The history of farmed salmon in Norway
Let’s salmonrise..
In advance, a thank you to Paul Greenberg for his chapter “The Selection of A King” in “Four Fish”. I am heavily leaning on it and it is one of the books that raised my interest in aquaculture. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you are interested in gaining an understanding of why we eat the seafood we eat.
The first time I visited a salmon farm was in Norway, a relatively small site about an hour west of Bergen, located on the beautiful Norwegian coast. When heading out to a fjord in October, you normally expect to get wet, from above and below, freeze your fingers off and likely not see much. The opposite was the case. We set out on an absolutely pristine autumn day with not a single cloud in the sky of what is known to be one of the wettest places on earth.
After about an hour drive between picturesque little villages, crossing bridge after bridge from island to island we reached the farm main building, tucked away in a side arm, adjacent to a small assembly of colourful little houses.
We were greeted by management and welcomed into a beautiful building with a cantina, traditional wood furniture and a glass front leading out to a balcony overlooking the fjord. Being split into two groups, we were led down to the docks to gear up on life jackets and admire the old boats and the former salting shed, which had been turned into a museum.
While flying over the perfectly transparent and flat water of the fjord in a small speed boat and only about 200m away from the shore, we could see multiple large net pens arrayed in one long row pointing towards the open ocean.
We stopped at the most outward pen and got onto the cage ring. While these were some of the smaller kind, they still easily support 20 people walking on them. Admiring the large fish that made their circles below us, clearly visible down to several meters deep, we could even make out the cleaner fish that live together in Polyculture with the Salmon, keeping the sea lice population in check.
After spending about 20 minutes on the cage and witnessing the automated feeding system in action, the farm manager took us back to the beautiful cafeteria where we were fed some excellent salmon chowder as we admired the view.
Everything seemed very easy, orderly and clean, they even had a full auditorium to teach their guests about the development of their animals, their farm and their feeding culture. It feels like this farm has forever been here, deeply integrated into Norwegian culture and their sense of identity. Norway is Salmon, Salmon is Norway. But, these farms came into existence within the last 50 years or less, the entire industry is very young, yet thriving and deeply integrated into Norwegian coastal life.
How did that happen?
We often talk about fish farming as a “young industry”, yet also as “one of the oldest practices of rearing animals”. Well what is it now? It is both, and salmon is no exception.
Yet, there is an important distinction. When we talk about humans capturing juvenile fish to raise them in captivity, we do not call that farming. For lack of a better distinction it became known as “ranching”. Now, if you have broodstock that you build over years which spawn in captivity, yielding you new eggs every year and you raise those from egg to edible fish, that is called “farming”.
To be clear:
“Ranching”= You caught fish, you’re feeding them, you’re selling them bigger
“Farming”= You raised fish from the egg up that have been spawned by fish you have already in your farm, your so called “Broodstock”.
Why is this distinction important? The most obvious and also very important one is that in ranching, catching juvenile fish is dangerous for a wild fish population because you are taking away the spawners of the next generation.
You take fish away from the ocean before they can replicate, diminishing the wild stock overall and impacting the next generation of fish.
Farming on the other hand does compromise wild stocks much less (close to not at all in best-practice farms, but the topic is a hot debate) and when the feed is right, a much lower impact and Food Conversion Rate (FCR). But more on that later.
Salmon seems to have been a highly desired fish for hundreds of years. The first record of Salmon ranching dates back to the 13th century, where in France people would block off parts of any river that contained salmon and trap them in there to feed them until they could be sold to the nobles.
Nowadays, when you think of Salmon, you think of Norway. It is an incredibly strong brand. The Norwegian Salmon industry were the ones who introduced it to the sushi plate and made it fashionable all over the world.
In the early 1960s, two brothers in Titra, a small town on an island west of Trondheim, started collecting juvenile Salmon from local rivers and raising them in nets suspended in the local fjord. They fed them chopped up herring, something easily found locally, and the fish grew. Sivert and Ove Grøndvendt were doing this as a trial, to see if they could make some money with the skyrocketing price of Salmon, which stocks were already in steep decline. And they did. By protecting the Salmon from predators and giving them a regular diet, the fish flourished and the brothers made some real money. And told everybody.
(Note: A source in this text points to two Danish brothers doing the same two in 1959. That is correct, but not mentioned here since I’m focusing on Norway.)
As more and more people on the coast started copying the brothers, someone from the terrestrial animal world took notice. Trained sheep breeder Trygve Djedrem, at this point writing his thesis, spoke to his supervisor about the potential of applying the breeding logic of Jay Laurence Lush to salmon farming. Now, what was this potential?
Two core factors of breeding are number of generations and the headcount of each of these generations. The more generations you get, the more clearly you can demonstrate your progress and select further. The more offspring you have, the more variety you get for your selection. This is what was hard about breeding large land animals for livestock. Their generations are fairly slow, and they normally don’t have very many offspring, especially in cattle. The average generation interval in beef cattle is 5 years, in Salmon it is 2 years. 60% percent faster.
Now, offspring. Cattle is normally one, twins are too rare. Salmon? Up to 800 eggs per pound of body weight, making it somewhere between 2,000–10,000 eggs per female Atlantic Salmon. In the wild, about 99% of these eggs are eaten by other predators or lost. Not in a breeding program.
Salmon accomplished in only 14 years and 7 generations what took cattle 60 years. The growth rate of the bred Atlantic Salmon doubled, skyrocketing Norwegian Salmon capacity to 500 000t in under 30 years, making Norway the world leader in Salmon overall.
This improvement all happened within Akvaforsk, now a part of the Norwegian research organisation NOFIMA. Most Salmon in the world, whether Chile, Iceland, Canada or Scotland, can trace their heritage back to Akvaforsk.
This breeding program has lead to great change in the metabolism and nature of the animal, to the point where it could be considered its own species. What began as Salmo Salar (Atlantic Salmon) at Akvaforsk could now be considered Salmo Domesticus.
But what impact does this have? Here is where it gets interesting from a resource point of view.
An Atlantic Salmon in the wild consumes about 10 kg of smaller marine life to put on one kg of weight. That equals to a food conversion ratio (FCR) of 10:1.
Farming this fish, the way we have changed it, is one of the most efficient ways in the world to create protein. Salmon aquaculture CAN be a net-gain when the fish have been fed right, but they are always a step up compared to a wild Salmon if your indicator is the total amount of wild fish needed to feed it.
Of course fishing wild fish to feed fish in captivity is problematic. This is the next step this industry is taking, solving the issue with wild-caught feed sources. And there are many out there already with viable solutions in the market. This change is rapid, happening away from the public eye because, well, it has not been too favourable. “We’ll get back to you once we are sure we can report a win” seems to be the current mentality.
However, if fish farming can be more sustainable than any other protein farming techniques in the world is not an “if” question, it’s a “when” question. We might very well already be there.
This article comes with a second part explaining the stages of a salmon lifecycle and farming techniques in more detail, discussing known issues in farming as well as introducing promising alternative feeding solutions. It will publish Friday 8th of May.
