Dangerous dinners: is salmon farming ruining Tasmania?

Salmon is healthy and tasty but debate rages over possible damage its farming is causing.

Laura Kelly from Environment Tasmania. Picture: Sam Rosewarne

As Australians prepare for the festive season, searching for a healthy, tasty source of protein to enliven jaded Christmas lunch ­tables, one product can’t help but catch the eye.

Tasmanian salmon — fresh, ­vibrantly coloured, plucked from the pristine waters of the island state and chock-full of omega 3 — is a naturally attractive option and one an increasing number of us are finding hard to resist. Already the average family of four consumes almost 10kg of salmon a year and demand for the product is growing: sales are rising by $100 million a year — $2m a week.

Salmon is not only replacing tuna as the fish of choice for home consumption but is seriously denting our reputation as rabid red meat eaters.

But while consumers are happy, others are distinctly less so. The industry is under attack from environmentalists, who accuse it of fouling Tasmania’s pristine ­waterways, while in October ABC television’s Four Corners aired grievances from those who derided the industry as “big business” and a “corporate juggernaut”.

Yet for thousands of Tas­man­ians in depressed regional communities, with low skills and high unemployment, “Big Salmon” transforms lives — providing jobs, pride and hope. And for the state, the success of the aquaculture ­industry it created from scratch 30 years ago is a perfect riposte to those mainlanders who paint the south isle as the “mendicant state”.

With homegrown know-how and vision, it built the largest fishery by value in the country, worth $720m a year and directly employing more than 2000 — indirectly thousands more. It is Tasmania’s largest agribusiness.

Consumers face a choice: ­embrace farmed salmon as a sustainable food produced on a low carbon footprint or, as some ­suggest, boycott a trade that ­releases tonnes of waste into pristine ­waterways.

The sheer speed with which the ­industry developed has prompted this debate. The fledgling industry and government is learning “on the job” what regulations are ­appropriate and, in some ins­tances, these struggle to keep pace with the stellar growth.

Mistakes were made: mass fish deaths and apparent overstocking in Macquarie Harbour, and alleged contamination of a mussel farm in Dover, while seabirds and seals were caught in netted fish pens across the state.

But the industry has demonstrated an ability to adapt, ­improving pen design and cleaning methods, adjusting fish stocks and working with external auditors to gain top-flight environmental accreditation.

So what is the truth of Big Sal­mon’s environmental impact?

Waste from salmon pens — fish excrement, uneaten feed and muck dislodged from nets during cleaning — does affect the ocean or estuary floor directly under the pens. Industry says this is temporary and sites are rehabilitated simply by moving the pens.

Even so, there are wider effects. In Macquarie Harbour, adjacent to the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, salmon farms appear to have affected water quality. A Cawthron Institute report for the state government last year concluded: “It appears there is correlative evidence that finfish farming is affecting the water quality of the harbour environment and is contributing to benthic DO (dissolved oxygen) reductions in the system.”

Similarly, in 2009, a study by Aquafin Co­operative Research Centre found fish farms in the Huon and D’Entrecasteaux Channel region were a “significant contributor of nutrients to this region and … these have led to measurable increases in phyto­plank­ton (microscopic algae) abun­dance”.

Critics of the industry say this proves fish farms can create harmful algal blooms and other broader environmental damage. However, a more recent paper in July last year paper by prominent fisheries scientist Colin Buxton, while agreeing that the nutrient profile of the Huon and D’Entrecasteaux Channel had changed from low to moderate, plays down the impact.

“These changes do not pose a significant or unacceptable broadscale risk to the environment,” Buxton concludes. He found no evidence of significant impacts ­beyond 35m from the fish pens, or that aquaculture was the cause of declining abalone stocks.

Even so, some within the industry, notably the second largest company, Huon Aquaculture, have joined calls for the government to adopt clearer, updated regulations. The idea is to ensure new fish farms are sited in better flushed, rougher waters, rather than sheltered bays and estuaries where effects may accumulate.

Huon invested $200m in tougher “fortress” fish pens, mooring systems and a well-boat to transport and bathe its fish in an on-board freshwater well — moves that allow it to focus its ­expansion in more open waters.

“The future for our industry is offshore sites, high (water) energy sites, and having the technology and the equipment to be able to manage those sites,” Huon Aquaculture founder Frances Bender says. “You’ve got to have practices that are world’s best practice. There is just no other way of doing it any more.”

She denies insinuations, made by government and her competitors, that Huon’s push for tighter regulation is aimed at benefiting her company over rival Tassal Group, which wants to expand in near-shore waters.

“It’s not about competitive tension, it is about the regulator and the government setting robust processes that everybody has to abide by,” Bender says.

Tassal is moving further offshore, like Huon Aquaculture, ­expanding further into Storm Bay, south of Hobart. But, controversially, it also has taken over a 20-year-old vacant fish farming lease at Okehampton Bay, on the east coast, in a $30m ­expansion.

Tassal, the biggest salmon farmer, rejects Huon’s push for new prescriptive rules on the siting of fish farms, claiming top-flight ­accreditation programs instead are the key to sustainability.

Caught in the middle is the Hodgman Liberal government, which responded to community concern by handing environmental regulation of fish farms to the independent Environment Protection Authority, increasing fines for regulatory breaches and allowing the EPA to impose limits on stocking and nutrient levels.

Tassal chief executive Mark Ryan, who originally acted as ­receiver for the company but then joined its management after having resurrected it, argues that Aquaculture Stewardship Council accreditation is the key to the trade’s sustainability.

“This (ASC) has resulted in a ­reduction in the use of antibiotics, improved fish welfare, reduced ­environmental impacts and ­reduced reliance on wild fish for our diets,” Ryan argues.

“My view is that it’s simplistic to position onshore (near-shore bays and waterways) as bad and offshore as good, because that doesn’t take into account the complexity of individual sites.”

He argues that the industry has a vested interest in ensuring each site is suited to fish farming.

“Unless we have an environment that is healthy, we can’t get the same production out of our salmon — and then we can’t continue to grow our business.”

Then there are the seals. Tas­sal’s failure to fully adopt the kind of reinforced, double-netted pens rolled out by Huon Aquaculture leaves its leases vulnerable to ­invasion by fur seals, always on the lookout for a free feed.

Tassal sustainability chief Linda Sams confirms the company has relocated up to 900 seals from its leases since June 1 — four times the number usually seen in a year. Controversially, it now is holding groups of seals in fish pens for up to six days before relocating them, ­despite animal welfare concerns.

Across the same period, Huon has had to relocate only 25 seals and in recent weeks has ended the practice, which carries dangers for the protected mammals, ­including dehydration and death during ­sedation.

Ryan says about 60 per cent of Tassal’s pens are virtually seal-proof but double-netted pens have downsides: reducing water flow (and thus oxygen supply) to the salmon and doubling net cleaning, which can release ­potentially harmful ­organisms.

But if the industry is divided, so are its critics, who range from abalone divers, concerned about reef health, and worried tourism operators to community and green groups. Some will support the industry if it moves into deeper, rougher waters offshore, where tides and currents more effectively disperse fish waste. But some say the industry should get out of the water ­entirely, into tanks or ponds on land, as occurs overseas.

“If other countries are doing it (land fish farming), it must be ­viable,” says Grant Gaffney, acting president of Marine Protection Tasmania. “What the companies here are doing is the easiest and cheapest solution while they can get away with it.”

Land-based fish farming does not stack up financially or environmentally, says the industry, with high start-up costs and heavy electricity use — plus far less favourable conditions for the fish.

Environment Tasmania is campaigning for better industry regulation and is lobbying Tassal’s shareholders — particularly ethical investment funds — to push change from within. It wants to stop companies choosing their preferred sites in favour of an independent process. “That’s comparable to Gunns Ltd’s lawyers writing the pulp mill legislation,” says Environment Tasmania strategy ­director Laura Kelly. “And there needs to be a consideration of how many marine species can die under cages. Currently, we allow 100 per cent to die.”

State Primary Industries Minister Jeremy Rockliff is unmoved, believing recent regulatory changes struck the right balance.

“Irrespective of whether the proposal is for an offshore, inshore or onshore marine farm, our focus is on ensuring all proposals are ­assessed and, where approved, managed through the rigorous ­assessment and management framework,” Rockliff says.

WWF Australia has backed Tassal’s view that ASC accreditation is the first and most significant step to ­improving environmental outcomes. In 2011, WWF entered into a three-year deal to help Tas­sal gain ASC certification. It gave Tassal exclusive use of WWF’s distinctive panda branding on its products, while the wildlife fund received ­almost $250,000 from Tassal for conservation projects.

The strategy was painted in a sinister light by Four Corners and some of WWF’s critics, but it ­appears to have worked: Tassal and competitor Petuna gained ASC accreditation across their entire operations, while Huon is working towards it.

“Tasmania will then be the first salmon aquaculture industry to get close to 100 per cent certification; that’s a great achievement,” says WWF Australia chief executive Dermot O’Gorman.

He urges consideration of the bigger picture. “We are currently producing more than 1.5 planets’ worth of the Earth’s sustainable ­renewable resources each year; and each year that consumption gets more,” O’Gorman says. “So in the past 20 years, we’ve identified food production and agriculture expansion as one of the biggest threats to wildlife and habitat and landscapes. That’s why we’re committed to finding a solution to how we can produce food more sustainably, to deal with the challenge of feeding nine billion people by midway through this century.”

Aquaculture offers a far more sustainable means of providing protein to humans than land farming for other meats.

“Farmed sal­mon uses around one-tenth the carbon emissions and the water use that beef does,” O’Gorman says.

Farming fish also relieves the burden on exploited wild fisheries. “More than 30 per cent of the world’s wild fisheries are over­fished and another 60 per cent are fished to maximum levels,” he says. “So if humanity continues to demand the need to eat seafood, aquaculture is going to have to play an important part.”

Four Corners attacked the use of an artificial compound, Astaxanthin, fed to salmon to give its flesh that vibrancy so alluring to shoppers. However, the lab-made chemical mirrors a compound found in krill that caged fish can’t forage for themselves and that is used as a human health food. Sourcing it from krill could further undermine the sustainability of vital wild stocks. While the salmon industry is looking for natural ­alternatives, no one has suggested there are any health implications from the artificial version.

Opponents of salmon farming seek to paint it as “the next forestry”, with connotations of devastated environments, regulatory failure and industry overreach.

What it does undoubtedly represent is a golden opportunity for Tasmania to demonstrate a new maturity, to show it is capable of fostering new industries without trashing its hard-won brand.