Deep inside a Norwegian fjord, a dream of farming salmon sustainably

HARDANGERSFJORD, NORWAY – Jørgen Wengaard steers across the rocky islands of a fjord, his boat chopping by means of the water’s nonetheless floor, sending ripples towards silent forested shores. However right here within the Hardangersfjord of western Norway, nonetheless waters run deep: greater than 2,000 toes deep.

“The Norwegian coastline is perfect for farming Atlantic salmon,” says Wengaard. “We have the optimal temperature. We have good oxygen levels. We have the right salinity and the water is always changing due to strong currents. That’s very good for farming.”

Wengaard is headed to one of many fjord’s a number of salmon farms, identified by their cylindrical pens produced from nylon netting, some holding tons of of 1000’s of salmon every below the floor of Hardangersfjord.

Norway is the world’s largest exporter of farmed salmon; greater than a fifth of salmon consumed by Individuals comes from the Nordic nation. And as Norway exports extra salmon the world over, the business has come below criticism from environmental teams who say salmon farms are irreversibly impacting the pristine setting of Norway’s fjords.

Wengaard’s boat glides to a cease at a floating walkway surrounding two areas of open water, round 50 toes in diameter, lined with shiny yellow nylon netting: a salmon farm run by the corporate Lingalaks. Wengaard, who’s labored a lot of his life on salmon farms, is a tour information right here.

“This is quite a small fish farm,” he says, climbing out of his boat. “We have two pens with only 15,000 salmon in each. That might sound like a lot, but on a regular-sized fish farm, they have one million salmon.”

Above these open water pens, a mechanical arm swivels in place, capturing out pellets of meals. It prompts silver streaks within the water beneath: a feeding frenzy. The pens are house for these Atlantic Salmon from March to December. In these 9 months, the fish develop to a weight between 10 and 15 kilos, after which they’re taken to a processing plant the place they’re shocked earlier than they’re slaughtered, filleted and exported all over the world.

However for now, they’re right here, consuming and swimming, the one factor separating them from the open ocean is a skinny nylon internet.

“We need to inspect it every single day and look for holes, because we really don’t want the salmon to escape,” says Wengaard, pointing to a tv display contained in the Lingalaks facility the place the corporate is ready to monitor each the well being of the fish and whether or not the web holding them is compromised in any manner.

“We don’t want them to mix with the wild salmon,” continues Wengaard. “So even though these salmon come from wild salmon originally, we don’t want them to mix their genes and destroy the spawning places for the wild salmon.”

However based on many business consultants, it’s too late for that.

Tons of of miles east of the fjords within the capital Oslo, creator Simen Saetre sits on a bench at his native park beside the raging waters of the Akerselva River, the place wild salmon, he says, can generally be seen, proper in the course of Norway’s largest metropolis.

“I’ve never fished it myself, but sometimes you see people in the river and they report nice catches,” he says.

Saetre, who co-authored The New Fish, a e book about Norway’s salmon farming business, says Norway’s wild salmon inhabitants has been reduce in half up to now 20 years largely as a result of impression of tens of thousands and thousands of farmed salmon. Every year, a median of 200,000 farmed salmon escape from their open internet pens, a big quantity when you think about that there are solely an estimated 500,000 wild salmon left within the nation, says Saetre.

“These farmed salmon then go and swim up to random rivers and then mate with wild salmon, and they weaken the wild salmon stock because these farmed salmon, they are made to be fat and slow and be effective for the industry,” says Saetre. “But when they mate with the wild salmon, the wild salmon offspring become slow and fat and easy to catch for predators.”

That’s a giant purpose, says Saetre, why Norway’s wild salmon inventory is quickly dying out. A examine this 12 months by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Analysis and the Institute of Marine Analysis discovered that almost a 3rd of untamed salmon in Norway have “significant genetic changes” because of interbreeding with escaped farmed salmon. However Saetre says there’s a larger downside with Norway’s farmed salmon: sea lice. They’re tiny crustaceans that connect themselves to salmon, feed on them, and reproduce.

“These sea lice have lived for ages on wild salmon swimming by and attached to them,” says Saetre. “And then when you gather millions of big salmon in the fjords and the sea lice get into that, it’s like a heaven for the sea lice, and they grow and adapt.”

In a four-year examine ending in 2020, Norwegian scientists found that within the fjords of western Norway mortality charges amongst farmed salmon from sea lice infestation reached greater than 30%. Salmon farms use chemical compounds like pesticides to deal with their fish, however scientists have found that sea lice have advanced to change into immune to the chemical compounds.

However one salmon farmer says he has an answer to all these issues.

In one other a part of the Hardangersfjord, Sondre Eide, the younger third-generation CEO of his household salmon farming firm Eide Fjordbruck, navigates his boat by means of the rain to what he calls his salmon farm of the long run. When he arrives, Eide factors to a black cylinder barely protruding of the water, surrounded by floating gangplanks. It’s the cap of what seems to be a tank.

“This tank goes down 72 meters. If it were on land, it would be the highest building on the west side of Norway,” Eide says. “It holds 200,000 fish.”

This, says Eide, is closed pen salmon farming: no escaped salmon and no salmon lice.

“So it is all about giving the optimal life for the fish inside,” explains Eide. “And then, of course, when you take away the salmon lice, you have no salmon treatment, so you don’t have the handling, and that’s responsible for 60 to 70% of all the mortality in the industry. So then you can focus on how can we create the best lives for the fish instead of the next lice treatment.”

Eide and a crew of his firm’s engineers put years of labor and tons of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} into this closed pen, which circulates ocean water into it and retains lice out. It additionally filters out salmon waste – a giant contributor to rising nitrogen ranges within the fjords – by carrying it by means of a collection of tubes to a separate tank the place it will definitely creates biogas which, in flip, can be utilized as vitality to energy this very facility, Eide’s subsequent challenge.

Eide’s closed loop farming system raises the query: Why isn’t your entire business farming salmon this manner? Whereas Norway’s authorities has been sluggish to discover this new expertise, the federal government of Canada, one other main salmon exporter, is phasing out open pens for its salmon farming business to push corporations to construct pens just like the one Eide has engineered. Eide says when he and his crew appeared for the expertise to perform this, it merely wasn’t there. He had the cash to attempt to construct it, he says, so he did.

“For me, it was the right thing to do, and I 100% believe it from the bottom of my heart,” says Eide. “I know my father would have done the same today. My grandfather would’ve have done the same, too, because times change and we have to change with them.”

To underscore this push for sustainable salmon farming, Eide climbs again into his boat and navigates it towards an excellent bolder challenge he’s constructed: the world’s largest floating artwork set up, only a 10-minute boat experience from his salmon farm. It’s a reflective silver orb that appears like a UFO that has crash-landed into the ocean. Eide calls it the Salmon Eye, and as soon as our boat arrives to a dock connected to it, we enter what appears to be like like a modern lair of a James Bond villain, however what is definitely an schooling heart about threats to the setting.

Inside, guests watch photographs projected on the partitions and ground whereas listening to tales about an setting in peril earlier than collaborating in a job play in regards to the sustainability of salmon farming. After that, those that have managed to safe a reservation for Eide’s Michelin-Starred restaurant upstairs partake in an 18-course tasting menu of sustainable seafood.

“We need 50% more food towards 2050,” says Eide. “And we have used 50% of all useable land for food production. And we have only used 2% of the calories coming from the ocean, and yet we know less about the ocean than we do about space.”

And someplace in these huge, deep, our bodies of water, says Eide, lies the reply to feeding the world sustainably.