THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, December 20, 1995 TAG: 9512200521
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: SPECIAL REPORT
DIVIDING THE WATERS
If the U.S. fishing industry has a future, it may take inspiration
from another business that once occupied vast territories: cattle
ranching. Aquaculture - essentially fish ``ranching'' - is showing
promise at sea and in landlocked ventures, where harpoons and nets
have been replaced by growing pens.
SOURCE: BY CHRISTOPHER DINSMORE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BUCKS HARBOR, MAINE LENGTH: Long : 277 lines
The killing crew goes to work at 3 a.m., whether it's a beautiful August morning or an icy January dawn.
Like their fathers and their grandfathers, the six crew members meet on a dock in Bucks Harbor, Maine, to gather fish from the sea.
Unlike their fathers, these men are not hunters. They're farmers. They motor out to an Atlantic salmon farm in Machias Bay, where the fish are raised in large floating pens. The killing crew, as its members call themselves, net the fish, kill them and pack them on ice.
In eight hours, the salmon can be on a plane in Boston, destined for dinner plates across the country.
``They are absolutely great,'' said Ray Haney, owner of the Cape Charles restaurant Sting Ray's, which serves the farm-raised salmon from Maine.
Known as aquaculture, fish farming is a young industry in the United States. Worldwide, cultured seafood provides about 20 percent of the seafood consumed. As wild fishery stocks get more depleted, aquaculture may someday provide the bulk of our seafood.
It's already a primary source for some species.
Much of the salmon eaten in the United States is farm-raised. The Alaskan wild catch is either bought by the Japanese or canned. At your neighborhood grocery store or fish market, not only is the salmon probably farm-raised, but the catfish, shrimp, clams and trout probably are, too.
As our appetite for seafood grows, the race is on to develop methods to breed and cultivate other types of fish.
Researchers in Canada, Norway and New England are working on such high-value species as cod, haddock and halibut. Populations of these popular groundfish in the North Atlantic have been decimated by years of overfishing.
North Carolina State University is doing promising work with summer flounder, a popular white fish.
A project sponsored by the New England Aquarium in Boston is showing that the increasingly rare bluefin tuna may be as ideal for aquaculture as catfish or salmon.
``With a lot of these emerging species, there's just not enough information for commercialization yet,'' said Gary Jensen, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's national program leader for aquaculture.
Whatever methods are developed, they must be commercially viable. Aquaculture is a $28.4 billion industry worldwide, but the United States accounts for less than $1 billion of that. World leaders include Norway, China and Chile.
The business itself is risky, involving a large initial investment to produce a commodity whose price is subject to global market pressures beyond a farm's control. And there are environmental concerns, about water quality.
There is also concern that aquaculture really doesn't alleviate pressure on wild fish stocks, but merely turns one protein into another, more palatable one. The salmon, for example, are fed a meal made of ground anchovies.
``I don't know of any case where it results in a net lessening of fishing pressure because - what feeds fish, but other smaller fish?'' said Carl Safina, director of the National Audubon Society's Living Oceans Program.
In the United States, catfish farming is by far the largest aquaculture industry. Big business in the South, catfish farms sold 440 million pounds of the freshwater bottom dweller in 1994, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's 1995 Aquaculture Outlook report. The average farm in Mississippi has 323 acres of ponds.
Salmon farms in Maine and Washington state produced about 26 million pounds of fish last year, the report said. By contrast, salmon farms worldwide raised nearly 1.1 billion pounds of the fish.
In Virginia and North Carolina, fish farming is a tiny industry that involves mostly freshwater species such as trout, catfish, hybrid striped bass and tilapia. Virginia is best known for its clam farms, mostly on the Eastern Shore.
Virginia hosts about 100 mostly small aquaculture operations, from 35-year-old trout ponds in the mountains to a state-of-the-art tilapia farm in Suffolk, said T. Robins Buck, aquaculture development services project manager for the state Agriculture Department.
Tilapia, the nation's fastest-growing aquaculture crop, has a delicate white meat, popular in ethnic markets and finding increasing acceptance from chefs and at grocery stores. The Suffolk farm, known as U.S. Aquaculture Inc., will soon be producing about 250,000 pounds of tilapia a year, nearly 15 times Virginia's entire production of tilapia in 1993.
``Unfortunately Virginia is at a very difficult latitude,'' said William DuPaul, associate director for advisory services at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. ``Our water is too warm in the summer for most species and too cold in the winter.'' COMMERCIALIZATION IS WHERE U.S. LAGS
While U.S. researchers have led the way in aquaculture research, particularly of spawning and fish health, the nation has lagged behind in commercialization, said the USDA's Jensen.
Norwegians developed the floating net pens and related technology for use in the aquaculture of salmon and other marine finfish. Both Norway and Canada provided considerable research support, low-interest loans and some subsidies to jump-start their aquaculture industries.
The U.S. government has taken a more laissez-faire approach, providing some research support and extension services, but offering no financial support until recently.
``We're missing a real significant opportunity by not pursuing aquaculture more aggressively,'' said Sebastian Belle, the tuna project manager at the New England Aquarium. Belle also managed a Maine salmon farm for several years. ``We have some of the best marine researchers in this country, but researchers don't start companies.''
In the maritime provinces of Canada, farm-raised salmon is eclipsing potatoes and dairy goods as the region's No. 1 farm product. Canada lost 40,000 fishing-related jobs when stocks of cod and other groundfish collapsed. With generous federal support, the country has put thousands of fishermen back to work in fish farming.
In Norway, aquaculture has created thousands of jobs and helped preserve the culture of the Scandinavian nation's coastal fishing villages. A Norwegian study of its salmon farms showed that those run by former fishermen outproduced those run by businessmen and fisheries scientists.
``They know the fish,'' said Belle, who once worked for a Norwegian aquaculture firm.
American fishermen have been reluctant to go from fish-hunting to fish-farming. It runs counter to the heritage.
``It's much easier to harvest a free fish than it is to try to raise them,'' said William Amaru, a groundfisherman from Chatham, Mass. But even he admits that declining fish stocks may cause some to turn to farming.
``Necessity is the mother of invention,'' said Amaru, who sits on the New England Fishery Management Council and on its aquaculture subcommittee. ``Aquaculture is just another step in the evolution of the fishery.'' A GLOBAL ENTERPRISE
The business of fish farming has evolved from a backwater industry into a global enterprise. In Maine, among the nation's most progressive aquaculture states, multinational conglomerates dominate the industry.
The nation's largest producer of farm-rasied salmon, Atlantic Salmon Inc., is owned by Continental Grain Co. and Seaboard Corp., two major agribusinesses. Boston-based Seaboard owns shrimp farms in Honduras and Ecuador.
``The problem with aquaculture is that it's costly,'' said John ``Jay'' Burke, Atlantic Salmon's national sales and marketing manager. ``If you don't have good strong financial backing, the cash flow situation would be unbearable.''
Atlantic Salmon produces nearly 7 million pounds of the fish a year. Most are shipped to restaurants, grocery stores and fish markets in the Northeast corridor, from Boston south to Washington and west to Chicago. Some is shipped farther, to Atlanta or the West Coast. A little even goes to the Far East.
The freshness and fat content of the company's fish make them popular in sushi restaurants, Burke said. Atlantic Salmon's product can be in a restaurant in less than a day. It takes several days for cheaper, farm-raised salmon from Chile even to reach Miami for distribution around the country, Burke said.
The Fairfield, Maine-based company also owns a freshwater hatchery on a lake in the western part of the state. The salmon spend their first nine months there growing in tanks. They are then trucked to the pens in Bucks Harbor.
The Atlantic salmon is commercially extinct in the wild. The damming and polluting of New England rivers for hundreds of years reduced it to a relic population of about a half-million.
Dozens of other highly desirable species have been hunted or polluted into oblivion. The majestic giant bluefin tuna ranks among the most treasured and overexploited.
Like the Atlantic salmon, the bluefin's salvation may lie in the confines of fish farms - instead of the open sea.
A key to successful fish farming is breeding fish that grow fast. Wild bluefin grow to 200 to 300 pounds in a handful of years and can grow up to 1,000 pounds. In captivity, a bluefin can double or triple in size in less than a year.
Demand for big fish is huge. A giant bluefin can fetch up to $40,000 at auction in a Japanese fish market.
The future of farming bluefins hinges on successfully breeding them in captivity. Bluefin are known to spawn in the Gulf of Mexico, but researchers aren't sure of the conditions or when the fish becomes sexually mature. Japanese researchers have apparently spawned bluefin, but they aren't sharing their research.
The 3-year-old research project at the New England Aquarium has answered some questions about the little-understood species. Much of the project's research has been done on bluefins caught off Virginia Beach in 1993 by Jack Stallings Jr., a local charter boat captain.
``How do you domesticate a fish that is as migratory and as powerful as a bluefin tuna?'' Belle said. ``If you feed them and take care of them well, they become very docile.'' SALMON FARMS ARE NO SURE BET
Salmon are docile, easy to breed and in demand. But raising them is no sure bet.
It costs millions of dollars to develop a salmon farm, and takes at least three years to harvest the first fish. That's a long time to go without revenues for any business, let alone one that most banks don't understand.
The availability of fish can fluctuate, creating even more of an investment risk. That happened with hybrid striped-bass farming. The long-overfished natural striped-bass population bounced back after several years of draconian regulation. As a result, prices dropped, making it difficult to support farms.
Salmon farmers are seeing a similar pattern. Successful farms in Chile, where the salmon grow faster in warmer water, have flooded the U.S. market, pushing prices down. Two large Maine salmon farms have gone bankrupt recently, unable to compete at the lower prices.
Complying with U.S. environmental laws can drive up operating costs. The biggest environmental concerns around aquaculture involve the consumption of water in freshwater fish farming and the contamination of water with fish feces, antibiotics and uneaten food. Complaints about unsightly floating pens marring scenic bay views have hurt salmon farms in Washington state.
The tilapia farm in Suffolk uses a system that recirculates water, purifying it with an extensive array of filters. Most of the waste water at the indoor facility on Carolina Road is used to feed a hydroponic garden growing lettuce, tomatoes and basil. The rest is filtered by a pond system.
Salmon farms in Maine are subject to random water quality checks by state regulators. The farms also only have a 10-year lease on their sites. After 10 years they'll move. The farms are helped by Maine's high tides, which flush the bays and coves.
Atlantic Salmon's Maine operations show the complexity and opportunities of aquaculture. The company started its farm in 1989 in Washington County, Maine, a rural area as impoverished as some Appalachian counties. It's since created nearly 100 jobs on the farm and in its processing plant. Many of the jobs are year-round.
The company has floating pens at five sites near Bucks Harbor. The first and largest site lies protected from the open ocean, behind some islands about 20 minutes by boat from the dock.
Each pen contains thousands of salmon, from 18-month-old smolts weighing about 300 grams to mature adults weighing around 50 pounds. The salmon are sorted by size to minimize competition for the feed - essentially, dried and ground anchovies.
On one mid-August day, an Atlantic Salmon crew harvested about 3,500 salmon. The salmon were nearly 3 years old and weighed up to 15 pounds each.
Among those working was David Coffin, a Maine native who graduated from Virginia Beach's Cox High School in 1965 while his father was stationed in Portsmouth with the Coast Guard.
Coffin use to work on a dragger out of Bucks Harbor, fishing for cod and scallops. Now he's a member of the killing crew on Atlantic Salmon's fish farm in Machias Bay.
A small, converted auto ferry is used to harvest the salmon. Coffin works the dipping pole, which nets fish out of a seine in the 35-foot-wide pen. The pole can be difficult to handle. Over Coffin's right eye is a fresh scar from the pole.
To stun them, and make it easier to slit their gills, the salmon are dumped into a carbon dioxide bath. The fish flop for about eight minutes in a tub of salt water before they die and are packed on ice in large insulated casks. It's bloody work and the men dressed in orange rubber overalls toil in quiet camaraderie.
As soon as the killing crew fills the day's order, they motor back into Bucks Harbor and the salmon-filled casks are trucked up the hill to the processing plant, where they are gutted, graded and packed for shipping.
``This company has been good for this area,'' Coffin said in a distinctive Down Easter accent. ``It's rough for a lot of people up here. For this area, the pay's good and there's all the work you want year-round.'' MEMO: ABOUT THIS SERIES: This series was reported over six months by seven
Virginian-Pilot reporters and photographers. Staff writers Lane
DeGregory, Scott Harper, Christopher Dinsmore, Stephanie Stoughton and
Bob Hutchinson traveled through Virginia and North Carolina and to
Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and Costa Rica. They were accompanied by
photographers Bill Tiernan and Drew Wilson. Staff designer Tracy Porter
produced the layouts. Photo editor Alex Burrows edited the photography
report. Staff artist Bob Voros produced the graphics. The stories were
edited by Joe Coccaro and Edward Power. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
BILL TIERNAN/The Virginian-Pilot
Baby clams - 8 to 10 weeks old - perch on a fingertip at Cherrystone
AquaFarm in Cheriton, Va. Clam farming is one of the bright spots
for the state's beleaguered fishing industry. Details, A13.
Photos
HUY NGUYEN/The Virginian-Pilot
A long tilapia at the Suffolk fish farm U.S. Aquaculture Inc. is
kept in the tank to show how big the baby fish will grow before they
are taken to market.
Al Magdaleno, filtration specialist, checks on the automatic feeder
system that feeds the tilapia. The chart tracks the number of fish
in the tanks and the amount of food needed.
Magdaleno picks tomatoes grown from fish waste at U.S. Aquaculture.
He plans to market the tomatoes along with the fish.
by CNB