The aquaculture of salmonids is the farming and harvesting of salmonid fish under controlled conditions for both commercial and recreational purposes. Salmonids (particularly salmon and rainbow trout), along with carp and tilapia, are the three most important fish groups in aquaculture. The most commonly commercially farmed salmonid is the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar).
In the United States, Chinook salmon and rainbow trout are the most commonly farmed salmonids for recreational and subsistence fishing through the National Fish Hatchery System. In Europe, brown trout are the most commonly reared fish for recreational restocking. Commonly farmed non-salmonid fish groups include tilapia, catfish, black sea bass and bream. In 2007, the aquaculture of salmonids was worth US$10.7 billion globally. Salmonid aquaculture production grew over ten-fold during the 25 years from 1982 to 2007. In 2012, the leading producers of salmonids were Norway, Chile, Scotland and Canada.
Much controversy exists about the ecological and health impacts of intensive salmonids aquaculture. Of particular concern are the impacts on wild salmon and other marine life.
Methods
The aquaculture or farming of salmonids can be contrasted with capturing wild salmonids using commercial fishing techniques. However, the concept of "wild" salmon as used by the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute includes stock enhancement fish produced in hatcheries that have historically been considered ocean ranching. The percentage of the Alaska salmon harvest resulting from ocean ranching depends upon the species of salmon and location. Methods of salmonid aquaculture originated in late 18th-century fertilization trials in Europe. In the late 19th century, salmon hatcheries were used in Europe and North America. From the late 1950s, enhancement programs based on hatcheries were established in the United States, Canada, Japan, and the USSR. The contemporary technique using floating sea cages originated in Norway in the late 1960s.
Salmonids are usually farmed in two stages and in some places maybe more. First, the salmon are hatched from eggs and raised on land in freshwater tanks. Increasing the accumulated thermal units of water during incubation reduces time to hatching. When they are 12 to 18 months old, the smolt (juvenile salmon) are transferred to floating sea cages or net pens anchored in sheltered bays or fjords along a coast. This farming in a marine environment is known as mariculture. There they are fed pelleted feed for another 12 to 24 months, when they are harvested.
Norway produces 33% of the world's farmed salmonids, and Chile produces 31%. The coastlines of these countries have suitable water temperatures and many areas well protected from storms. Chile is close to large forage fisheries which supply fish meal for salmon aquaculture. Scotland and Canada are also significant producers; and it was reported in 2012 that the Norwegian government at that time controlled a significant fraction of the Canadian industry.
Modern salmonid farming systems are intensive. Their ownership is often under the control of huge agribusiness corporations, operating mechanized assembly lines on an industrial scale. In 2003, nearly half of the world's farmed salmon was produced by just five companies.
Hatcheries Modern commercial hatcheries for supplying salmon smolts to aquaculture net pens have been shifting to recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS)s where the water is recycled within the hatchery. This allows location of the hatchery to be independent of a significant fresh water supply and allows economical temperature control to both speed up and slow down the growth rate to match the needs of the net pens.
Conventional hatchery systems operate flow-through, where spring water or other water sources flow into the hatchery. The eggs are then hatched in trays and the salmon smolts are produced in raceways. The waste products from the growing salmon fry and the feed are usually discharged into the local river. Conventional flow-through hatcheries, for example the majority of Alaska's enhancement hatcheries, use more than of water to produce a kg of smolts.
An alternative method to hatching in freshwater tanks is to use spawning channels. These are artificial streams, usually parallel to an existing stream with concrete or rip-rap sides and gravel bottoms. Water from the adjacent stream is piped into the top of the channel, sometimes via a header pond to settle out sediment. Spawning success is often much better in channels than in adjacent streams due to the control of floods which in some years can wash out the natural redds. Because of the lack of floods, spawning channels must sometimes be cleaned out to remove accumulated sediment. The same floods which destroy natural redds also clean them out. Spawning channels preserve the natural selection of natural streams as no temptation exists, as in hatcheries, to use prophylactic chemicals to control diseases. However, exposing fish to wild parasites and pathogens using uncontrolled water supplies, combined with the high cost of spawning channels, makes this technology unsuitable for salmon aquaculture businesses. This type of technology is only useful for stock enhancement programs.
Sea cages Sea cages, also called sea pens or net pens, are usually made of mesh framed with steel or plastic. They can be square or circular, across and deep, with volumes between . A large sea cage can contain up to 90,000 fish.
They are usually placed side by side to form a system called a seafarm or seasite, with a floating wharf and walkways along the net boundaries. Additional nets can also surround the seafarm to keep out predatory marine mammals. Stocking densities range from /m3 for Atlantic salmon and /m3 for Chinook salmon.
In contrast to closed or recirculating systems, the open net cages of salmonid farming lower production costs, but provide no effective barrier to the discharge of wastes, parasites, and disease into the surrounding coastal waters. Farmed salmon in open net cages can escape into wild habitats, for example, during storms.
An emerging wave in aquaculture is applying the same farming methods used for salmonids to other carnivorous finfish species, such as cod, bluefin tuna, halibut, and snapper. However, this is likely to have the same environmental drawbacks as salmon farming.Naylor R. L. (2005) "Search for Sustainable Solutions in Salmon Aquaculture" Stanford University.
A second emerging wave in aquaculture is the development of copper alloys as netting materials. Copper alloys have become important netting materials because they are antimicrobial (i.e., they destroy bacteria, viruses, fungi, algae, and other microbes), so they prevent biofouling (i.e., the undesirable accumulation, adhesion, and growth of microorganisms, plants, algae, tubeworms, barnacles, mollusks, and other organisms). By inhibiting microbial growth, copper alloy aquaculture cages avoid costly net changes that are necessary with other materials. The resistance of organism growth on copper alloy nets also provides a cleaner and healthier environment for farmed fish to grow and thrive.
Feeding With the amount of worldwide fish meal production being almost a constant amount for the last 30+ years and at maximum sustainable yield, much of the fish meal market has shifted from chicken and pig feed to fish and shrimp feeds as aquaculture has grown in this time.Shepherd, Jonathan; Jackson, Andrew and Mittaine, Jean-Francois (July 4, 2007) Fishmeal industry overview. International Fishmeal and Fish Oil Organisation.
Work continues on developing salmonid diet made from concentrated plant protein. As of 2014, an enzymatic process can be used to lower the carbohydrate content of barley, making it a high-protein fish feed suitable for salmon. Many other substitutions for fish meal are known, and diets containing zero fish meal are possible. For example, a planned closed-containment salmon fish farm in Scotland uses ragworms, algae, and amino acids as feed.Merrit, Mike (13 January 2013) Sea-change as farm grows fish on land The Scotsman, Retrieved 22 January 2013 Some of the eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) in Omega-3 fatty acids may be replaced by land-based (non-marine) algae oil, reducing the harvest of wild fish as fish meal.
However, commercial economic animal diets are determined by least-cost linear programming models that are effectively competing with similar models for chicken and pig feeds for the same feed ingredients, and these models show that fish meal is more useful in aquatic diets than in chicken diets, where they can make the chickens taste like fish. Unfortunately, this substitution can result in lower levels of the highly valued omega-3 content in the farmed product. However, when vegetable oil is used in the growing diet as an energy source and a different finishing diet containing high omega-3 content fatty acids from either fish oil, algae oils, or some vegetable oils are used a few months before harvest, this problem is eliminated.
On a dry-dry basis, 2–4 kg of wild-caught fish are needed to produce 1 kg of salmon. The ratio may be reduced if non-fish sources are added. Wild salmon require about 10 kg of forage fish to produce 1 kg of salmon, as part of the normal trophic level energy transfer. The difference between the two numbers is related to farmed salmon feed containing other ingredients beyond fish meal and because farmed fish do not expend energy hunting.
In 2017 it was reported that the American company Cargill has been researching and developing alternative feeds with EWOS through its internal COMPASS programs in Norway, resulting in the proprietary RAPID feed blend. These methods studied macronutrient profiles of fish feed based upon geography and season. Using RAPID feed, salmon farms reduced the time to maturity of salmon to about 15 months, in a period one-fifth faster than usual.
Other feed additives , 50-80% of the world fish oil production is fed to farmed salmonids.
Farm raised salmonids are also fed the carotenoids astaxanthin and canthaxanthin, so their flesh colour matches wild salmon, which also contain the same carotenoid pigments from their diet in the wild.
Harvesting Modern harvesting methods are shifting towards using wet-well ships to transport live salmon to the processing plant. This allows the fish to be killed, bled, and filleted before rigor has occurred. This results in superior product quality to the customer, along with more humane processing. To obtain maximum quality, minimizing the level of stress is necessary in the live salmon until actually being electrically and percussively killed and the gills slit for bleeding.Modern Salmon Harvest. The Fishery and Aquaculture Industry Research Fund (2010) These improvements in processing time and freshness to the final customer are commercially significant and forcing the commercial wild fisheries to upgrade their processing to the benefit of all seafood consumers.