The Ocean’s 1%
A story of efficiency and progress
Approximately 20, 000 years ago, somewhere in the area between modern day Syria and the very South-East of Turkey, farming began. To this day, it is debated if farming began from a single point of origin, or some extraordinarily innovative individual who was tired of chasing animals faster than them.
Possibly the domestication of plants and animals was conceived in many places at around the same time, gradually spreading across the world from what scientists call “The Fertile Crescent” in todays Levant area.
One undeniable truth, however, is the monumental impact the invention of farming has had. This shift in paradigm has changed literally everyone’s life’s forever and enabled humans to flourish on our planet.
It is not exactly clear why people started farming. It might have been caused by a shift in climate, a significant diminishing of wildlife and need for more nutrition, a singular lazy but highly inventive soul, or a combination of the above. Knowing our fellow humans a little, the combination seems likely.
It was an immense win for efficiency. The abundance of food meant a more secure food supply, thereby enabling a steady source of nutrition and protein.(Many ancient grains contain a significantly larger amount of protein, nutrition and vitamins than most of the more modern varieties)
Over the years, humans got better at understanding their domesticated plants and animals. Selective breeding developed, strains were optimised and yield maximised.
The step change from hunter-gatherer nomads to farmers has enabled humanity to flourish. It even might have financed the energy trade-off homo sapiens made between less muscle and more brain power.
Now, let’s try and imagine the following:
Someone came up to you and would propose to hunt down the entire deer population of the nearby forest in order to turn it into a business.
Cut all the wild game he could find into thin stripes, bread it and freeze it to sell it worldwide, maybe secure a deal with a large fast food chain for thousands of tons of pressed Squirrel burgers.
Even better, he proposes that once that forest is empty, you could move on to the next one, there’s plenty of forest and still so many animals to hunt.
Not just the deer, no if you’d squeeze the birds tight enough, you can also sell them as pig feed.
You’d probably try and, let’s say, “minimise” conversation with that person after this pitch.
It seems rather off that in our world of farmers, the Ocean is still largely hunter-gatherer territory. Do not get me wrong, sport fishing and fishing by coastal communities to sustain themselves is absolutely fine.
That is the equivalent of current land game hunting practice, most likely with even less impact and much greater gain if they were fishing healthy oceans.
However, they are not. A mind blowing 90, 000, 000 tons of seafood are taken out of the oceans every year by industrial fishing. Everyone has heard the grim tales of crashing fish stocks, seen pictures of hundreds of sharks rowed up with fins cut off and trawlers drop tons of dead or dying bycatch back into the ocean.
(It’s not the same as alive, even if they get eaten by other marine animals, they don’t have offspring. That’s an issue.)
It’s an industry where humans have missed the step change that occurred in land farming, it is efficiency gone the wrong way. It’s pillaging with no concern for sustainability.
While all of this occurs, one of the oldest practices in the world still struggles to gain public acceptance for questioning the way we gather our seafood.
The rearing of aquatic animals and plants, aquaculture.
Yet the communication strategy is still one of “duck and cover”. We talk to ourselves in “the industry” because we are afraid of those out there who have read something about fish being farmed without skin
(Fish skin is actually one of the most valuable parts of a fish. We make collagen plasters from it that are a blessing for burning wounds)
or the myth of salmon farms being toxic pools rearing the next world-ending disease while the fish are so tightly packed together they can’t even move (the fish in the average Norwegian Salmon farm take up about 2% of the space, the rest is, you guessed it, ocean).
For the very largest part of the industry, none of that is true. Some of it was when this industry started out 40 years ago, figuring out how to grow many big fish in a net and hundreds of thousands of shrimp in a pond.
Animal health is the first and foremost concern of any aquafarmer. Not just for the obvious, but also economic reasons.
You want to do some more reading on this? Here is the handbook of the world’s biggest salmon producer, Mowi, publicly available.
At the beginning, mistakes were made. There was a steep learning curve, farmers got better, not just because there is great pleasure in healthy crops but also because farmers’ livelihoods depend on them.
If your animals are sick, you are losing money in the sale or worse, your stock collapses and you have nothing.
Every bad farmer is putting himself out of business a little more every day. It is simply economically not viable to constantly have sick animals that need medication to survive.
The health of the animal is the most crucial element in any aquaculture operation because farming seafood can be far more unpredictable than terrestrial mammals like cows or pigs.
A study of the six biggest shrimp producing countries in the world has yielded one consensus: The number one concern for any farmer, across all regions, is disease.
What I’m trying to share with you is this:
(I’m using “1%” in the title because that’s what the article in the source states would suffice to replace fishing. But we eat double that, so I took the liberty to double the amount. It’s probably a little less.)
Sounds a lot? Just crop production covers 11% of the earth’s land mass. An incredible 26% are taken up by lifestock farming and feed production. Feeling like you are squeezed tightly between a cattle ranch and a corn field?
Additionally, good fish farming is easier when a little further out at sea, and mostly out of sight. But more on that in another article.
Because we all rarely have the time to read long blog posts and so you can look forward to something on Wednesday, I’ll share the story of how the world’s most prized and probably most famous farmed fish, Atlantic Salmon, has became a beacon of efficient protein and good farming practices.
That is, if you farm it with its skin on.
The 2020 HATCH accelerator program is taking applications again. Check out the details at www.hatch.blue/program.
Keep up with the HATCH Aquaculture Accelerator by subscribing to the newsletter and connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
