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The following guest blog was submitted by Shauna MacKinnon with the Living Oceans Society and the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform.

Say “healthy fish” and many customers will give salmon as their first response, not surprising given its top-seller status. Ask a customer where salmon comes from and you’ll probably get some vivid descriptions of wild fish swimming strongly in cold Alaska waters with burly fishermen chasing just behind. The wild, natural image of salmon is often incorrect – in North America just over 50% of the salmon sold is farmed, that is its Atlantic salmon grown in net-cages in the ocean. While that might sound fairly natural, farming fish in nets with no barrier between the farm and the wild environment creates a suite of problems—feces and chemicals polluting local ecosystems, escapes that add up to millions of farmed fish competing with struggling wild stocks for food and habitat, and the proliferation of disease and sea lice (necessitating antibiotic or pesticide treatments), which can infect wild fish. There is also the massive transfer of small fish from southern oceans to feed farmed salmon, it takes between 3-5 pounds of wild fish for every pound of farmed salmon grown.

That salmon fillet is starting to sound less appetizing already.

In British Columbia, Canada a coalition of non-governmental organizations, the “>Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, have been working together to change salmon farming practices since 2001. Canada is the #3 farmed salmon producer in the world, after Norway and Chile, and a major supplier of “fresh” farmed salmon to the United States. (It still qualifies as “fresh” after it has been trucked over 1,000 miles a week after harvest.) The British Columbia coastline is home to over a thousand stocks of wild Pacific salmon and these salmon play an extremely important role in the Pacific coastal ecosystem, economy and culture. With decades of logging, poor fisheries management and now changing ocean and river conditions due to climate change, BC wild salmon are in a bad state. Adding to the problems are the 100+ net-cage salmon farms on the BC coast that are creating a gauntlet of sea lice that small, vulnerable juvenile wild salmon need to pass through as they migrate from their natal rivers to the open ocean where they spend their adult lives.

The Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform is proposing a solution to this problem – a safer technology that separates farmed and wild fish – closed containment. Closed containment systems are already growing artic char, striped bass, and Coho salmon. We just need wider adoption! Chefs can help make this happen. You can visit www.FarmedandDangerous.org for more resources and www.SalmonSupporters.com to join our chef and retail program.

Visit the Resources page for the information you need to make informed choices about salmon, including:

Thanks for helping make a difference!