My husband is a mechanic to trade but here in this area you take what is about and he works in salmon farming and I can honestly say there is nothing wrong with it. Not if done properly and responsibly. I personally would rather have farmed than knowing out of a tin they have just decimated half the fish going upto spawn in a mad dash to make money.
The argument for salmon farming is it creates jobs... how many people work per salmon farm? Not very many really and the numbers employed in total have seriously crashed in recent years as automation and foreign supply take their toll.
The arguments against... where to start?
SLICE - sea lice pesticide dumped into estuarine systems in vast quantities even where there's sufficient throughput to clear the...
EFFLUENTof millions of salmon which would, in the wild, deposit their 'guano' over hundreds if not thousands of square kilometers of sea bed as they follow the North Atlantic drift now deposit it all in one spot (until they move the nets because the current location is over-polluted) which comes from...
INDUSTRIAL FISHING OF SANDEELS to make the feed pellets, by removing a staple from low in the food chain many other species than just the native wild salmon are affected including bass and cod, both of which feed on sandeel as juveniles, this processed and nutritionally poor diet not only has a smaller protein conversion ratio than wild fish manage but also requires the use of...
CHEMICAL ADDITIVES to colour the flesh of the farmed fish have been linked and other chemicals absorbed from the feed through accumulation of the smaller species used to make it have been linked in the past to a host of diseases in humans, indeed one US study recommended no more than 3 portions per person per year of farmed Scottish salmon - the 'Merkins take their health stuff seriously so I'll not argue with them. This doesn't segway nicely into the financial side of things but...
PROFITS by and large, don't stay in Scotland. The vast majority of the fish farms in Scotland are foreign owned, Norwegian in the main, so the environmental damage caused benefits not the Scots, but the vikings who stole all the pretty ones and left Aberdeen the desperate place it is of a weekend night when you're out on the lash.
You said something about a mad dash to make money? When I was a kid salmon was about the most expensive thing you could buy in terms of meat or fish. These days it's not only the cheapest thing on the supermarket shelves but it's frequently discounted in order to shift it in enough bulk to make it profitable.
There's your mad dash to cash in - the canning of wild pacific salmon ALL of which die after spawning and only 10% of which are required to spawn to replenish the rivers has nothing to do with salmon farming in Scotland, although it is frequently used by that industry as a smoke screen.
Don't get me completely wrong here - there are some good ones, I hope your husband works for one of them, the majority however, aren't.
Cheers,
PS. Don't eat the salmon... it's off
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