the
idea of vacuuming up the bottom of the food chain in order to churn out
slabs of relatively cheap protein sounds like ecological insanity.
In their defense, fish farmers have been getting
more efficient, farming omnivorous fish like tilapia and using feeds
that contain soybeans and other grains; salmon feed these days is
typically no more than 10 percent fish meal. The amount of forage fish
used per pound of output has fallen by roughly 80 percent from what it
was 15 years ago. It could fall a lot further, says Rick Barrows, who
has been developing fish feeds at his U.S. Department of Agriculture lab
in Bozeman, Montana, for the past three decades. “Fish don’t require
fish meal,” says Barrows. “They require nutrients. We’ve been feeding
mostly vegetarian diets to rainbow trout for 12 years now. Aquaculture
could get out of fish meal today if it wanted to.”
Replacing fish oil remains trickier, because it
carries those prized omega-3 fatty acids. In the sea they’re made by
algae, then passed up the food chain, accumulating in higher
concentrations along the way. Some feed companies are already extracting
omega-3s directly from algae—the process used to make omega-3 for eggs
and orange juice. That has the added benefit of reducing the DDT, PCBs,
and dioxins that can also accumulate in farmed fish. An even quicker
fix, Stanford’s Rosamond Naylor says, would be to genetically modify
canola oil to produce high levels of omega-3s.
At dawn on China’s Fujian
coast, seaweed farmers head out to tend their aquatic fields. Such farms
help China grow 12 million tons of food a year with no soil or fresh
water and no fertilizer except runoff from the land. Oceans cover 71
percent of Earth yet provide less than 2 percent of our food—for now. Photograph by George Steinmetz
Figuring out what to feed
farmed fish may ultimately be more important for the planet than the
question of where to farm them. “The whole concept of moving into
offshore waters and on land isn’t because we’ve run out of space in the
coastal zone,” says Stephen Cross of the University of Victoria in
British Columbia, who was an environmental consultant to the aquaculture
industry for decades. Though pollution from coastal salmon farms gave
the whole industry a black eye, he says, these days even salmon farms
are producing 10 to 15 times the fish they did in the 1980s and 1990s
with a fraction of the pollution. In a remote corner of Vancouver Island
he’s trying something new and even less damaging.
His inspiration comes from ancient China. More
than a thousand years ago, during the Tang dynasty, Chinese farmers
developed an intricate polyculture of carp, pigs, ducks, and vegetables
on their small family farms, using the manure from ducks and pigs to
fertilize the pond algae grazed by the carp. Carp were later added to
flooded paddies, where the omnivorous fish gobbled up insect pests and
weeds and fertilized the rice before becoming food themselves. Such
carp-paddy polyculture became a mainstay of China’s traditional
fish-and-rice diet, sustaining millions of Chinese for centuries. It’s
still used on more than seven million acres of paddies in the country.
In a fjord on the British Columbia coast, Cross
has devised a polyculture of his own. He feeds only one species—a sleek,
hardy native of the North Pacific known as sablefish or black cod.
Slightly down current from their pens he has placed hanging baskets full
of native cockles, oysters, and scallops as well as mussels that feed
on the fine organic excretions of the fish. Next to the baskets he grows
long lines of sugar kelp, used in soups and sushi and also to produce
bioethanol; these aquatic plants filter the water even further,
converting nearly all the remaining nitrates and phosphorus to plant
tissue. On the seafloor, 80 feet below the fish pens, sea
cucumbers—considered delicacies in China and Japan—vacuum up heavier
organic waste that the other species miss. Minus the sablefish, Cross
says, his system could be fitted onto existing fish farms to serve as a
giant water filter that would produce extra food and profit.
“Nobody gets into farmed production without
wanting to make a buck,” he adds, over a plate of pan-seared sablefish
and scallops the size of biscuits. “But you can’t just go volume,
volume, volume. We’re going quality, diversity, and sustainability.”
Farming Soars as Wild Catches Stall
With demand rising and
many marine fish stocks already overfished, nearly half of all seafood
now comes from aquaculture, which has grown at a double-digit clip for
decades. Most of the growth is in Asia, home to 90 percent of fish
farms. China, the world leader, imports additional fish to make fish
oil, fish food, and other products.
Perry Raso of Matunuck, Rhode Island, farms a
monoculture, not a polyculture, but he doesn’t feed his aquatic animals
anything at all—and he’s got 12 million of them. Raso is an oyster
farmer, one of the new generation of shellfish growers who’ve been
blessed by virtually everyone, from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood
Watch program to the new Aquaculture Stewardship Council, which recently
published its first standards for shellfish. A key to sustainability,
these groups say, is learning to eat farther down the food chain.
Shellfish are just one step up from the bottom. And besides producing a
healthy product low in fat and high in omega-3s, shellfish farms clean
the water of excess nutrients.
Raso, with his powerful build, five-o’clock
shadow, and fisherman’s hoodie, looks more like the collegiate wrestler
he once was than the greenest guy in the aquaculture business. He
started his farm his senior year and was soon selling his oysters at
farmers markets. “I’d get there, look around, and say, What am I doing
around all these crunchy people?” Raso says. “But then I started making
more money, started eating local foods, and you know what? That stuff
was good.” Raso now serves 800 people a day in the summer at the
Matunuck Oyster Bar. Meanwhile the University of Rhode Island has sent
him on teaching trips to Africa, where aquaculture is exploding—and
where people desperately need affordable, healthy protein.
A few hundred miles north, in the clear, frigid
waters off Casco Bay, two Maine watermen, Paul Dobbins and Tollef Olson,
have stepped down the food chain even farther. After watching one
commercial-fishery closure after another devastate Maine’s coastal
communities, they launched the first commercial kelp farm in the U.S.,
in 2009. They started with 3,000 linear feet of kelp line and last year
farmed 30,000, harvesting three species that can grow up to five inches a
day, even in winter. Their company, Ocean Approved, sells kelp as
fresh-frozen, highly nutritious salad greens, slaw, and pasta to
restaurants, schools, and hospitals along the Maine coast. Delegations
from China, Japan, and South Korea have visited the farm—the seaweed
industry is a five-billion-dollar business in East Asia.
Let us all eat kelp? “We call kelp the virtuous
vegetable,” says Dobbins, “because we are able to create a nutritious
food product with no arable land, no fresh water, no fertilizer, and no
pesticides. And we’re helping clean the ocean while doing it. We think
the ocean would approve.”
Contributing writer Joel K. Bourne, Jr.,
is working on a book about food. Brian Skerry photographed the bluefin
tuna for our March issue.
The magazine thanks The Rockefeller
Foundation and members of the National Geographic Society for their
generous support of this series of articles.
All maps and graphics: Virginia W.
Mason, Jason Treat, and Matthew Twombly, NGM Staff; Shelley Sperry.
Integrated Aquaculture, source: Stephen Cross, University of Victoria,
British Columbia. Indoor Aquaculture, source: Blue Ridge Aquaculture.
Open-Ocean Aquaculture, source: Brian O'Hanlon, Open Blue. Pounds for
Pound, sources: Malcolm Beveridge, WorldFish; Rodney Hill, University of
Idaho; Robert Swick, University of New England, Australia; U.K.
Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board. Farming Soars as Wild
Catches Stall, sources: FAOSTAT; Global Trade Information Services.
------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.