Fish farm closed due to mistake
By Grant Warkentin, Vancouver Sun January 20, 2014
Peter O'Neil's story about fish farm expansion contains several inaccuracies, and misrepresents the facts. Most of the "new" applications have been on hold for years, stalled when DFO took over regulation of salmon farms from the province of B.C., and stalled again throughout the Cohen Inquiry.
His article also errs in explaining why we are applying to expand our Cypress Harbour site. Years ago, this site had its biomass (the maximum amount of fish allowed on a site at any given time) decreased to 10 tonnes due to a long-standing clerical error.
As anyone in salmon farming knows, a 10-tonne farm would be a waste of time: typical production farms are 3,000 tonnes. We need 460 tonnes capacity at Cypress to hold broodstock fish, which provide eggs for future generations of our farmed salmon.
Because of this error, we had to shut down a nearby production site and transfer broodstock there. Cypress has remained empty and we have been down one production site since this happened.
Now that DFO is again processing salmon farming files, we are eager to get this error corrected, so we can move our broodstock back to Cypress Harbour, and regain our production site.
GRANT WARKENTIN
Cermaq Canada Ltd.,
Communications Officer
Reference Link:
Sun story about salmon farm growth gets it wrong
Cermaq, January 17, 2014
A recent story in the Vancouver Sun about salmon farm expansion has several erroneous statements about our operations that need to be corrected...
To read more click here.
