Comment to: I'll take wild fish over farmed ones anytime
by Grant Warkentin, Terrace Standard, October 7, 2011
Mr. Clayton Lloyd-Jones asks me several questions in his Oct. 7, 2011 letter and I will attempt to answer some of them.
To answer his questions about impacts on the sea floor, it’s important to understand that on a salmon farm very little food is allowed to go to waste. Feed is our single biggest cost and we have cameras in the water to watch the salmon eat. As soon as their feeding slows down, and pellets appear to be sinking below the pen, we shut off the feeders. There is little feed waste on the ocean floor.
As for fish “poop,” farms are sited in deep-water areas with good water flow to allow waste to be dispersed, just as the waste from schools of wild fish disperses in the ocean. Some waste does build up below pens, but since sites are in deep water, there is little negative impact on the ocean floor and the sea life below. These impacts are monitored by DFO and many years of monitoring shows the ocean floor recovers very quickly once a farm is fallowed. Before we can restock a farm, our impact must be shown to be within government limits and regulations.
Mr. Lloyd-Jones makes some gross exaggerations about “chemicals” being fed to our fish. We do not feed our fish “chemicals.” Our fish sometimes eat feed with antibiotics, but this is rare because we keep our fish healthy through low-stress conditions and good feed. In fact, for every tonne of salmon we produced in 2010, less than 15 grams of antibiotics were used. That’s about the size of half a granola bar.
And the only treatment we use for sea lice is SLICE, licenced in Canada as a drug, and milled into the feed. The actual amount of active ingredient used to treat an entire farm would fit in the palm of your hand.
Mr. Lloyd-Jones goes on at length about SLICE, using unsourced and outdated information which repeats many falsehoods. It is used only under the prescription of a veterinarian; it is used in such small doses that it does not impact other sea life; and most importantly, it is never used in a preventative way, only when a veterinarian deems it is necessary. We use it mainly during the spring out-migration period for wild salmon, to make sure the lice levels on our farms are as low as possible and so there is little or no risk of sea lice being passed from our farms to juvenile wild salmon swimming by.
There is plenty of public information available about SLICE through the B.C. Agricultural Ministry, Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and even the US EPA because the main ingredient – emamectin benzoate – has been used for more than a decade as a pesticide in American vegetable farms.
And it is certainly not “used at least once on every farmed salmon.” It’s not uncommon for a full production cycle of fish to go from smolt to harvest without any antibiotic or SLICE treatment at all. And regular tests of our fish by us and by the CFIA show there is no detectable residue in the salmon flesh from antibiotics and SLICE.
Mr. Lloyd-Jones is certainly welcome to enjoy wild sockeye, as do I and many of our employees who love sport fishing as much as anyone. We believe there is plenty of room for farmed and wild salmon in our oceans, as science is showing, and that they can sustainably co-exist for many years to come.
Grant Warkentin was commenting on the following Letter to the Editor:
I'll take wild fish over farmed ones anytime
Dear Sir:
In response to Mr. Grant Warkentin’s Sept. 28, 2011 criticism of Skeena Angler Rob Brown’s concern over the Cohen Commission’s reporting on aquaculture and its impact on wild salmon I would like to ask Mr. Warkentin a few questions about the clean, highly-regulated operation of which he is so proud.
What happens to all the fecal matter and waste food that is piling up on our ocean’s floor underneath these farms? With millions of fish in open net containment pens there are thousand of tonnes of waste product killing the sea life and plants in the places these farms are operating. If it is so highly regulated how can the federal government allow disposal of this sludge into our coastal waters?
This waste is filled with chemicals that are ingested by the fish. They are given antibiotics and pesticides presumably to ward off disease and sea lice. If the DFO caught an average Joe unloading his septic tank into the ocean there would be hell to pay. The provincial government is moving towards a ban on pesticides in fertilizer but you get away with it because they give you a special permit.
If sea lice attached to fry are not a factor in the decline of the wild salmon why do fish farmers use SLICE to keep sea lice away from mature fish? SLICE is a highly toxic pesticide that is only available through the emergency drug release program, which allows the use of non-approved drugs when recommended by veterinarians for emergency situations.
This drug is fed to fish to keep them from becoming infested with lice. The information regarding this chemical, according to Health Canada, is proprietary and not available to the public. It affects prawns, crabs and shrimp as well as the sea lice.
The ingredients in this drug are toxic to fish, birds, mammals, and aquatic invertebrates – do not apply directly to water, or to areas where surface water is present, or to intertidal areas below the mean high water mark. Do not contaminate water when cleaning equipment or disposing of equipment wash water.
The US has listed this as an unapproved drug that should not be used for consumption in the US. According to the Canadian government this chemical is used at least once on every farmed salmon, 80 per cent of which go to the US market.
How long does it stay in a fish’s system before it is completely gone? And if it is just a short term solution why use it all? There are known cases where sea lice are becoming immune to SLICE. What’s next? A more potent chemical? That has already been tried in New Brunswick. Alphamax® is highly toxic to crustaceans. It is applied by chemical bath with the fish pens surrounded by tarps. The tarps are removed and the solution is released into the ecosystem.
If you are concerned about wild salmon, as you say you are, why not go to closed containment pens. This solves the lice problem and would eliminate the need for pesticides.
Fish farmers are also getting away with killing nearly 200 California sea lions and Stellar seals this year and we still have three months before the year is over. Again, that’s not something that is allowed by ordinary citizens.
Aquaculture may be clean and highly regulated but that’s only on the surface. Beneath that surface is a foul, disgusting and lethal mess killing our wildlife and polluting our ocean,
Mr. Warkentin, you are welcome to your dyed, chemical infected farmed fish. I’ll take a wild sockeye from the Skeena River and not worry about what was used to get rid of the sea lice or what colour was used in their food to give it a more palatable look.
Clayton Lloyd-Jones,
Terrace, BC
Here is the link to the Grant Warkentin Letter to the Editor, Lloyd- Jones responded to:
Smoking gun missed its mark - Cohen Commission
The biggest mystery about Rob Brown’s latest column from Sept. 21 is why it so poorly represents the discussions which happened at the Cohen Commission nearly a month ago.
Apparently in that month Mr. Brown did not read through any transcripts and studies from the week he writes about, even though they are all publicly available online at www.cohencommission.ca...Read more here.
PAA Note: Cohen Commission transcripts for Aquaculture are crossed linked on the PAA website at:
http://www.farmfreshsalmon.org/blog/cohen-commission-evidentiary-hearing-transcript-links
