Study on Closed Containment - Bernadette, Major Changes are Needed, Updated Feb 1, 2020

Hi Bernadette Jordan, Min of DFO

Please send me a link or copy of the study you are doing on on-land fish farms.

This sure looks like your staff does not know the industry as well as those of use who write about it do.

For example, my list of on-land fish farms around the world has 308 different farms: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2016/05/152-different-on-land-fish-farm-systems.html. This means that on-land, despite negative crowing to the opposite by the industry, is well established, and the in-ocean industry is on its last legs as on-land will take away its markets. This post has lots of studies and financial documents in it.

In North America for instance, Atlantic Sapphire, on land in Florida, when fully operational will be more than twice the entire Canadian market in the USA, at 260,000MT. The Canadian farms need to be on land or they are going to be wiped out. In addition, there are a half dozen other on-land farms coming on stream in the USA. BC’s market is 85% to the USA. They will be wiped out in the next few years, unless they come out of the water because consumers are fed up with in-ocean pollution.

That is the reality, and if your staff say different, I am sorry to say, they don’t know what they are talking about. In the past year, for example, my list of positive stories, studies, economic comparisons about on-land farms has grown to 300 articles/studies. That is the reality: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2018/11/good-news-post-links-to-on-land-closed.html. I suggest your staff start catching up with what the rest of us commentators already know.

The other side of this story is that because of DFO mismanagement for the past 50 years, wild salmon are in crisis in BC. You need to do something. Your Big Bar project is just one project on one river. Your program on habitat restoration across BC has serious flaws. Here is one post on it that you can read, illustrating problems and giving links to another post on the flaws with your habitat restoration program: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2019/11/salmon-habitat-restoration-raincoast.html.

The post also lays out a good method to solve chinook salmon problems in BC.

Thanks

DC (Dennis) Reid

Why the Public Doesn't Like Fish Farms - Grieg Seafood Canne't Figger Tit Owt

Per Grieg

You wonder what can be done to make people like fish farms.

You say it here: https://www.intrafish.com/sustainability/grieg-chairman-salmon-farmers-have-to-work-harder-to-change-public-perceptions/2-1-741515?utm_source=IntraFish%20Aquaculture%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=d7a7057730-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_01_29_07_00&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ec4b681694-d7a7057730-244877629.

The reason is: the gross environmental carnage caused by in-ocean fish farms.

But you don’t see what is staring you in the face. You see the problem as: ‘Salmon farmers have to work harder to change public perceptions.’

This is a variation on the old communication’s spin that you have to solve the misinformation by educating the public so they understand how wonderful in-ocean fish farms really are. You have been doing the same thing for 50 years and expecting a different outcome.

And that is the problem: instead of making changes, like putting fish farms on land and using their sewage for aquaponics, your perception is that there is something wrong with the public who don’t like in-ocean fish farms. You will keep on getting the same answer because you keep on saying the public is the problem.

If you want to solve this issue, here is the answer: put all of your fish farms on-land, sequester sewage and reuse it, avoid the use of antibiotics, lice chemicals, all in-ocean diseases and so on. And eliminate using ocean forage fish for feed. Make it from another source so that you are not killing protein to make protein, and taking food from the mouths of hundreds of millions of 3^rd World people. See the Sea Around Us document. (1)

Don’t change consumers, change the industry, and the public will change their attitude. You are behind the 8-ball on this one. Right now, my list of 308 on-land fish farm companies are making the changes the public wants. (2)

And here is my list of 300 good news articles on on-land advantages in the past year. (3) .

And companies like Atlantic Sapphire, on-land in Florida USA, are on the brink of wiping you out. You don’t have much choice. So make the choice for on-land and people will like you.

DC Reid

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1. The Sea Around Us Document can be found here:  http://www.seaaroundus.org/.

2. 308 On-Land Fish Farms: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2016/05/152-different-on-land-fish-farm-systems.html.

3.  Good News Stories - about on-land fish farms:
https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2018/11/good-news-post-links-to-on-land-closed.html

Climate Change Comes Last With In-ocean Fish Farms

Go to this link and read: https://salmonbusiness.com/climate-comes-second-as-land-based-salmon-farms-attract-capital/?fbclid=IwAR1JzGz_iyAK31kXkI3vHmU_dJWHCoUf5ckVRQ6y-41Dn7rkmecRspxniP8.
You'll be rolling your eyeballs at the falsehoods claimed as fact.

These are the claims: 1. Fish farms don't pollute the ocean; 2. The fish feed conversion rate is better than cows; and, 3. Their jobs are climate friendly.

All three are BS.

First: A. $10.4B, B. Dead Zones C. Bengal Bay. D Land-based Agriculture Sewage

Salmon Business makes the false statement about in-ocean: "Nor is it necessary to purify the water, which is crucial and energy-intensive on land. Nature itself takes care of this."

And by this sleight of hand, the fish farm industry disregards the huge amount of sewage it puts in oceans all around the world.

A. But this is false. The common conversion ratios found  in the literature are between 3-fish = the sewage of 1 human, to 10-fish = the sewage of one human. And after much research, I calculated the in-ocean cost in BC. See: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2017/02/fish-farm-sewage-huge-cost-to-bc.html.

The conservative range of fish farms sewage in BC is between $10.4B to $31.2B, a huge cost that society pays, not fish farms. The cost is huge and it happens all around the world. Anyone can calculate the sewage cost anywhere using my method.

B. Dead Zones. The reality is that there are now 700 dead zones with no oxygen in the oceans, caused largely by sewage, acidification, and the ocean absorbing so much green house gas, that were they not there, the earth would already be 35 degrees warmer than it now is. In other words, we would all be dead. Fish farms produce huge amounts of sewage and need to be put on land, as we are all in peril.

See:  https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2020/01/dead-zones-oceans-at-critical.html.

C. Bengal Bay. Huge amounts of sewage, acquaculture, farming, plastic waste is creating a dead zone in such a huge body of water, it is at the tipping point for killing other oceans. The researchers call it a catastrophe.

See: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2017/02/killing-our-oceans-with-fish.html.

D. Landbased. The reality is that sewage can be sequestered on land, whether it is from a cow or a fish. Then it can be reused as fertilizer. Milwaukee, for example, produces Milorganite from its human sewage and sells it for more than $40M every year. More commonly, land based fish farms will reuse their sewage growing vegetables, so it isn't wasted killing our oceans with fish.

Second: Feed Conversion Rates/Comparison with Cows

A. Fish farms like to claim they are now at 1 kg feed in to 1 kg in salmon out. However, the Sea Around Us, told me that it is more like 2 to 2.4 kg. And, killing protein to make protein is a waste of protein that should be fed to humans.

See:  http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2016/08/jack-mackerel-fish-farms-buffalo.html.

B. Comparison with Cows. Fish farms saying fish put on more protein per kg of feed than cows, is a false comparison. It is apples and oranges. You can't compare fish protein with fibrous carbohydrate, most of which is simply structural components that are not absorbed.

And fish farms have killed off 19 of 20 global forage fish stocks to feed farmed fish. And, it is reprehensible not to feed these to humans, taking the food out of their mouths, to raise an expensive product for first world mouths. Check the Sea Around Us, a huge, global study.

See:  http://www.seaaroundus.org/doc/publications/books-and-reports/2016/End_Use_Reconstruction_Report.pdf.

Third: Climate Friendly Jobs

Well, to make this claim, you have to ignore the sewage of in-ocean that drifts out of nets to foul hundreds of miles of ocean, in a time where oceans are now in very bad shape. The rest of us don't want the oceans destroyed.

In fact, in Canada, Scotland and Norway, in-ocean fish farms produce more sewage than the entire human population.

See this for the calculation: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2015/11/fish-farm-sewage-more-than-entire-human.html.

We don't want rising temperatures, algal blooms, vast acidification in-ocean, while on-land sewage has no such effects. Do remember we would already all be dead if there was not ocean to absorb greenhouse gases.

Go read the Dead Zones article above and give yourself a good scare about how bad things are for our oceans right now. And us.

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And, one last quote: "While the well-tempered coastline of British Columbia is well-suited for open cage aquaculture, remote areas here don’t have any competitive advantage for land-based salmon production. On the contrary. It will be both long and expensive to transport the fish to the market."

This also is false because any on-land farm in the same place as in-ocean, has exactly the same distance to market. Duh.

Secondly, it is likely that most on-land in BC will be in the Lower mainland and thus be closer to markets than in-ocean.And the new on-land in the USA may wipe out Canadian in-ocean markets, Atlantic Sapphire is one large example.

Dead Zones - Oceans at Critical Crossroads - Fish Farm And Other Pollution Must Stop

First: I think that the worst problem with fish farms is their sewage, their eutrophying the world's oceans, their acidification, how they are suffering more and more algal bloom, ocean warming catastrophes.

Second: Right now, a major new report on the oceans has come out; oceans are already at a critical crossroads and if we don't do something big and soon to prevent pollution/sewage/oxygen depletion, they are without more time for the world. Oxygen is depleting to a level that is making them less and less able to absorb pollutants, and the greatest amount of ocean rising is being caused by their warming and thus expanding. This has nothing to do with glaciers melting. It is in addition to that side of the problem.

Read the Independent news piece and weep. Fish farms must come out of the ocean, and their problems taken care of on land, for example, their sewage used to grow vegetables in coupled aquaponics sheds of tiered vegetables.

Here is the story on the report, in the Independent. Do go and read it. Here is the title:

‘Dead zones’ expanding rapidly in oceans as climate emergency causes unprecedented oxygen loss.

Largest ever study into issue potentially impacting ‘hundreds of millions of people’ a ‘wake-up call’ for world leaders at COP25.

And this is the link: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-oceans-oxygen-loss-dead-zones-cop25-madrid-iucn-a9237116.html?fbclid=IwAR2-ElAIi_7MNc-1HJF7FHua4MA74BbVj8Ls88WrJGEOc_TKUbtyCd2M4ng.

The lead paragraph says it all:

"“Dead zones” are rapidly appearing in the world’s oceans as they lose oxygen at an unprecedented rate due to climate change, sewage pollution and farming practices, presenting an existential threat to marine life and ecosystems, according to a vast new study.

"The overall level of oxygen in the oceans has dropped by roughly 2 per cent, while the number of known hypoxic “dead zones” – where oxygen levels are dangerously low – has skyrocketed from 45 known sites in the 1960s to at least 700 areas now dangerously devoid of the life-giving compound [O2], some encompassing thousands of square miles."

And it goes on:

 “This is perhaps the ultimate wake-up call from the uncontrolled experiment humanity is unleashing on the world’s oceans as carbon emissions continue to increase,” said Dan Laffoley, co-editor of the report.

"The International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) study is the largest ever analysis of the causes and impacts of ocean deoxygenation, which the organisation describes as “one of the most pernicious, yet under-reported side-effects of human-induced climate change”."

The rest of the article is every bit as bleak as this quote. It is a huge problem and we are at the brink of not being able to stop it.

The amount of energy absorbed by the ocean is five atom bombs landing per second. The COP25 conference just ended was hailed as humanity's last chance to stop the problem by not polluting the ocean any more. Oxygen levels dropping are creating huge dead zones. And the oceans are absorbing 90% of the atmospheric green house gas emissions heat, and they are losing the battle.

If the oceans had not absorbed the green house gas emissions since 1955, the surface of the earth would be 36 degrees celsius warmer than it is now, and we would all be dead. This is not a joke. It is very serious and fish farms, along with other things need to come out of the ocean.

Third: I spent considerable time figuring out how to quantify the cost of fish farm sewage released into the ocean. The following post shows how to calculate the cost in any ocean in the world: https://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2017/02/fish-farm-sewage-huge-cost-to-bc.html.

Skim the voluminous references at the bottom, which shows that I did the work required to do the calculation. Note in particular the Op Ed in the Times Colonist by  Ken Ashley, Director of Rivers Institute, which is item 17. The title, as I recall, was: Dilution is not the Solution. He said that today any engineering student would laugh at the suggestion that you can release sewage into the ocean and expect that the problem just disappears.

And the sewage cost is astronomical. The $10.4B that I calculated for fish farms in BC, is the low end of conservative, while the other end of conservative is $31.2B. 

Fourth: The Bengal Bay sewage, etc. is one huge example of the crisis now affecting far reaches of our oceans. The link is in this post: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2017/02/killing-our-oceans-with-fish.html.

The point is clear: fish farms need to be on land. Humanity can no longer allow the Killing of the Oceans.We need to stop releasing human sewage as well. And so on. The clock is ticking.

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 And, another link:  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ocean-acidification-threatens-the-u-s-economy/?utm_source=Watershed+Watch+Email+List&utm_campaign=548e020e4b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_01_16_12_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_405944b1b5-548e020e4b-166907249&mc_cid=548e020e4b&mc_eid=5777c92bcd.

The article is about acidification of the world's oceans: "Ocean acidification threatens to cause billions of dollars in damage to the U.S. economy, harming everything from crabs in Alaska to coral reefs in Florida and the Caribbean, NOAA researchers said in a new report.

"Carbon dioxide emissions and ocean acidification are occurring at an "unprecedented" rate, deteriorating valuable fisheries and tourist destinations across the United States and its territories, NOAA said in a draft research plan for ocean acidification."

This article is based on a report that you can read on their site.

And another link:  https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/earth-s-oceans-are-hotter-ever-getting-warmer-faster-n1114811?utm_source=Watershed+Watch+Email+List&utm_campaign=548e020e4b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_01_16_12_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_405944b1b5-548e020e4b-166907249&mc_cid=548e020e4b&mc_eid=5777c92bcd. It is on the report cited above in the main article.

""The amount of heat we have put in the world's oceans in the past 25 years equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom bomb explosions," Cheng said in a statement."

Fish Farms Spread Viruses/Diseases Around the World, Updated Feb 11, 2020

Chapter 6 - Determinants of Emergence of Viral Diseases in Aquaculture

Read this article by Fred Kibenge, who was one of only two fish farm virus shops in the world, until the CFIA plotted his demise at the OIE: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128015735000061.


Here is the abstract to this piece, which is chapter from a book on the spread of viruses and their diseases by fish farms:

Aquaculture, the intensive water rearing of fish, mollusks and crustaceans, remains the world’s fastest growing sector producing food of animal origin. This high-density rearing of aquatic animals involves substantial animal stress, which facilitates diseases. Moreover, the burgeoning international aquaculture expansion and expanding global trade in live aquatic animals and their products facilitate long-distance geographical redistribution of aquatic animal species and their viruses. This chapter presents a context for understanding the drivers responsible for the emergence of viral diseases in aquaculture and fisheries. The most recent definition of an “emerging infectious disease” is used to group emerging aquatic animal viruses into eight categories: (1) a virus introduced in a new host and new geographic area; (2) a virus infecting the same host, but introduced in a new geographic area; (3) enzootic virus with increased pathogenicity in the same host (manifesting as increased incidence or more severe disease); (4) enzootic virus with increased host range; (5) enzootic virus with expanded geographic range; (6) increased awareness; (7) improved diagnosis and surveillance and (8) newly discovered viral cause of existing disease. An emerging aquatic animal viral disease may fit into several of these categories depending on the sequence of events involved and geographical area concerned. The drivers (attributes or causal factors) of emerging viruses can be categorized into virus drivers, animal host drivers, environment drivers and anthropogenic drivers. The interplay of these drivers manifests into new or previously unrecognized viral diseases or reemerging viral diseases in aquaculture and fisheries. A separate distinct category is introduced for those viral diseases whose incidence is decreasing as a result of anthropogenic means or through natural means because this is the ultimate goal of disease control and prevention.

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Here in BC, DFO has refused scientific evidence on harm and killing of wild salmon by PRV four times now:  https://alexandramorton.typepad.com/alexandra_morton/2020/01/the-virus-prv-brings-out-the-worst-in-dfo.html?fbclid=IwAR1RVl5HttXekuttvJChNOwu51SufY3oxLT3uc7hZ_TScKjBL5nyr0siMuE.