“Trout need lots of clean, fresh oxygen to thrive,” says Walker, 34. Some grass is good, but too much can deplete dissolved oxygen, slow waterflow and clog drains, “which stresses the fish. And calm fish are healthy fish; healthy fish are delicious fish.” 

Earthen ponds at Smoke in Chimneys trout farm.

This is part of Walker’s annual maintenance routine at Smoke In Chimneys trout farm, which opened in 2019. He’ll spend the day weeding and cleaning, then harvest the remaining fish in the next week or so. The pond then gets a break from production to naturally incorporate or filter out excess nutrients from the ecosystem. In the fall, it will again be loaded with thousands of baby trout. They’ll start their lives here, then cycle through a dozen similar impoundments—that together hold more than 20,000 fish at various stages of maturation—for about two years until they’re ready for harvest. 

“It takes a stupid amount of labor to do it this way compared to big commercial aquaculture operations,” says Walker. “But this is the only way to raise trout that consistently taste like they’ve been pulled fresh out a mountain stream.” 

That’s because the pond is part of a restored, 1930s US Department of the Interior gravity-fed trout hatchery and research facility in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains that was abandoned in the early 1990s due to budget cuts and remoteness. Here, there are no electric pumps, plastic tanks, antibiotics, mechanical agitators, recirculated water, chemical additives or computer monitoring. Water comes from a pristine, 54-degree spring that gushes from the bedrock at 2,000 gallons a minute. It is carried to the ponds through a series of pipes and concrete raceways that mimic natural trout streams, then empties into an adjacent creek. The shale-bottom impoundments are lined with native plants, surrounded by pollinator gardens and selectively managed forest. They’re filled with naturally occurring microbes, insects, amphibians and crustaceans. Walker and two employees hand-survey populations monthly for signs of illness or stress. They harvest and process about 400 whole trout a week, then pack them in coolers for shipping to restaurants and individual customers.

“There are a lot of small-scale trout producers in the US, but this is truly a diamond-in-the-rough situation,” says freshwater aquaculture researcher and current US Trout Farmers Association president Jesse Trushenski. Most similar facilities either vanished during the big-ag-fueled Blue Revolution of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s or are still used to supplement native wild trout populations for fishing. Then there’s the production side: The nation’s largest commercial producer—Boise, Idaho-based Riverence—churns out more than 22 million pounds of trout a year compared to Smoke In Chimney’s give-or-take 120,000.

This is a small, extremely high-end facility operating on historic infrastructure, says Trushenski. “If other commercial facilities [like the Walker’s] exist, there can’t be more than one or two.”

Walker also touts Smoke In Chimney’s sustainability versus typical fish-focused commercial aquaculture farms. On one hand, he likens his farm’s production methods to the inland freshwater equivalency of regenerative livestock farming. 

“This approach is without a doubt going to affect a net positive environmental impact,” says Trushenski. The system acts like a natural waterway, using gravity and hydrostatic pressure to move perfectly balanced water from a limestone aquifer. It requires no electricity or additives to operate. It’s effectively a restored habitat for depleted natural fish populations where, like rotational grazing, trout cycle through different impoundments as they grow and mature, nurturing their needs while playing a supportive role in the overall ecosystem. A percentage of newly hatched fish escapes into the nearby stream, bolstering habitat and wild populations. 

Smoke in Chimneys trout farm.

Meanwhile, more farm-raised trout on the market means less extractionary pressure on local streams. It also helps balance the increasing gap in wild-caught seafood production due to overfishing, climate change and human population growth.

“This is an ecological win-win,” says Trushenski. “You’re boosting stream health and native fish populations while making inroads on a problem that is only going to get worse with time.” 

Walker appreciates sustainability and historic novelty—and leverages both to market and tell the story of his trout—but he’s more concerned with the quality of product the method yields. And testimonies back up his claims. 

“There’s this rich, nutty, buttery decadence. It tastes clean and refreshing, like spring water,” says Patrick Pervola, research and development chef at Michelin-starred Washington D.C. eatery, Albi. “This is some of the best fish I’ve tasted in my career. It rewrites what you think of as possible for farm-raised fish.”

The limestone aquifer. Photography via Smoke in Chimneys.

But despite all the benefits—and roughly 2,900 miles of native wild trout streams—Smoke In Chimneys is one of about three other commercial trout farms in Virginia. And the others are tiny by comparison and sell almost exclusively to family friends or at local farmer’s markets. That means, by Trushenski’s estimate, about 95 percent of trout consumed in Virginia comes from production strongholds like Idaho, Washington or North Carolina. 

She says the problem stems from issues around education. 

First, most seafood consumers have never tasted wild-caught or truly healthy farm-raised trout, and that lack of exposure leads to decreased demand. Second, Virginia focuses aquatic agricultural resources on marine seafood, so there are no dedicated high school or collegiate-level educational programs for inland freshwater aquaculture. And would-be farmers can’t pursue opportunities they don’t know about.

“To put it into perspective: When I started out, I called around to agricultural extension offices at [the state’s leading universities] and there was literally nobody there that could tell me anything useful about farm-raised trout,” says Walker. “I had to rely on old books from the 1930s I dug up on eBay, rangers working at hatcheries, farmers in other states and trial-and-error to figure it out.”

Photography via Smoke in Chimneys trout farm.

But Walker remains undaunted. He and wife, Shannon, spent a year sifting through regulatory red tape and launched a small USDA-inspected processing plant near the farm. They work tirelessly on social media and with restaurateurs to educate eaters about the virtues of healthy, farm-raised trout. 

Walker has also joined the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Aquaculture Advisory Board and is in talks with administrators at the new Virginia Tech Aquaculture and Seafood Production Facility. He’s using the position and access to advocate for increased resources around gravity-fed inland freshwater aquaculture. He envisions a future where Smoke In Chimneys has expanded to include one to two dozen sister farms and helped dramatically increase trout consumption throughout the state and Mid-Atlantic. 

We have “the natural resources and the market potential is there,” says Walker, noting $67.5 million in USDA-reported 2018 sales at farms in the top two US trout-producing states alone. “All we need is the support to help us get the ball rolling and tap into that potential. And I don’t plan to quit until that happens. I want to remind Virginians why trout is our state fish.”

The post Meet the Modern Trout Farmer Using Gravity to His Advantange appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Last week, the FAO released its annual report on the state of aquaculture — which refers to the farming of both seafood and aquatic plants — and fisheries around the world. The organization found that global production from both aquaculture and fisheries reached a new high — 223.3 million metric tons of animals and plants — in 2022. Of that, 185.4 million metric tons were aquatic animals, and 37.8 million metric tons were algae. Aquaculture was responsible for 51 percent of aquatic animal production in 2022, or 94.4 metric tons.

The milestone was in many ways an expected one, given the world’s insatiable appetite for seafood. Since 1961, consumption of seafood has grown at twice the annual rate of the global population, according to the FAO. Because production levels from fisheries are not expected to change significantly in the future, meeting the growing global demand for seafood almost certainly necessitates an increase in aquaculture.

Photography via Shutterstock/Adnan Buyuk.

Though fishery production levels fluctuate from year to year, “it’s not like there’s new fisheries out there waiting to be discovered,” said Dave Martin, program director for Sustainable Fisheries Partnerships, an international organization that works to reduce the environmental impact of seafood supply chains. “So any growth in consumption of seafood is going to come from aquaculture.”

But the rise of aquaculture underscores the need to transform seafood systems to minimize their impact on the planet. Both aquaculture and fisheries — sometimes referred to as capture fisheries, as they involve the capture of wild seafood — come with significant environmental and climate considerations. What’s more, the two systems often depend on each other, making it difficult to isolate their climate impacts.

“There’s a lot of overlap between fisheries and aquaculture that the average consumer may not see,” said Dave Love, a research professor at the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University.

Tuna farm rings. Photography via Shutterstock/Karina Movsesyan.

Studies have shown that the best diet for the planet is one free of animal protein. Still, seafood generally has much lower greenhouse gas emissions than other forms of protein from land-based animals. And given many people’s unwillingness or inability to go vegan, the FAO recommends transforming, adapting, and expanding sustainable seafood production to feed the world’s growing population and improve food security.

But “there’s a lot of ways to do aquaculture well, and there’s a lot of ways to do it poorly,” said Martin. Aquaculture can result in nitrogen and phosphorus being released into the natural environment, damaging aquatic ecosystems. Farmed fish can also spread disease to wild populations, or escape from their confines and breed with other species, resulting in genetic pollution that can disrupt the fitness of a wild population. Martin points to the diesel fuel used to power equipment on certain fish farms as a major source of aquaculture’s environmental impact. According to an analysis from the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown, swapping out fossil fuel-based generators on fish farms for renewable-powered hybrids would prevent 500 million to 780 million metric tons of carbon emissions by 2050.

Fish food. Photography vis Shutterstock/Attasit Saentep.

Other areas for improvement will vary depending on the specific species being farmed. In 2012, a U.N. study found that mangrove forests — a major carbon sink — have suffered greatly due to the development of shrimp and fish farming. Today, industry stakeholders have been exploring how new approaches and techniques from shrimp farmers can help restore mangroves.

Meanwhile, wild fishing operations present their own environmental problems. For example, poorly managed fisheries can harvest fish more quickly than wild populations can breed, a phenomenon known as overfishing. Certain destructive wild fishing techniques also kill a lot of non-targeted species, known as bycatch, threatening marine biodiversity.

But the line between aquaculture and fish harvested from the wild isn’t as clear as it may seem. For example, pink salmon that are raised in hatcheries and then released into the wild to feed, mature, and ultimately be caught again are often marketed as “wild caught.” Lobsters, caught wild in Maine, are often fed bait by fisherman to help them put on weight. “It’s a wild fishery,” said Love — but the lobster fishermen’s practice of fattening up their catch shows how human intervention is present even in wild-caught operations.

An oyster farm in the Netherlands. Photography via Shutterstock/Elena Zadorina.

On the flipside, in a majority of aquaculture systems, farmers provide their fish with feed. That feed sometimes includes fish meal, says Love, a powder that comes from two sources: seafood processing waste (think: fish guts and tails) and wild-caught fish.

All of this can result in a confusing landscape for climate- or environmentally-conscientious consumers who eat fish. But Love recommends a few ways in which consumers can navigate choice when shopping for seafood. Buying fresh fish locally helps shorten supply chains, which can lower the carbon impact of eating aquatic animals. “In our work, we’ve found that the big impact from transport is shipping fresh seafood internationally by air,” he said. Most farmed salmon, for example, sold in the U.S. is flown in.

From both a climate and a nutritional standpoint, smaller fish and sea vegetables are also both good options. “Mussels, clams, oysters, seaweed — they’re all loaded with macronutrients and minerals in different ways” compared to fin fish, said Love.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post The World is Farming More Seafood Than it Catches. Is That a Good Thing? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In 2009, Maine lobster fishers were required to replace more than 27,000 miles of floating ground line (underwater ropes that float above the ocean floor and connect trawls) with whale-safe sinking line (which rests on or near the ocean floor, preventing whale entanglements). Then, in 2015, they were mandated to put more traps on each buoy to reduce the number of end lines, or individual points of harvest, in the water. By 2020, Maine lobsterers had to ensure their gear was labeled in case of a whale entanglement. The next year, regulators instituted a closure of a 1,000-square-mile area during a particularly lucrative time of year for lobsterers, and in 2022, regulations enforcing the use of weak links, which allow whales to more easily break free of entanglements, went into effect. Making these changes was costly and time-consuming for lobster harvesters.

Photography by Shutterstock.

But since right whales are so endangered—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that there are only about 360 North Atlantic right whales remaining, with only around 70 reproductively active females—advocates say it’s important to address threats to their continued existence now, before it’s too late. After all, large whales are important to their marine environments. “They are vital to the balance of marine ecosystems, play an important role in the food web and are key indicators of the overall health of the ocean,” says Jennifer Goebel, NOAA’s Marine Mammal Policy Analyst.

According to NOAA, regulating fishing equipment is key to protecting vulnerable right whales. “Vessel strike and entanglement are the leading threats to whales,” says Goebel. Until the required marking of lobster gear went into effect in 2020, it was difficult to attribute whale deaths and injuries to specific pieces of equipment. Since the regulation went into effect, other large whale species have been found entangled in Maine lobstering gear, demonstrating, says Goebel, that the equipment can, in fact, pose a threat to right whales as well.

Curt Brown, lobsterman and marine biologist for Ready Seafood, says that Maine’s lobstering industry has been proactive in complying with these new regulations. “We’re certainly not opposed to protecting right whales, quite to the contrary.” But many lobstermen and women question the necessity of these seemingly ever-more-restrictive right whale regulations, particularly because they maintain that there has been no documented entanglement of a right whale in Maine lobstering equipment since 2004, and there has never been a recorded right whale death associated with Maine’s lobstering industry. “Ultimately, we’re not in favor of being put out of business for rules and regulations that aren’t going to save any right whales,” explains Brown.

However, NOAA says that right whales do appear to be getting entangled in fishing rope off the coast of Maine, but the incidents can be difficult to document officially. “Most, over 85 percent, of all North Atlantic right whales show scars caused by entanglement, and about 100 new scars are detected each year, says Goebel. “Of the 1,600 entanglement scars and incidents evaluated by New England Aquarium researchers, only about 16 have been traced back to a fishing location—that is one percent. In most entanglement cases, no gear is observed. When gear is observed, it can rarely be retrieved.” Tracing these injuries back to the equipment that caused them is, therefore, quite complicated.

Lobster fishing in Vinalhaven, Maine, 2017. Photography by Shutterstock.

Ultimately, Maine lobsterers say that these regulations still pose significant risks to the financial viability of the industry. Maine’s lobster industry is composed of thousands of individuals, effectively all small business owners. Brown estimates that, conservatively, harvesters along the coast of Maine spent a collective $100 million adhering to regulations designed to protect right whales over the last 20 years, in addition to the hours of labor required to implement these changes. Although some state and federal subsidies are available for lobsterers, they say that the money doesn’t come close to covering the costs they’ve invested in making these changes.

In fact, some lobstermen, like Bruce Fernald, say that they very rarely even see whales out on the water. “We’re doing all this just because we’re supposed to, but there are no real issues with whales in our area,” says Fernald, who’s been fishing for more than 50 years. “We do it because we have to or you’ll lose your license.”

Some are feeling anxiety as the industry changes. “Within the last two years, there’s a lot of guys riding on the border of red,” says fourth-generation lobsterman Mike Sargent, who started fishing full-time in 2016. Rising costs of equipment and labor, plus supply chain shortages and a growing list of regulations, are making some lobsterers question their long-term prospects in the industry. A year ago, says Brown, “There were more boats for sale than I think I’ve ever seen, more traps for sale than I think I’ve ever seen.”

Sargent lives in Steuben, a town of 1,129 residents, and says that lobstering is really the only viable industry in town. “If fishing were to go south, this place would close up. There’s nothing here for me to do that I could support myself with the cost of living here. It just doesn’t exist.” 

Mike Sargent. Photography submitted.

Many of Maine’s lobsterers come from families that have done this work for generations, but it’s become more difficult for younger people to enter the industry. “Think, if you’re going to put your roots down here, you’re a young person wanting to start a family, the realization is it might not be here for you,” says Sargent. “There’s a good chance it won’t be here for your kids. So, do you want to put roots down here and not give your kid the same opportunities you had? You know, it’s a risk.”

The collapse of the lobster fishing industry could absolutely change the face of coastal Maine’s culture. Without a healthy, sustainable lobster fishery “many of these island communities would very quickly just turn into vacation homes for people from out of state, and that would be very different from what we have now,” says Brown.

Maine’s lobster fishers are hoping that things are starting to look up. In December of 2022, they won a six-year break from new regulations, which they hope will provide some stability for the industry and, in turn, for their communities. But regulators whose aim is to protect right whales still want to see changes in the industry, including wider use of ropeless fishing gear. Some environmentalists say that without the ability to enact new regulations, whales will die.

Brown underscored that the industry is well equipped to contend with the inevitable changes to come and that the six-year pause gives them some breathing room to adjust at a slower pace. But it’s still unclear how the industry will take shape after the conclusion of the six-year pause. What is clear, though, is that Maine’s lobsterers are committed to preserving their way of life. “The thought of losing this fishery to regulations that aren’t warranted is, in my mind, unacceptable,” says Brown. “People know Maine for its lobster resource. People don’t come to Maine to eat chicken.”

The post The Uncertain Future of Lobstering in Maine appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“I was always seeing these little segments of yellow rope,” says Shaw. “We would see thousands of them across the season.”

After asking around, Shaw realized that these little yellow ropes came from longline oyster aquaculture, an off-bottom growing technique that is particularly useful in areas where the bottom can’t support bottom-grown oysters due to the prevalence of burrowing shrimp. After the oysters are harvested, pieces of these ropes can end up back in the water, contributing to the issues of marine debris and microplastics pollution.

In 2019, Shaw called a meeting with the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association and the Willapa-Grays Harbor Oyster Growers Association. He presented the issue, and a discussion ensued about how to solve the problem. Oyster growers such as  Pacific Seafood began introducing processes to address these rope fragments. The industry response had an immediate effect.

In September of this year, Shaw went for a walk down a 2.5-mile stretch of beach that he visits frequently. 

“Prior to [2018 or 2019], I would pick up 500 to 600 pieces of yellow rope in a walk and bring in multiple bags,” says Shaw. On this walk, he found only three or four individual pieces.

“We just saw this immediate decline in the material that was coming out of Willapa Harbor,” says Shaw. “It was stunning.”

Beach clean-ups helped pull tens of thousands of pieces of yellow rope out of the environment. (Photography courtesy of John Shaw)

The Cluster Buster

Beach clean-ups in Washington state resulted in the collection of tens of thousands of pieces of yellow rope. Yellow rope affects beaches in the Pacific Northwest and is one part of a larger issue of marine debris pollution. But unlike things such as water bottles and glass fragments, this yellow rope comes from one specific source.

Longline aquaculture uses yellow polypropylene rope. To grow oysters this way, you have to splice an oyster shell with seed on it into the rope. As the seeds grow, they form a cluster.

“You get this big, almost flower of oysters,” says Kyle Deerkop, Washington Shellfish Farm manager for Pacific Seafood. “One shell can turn into 10 to 15 oysters.”

When harvesting, you cut between the clusters. After the oysters have been harvested, you’re left with softball- or cantaloupe-sized balls of shells. The industry recycles these shells—either new oysters will be set on them in the hatchery or the shells will be spread on oyster beds to catch natural set oysters. The problem has been that these clusters dispersed for natural catch production still held onto their yellow rope segments. That rope would eventually end up floating in the water and washed up on the beach.

After the 2019 meeting, nonprofits such as the Surfrider Foundation and Twin Harbors Waterkeeper also got involved in trying to address the issue. 

“There’s two things when you have a challenge like that. The first is to stop the flow of it to the environment,” says Deerkop. “And then the second is to clean up what’s out there.”

Yellow rope collected during beach clean-ups in southwest Washington. (Photography courtesy of John Shaw)

The industry and nonprofit groups worked to approach the issue from multiple angles—beach clean-ups, education and figuring out what interventions could intercept the yellow rope before it makes it back into the water. Pacific Seafood, with help from college interns from surrounding universities, got to work developing what they would end up calling the “Cluster Buster”—a machine that could take these shell clusters and break them apart, so that the rope within could be removed and disposed of. The Cluster Buster breaks apart the clusters but without damaging the shells. This is important, since the shells are usable for future growing operations. It took some trial and error to get it right.

“You don’t realize how much force it actually takes,” says Deerkop. “So, we were bending shafts, we were having to reconfigure the rollers.”

Left: The Pacific Seafood team picking rope from the “busted” clusters. Right: The team loads shells into the hopper. (Photography by Kyle Deerkop)

After they built their onsite Cluster Buster, they received funding from the Washington State Conservation Commission to develop a mobile version that could be used at the shell piles—not just those belonging to Pacific Seafood but also those of other companies. Longline oyster growers in Oregon and Washington will be able to borrow the mobile Cluster Buster, once processes are established for maintenance and repairs. A chance to use it annually would be sufficient for most growers, says Deerkop. Continued effort will be necessary to keep yellow rope numbers down.

Shaw is satisfied with the industry reaction. “I think that the industry should get kudos for having responded.”

Shared resource

In addition to the Cluster Buster, community engagement has resulted in other alternative endings for yellow rope. In one project, yellow rope collected during beach clean-ups was processed and delivered to Western Washington University, where it was used to make crab gauges, an industry tool to determine if a crab is big enough for harvest. In that instance, the yellow rope was recycled right back into the industry.

For Deerkop’s part, he and his farm team continue to go to beach clean-ups. He says it’s important to have the mindset of being invested in the health of the estuary, as a seafood company. Without clean water, he says, you can’t have clean shellfish.

“It is a shared resource, right? It’s important for our company and it’s important for the community.”

The post Stopping Aquaculture Rope Pollution at the Source appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“They can be divided into two categories,” says Claudio DiBacco, a research scientist with Canada’s Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “Those that have been around since the latter part of the 19th century, they don’t harm the environment. It’s the newcomers that have arrived in the last few decades that are the troublemakers,” he says.

How sea squirts arrive and spread in a new area is no mystery. Often, they hitch rides in the ballast water used to weigh down ships without cargo. “The larvae are invisible and float with the ocean currents. They’re onboarded with a ship’s ballast water, and when it discharges in a new location, so does the tunicate,” says Boris Worm, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University’s Ocean Frontier Institute. “It is almost impossible to keep them from spreading.”

Sea squirts are tiny (species range from 6-10 inches long) and have cute nicknames such as Compound Sea Squirt, Golden Star and Pancake Batter. But, despite their small stature and fun names, these invaders sucker themselves like barnacles to any hard surface, natural or manmade, singularly or in massive colonies. And they are heavier than they look. Made up of organs, sea squirts are 95 percent water; an oyster cage weighing five pounds can easily exceed 75 lbs. when attacked by colonized tunicates. 

“We weren’t prepared for how heavy they were.” (Photo courtesy of courtesy of Fisheries and Oceans Canada)

Colton D’Eon is a self-described sea farmer and chief operating officer for D’Eon Oyster Company in Yarmouth, NS.  He remembers the first time his oyster farm was hit with a tunicate infestation. “We weren’t prepared for how heavy they were, and lines snapped and we lost equipment. Now, we’re diligent. Our oysters are grown on the surface of the water in cages that can hold up to six bags of 300-1,200 oysters. We have learned to regularly take the bag and cage out of the water and let the sun and wind dry it out. This kills the tunicate but doesn’t solve the problem. They never go away,” he says.

It used to be that tunicates would die back in the cold winter water, and reemerge in the spring as the ocean warmed. “Now,” says DiBacco, “they’re finding thermal refuges, where the water stays warm enough for them to survive all year.”

Since the 1980s, there’s been an increase of more than two degrees Celsius (four degrees Fahrenheit) in the Gulf of Maine and surrounding waters. The average global ocean temperature has risen by only 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) during that time. “The rate of warming is more than twice as fast as the global average,” says Worm.

Where the Bay of Fundy converges with the Gulf of Maine, for example, the water has warmed from a low of -3 degrees Celsius in 1960 to a low of just above freezing in 2020.

In 2006, NASA scientists said warming sea surface temperatures were also causing a global decline in phytoplankton productivity, a main food source for tunicates and shellfish.

“This competition for resources has caused the growth rate of mussels in some areas with heavy tunicate populations to be reduced by 30 percent,” says DiBacco. In 2015, bio-fouling tunicates so severely affected mussel supply in Nova Scotia that there was a three-month shortage for shellfish consumers.  

Bio-fouling tunicates have severely affected mussel harvests. (Photo courtesy of courtesy of Fisheries and Oceans Canada)

Controlling bio-fouling organisms such as tunicates is expensive for fishermen, sometimes taking up to 10 percent of their profits in terms of manpower and equipment needed. These expenses can then be passed on to the consumer.

They are everywhere along the eastern coast of North America. The United States Department of Agriculture lists several species of sea squirts including clubbed and compound as invasive. In 2008, tunicates were found in Lake Tashmoo, a protected marine pond with shellfish aquaculture operations located on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. 

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts says oyster farmers along the US Eastern seaboard are continually finding cages and equipment covered with the brown-and-orange foam of the pancake batter tunicate. It takes months to clean it off and recoup the market loss of thousands of oysters suffocated by the invader. The institute is now studying the adaptive qualities of tunicates, wondering if there are any limits to their survival.

 “I don’t think there’s a way for humans to stop them,” says D’Eon.

Aside from manually flipping and drying cages, pressure washing to rinse off the fouling tunicates has also been effective, along with adding a chemical lime solution to infested mussel stocks. And starting in 2024, the Canadian government will implement new ballast water regulations that require ships to scrub the water of organisms before dumping it. But, ultimately, it may be climate change that solves the problem. 

In July 2023, Nova Scotia experienced a massive rain event. A total of 200 millimetres  of rain fell within 12 hours, adding fresh water to Halifax harbor where the DFO had set up plates to track tunicate populations. “After the storm,” says DiBacco, “the invasive tunicates were gone and, as of mid-September 2023, hadn’t returned. It might be that the rainfall lowered the salinity in the water, changing oxygen and PH levels and affecting reproduction. We’re still collecting data.”   

It’s a small flicker of hope for D’Eon, especially as more fresh water is coming. As polar ice caps melt, volumes will spill into the Atlantic. This, along with a warmer atmosphere and its ability to hold more moisture, increasing the frequency and velocity of rain events, could be the sea squirt’s kryptonite—an outcome for which fishermen and shellfish farmers have been hoping.

The post What Will Stop Troublemaking Sea Squirts Along North America’s Atlantic Coast? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

When you harvest oysters, you have to make sure you aren’t crossing over into restricted territory. To help, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources developed a web app for commercial and recreational shellfishers called iShellfish, that depicts state waters with demarcations for several categories including seaweed protection zones, oyster sanctuaries, aquaculture leases and more. Users can see where they are in relation to these boundaries, many of them hard to see in person.

“I can hold it in my hand and look at it and know exactly where I am without having to get the binoculars out to look,” says Harrison. The app helps him stay on the right side of the different boundaries. Crossing them could have serious consequences. “I could actually lose my license.” 

Screenshot of the iShellfish web app.

Harrison uses iShellfish regularly. When it comes to knowing where he can go, it takes all of the guesswork out of the process, he says. Harrison, also the president of the Talbot Watermen Association and chair of the County Oyster Committee for Talbot County, used to try to find individual boundary charts online, but the app compiles all of the information into one place.

Shellfish are both culturally and economically significant in coastal communities across the continent, but knowing which waters are legal and safe to harvest can present a significant obstacle. Behind these issues are wicked problems without simple solutions. But when it comes to figuring out where and when you can harvest shellfish, the answer may be as easy as downloading an app.

Helping farmers adapt

Some call North Carolina’s estuaries the “Napa Valley of oysters,” a nod to the abundance of perfect shellfishing conditions in the area. But being an oyster grower in this area also comes with its fair share of financial risk and unpredictability.

Heavy rainfall can flush pollutants and chemicals from roadways into the water. This is when pollutant concentrations in a waterbody can hit dangerous levels, and in North Carolina, the Division of Marine Fisheries enforces temporary closures for affected shellfish leases as a way to address the health risks associated with eating oysters from contaminated waters. 

These closures are critical for public health. But they also create a very inconvenient interruption for growers.

View of the water from Morehead City, North Carolina. (Photography by Lena Beck)

Before Natalie Nelson started working on the ShellCast app, there wasn’t an accessible tool in North Carolina that could help oyster farmers predict potential closures to their leases. Nelson is an associate professor in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department at North Carolina State University. ShellCast, which was piloted in 2021 and released to the public in 2022, was recently updated and expanded this year. It sources data from the National Weather Service’s probabilistic quantitative precipitation forecast, which shows the future precipitation possibilities.

“We’re essentially contextualizing [the forecast],” says Nelson. “So we provide that information in the context of the management criteria that are used to determine when the temporary harvest closures should occur.”

The app features a map of all the oyster waters in the state, and users can see whether the risk of closure is very low, low, moderate, high or very high. The forecast presents the risk level for the present day, one day out and two days out. 

Now, the team has expanded the app to include South Carolina and is working on expanding to Florida. Nelson says the farmers who benefit the most are the ones who are most vulnerable to low influxes of rain—that is, are more likely to experience a closure due to less rain.

“If they have a temporary closure that occurs, they are then suddenly in limbo, and they might not be able to harvest their products as planned,” says Nelson. “By having information, they’re at least able to assess whether or not they should potentially harvest early.” 

Screenshot of the ShellCast web app.

Mapping toxin risk

Toxin-producing algae and pollution present multiple obstacles to shellfish consumption. In coastal areas of Canada, a new app is mapping toxin risk to enable safe, local harvesting. 

The idea for Can U Dig It was developed by Q’ul-lhanumutsun Aquatic Resources Society (QARS), a coalition of Hul’q’umi’num’ communities. Intertidal shellfish are a traditional food source for these First Nations, and safe access to these foods is important to maintain. Trailmark Systems, a cultural and environmental consulting firm, took on the project.

“Folks do get sick by harvesting shellfish in these areas, and we really wanted to develop something that they felt was trustworthy and that they could use while they’re out in the field,” says Beth Keats, partner at Trailmark Systems. “QARS wanted to make sure that people would know when there is a partial opening so that they can go and exercise their rights to harvest and be safe to do it.”

Screenshot of the Can U Dig It app.

Can U Dig It harvests open-access government data from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, including which beaches are currently open or closed to shellfishing, as well as whether the closure is caused by biotoxins or sanitation issues. The openings can sometimes be short and easy to miss, says Keats, so it’s important to be able to identify harvest windows when they occur. Can U Dig It is also available in more languages besides English, including Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese. The app is usable on both Canadian coasts.

Harvesting shellfish contributes to a greater sense of well-being, says Keats, and is an especially important right for First Nations.

“It is so essential…to maintain that practice as they have for millennia.”

The post Harvesting Shellfish? Get the App appeared first on Modern Farmer.

This marks Patryn’s sixth year as a seaweed farmer, but he’s been working on the water for much longer. Hailing from a commercial lobstering family in Maine, Patryn sees cultivating this marine crop as a lifeline for a community threatened by fishing’s uncertain future. While he still casts his traps on occasion, farming kelp by hand and selling it as snacks and seasonings has become his main focus.

It may seem quaint compared to the industrial operations that grow most of the world’s food, but outfits like Patryn’s Nautical Farms are poised to skyrocket in number over the next few years. Now seen as a “future-proof” material, seaweed is a hardy, fast-growing protein source useful for everything from biofuel to petroleum-free plastic to consumer goods like utensils, soap, clothing, and of course, food. The World Bank said raising this versatile crop in just 5 percent of U.S. territorial waters would produce as much protein as 2.3 trillion hamburgers and sequester the carbon emissions of 20 million cars.

Given all that, the market, which stood at $15 billion two years ago, is projected to hit $24.92 billion in 2028. There were 30 venture investments in seaweed startups throughout North America last year, with some $130 million raised. The Department of Energy is throwing $22 million toward exploring how growing 500 million tons of macroalgae per year could meet 10 percent of the nation’s demand for transportation fuel.

Seaweed snacks represent just one of the many uses of seaweed. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Although China, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines still account for more than 95 percent of global production, farms in North America – particularly British Columbia, Alaska, and Maine – are cropping up to meet demand. But just like industrial agriculture on land, such operations can harm the environment – and given the role kelp forests play in sequestering carbon, the climate. Monocropping, the introduction of non-native species, and poor management have led the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to declare “commercial kelp harvesting is potentially the greatest threat to long-term kelp stability nationwide.”

In response, cultivators are calling for more policies to govern their business and protect waterways and marine ecosystems. This climate work is no less critical than reducing the world’s demand for beef or easing its dependence on fossil fuels because this ubiquitous plant provides essential habitat for hundreds of marine species, offers protection from storms and coastal erosion, and draws millions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere each year. Marine algae also provide around 50 percent of the planet’s oxygen. Seaweed is, in many ways, already saving the world. People like Patryn want to make sure their growing industry doesn’t do anything to mess that up.

“I don’t think it would be a good idea to have thousands of kelp farms all up and down the coast of Maine, peppered in every single bay,” he said. “Growing this industry overnight would be a good way to to tarnish it before it even gets off the ground.”

Thousands of species of seaweed fill the world’s oceans, but only a handful are cultivated for human consumption. In North America, kelps, which thrive in cold, shallow, nutrient-rich waters, are the most commonly farmed varieties.

In the wild, thick ribbons of the stuff stretch up to 200 feet long, sheltering a wide variety of sea life. Rumor has it that the sheer size of South American kelp forests led Charles Darwin to remark, “I can only compare these great aquatic forests with the terrestrial ones in the inter-tropical region. Yet if in any country a forest was destroyed, I do not believe nearly so many species of animals would perish as would here, from the destruction of the kelp.”

Growing the stuff is remarkably straightforward: Farmers cast seedlings out on ropes and submerge them until they’re ready to harvest a few months later. It’s also relatively cheap. Seaweed is a “zero-input crop,” meaning it doesn’t need any additional food, fertilizer, or freshwater to grow. Bren Smith, who started the regenerative ocean farming company GreenWave, writes in his book Eat Like a Fish that anyone with $20,000 and a boat has enough to start harvesting 10 tons of kelp per acre — and net as much as $120,000 per year doing it, given they find the right buyer.

When Patryn and Fogg started Nautical Farms back in 2017, they were lucky to grow a few hundred pounds in a season. Now, they’re managing a 5-acre sea farm in Englishman Bay and cultivating thousands of pounds of kelp in the process. They used to sell their harvest to a few buyers, but these days they have as many as half a dozen part-time employees helping them dry sugar kelp, skinny kelp, and alaria themselves to make nearly a dozen different snacks and other goods.

Most of the nation’s seaweed farming occurs in their home state of Maine, with its abundance of cold, clean water and working waterfronts, and in Alaska, which has those things and the nation’s longest coastline. The two states account for more than 85 percent of the U.S. supply of edible seaweed. The 27 operations within Atlantic Sea Farms in Maine, for example, harvested nearly 1 million pounds last year. A 100-acre Alaskan operation owned by Premium Aquatics, which sells its bounty under the brand Seagrove Kelp Co, has become the largest kelp farm in the U.S in the four years since its founding.

The nutrient-rich and biodiverse waters around Vancouver provide another thriving location for kelp cultivation. Cascadia Seaweed, also founded in 2019, operates eight farms covering 62 acres. It plans to have 1,235 acres under cultivation by 2025 (and that many more pending development) as it looks to expand more than tenfold in the next decade. Government funding has given the company a good head start: It has provided two grants worth $5.8 million to help build a new farm and processing facility.

Since most U.S. seaweed farms sit within a few miles of shore, they are governed by state laws, which can vary widely. Maine limits farm size from 400 square feet to 100 acres depending on the lease, for example, while Alaska strictly regulates where species may be grown. Still, there are no national regulations monitoring seaweed farming. Canada doesn’t have much in the way of rules, either. There are currently no policies around farm size or native seed collection in British Columbia.

While this piecemeal approach has worked out so far, industry insiders wonder how it will hold up as farms become larger and drift further from shore. Growing enough seaweed for the biofuel needed to meet the nation’s energy needs, for example, will require more than a few buoys in a bay.

Amanda Swinimer of Dakini Tidal Wilds, who has been wild-harvesting seaweed off the west coast of Vancouver Island since 2003, believes the seaweed industry has already started sneaking up on policy — with potentially costly results. “There was no need to have regulations around seaweed farming before because nobody was doing it before,” she said. “But now, if both the feds and the provincial government are throwing the kind of money at it that they are, policymakers should be doing primary research and putting some basic regulations in place.”

A seaweed harvest in Japan. (Photo: Shutterstock)

One question looming over the North American seaweed market is how big is too big. Large-scale monoculture outposts covering 100 acres or more could starve the surrounding ecosystem of nutrients, obstruct wildlife migration patterns, or prevent sunlight from reaching other flora and fauna. Massive seaweed operations in Asia offer a cautionary tale. In China, where farms can cover 15,000 acres, pests and bactia infections present a growing concern. Some diseases are triggered by abiotic factors: Unfavorable conditions like too much or too little light have provided the conditions they need to spread rapidly, ruining an estimated 25 to 30 percent of annual seaweed harvests and changing the microbial structure of nearby ecosystems.

“There’s always going to be a point where you get too much of a good thing,” Scott Lindell, a marine farming researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said. “And we don’t know where that breaking point is.”

The introduction of non-native species also could pose a risk. Seaweed farmers choose strains that are resilient, fast-growing, and tolerant to many conditions — precisely the traits, scientists warn, that could allow them to overwhelm their habitat and crowd out other species. Varieties that are new to an area also can carry dangerous “hitchhikers.”

“You can’t guarantee that you’re just importing the seaweed,” said marine biosecurity researcher Elizabeth Cottier-Cook. “There will be other things like microorganisms attached to that seaweed that could then cause disease and spread to wild native strains as well.”

Seaweed farms can also be vehicles for food-borne diseases when improperly managed, as seen with a Salmonella outbreak traced to a Hawaiian seaweed farm in 2016.

Rapid growth of an industry that gets ahead of market demand could lead to significant waste issues, too, said Anoushka Concepcion, who works in marine aquaculture for NOAA’s Sea Grant program in Connecticut. She points out that the reason government-funded farms in China or Korea can stay afloat is because they feed populations accustomed to eating seaweed many times a day. The average American palate doesn’t have the same taste for the sea veggie, so barring quick innovation on the biofuel and bioplastic fronts (still very much in their infancy), huge seaweed farms in the West could leave whole lot of product left to rot.

Finally, Swinimer, who makes her living harvesting wild seaweed, worries about the risk of farmed seaweed mixing with wild strains. Seaweed hybridization has already happened off Oslofjord, an inlet of Southeast Norway, to unknown consequence.

“There are fewer boundaries in the ocean than there are on land,” Swinimer said, introducing the threat of genetic intermingling. Given the essential role seaweed, particularly kelp forests (often called the sequoias of the sea), plays in sequestering carbon and providing oxygen, Swinimer is worried about the risks industrial-scale cultivation has on this invaluable organism.

“Seaweed is already saving the world from climate change,” she said. “If we mess with that, we are going to be in big, big trouble.”

When considering how to regulate the seaweed industry to mitigate potential climate pitfalls, Cottier-Cook points to a “restorative aquaculture” model that would incentivize ecologically beneficial farming. Governments could, for example, pay farmers for the carbon their crops capture; a new type of blue subsidy. Smith’s company GreenWave is testing this idea with its Kelp Climate Fund, which awards farmers up to $25,000 per season for the carbon and nitrogen capture and reef restoration they provide.

Encouraging the growth of hyper-native seaweeds will also make sense in some places. Alaska leads the way here, with state laws that require farmers to collect their kelp seeds from within 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) of their grow site each year to ensure their crops share their genetic makeup with local wild stocks. Laws that prohibit altering the marine ecosystem in any way, like Maine’s strict regulations that fine farmers for abandoned gear, could also help keep quell aquaculture’s environmental impact.

While the process to secure an seaweed farming lease is closely regulated by a state’s department of marine resources or environmental conservation, government involvement fades once the first lines are dropped in the water. While Concepcion notes that some states are talking about enforcing more rigorous inspections and penalties, it’s a slow process in a new industry that still has so many question marks. “Agencies are hesitant to establish a policy because they don’t know what to expect,” Concepcion said. “They don’t want to add additional requirements to farmers that make it harder to get involved. But at the same time, they want to be cautious because they don’t want an accident to happen. So right now it’s still a lot of vetting of information, and a lot of discussion.”

Sugar kelp is one variety of edible seaweed being cultivated in the US. (Photo: Shutterstock)

The most important decisions have not yet been made. The regulations policymakers pass in the next few years ultimately will determine not only how and where seaweed is grown, but whose hands (or if the techies get their way, robotic appendages) grow it. Will the farms of the future be owned by massive corporations, or by local cooperatives? Those in coastal communities whose livelihoods hinge on ocean health would argue for the latter.

“The people who I think should be in kelp farming are fishermen who already know how to work on the water, already have a boat, and already have another generation coming up underneath them to raise on the water,” said Patryn.

Dune Lankard, an Eyak Athabaskan Native of the Eagle Clan from Cordova, Alaska, also transitioned from fishing to kelp farming after watching local fisheries collapse. He started the non-profit Native Conservancy to help other Native peoples start kelp farms in order to maintain food sovereignty and cultivate a resource that has long been a part of their ways of life.

If passed, the federal Coastal Seaweed Farm Act of 2023 would help further this mission by establishing an Indigenous seaweed farming fund and publishing a report outlining how to responsibly scale seaweed in the U.S. with the help of Indigenous knowledge.

A spokesperson for U.S. Representative Mary Peltola of Alaska, who introduced the bill with Representative Jared Huffman of California in March, said it has received positive feedback and the lawmakers hope it will be included in this year’s farm bill.

As seaweed inhabits the liminal space between land and sea, it holds the opportunity to build a new food sector that is more equitable, efficient, and environmentally informed than those that came before it. By incentivizing restoration, prioritizing native planting, taking a precautionary approach to expansion, and centering coastal community knowledge, the industry can grow in a fast yet controlled and methodical way. In short, it can grow like seaweed itself.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post The Kelp Business is Booming. How Big is Too Big? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

If you are a woman, the challenges don’t stop there. You may be the only woman fishing out of your harbor, vying for respect in an industry that throughout its long history has welcomed only men onboard. Every day, you’ll be working to prove you belong on the boat and not keeping the books back at the wharf.

When Krista Tripp was 18, she’d completed all of the hours at sea necessary to get her captain’s license, but her parents submitted her brother’s paperwork to the State of Maine and not hers. Why? Even though Krista had been hauling traps since she was eight years old and running her own boat since 15, the expectation was that now she’d settle down and start having babies. 

“My brother and I shared the boat, we had 150 traps and I became obsessed at an early age,” Tripp recalls. “I knew that was what I wanted to do. But, as a girl, my parents didn’t really take me seriously.”

Tripp would spend the next few years working as a sternman off of a scallop boat in Massachusetts. Eventually, she returned to Maine, and after 14 years, she got herself off the waiting list and became the captain of her own lobster boat. Today, she has been captaining her own lobster boat for more than eight years. 

Heather Strout Thompson’s boat “Gold Digger” in Harrington Harbor. (Photo courtesy Heather Strout Thompson)

Heather Strout Thompson started lobstering at age 10. She fishes the state limit of 800 traps out of the rural harbor of Harrington, just outside of Jonesport in the deep Downeast of Maine. Growing up there, it was either the sea or the blueberry fields, and Strout wasn’t a fan of the blueberry fields. 

“My dad was the one who gave me the hardest time out of anybody,” says Strout. “I always wanted to prove him wrong, throughout my childhood and even now, to prove that I can do it.”

Down the coast in the endearingly named town of Friendship, Kelly Wallace started fishing at age five. When she was old enough, she bought her own skiff and started hauling her traps by hand. Lobster traps are typically hauled onboard using a hydraulic trap hauler, but Wallace would haul 150 traps—each weighing 50 pounds—by hand all through high school.

Wallace’s family has been working on the water for six generations and operates the Wallace Lobster Wharf. But she was the first female member of her family to choose to become a lobster boat captain.

“It’s definitely hard to be a woman in the fishing industry because you aren’t ‘one of the guys’,” admits Tripp. “A lot of men are really egotistical when it comes to their jobs being physically demanding—so when they see a girl doing the same kind of job, it makes them feel less of a man. They just aren’t as welcoming.”

But none of these women has let a little bit of ego hold them back. 

“I might not do things the exact way a man does things,” says Heather Strout Thompson. “But I can get the job done. I might not lift a trap with my arms—I might have to use my legs a little bit—but I can get it up there.”

Being a woman in the lobstering industry can be singular, but it is a challenge upon which all three women have thrived. And within the world of lobster fishing, the proof is in the traps hauled and the hours put in.

“I’ve noticed more men giving women opportunities,” says Thompson, “because they’re looking for a more reliable person to work with and women are very reliable. They’re going to do whatever they can to prove themselves.”

Tripp echoes the same sentiment. “Some guys think that women are great workers because they want to prove themselves more.”

“When I was younger, you never saw women on a boat, ever,” says Tripp. “I know a lot of other women lobstering now, but I never did before.”

Commercial fishing is one of deadliest professions in the United States. (Photo: Kirsten Lie-Nielsen)

The lobster industry is a tough place to make a living for anyone. It is the backbone of Maine’s economy and the iconic food of the state, but it has become a more challenging industry in recent years. 

The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than any other body of water in the world, and to survive, lobster may follow the Maine shrimp north to Canadian waters. When fishing, lobstermen are careful to take only crustaceans of a certain size and to return females with eggs to the sea. Nevertheless, additional environmental regulations come down hard on Maine lobstermen, while the cruise ships and tankers responsible for pollution and whale strikes are largely unregulated. Since 2020, the price of fuel has risen steadily, while the market price of lobster has dropped. Commercial fishing remains one of the most deadly professions in the United States, making every trip to haul a risk.

With all of these hurdles, you may wonder why women are heading out to sea in pursuit of the recognizable red “bugs.” But Maine women are as resilient as the state’s rocky coast, and they seem uniquely suited to thriving in a trade that requires grit and diligence.

Marina Landrith is a 13-year-old aspiring lobsterwoman who fishes out of the picturesque harbor of Rockport. She currently holds a student license that allows her to fish up to 50 traps. On lobstering days, she launches her boat, fills her bait bags and motors out to haul her traps. 

Her family has been lobstering for five generations and she was inspired to begin by her uncle, who lives and fishes off of Matinicus Island, the farthest inhabited land off the east coast of the US. Matinicus is home to less than 100 year-round residents, the majority of whom are lobstermen. Landrith’s uncle has been taking her out lobstering since she was a baby.

“What I enjoy most about it is that I get to spend time with my dad when we go out to haul and the feeling of accomplishment when I get in from hauling and sell what I caught,” says Landrith.

Marina Landrith holds a student license that allows her to fish up to 50 traps. (Photo courtesy Dale Landrith)

She knows several women who lobster or assist as sternmen on lobster boats, including her own 10-year-old cousin. A sense of accomplishment and personal pride seem to drive every woman in the industry. 

“Nobody else cares that I’m doing this or not,” says Heather Strout Thompson. “It’s something within yourself that you have to push and want to be able to do. At the end of the day, you’re the one that’s going to sit back and ask, ‘Did I work as hard as I could? Did I earn my spot here?’ And I feel I have.”

While commitment and drive push these women off shore every day to compete in the lobstering industry, the inspiration always circles back to family. The majority of lobstermen, male or female, are continuing a family tradition.

When Landrith thinks about her future, she can imagine life as a lobsterwoman. Someday, she wants to live on Matinicus like her uncle. “I think it would be great to live out there where my family grew up and I have visited during the summer for as long as I can remember,” she says.

Marina Landrith’s family has been lobstering for five generations. (Photo courtesy Dale Landrith)

Thompson points out that in the lobstering world, family goes beyond flesh and blood. “Fishermen are some of the most generous people I’ve ever met,” she says. “They’ll stop what they’re doing and help you, tow you in, give you a part to fix your boat, so you can get back to haul. It’s a family within the lobstering industry.”

And the family of women who lobster continues to grow. In 2021, 15 percent of lobster licenses belonged to women, compared to less than 5 percent in 2014. When tomorrow’s generation of lobstermen look back at their family heritage, it won’t be a men’s club anymore.  

“There’s different things that I might do that aren’t the way the men do it,” says Thompson. “But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong; it’s just different. Sometimes, you don’t have to do it the same as everybody else does. Do what’s best for you, what you are comfortable with and keep moving forward.”

The post Meet the Women Making Waves in Maine’s Tough Lobster Industry appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The colorful packages are trending on Tik Tok and Instagram, (#tinfish has 38.6 million views on the latter platform), with influencers touting high nutrient value, long shelf life and convenience. Cookbooks such as Tin to Table  by Anna Hezel and The Magic of Tinned Fish by Chris McDade feature tinned-fish recipes. In the United States, the tinned-fish industry has been valued at almost $9.5 billion, and a package of tinned fish can range in price from $8 to $27, depending on the brand and the fish species.

That can be a pricey can of sardines. Many brands claim the high price tag is due to their sustainable practices, but in a complex seafood system, that can mean something different for every brand. For each purveyor, sustainable practices can mean different methods of sourcing, canning and labeling tins; there is no universal standard for a product to be labeled as sustainable. 

For some purveyors of tinned fish, sustainability is about the carbon footprint. For others, it’s about recognizing the labor of the fishermen or utilizing bycatch, fish caught unintentionally when fishing for specific species or sizes of fish. “I really try to avoid the word ‘sustainable.’ Food systems are so extractive, to use [the term]) ‘sustainability’ is really complicated,” says Bryan Szeliga, owner of Fishtown Seafood in Philadelphia. 

Bryan Szeliga, owner of Fishtown Seafood in Philadelphia.

 Sara Hauman, chef and founder of the Tiny Fish Co. in Seattle, says she wanted to reduce her carbon footprint by sourcing local fish species and canning locally. Hauman uses bycatch and sells less-well-known species that are caught in the Pacific Northwest, including rockfish, geoduck and black cod. 

“I feel it’s a more responsible decision than throwing them overboard,” says Hauman. She sources her octopus from bycatch and says one 15-kilogram octopus can produce around 100 tins of octopus in butter with lemon and dill. Hauman develops the recipes herself and works with local fisherman and a local cannery to produce her tinned fish. “Historically, canned fish has been a cheap pantry staple, but I feel strongly that fish should be expensive because it is a fleeting food resource,” says Hauman, who wants consumers to view tinned fish as a gourmet item. 

But for every brand that is trying to be transparent, there are also purveyors that may not think twice about greenwashing a seafood product’s labels. “Perfection in labeling might not be possible. With that said, there is some level of responsibility that [seafood sellers] need to take if they want to make a profit off of buying and selling seafood,” says Szeliga, who adds that honest mistakes can be made in a complicated seafood industry. 

Sometimes, tinned fish can be mislabeled, as it was when he placed an order for squid ink and instead received cuttlefish ink. Cuttlefish are much harder to sustainably trace—that is, to know where and when they were caught and if they were ethically sourced. Szeliga says  there is simply not enough information on the stock status of cuttlefish, meaning whether they were overfished or not, and consumers will see the country of origin labeling as where it was processed, not where it is actually from. 

Szeliga has a critical eye for sourcing and wants consumers to be skeptical of labels. “Octopus can be caught in Morocco or Mauritania, but since it is processed in Spain or Portugal, it gets the country-of-origin label from where it is processed.” Szeliga says that aspects of catch composition, species, harvesting methods, transport means and using salt for moisture retention should be considered when discussing seafood sustainability.   

Conditions for fishermen are not always transparent and can be overlooked in the narratives around sustainable fish. “The ocean is a dangerous place—weather can turn bad in an instant and mistakes can be life-threatening when out in the open sea,” says Hauman. She encourages consumers to remember “wild-caught fish” means the fishing crew has risked their lives.  

The tinned-fish industry in Europe has been around for nearly two centuries, with market share continuing to grow. In 2021, it was worth an estimated $4.95 billion. European canneries often support smaller tinned-fish companies and brands that don’t produce at a high volume. In the United States, more canneries are on the West Coast, making it difficult for some purveyors to source fish locally with a low carbon footprint.

FANGST, a tinned-fish company based in Denmark, also uses bycatch, fishes in regional waters and maintains Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) certifications. For MSC certification, the company must fish only healthy stocks, which can be fished for the long term, and must minimize impact on other species and the wider ecosystem. 

“The certifications need to be as transparent as they expect the seafood supply chain to be,” says Szeliga, who is concerned that certifications allow seafood companies to stay certified even when certain conditions lapse. He adds that while certifications have some value, finding compliance standards and company audits are often difficult for consumers. 

“It’s not good enough to say we are sustainable. We are open to work with even stricter certifications if they existed in our region,” says Martin Bregnballe, the founder of FANGST. Bregnballe says he hopes he will one day be able to label his tinned fish with the fisherman’s name, time of catch and the specific area where the fish was caught.

Bregnballe says he hopes that FANGST tinned fish such as baltic sprat and Norwegian sea herring will encourage people to eat more small fish that feed on plankton instead of eating predatory fish, which is better for the environment and provides more Omega-3 fatty acids (than eating predatory fish) instead of turning them into fishmeal and animal feed. “The huge local catch of ‘Brisling’ [sprat] is used for fishmeal. However, calculations show that if we eat the fish ourselves instead of feeding them to the pigs, we could cover one-third of Denmark’s protein needs by this catch alone.” 

As the tinned-fish industry grows, purveyors hope that transparency will help them stand out in a crowded marketplace. “As a chef, I would never write ‘house-made pasta’ on a menu and use dried pasta,” says Hauman. “Maybe I’m not the best business person, but it means more to be honest to consumers.”

The post Tinned Fish is Trending. But Can You Trust the Label? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“Back then, gosh, it was amazing to see the fish when the fish ran during the fall,” says Hockaday, a traditional fisherman and council member of the Karuk Tribe. “The salmon were huge.” On average, he says, you could catch fish ranging from 40 to 50 pounds—although members of his grandparents’ generation were known to catch 100-pound Chinook salmon at Ishi Pishi Falls, the tribe’s sacred fishing grounds. “Nowadays, our average is anywhere from 15 to maybe 25 pounds. We catch a 30-pounder and that’s a hog, that’s a big fish.”

A slow-motion disaster for tribes, commercial fishermen and conservationists, the decline of California’s once-abundant salmon population has been unfolding for decades. The crisis has its roots in decisions about the state’s water use made a century ago and, like so many stories of water wars in the West, it has pitted stakeholders against one another in a seemingly zero-sum contest over a dwindling natural resource. 

The outlook is grim, but there are bright spots. As a future of increasingly hot and dry weather hangs over the state, can change come quickly enough to save the imperiled salmon from extinction?

Salmon are the epitome of endurance and resilience. Spawned in cold, high-elevation mountain streams, they navigate downriver as juveniles, fattening up as they make their way to coastal estuaries, where they undergo a remarkable transformation from freshwater to saltwater fish before entering the ocean. Depending on the species, they can spend years maturing at sea, where commercial fishermen vie for the valuable catch. Then, governed by an unshakeable biological imperative, they reverse the journey, this time propelling themselves against the current to return to their spawning grounds, where they’ll lay their eggs and then die, their nutrients enriching the river ecosystem. 

Or, at least, that’s what salmon have historically done. But ever since white settlers made their way westward, a barrage of man-made challenges has disrupted the salmon’s natural journey. In the late 1840s came the gold miners, whose use of hydraulic mining clogged waterways with sediment. Then, a growing population began to reshape the state’s water systems, building channels and levees to control where water flowed. In the 20th century, ambitious dam projects rose up to store and divert water for cities and farming, cutting salmon off from hundreds of miles of upriver habitat. 

“In a way, it’s amazing we have as many salmon around as we do,” says Peter Moyle, associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis and a distinguished professor emeritus in the university’s Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology. He estimates that, prior to the Gold Rush, there were one million to two million salmon a year coming up through the Central Valley alone, and another half a million or more in other rivers. But a confluence of factors, including water diversions that erased more than 90 percent of the state’s wetlands and large dams that blocked 70 percent of salmon’s historic spawning grounds, have decimated the wild salmon population.

A mature Chinook salmon. (Photo: Ryan Hagerty/USFWS)

Today, the state’s salmon fishery is reliant on hatcheries that produce millions of fish and release them into the wild. “What we see today, the reason we have as much salmon as we do today, is hatcheries. But the hatchery fish are in decline,” says Moyle. “They keep producing more hatchery fish, and the numbers keep going down, partly because hatchery fish are poorly adapted for life in the wild.” 

Warming waters present another threat, and one that increases in severity during drought, when surface water supplies falter. Warm freshwater can contribute to the proliferation of algal blooms and harmful bacteria, and temperatures above 70 degrees Fahrenheit can be lethal to salmon; ocean acidification and marine heatwaves also imperil the fish. That’s bad news for California, where, despite a winter of heavy rainfalls that refilled reservoirs and lifted the state out of a severe multi-year drought, human-caused climate change continues to accelerate the frequency and severity of extreme heat events and drought conditions.

And those recurrent drought conditions have forced salmon, and the people who rely on them, closer to a breaking point. 

This spring, for just the second time in history, the ocean commercial and recreational salmon fishing season was canceled, impacting a swath of the West Coast, from northern Oregon to the border with Mexico. The decision came after last year’s Sacramento River fall-run Chinook, the principal salmon stock harvested in California’s fisheries, returned to the Central Valley at near-record low numbers—estimated at just 169,767 adults.

“Those numbers were abysmal,” says Glen Spain, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. “What happens three years ago determines how many adults come back this year, so what we’re seeing was the worst part of the [2020] drought, which essentially dried up the rivers or created hot water conditions, and that just killed lots of eggs and lots of young salmon before they could even get to the ocean.” 

Without the salmon season, many fishermen are losing their livelihoods. “There are over 1,000 boats out there with permits, and they’re basically in dry dock,” he says, noting that the closure could extend beyond this season, and up to another two years, creating uncertainty in an already challenging industry.

“It used to be that we could rely on a salmon season to buffer us from potentially a slow crab season,” says Dick Ogg, a commercial fisherman who operates out of Bodega Bay. “But with the seasons being compressed and getting smaller and smaller, and opportunities becoming less and less … the impact is significant.” 

Fishing boats in Bodega Bay, CA. (Photo: Shutterstock)

In addition to salmon, Ogg holds permits to fish for black cod, albacore, Dungeness crab and rockfish. The days when a fisherman could rely on just the salmon fishery are “almost a thing of the past,” he says, but the cost of diversifying with multiple permits can become a barrier,  especially for new fishermen entering the business. “The cost of each permit, the cost of owning your own vessel, the insurance that’s required, the slip fees that you have to pay, the taxes that you have to take care of, the crew that you need to maintain … it just is devastating.”

In April, California Governor Gavin Newsom submitted a request to the US Secretary of Commerce asking for a Federal Fishery Disaster Declaration, which would provide relief for businesses and fishermen impacted by the closure of the salmon season. In the meantime, Spain says, “There is the edge of desperation in a lot of our communities.”

“We all know why this is happening … but what we don’t know is how to get around it, at a family-by-family and port-by-port level,” says Spain. “And the sad thing is this was once a billion-dollar fishery.”

The formidable challenges facing California’s salmon population are prompting efforts to get creative with everything from building a controversial “fishway” around the Yuba River’s Daguerre Point Dam to exploring the reintroduction of fish transplanted to New Zealand more than a century ago, as the Winnemem Wintu Tribe has proposed.

In the Central Valley, one project has a particularly grand vision for transforming water management systems to support native fish. Called the Nigiri Project for its fish-on-rice concept, it’s a collaboration between researchers and farmers that floods rice fields in the winter, helping to break down rice straw while offering juvenile salmon and waterfowl conditions that mimic the bug-rich floodplain ecosystems to which they’re adapted. 

It’s a win-win that researcher Jacob Katz hopes proves that a paradigm shift is possible. “We actually have the capacity to manage the Sacramento Valley in a way that is good for both fish and for farms,” says Katz, a senior scientist at California Trout, a nonprofit aimed at restoring waterways and wild fish. “One of the major reasons we’ve so diminished our fisheries resources is not necessarily an inevitable consequence of development but a specific and direct consequence of the way in which we developed.” 

Juvenile Chinook salmon. (Photo: USFWS/Flickr)

Levees that block rivers from adjoining wetlands have benefits, such as flood protection and creating farmland, but they also cut fish off from essential food sources in floodplain wetlands, turning rivers into food deserts. The Nigiri Project, along with a related initiative that drains food-rich fields back into rivers, provides a blueprint for what Katz hopes could be a large-scale reimagining of the system. It’s ambitious, but Katz says that, “if you look at the science, we have no right to expect a population-level recovery of salmon if we aren’t actually changing the real world at landscape scale. To have a postage stamp here and a postage stamp there, why would we expect that to lead to population recovery? That’s not how it works.”

But rethinking the levee model to provide food for salmon would address just one of the two biggest problems facing the fish, says Katz. The other is the large-scale dam infrastructure that blocks salmon’s upstream migration. “The fact that we have essentially dammed all of the [Sacramento] Valley’s rivers, cutting off that critical cold water refuge, is ultimately a death sentence, an extinction sentence, for our salmon if something isn’t done.”

While most dams are built for a 50-year lifespan, the average age of California’s nearly 1,500 dams is 70 years old, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the state’s dams a grade of C- in its most recent infrastructure report card. But that wasn’t what prompted the Klamath River tribal communities to launch a campaign to remove the four aging dams sitting upriver from them.

In 2002, upwards of 70,000 Chinook salmon died as part of a massive fish kill caused by low flows on the Klamath, the result of low flows caused by water diversions by farmers and ranchers upstream. “Tens of thousands of adult salmon died before spawning and just littered the banks of the river,” says Craig Tucker, a natural resource policy consultant for the Karuk Tribe. “And for tribal communities, that was sort of the breaking point.”

What followed was a grassroots effort by tribes and other advocacy groups to remove the dams, as well as to broker a water-sharing deal between the tribes and Klamath Basin irrigators that required an act of Congress to pass. Ultimately, the arduous, multi-decade campaign was successful: Demolition recently began on the first dam, and the remaining dams are set to come out by the end of 2024 in what’s been billed as the largest dam removal project in history.

Klamath Basin tribes and allies staging a dam-removal rally in 2006. (Photo: Patrick McCully/Flickr)

“These should be easy,” says Tucker of the tortured process. “The Klamath River dams are what we call ‘deadbeat dams.’ They don’t pay their own way, there’s no flood control, no irrigation diversions, they’re not making a lot of money for anybody. They have this devastating impact on fisheries and water quality. It should be a no-brainer. And it’s taken us 20 years to get to dam removal.” 

As most of the state’s dams are approaching or past their engineered life spans, Tucker says we’ve reached a critical inflection point for the future of salmon. “Now is that moment of reckoning: Are we going to have wild salmon or not? If we’re going to have wild salmon, we have to remove some dams.”

The situation reflects the complexity of a system that aims to control and deliver a limited resource—water—that just happens to also be the foundation of life on earth. For farmers, water is necessary for growing crops. For fishermen, it’s essential for supporting fish. And for the Karuk and other tribes, those fish form the basis of their entire cultural identity. “It’s not just a fish, it’s a way of life,” says Kenneth Brink, another Karuk council member and traditional fisherman. “It’s our ceremonies. It’s our cross on top of our church. Some people just look at fish as a food. Some people look at it as money. We look at it as a way of life.”

It remains to be seen whether that way of life—and the fish on which it relies—can continue. But for the people who are fighting for salmon’s survival, the only option is to carry on.

This story is part of State of Abundance, a five-part series about California agriculture and climate change. See the full series here.

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