What are the issues with farmed salmon?
Farmed salmon now accounts for 80% of all salmon sold in the United States. Yet few consumers are aware of the negative environmental, health, and social costs of farmed salmon. Fortunately, this is beginning to change! Environmental Costs: Salmon are farmed in net pens, usually in estuaries that historically were home to native wild salmon runs. In British Columbia, Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) are farmed in rivers that still hold wild Pacific runs. When the nets rip, the Atlantic salmon escapees may colonize and crowd out the native wild populations. Additionally, farmed salmon require enormous amounts of feed (made of harvested ocean fish), which escapes from net pens along with the fishes’ own excrement, polluting estuarine environments. Each net pen can produce two metric tons of waste, equivalent to the waste output of a small city! Net pen salmon are also hosts for disease and parasites like sea lice, which attack wild salmon during their migrations. To confront the sea lice, s
