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.