world. A further result of Gjedrem’s efforts is the outright domination of farmed salmon over wild salmon. Every year more than 3 billion pounds of farmed salmon are produced, around three times the amount of wild fish harvested. Many of those many millions of farmed salmon, whether living in Norway, Chile, or Canada, can trace their heritage back to the breeding lines created at Akvaforsk in 1971.
To people who trade in wild salmon, like Jac Gadwill of Kwik’pak Fisheries, this seems like the worst kind of bastardization. “A cage is a cage is a cage,” Jac told me when I asked his opinion of farmed salmon. “The life of a wild animal is completely different to the life of an animal in a feedlot. What happens to a fish if you don’t let it swim? I suppose you could take a Fijian boy and raise him in Guyana and maybe he’d still wind up a fat boy, but I don’t know.”
But Trygve Gjedrem sees nothing wrong with a dominant strain of domesticated fish emerging in the world. Indeed, there is something in artificial selection that needs to be kept in mind when thinking about the health of the ocean in larger terms. Farmed salmon are the most consumed farmed finfish in the Western world. The salmon-farming industry requires an enormous amount of food. And with salmon a lot of that food consists of other fish that are harvested from the wild. In an unimproved state, farmed salmon require as much as six pounds of wild fish, ground up and turned into pellet feed to produce one pound of edible flesh. Selectively bred salmon, meanwhile, have reached a point where less than three pounds of wild fish can produce a pound of salmon. And as salmon continue to be bred into a more and more efficient consumer of marine protein, that ratio is likely to drop.
But there is also a risk. The tamed-salmon genome is now markedly different from the wild-salmon genome. When tamed salmon escape into the wild (as they do in the millions every year) they risk displacing a self-sustaining wild fish population with a domesticated race that is not capable of surviving without human support. Salmo domesticus has been bred to eat a lot and grow fast in a controlled environment, but it has lost many of the fierce, determined traits that make a wild salmon able to swim against powerful currents, withstand fluctuations in temperature, and spawn in a river besieged by predators. Critics argue that escaped farmed salmon may outcompete wild salmon in some phases in their life cycle only to be unable to reproduce later on down the line. Some maintain that this could have a fatal impact on the long-term viability of wild salmon everywhere.
In spite of these risks, Gjedrem believes that improvement should be the norm for all farmed fish. “With the exception of Atlantic salmon, we are so far behind terrestrial food production,” he told me, driving me in his little blue car back to the little yellow train across the snowy white Norwegian dales. “Think of the Green Revolution of the 1960s! Since the Green Revolution, there has been no major starvation in India or China. The same thing should have started by now with fish and shellfish.”
Of all the people I’ve met in the world of seafood, Gjedrem seemed the most baffled by the way salmon farming has been increasingly targeted by nonprofits as a polluting, environmentally degrading industry. Gjedrem is a child of the Depression, and the formative experiences of his childhood were poverty and human starvation. Any move away from that baseline is progress. His blue eyes twinkled, and he seemed to bristle with excitement when he talked about all the people the ocean could feed if breeding principles were put into place in a rational manner. “It’s such a waste of resources,” he declared of the world’s failure to embrace selective breeding of fish. It was not in fury or anger that he said this, but with a kind of bewilderment. Why even allow for the possibility of starvation?
As we reached the
To people who trade in wild salmon, like Jac Gadwill of Kwik’pak Fisheries, this seems like the worst kind of bastardization. “A cage is a cage is a cage,” Jac told me when I asked his opinion of farmed salmon. “The life of a wild animal is completely different to the life of an animal in a feedlot. What happens to a fish if you don’t let it swim? I suppose you could take a Fijian boy and raise him in Guyana and maybe he’d still wind up a fat boy, but I don’t know.”
But Trygve Gjedrem sees nothing wrong with a dominant strain of domesticated fish emerging in the world. Indeed, there is something in artificial selection that needs to be kept in mind when thinking about the health of the ocean in larger terms. Farmed salmon are the most consumed farmed finfish in the Western world. The salmon-farming industry requires an enormous amount of food. And with salmon a lot of that food consists of other fish that are harvested from the wild. In an unimproved state, farmed salmon require as much as six pounds of wild fish, ground up and turned into pellet feed to produce one pound of edible flesh. Selectively bred salmon, meanwhile, have reached a point where less than three pounds of wild fish can produce a pound of salmon. And as salmon continue to be bred into a more and more efficient consumer of marine protein, that ratio is likely to drop.
But there is also a risk. The tamed-salmon genome is now markedly different from the wild-salmon genome. When tamed salmon escape into the wild (as they do in the millions every year) they risk displacing a self-sustaining wild fish population with a domesticated race that is not capable of surviving without human support. Salmo domesticus has been bred to eat a lot and grow fast in a controlled environment, but it has lost many of the fierce, determined traits that make a wild salmon able to swim against powerful currents, withstand fluctuations in temperature, and spawn in a river besieged by predators. Critics argue that escaped farmed salmon may outcompete wild salmon in some phases in their life cycle only to be unable to reproduce later on down the line. Some maintain that this could have a fatal impact on the long-term viability of wild salmon everywhere.
In spite of these risks, Gjedrem believes that improvement should be the norm for all farmed fish. “With the exception of Atlantic salmon, we are so far behind terrestrial food production,” he told me, driving me in his little blue car back to the little yellow train across the snowy white Norwegian dales. “Think of the Green Revolution of the 1960s! Since the Green Revolution, there has been no major starvation in India or China. The same thing should have started by now with fish and shellfish.”
Of all the people I’ve met in the world of seafood, Gjedrem seemed the most baffled by the way salmon farming has been increasingly targeted by nonprofits as a polluting, environmentally degrading industry. Gjedrem is a child of the Depression, and the formative experiences of his childhood were poverty and human starvation. Any move away from that baseline is progress. His blue eyes twinkled, and he seemed to bristle with excitement when he talked about all the people the ocean could feed if breeding principles were put into place in a rational manner. “It’s such a waste of resources,” he declared of the world’s failure to embrace selective breeding of fish. It was not in fury or anger that he said this, but with a kind of bewilderment. Why even allow for the possibility of starvation?
As we reached the
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