[Scpg] Time mag article on Aquaculture

[LBUZZELL at aol.com]

Thanks to Wes Roe for passing this timely info along to us.The next  
Permaculture Guild of Santa Barbara meeting will be Wed July 20, 7 pm at the  
Watershed Resource Center at Arroyo Beach, 2981 Cliff Drive in Santa  Barbara. 
Our topic will be how to build aquaponic  systems. 

Aquaculture  article in Time Magazine July 18 2011 


End of the Line:  Can Fish Farming take the place of catching  them?

_http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2081796-1,00.html_ (http:
//www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2081796-1,00.html) 

Fish  are the last wild food, but our oceans are being picked clean. Can 
farming  fish take the place of catching them?


Josh Goldman  runs a fish farm, but the hangar-size facility in the western 
Massachusetts  town of Turners Falls looks a lot less like a farm than a 
factory. Thousands  of one-third-pound barramundi — an omnivorous fish native 
to Southeast Asia  and Australia — swim in a 36-ft.-diameter tank that 
resembles a supersize  kiddie pool. They spend their days fattening up on feed 
pellets under the  watchful eyes of factory workers — farmers, if you must — 
who grade them for  size. After several weeks of careful feeding, the fish 
are moved via an  industrial waterslide — the pescalator, Goldman calls it — 
to a larger tank in  the plant's next cavernous room. The assembly line 
runs until the barramundi  have been raised to market weight, about 2 lb., 
after which they're sent off  to white-tablecloth seafood restaurants and 
sustainability-minded retail  outlets across the U.S.

>From the moment the barramundi are hatched,  from eggs barely one-hundredth 
of an inch long to the day they're sold, they  never swim in a river or 
sea, never hunt for food, never feel the tug of a  fishing line. "We're 
producing great-quality fish without harming the oceans  or anything else," Goldman 
says of his operation, Australis Aquaculture. His  barramundi aren't 
caught; they're manufactured. And factories like these might  represent the last, 
best chance for fish to have a future.

Since human  beings first took up the plow about 10,000 years ago, most of 
our food has  come from the farmer's hand. We grew fruits, vegetables and 
grains to feed  ourselves and support those domesticated animals we relied on 
for meat and  dairy products. But there was an exception. When humans 
fished, we still went  out into the wild, braved the elements and brought back 
decidedly  undomesticated animals for dinner. There was a romance to fishing 
that was  inseparable from the romance of the sea, a way of life — for all its 
peril and  terror — suffused with a freedom that the farmer and rancher 
would never know.  Though the fishermen who roved the Sea of Galilee in Jesus' 
time and the  factory trawlers that scrape the ocean floor today couldn't be 
more different,  they share a common link to our hunter-gatherer past. 
"Fish are the last wild  food," says Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish, one of 
the best books on the  state of seafood. "And we're just realizing it."

But we may be coming  to that realization too late, because it turns out 
that even the fathomless  depths of the oceans have limits. The U.N. reports 
that 32% of global fish  stocks are overexploited or depleted and as much as 
90% of large species like  tuna and marlin have been fished out in the past 
half-century. Once-plentiful  species like Atlantic cod have been fished to 
near oblivion, and delicacies  like bluefin tuna are on an arc toward 
extinction. A recent report by the  International Programme on the State of the 
Ocean found that the world's  marine species faced threats "unprecedented in 
human history" — and  overfishing is part of the problem.


Meanwhile, the worldwide catch  seems to have plateaued at about 90 million 
tons a year since the mid-1990s.  That's a lot of fish, but even if those 
levels prove sustainable, it's not  enough to keep up with global seafood 
consumption, which has risen from 22 lb.  per person per year in the 1960s to 
nearly 38 lb. today. With hundreds of  millions of people joining the middle 
class in the developing world and fish  increasingly seen as a tasty and 
heart-healthy form of protein, that trend  will continue. The inescapable 
conclusion: there just isn't enough seafood in  the seas. "The wild stocks are 
not going to keep up," says Stephen Hall,  director general of the WorldFish 
Center. "Something else has to fill that  gap."

Something else already does: aquaculture. Humans have been  raising some 
fish in farms for almost as long as we've been fishing, beginning  with 
Chinese fishponds 4,000 years ago. But it's only in the past 50 years  that 
aquaculture has become a true industry. Global aquacultural production  increased 
from less than 1 million tons in 1950 to 52.5 million tons in 2008,  and 
over the past few decades, aquaculture has grown faster than any other  form of 
food production. Today about half the seafood consumed around the  world 
comes from farms, and with the projected rise in global seafood  consumption, 
that proportion will surely increase. Without aquaculture, the  pressure to 
overfish the oceans would be even greater. "It's no longer a  question about 
whether aquaculture is something we should or shouldn't  embrace," says Ned 
Daly, senior projects adviser at the Seafood Choices  Alliance. "It's here. 
The question is how we'll do it."

That's not an  easy question to answer, because the rapid growth of 
aquaculture has been  accompanied by environmental costs. In the past, the dense 
salmon farms of  Canada and northern Europe helped spread disease among wild 
fish while  releasing waste into coastal waters. Mangrove forests, which 
provide a  valuable habitat for coastal life, have been razed to make way for 
Thailand's  shrimp farms. Especially troubling, many of the most popular 
farmed species  are carnivores, meaning they need to be fed at least partly with 
other fish.  By one count, about 2 lb. of wild fish ground up to make fish 
meal is needed  on average to produce 1 lb. of farmed fish, which leaves the 
ocean at a net  loss. "Aquaculture's reliance on fish meal and fish oil is a 
major concern for  marine conservation," says Sebastian Troeng, a marine 
expert with Conservation  International.

But unless you can convince 1.3 billion Chinese — not to  mention everyone 
else in a growing world — that they don't deserve the  occasional sushi 
roll, aquaculture will keep growing. As it does, it will need  to become more 
efficient and less polluting. The good news is that the  industry is 
improving. More farmable but less familiar species like the  barramundi — which 
yields more protein than it takes in as feed — may have to  supplement popular 
fish like cod that haven't taken as well to aquaculture. We  may even need to 
genetically engineer popular species to make them grow faster  and bigger. 
And perhaps most of all, we need to accept that on a planet with a  
population of nearly 7 billion and climbing, we may no longer be able to  indulge our 
taste for the last wild food. We've farmed the land. Now we have  little 
choice but to farm the sea as well.


Aquaculture and Its  Discontents
To the average shopper, farmed fish is barely distinguishable  from its 
wild cousin — except, often, in price. Without the growth in  aquaculture, many 
of our favorite kinds of seafood would likely be much more  expensive than 
they are now. And chances are, you get what you paid for:  farmed seafood 
can be inferior to wild fish in taste and may not always have  the same 
nutritional value. Salmon raised in an aquaculture environment, for  instance, 
often have lower levels of cardiovascular-friendly omega-3s than  wild fish, 
and farmed fillets would actually be gray without a pink chemical  dye. And if 
you're eating farmed seafood, you're almost certainly getting it  from 
overseas: U.S. aquaculture accounts for just 5% of Americans' seafood  
consumption. The Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program mostly  discourages 
consumers from choosing farmed fish, both for health reasons and  because of 
worries over the environmental impact of aquaculture. "There's a  real 
difference in the regulation you might see in other countries compared  with the 
U.S.," says Peter Bridson, Monterey's aquaculture-research  manager.

At the same time, it's important to look at the big picture.  For health 
reasons, most of us should be eating more fish. For its new dietary  
guidelines, the U.S. government just upped the recommended consumption of  seafood to 
8 oz. or more a week — which is more than twice what the average  American 
eats — and 12 oz. for pregnant women. In a report this month, the  U.N. said 
global food production would need to increase by as much as 100% by  2050 
to meet growing demand — and seafood, as a vital protein source, will  have 
to be part of that. Farming is unavoidable. "There may be a price split  
between expensive wild fish and cheaper farmed fish," says Don Perkins, head  of 
the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. "But seafood consumption will spread  
because we need it for health reasons."


To understand global  aquaculture — its potential and its problems — it 
helps to look at the  industry's track record in China, a country responsible 
for 61% of the world's  aquaculture. China has begun exporting industrially 
produced catfish, shrimp  and tilapia in recent years. As production 
pressures have ramped up, Chinese  manufacturers have packed their ponds more 
tightly, leading to disease and  pollution from fish waste. That waste can 
overload coastal waters with  nutrients, causing dead zones that can strangle sea 
life. To fight the  diseases worsened by crowding, Chinese fish farmers have 
liberally used  antibiotics and other drugs, including malachite green, an 
antifungal agent  and potential carcinogen that was banned by Beijing in 
2002 but shows up  periodically in exports. "It is still a problem," says Wong 
Ming Hung, a  biology professor at Hong Kong Baptist University.

While China remains  a laggard on safety — though experts say its 
fish-farming industry is  improving as it matures — there's no denying that 
aquaculture can be messy. A  badly run near-shore farm of 200,000 salmon can flush 
nitrogen and phosphorus  into the water at levels equal to the sewage from a 
town of 20,000 people. But  for all that, fish farming's bad reputation isn't 
entirely deserved,  especially if it's compared with farming on land.

chanics and  metabolism. Unlike land animals raised for food, fish are 
cold-blooded and  live in the water, which means less of their feed is wasted — 
from our point  of view — being burned as energy to keep warm or to build 
bone. Fish farmers  had the bad luck to come along after industrial meat 
production was well  established, and the new guy on the block gets more 
scrutiny. "We have to  address the environmental and social issues," says Jose 
Villalon, director of  the WWF's aquaculture program. "But aquaculture is a good 
tool to deal with  food security."


One way to address those issues is to build an  aquacultural system that 
mimics nature, in which the waste produced by farmed  fish is put to use. 
Thierry Chopin, a biologist at the University of New  Brunswick, wants to take 
advantage of that principle with his integrated  multitrophic aquaculture 
(IMTA). In an IMTA loop, species like salmon and  shrimp are raised less 
densely than in conventional aquaculture, together with  seaweed and shellfish 
like mussels. The waste from the farmed species  fertilizes the seaweed, which 
can be harvested for use in fish feed. The  mussels, which are filter 
feeders, can gobble waste in the water, preventing  pollution from building up. 
The result is more biomass and less waste — just  as nature intended. "If it 
functions as an ecosystem does," says Chopin, "then  it functions right."

Even an aquacultural system more in tune with  nature still faces essential 
challenges, including the feed-ratio problem.  When producers began raising 
fish intensively, they picked species that people  like to eat: salmon and 
sea bass. But those species are high on the food  chain, and raising them on 
a farm is a bit like trying to domesticate tigers.  The aquaculture 
industry has gotten better at replacing fish meal with  plant-based feed, but not 
fast enough. You're not feeding the world  sustainably if you need to remove 
the base of the marine food chain to do it.  "The question of what the fish 
will eat is central to aquaculture," says  Australis' Goldman. "We can't 
grow on the back of small forage  fish."


A Fish and a Dream
The answer might be simply to find a  better fish, one more suited to 
farming. This is exactly what Goldman set out  to do. He got into aquaculture in 
the 1980s as a college student and had a  tilapia-farming operation for a 
few years. But while tilapia are more  sustainable than many other fish 
because they're vegetarians, they lack the  high amounts of omega-3 oils that make 
salmon so heart-healthy. Goldman tried  striped bass but found them too 
fussy to raise. It wasn't until a chance  encounter with an Australian 
entrepreneur that he found his dream fish: the  barramundi.

As a farmed species, the barramundi is just about perfect.  It can survive 
in a wide variety of environments and lays eggs frequently. It  has a 
flexible diet, and much like its fellow Australians, it is laid-back by  nature, 
so it can endure the rigors of farming. Goldman launched Australis in  
Turners Falls in 2004 and was producing barramundi commercially by 2005. The  fish 
is rich in omega-3 oils; Dr. Oz named it one of his top superfoods in  
2010. Less than 20% of the barramundi's feed at Australis comes from fish meal  
and fish oil — a better percentage than for many farmed salmon, which can  
require as much as 50% of their feed from fish meal. The Turners Falls  
operation is an indoor, closed recirculating system, so there's little waste,  
little risk of disease and no threat that the barramundi will escape into the  
wild. Plus, barramundi tastes good, with the flaky mouthfeel of the  
better-known sea bass. Goldman's real challenge is convincing Americans — with  
their appetite for shrimp, tuna and salmon — that they should eat an  
unfamiliar Australian fish. "Selling it as sustainable helps," he says. "But  once 
they try it, people like it."
Australis' barramundi has become so  popular, in fact, that Goldman has 
expanded production — but not in  Massachusetts. While the closed recirculating 
system he uses in Turners Falls  is an environmentalist's dream, Goldman 
eventually wanted to reach a larger  market at a lower cost, a step that he 
decided required an outdoor operation  on the central coast of Vietnam. That 
branch, where barramundi are raised in  sea cages in a protected bay, isn't 
quite as green as Turners Falls, but it's  cheaper.

Land-based systems may work for more premium species, and they  offer the 
chance to raise fish close to cities. In New York State, for  instance, a 
company called Local Ocean produces indoor-farmed sea bass and  flounder two 
hours from Manhattan. But such systems are still more  experimental than 
economical. "As much as the NGOs would have loved it,  [Australis] just couldn't 
meet the economics of an expensive indoor  environment," says Goldman.

Rise of the Frankenfish
Many NGOs would  also like us all to choose farmed fish more judiciously, 
selecting sustainable  species low on the food chain. There's not a lot of 
evidence that's going to  happen, however. But if we won't always choose the 
fish that take better to  farming, another option is to take the fish we like 
and engineer them into  sustainability. Fish farmers have been doing that 
quite naturally for the past  few years, breeding salmon and other species so 
they grow faster and require  less fish meal — something farmers on land 
have done for hundreds of years  with cattle, pigs and chicken. The 
Massachusetts-based biotech company  AquaBounty wants to take that breeding process a 
step further by genetically  engineering Atlantic salmon that can grow up to 
twice as fast as conventional  fish. Its product, the AquAdvantage salmon, 
contains a gene from the chinook  salmon, a larger cousin that lives in cold 
northern waters. That gene  activates a growth hormone, with obvious 
commercial benefits for farmers who  want to get their fish to market weight 
quickly. "America imports its seafood  at the cost of a huge carbon footprint," 
says Ronald Stotish, AquaBounty's  CEO. "This could make it economical to 
raise land-based salmon domestically.  This is sustainability."


The Food and Drug Administration convened  a panel of experts last fall to 
review the genetically modified (GM) salmon,  and they were mostly satisfied 
with AquaBounty's proposal. But while the FDA  hasn't yet decided whether 
to approve what would be the first genetically  modified food animal, most 
environmental groups are staunchly against what  they've termed the 
Frankenfish. They worry about the possible effect on human  health, and they're 
concerned that if GM salmon escape into the wild — as  conventionally farmed 
salmon do all the time — they might outcompete wild  salmon.

While AquaBounty has pledged to ensure that the GM salmon will  be kept 
sterile and produced in confinement, critics fear that something will  go 
wrong. (As a government scientist wrote in a leaked e-mail, "Maybe [the  FDA] 
should watch Jurassic Park.") "Absence of evidence does not mean evidence  of 
absence," says Zach Corrigan, fish-program director for Food & Water  Watch. 
"The regulation isn't there."


Even if GM salmon doesn't  succeed in North America, it might find a home 
in China or another fish-hungry  country where knee-jerk resistance to 
transgenic technology isn't so strong.  And newer, better GM fish are being 
engineered in labs right now, including a  transgenic trout that can pack on 15% 
to 20% more muscle than a conventional  fish. But the very fact that we can 
ponder these issues shows how much our  relationship with the last wild food 
has changed. For thousands of years,  fishermen risked the elements to bring 
back the bounty of the sea. Fishing is  the deadliest job in the U.S.: in 
2009, 0.2% of fishermen died hauling in our  seafood, compared with 0.01% of 
miners who died on the job. But that danger is  also part of the allure, as 
the success of TV shows like The Deadliest Catch  and books like The Perfect 
Storm demonstrates. "Fishermen are the last  commercial hunters in the 
world," says Sebastian Belle, director of the Maine  Aquaculture Association, 
who has seen unemployed New England fishermen take up  aquaculture. "They had 
the excitement of never knowing what they were going to  get."

With 7 billion people, however, the planet doesn't have much  space for 
such freedom. It's not that commercial fishing will disappear; in  fact, 
sustainable fisheries like Alaska's wild-salmon industry may even  produce 
boutique foods, finally earning what they're worth. There's no doubt  that 
something will be lost in the transition to mass aquaculture, as fish —  the last 
true wild food — are domesticated to support human beings, in much  the same 
way we tamed cattle, pigs and chickens thousands of years ago. But if  we're 
all going to survive and thrive in a crowded world, we'll need to  cultivate 
the seas just as we do the land. If we do it right, aquaculture can  be one 
more step toward saving ourselves. And if we do it well, we may even  enjoy 
the taste of it.
— With reporting by Austin Ramzy / Beijing and  Robert Horn /  Bangkok




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