What is salmon aquaculture?
Salmon aquaculture, also known as salmon "farming",
is the industrial mass production of salmon. Farmed salmon are
raised in net cages - floating feedlots. These are pens made
of nets located directly in the ocean.
Is farmed salmon healthy?
Increasingly, people are turning to salmon for a healthier diet.
However, much of the salmon available on the market, comes from
fish farms, not from the wild. The groundbreaking study A
Global Assessment of Organic Contaminants in Farmed vs. Wild
Salmon: Geographical Differences and Health Risks released
January 2004 in the respected journal Science, found in most
cases that consuming more than one serving of farmed salmon
per month could pose unacceptable cancer risks, according to
United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards
for determining safe fish consumption levels. Farmed salmon
contain higher levels of PCBs and dioxins than wild salmon.
To
learn more about the health concerns associated with farmed
salmon, click here.
Is farmed salmon good for
the environment?
There are presently over 85 open net cage fish farms currently
operating in the coastal waters of British Columbia producing
waste that is roughly equivalent to the raw sewage from a city
of 500,000 inhabitants. Read
more about the environmental impacts of salmon farming.
Am I eating farmed salmon?
There are virtually no commercial Atlantic salmon fisheries
in the world. Therefore if you are eating Atlantic salmon, it
is farmed. Although most farms around the world raise Atlantic
salmon, in British Columbia there are a few farms that raise
chinook and coho.
Retailers and restaurants
often advertise fresh salmon, but this often means fresh from
the farm, not the ocean.
To
be sure, ask your restaurant or retailer if the salmon is farmed
or wild.
The
food given to farmed salmon does not contain the natural sources
of color and as a result, their flesh is an unappetizing gray
color. To make their product more marketable, fish farm companies
choose what color they want their salmon from the SalmoFan.
Chemical additives are then added to the fish feed.
More information about farmed
salmon can be found at 
