What is the problem with salmon aquaculture?
There are a number of problems with salmon farming, but the main one is that the farming is being done directly in coastal bays and estuaries, treating them as a dumping ground. salmon farming is basically akin to putting a feedlot in the water. Very large numbers of fish, a couple hundred thousand fish in any particular farm site, are put close together. All the waste from those fish and uneaten feed flow directly into coastal waters. The mantra of the salmon farming industry is a rather old fashioned one: dilution is the solution to pollution. If you go back to the turn of the century, the way of dealing with air pollution was to build tall smoke stacks and get it up into the atmosphere and spread the smoke out. We didn’t have to worry about it. That’s the approach of the salmon farming industry. Put the farm into the water. The water will take salmon waste and dilute them and therefore they’re not a problem. That’s a rather old fashioned mentality in an era where we realize that our
