Fancy some Manitoba cod? How about Saskatchewan salmon? The idea of Prairie seafood may seem outlandish, but with soaring demand running headlong into environmental concerns over fish farms, some believe the future of the fisheries industry rests on dry land.
At the Cheslakees Indian Reserve near Port McNeill on Vancouver Island, environmental groups and the ’Namgis First Nation recently opened North America’s first commercial-scale Atlantic salmon farm based entirely on land. It’s already common for land-based farms to raise smolts, or baby salmon, before dumping them into ocean net pens. But the ’Namgis project mechanizes the entire fish-growing process from smolt to slaughter in a series of large tanks (using 98 per cent recycled water), covering about the same area as two Olympic-sized swimming pools. Every aspect of the fish’s environment is controlled, from water quality and temperature to light exposure and feed, all without the threat of predators or the risk of contaminating wild fish.
There’s clearly a market. For the first time ever, global production of farmed fish has surpassed that of farmed beef, according to a recent study by the Earth Policy Institute, and the gap is set to widen as demand soars. Yet Canada’s share of the booming global seafood market has shrunk by 40 per cent over the last decade, thanks in large part to changing legislation affecting ocean-based fish farms.
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