Something Fishy

 National Geographic is running a series right now on how we are going to feed the world as populations swell.  The June edition highlights fish farms and the article can be found HERE.    While it does mention that there have been disease issues with farming fish,  the article focuses on solutions and not problems.  When I mentioned the article on another social media site,  my niece spoke up about a documentary she has seen about the problems with Salmon farms in Canada.  The entire documentary can be viewed on YouTube and is excellent.  Since it is long I am going to post only the trailer here but please after watching the trailer go to YouTube and watch the entire hour of information available.



After watching the entire hour long documentary I came away with the same opinion that I have of the beef, pork and chicken sources in this country.  That is -  if you are going to eat meat - cook it thoroughly.  To be fair,  National Geographic does mention the Salmon farms as an example of problems with the industry and offers a solution in the quote that follows.



  "Figuring out what to feed farmed fish may ultimately be more important for the planet than the question of where to farm them. “The whole concept of moving into offshore waters and on land isn’t because we’ve run out of space in the coastal zone,” says Stephen Cross of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, who was an environmental consultant to the aquaculture industry for decades. Though pollution from coastal salmon farms gave the whole industry a black eye, he says, these days even salmon farms are producing 10 to 15 times the fish they did in the 1980s and 1990s with a fraction of the pollution. In a remote corner of Vancouver Island he’s trying something new and even less damaging.

His inspiration comes from ancient China. More than a thousand years ago, during the Tang dynasty, Chinese farmers developed an intricate polyculture of carp, pigs, ducks, and vegetables on their small family farms, using the manure from ducks and pigs to fertilize the pond algae grazed by the carp. Carp were later added to flooded paddies, where the omnivorous fish gobbled up insect pests and weeds and fertilized the rice before becoming food themselves. Such carp-paddy polyculture became a mainstay of China’s traditional fish-and-rice diet, sustaining millions of Chinese for centuries. It’s still used on more than seven million acres of paddies in the country.

In a fjord on the British Columbia coast, Cross has devised a polyculture of his own. He feeds only one species—a sleek, hardy native of the North Pacific known as sablefish or black cod. Slightly down current from their pens he has placed hanging baskets full of native cockles, oysters, and scallops as well as mussels that feed on the fine organic excretions of the fish. Next to the baskets he grows long lines of sugar kelp, used in soups and sushi and also to produce bioethanol; these aquatic plants filter the water even further, converting nearly all the remaining nitrates and phosphorus to plant tissue. On the seafloor, 80 feet below the fish pens, sea cucumbers—considered delicacies in China and Japan—vacuum up heavier organic waste that the other species miss. Minus the sablefish, Cross says, his system could be fitted onto existing fish farms to serve as a giant water filter that would produce extra food and profit."

While there are issues with disease and fish farms, to strive to solve the issues seems to be a worthy goal. But what of fishermen and the way we have always done it?  Unfortunately,  that process also is riddled with problems.  There have been many reports,  like the one that follows,  of slave labor being used on fishing boats.  

The entire system around fish seems to be so complicated that it is tempting to close our eyes to the issues.   While as individuals we can't solve all the problems,  it is important to educate ourselves and be aware of where they are.   We may not be the whole solution but we may be able to not be part of the problem.