TasWeekend: Salmon industry seeks bridge over troubled waters
Tasmania’s salmon industry wants to build bridges with an increasingly angry public that it says has been misled about the environmental impacts of fish farms.
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“THERE’S still lots of ocean out there,” says Tassal head of aquaculture Mark Asman with a smile. In his easygoing way, the Californian makes the expansion of Atlantic salmon farming in Tasmania sound like a super-cool idea. That is one way of looking at it, but not everybody is as chilled as Asman about the salmon plan. Far from it. And it is going to take more than the vision splendid outlined in the State Government’s Sustainable Industry Growth Plan for Salmon Farming to change that response, even if it does have “sustainable” in the title.
Especially since the environmental and PR disaster known as Macquarie Harbour, the vast, ecologically unstable body of water on the West Coast in which it took place, many Tasmanians feel unnerved by the prospect or arrival of salmon pens in their waterways. Sharing their postcodes are thousands of others who are simply grateful for their jobs in aquaculture. Then there’s the rest of us, who don’t necessarily live near the salmon leases but share concerns — to wildly varying degrees — about salmon farming but perhaps not enough to stop us eating the soft, delectable meat. Beyond that are those who won’t go near the stuff.
“I find it hard to understand the microscope we are under when we add so much value and put so much effort into being sustainable,” says Asman, who started his career at an Oregon salmon ranch with the outfit that grew into Marine Harvest, the biggest salmon farming operation in the world. “I have always felt very good about what I do. I believe in it.” Even as a university student studying aquaculture, he says he could see a looming global need for more marine-based protein. “The writing was on the wall back then and today that need is even more obvious,” he says.
The United Nations estimates the global population will grow from 7.2 billion to about 9.77 billion by 2050. With limited opportunities for expanding protein production on land and a stagnating wild fisheries catch, aquaculture is expected to meet some of that new demand. It is the fastest-growing and most efficient animal-based protein-producing sector in the world.
Our salmon producers are moving more into this supermarket space rather than carving out a high-end niche. And it’s a shift to a mass rather than premium product that bothers some Tasmanians. The keyword is scale. The industry may be small in global terms, but is it getting too big for Tassie? It’s the proposed size as much as a persistent lack of confidence in environmental regulation that is feeding apprehension. Compounding these concerns is the perceived refusal of salmon producers, Tassal in particular, to accept culpability when things go wrong, as they do from time to time in every agribusiness, opting instead for stonewalling and spin that enrages environmentalists, deadlocks the debate and activates well-intentioned citizens who are unqualified to discuss potential impacts on sensitive marine environments but have a go anyway, sometimes leaping into the fray with alarmist assertions and slanderous accusations.
In person Asman is disarming and seems baffled by suspicion surrounding salmon farming in the state. He says the mood has changed dramatically since he first worked for Tassal here between 2005 and 2011, before returning three years ago. “That friction didn’t exist when I was here for the first stint,” he says. “Something changed significantly during the time I was away.”
He puts it down to industry growth and change being perceived as threatening. At a community level, his response is to talk about it with people one-on-one. He enjoys his educational — some would say evangelising — role. When he gets out on the water at the weekends, the keen surfer shares his message with other wave riders. “They usually say, ‘I saw this on Facebook, is this true?’ and I have to go through and say it’s not. But I’m happy to do it. To me, that’s one of the big battles we face. It’s easy to spread a negative message.”
He even did his thing on a father-son surfing trip to King Island, where in January some locals and well-known surfers launched a boycott of Tassal products in protest over the company’s potential expansion at the Bass Strait island. Like Tasmania’s other two big players, Huon Aquaculture and Petuna Seafoods, Tassal has been casting about for places to grow in line with its market demand, which is surging by about 7 per cent a year. Asman reckons he got some traction in those holiday chats. He and his boy weren’t kicked off the island, anyway, he laughs.
At Huon Aquaculture, Tasmanian industry pioneers Frances and Peter Bender are calling for fresh perspective and a fair go. “What is wrong with us in this state?” asks Frances, a passionate country Tasmanian known for speaking her mind.
“I understand that people are concerned, but 90 per cent of Tasmanian sewage plants don’t meet Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation Council [water quality] guidelines. Everybody poos, it goes into sewage plants, runs into rivers and runs out to sea not treated properly and it has E. coli in it. You can’t swim at Blackmans Bay [at the moment] and it has nothing to do with us.
“That is s... going into our rivers and no one is protesting with placards about that … I’m not saying that because I am in a bitchy mood. I am saying that no matter what we do, it is never enough. And yet nobody else has to do any of it, including TasWater, who have poo going out all over the state.”
It’s hard to blame Frances for having a spray. Peter is more measured but nods as his wife lets loose. She’s had a tough time since making what she says was a snap decision while being filmed for a Four Corners documentary to turn whistle blower on her industry over farming issues at Macquarie Harbour, where all three salmon companies hold leases. She says she acted in desperation after their calls to reduce stocking levels over water quality and biosecurity fears in the harbour were repeatedly ignored by everybody in the position to act.
“We threw ourselves out there in front of the bus and said ‘listen, guys, this isn’t working, we have tried everything behind closed doors to fix this, the whole industry will blow up if we don’t change’.”
Frances is still smarting from the shunning she says she and Peter received after the program aired two years ago. “You have no idea how I was attacked personally and professionally after the Four Corners show,” she says. “Within the industry and around Government we were personae non gratae.”
Huon Aquaculture took the state and federal governments to court to try to get the salmon industry better regulated. While unsuccessful, the Benders claimed a moral victory. Over that same vexed period, environmental regulation responsibility shifted from the Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment, which also promotes the industry, to the Environment Protection Authority.
HUON LAUNCHES COURT ACTION TO ‘PROTECT HARBOUR’
HUON BLAMES EXPANSION ON ‘DEFECT’ DECISION
Growers continue to self-monitor and provide much of the data for analysis. While the EPA is empowered to make assessment and regulatory decisions separate from government, it is also required to deliver on a range of government commitments as outlined in last year’s growth plan.
In March, EPA director Wes Ford distanced himself from the overstocking of Macquarie Harbour, saying the scientific modelling that led to the higher cap was wrong and noting that the EPA became regulator only in July 2016, three months after the cap rose to 21,000 tonnes per hectare. Ford says an adaptive management style is appropriate at Macquarie Harbour, a complex waterway heavily influenced by seasonal weather and storm events and freshwater flows from the Gordon River as well as being impacted by salmon. “Management frameworks need to be adaptive and responsive,” says Ford, describing how elevated nutrients and decreased dissolved oxygen in and surrounding salmon leases can exacerbate naturally low oxygen levels in the harbour’s midwaters.
EPA TELLS FISH FARMERS TO LOWER PEN STOCKS
Asman is comfortable with a “wait and see” approach but emphasises the need for agility when conditions do change.
“It’s one of those situations where you live and learn,” he says. “Soon after I returned, we had the driest, hottest summer on record, followed by the wettest winter and we think that threw Macquarie Harbour into a spin and then that heightened any effects around salmon farming. We couldn’t predict what Mother Nature would do so we had to experience that and back off… We have reduced the amount of biomass in there and we will just keep learning as we go.”
He says when Tassal decided to stay in Macquarie Harbour during that unstable period, it implemented an effective temporary waste-capture system to keep the organic load down until the fish were ready for harvest, minimising disruption to fish and the Strahan workforce. More recently, Tassal formed a joint venture with Petuna to share resources that enable them to fallow leases until they recover and separate younger stock from older fish to combat the spread of Pilchard Orthomyxovirus (POMV), the virus responsible for the mass mortality last summer. It is a husbandry method Huon has long practised.
Petuna boss Ruben Alvarez says he knows from experience elsewhere that the only way to have strong biosecurity in a farmed area is to co-ordinate efforts between companies. “I have no doubt that more closeness in industry will lead to better environmental outcomes,” says the Chilean, who joined Petuna just as the company’s stock was hit by POMV virus in Macquarie Harbour. He seemed unfazed by the death of more than a million fish. “I think every fish farmer and every farmer who grows animals understands you are going to be hit by disease or storms. It can be traumatic, but the industry is resilient.”
As the unhappy Macquarie Harbour chapter draws to a close, the biomass has been slashed to pre-expansion levels (9500tph). The Benders are still feeling bruised by the fallout of the affair but confident it has been a catalyst for industry-wide change, even if they and Tassal head Mark Ryan are yet to share stems of sparkling wine and hand-milked salmon caviar to celebrate recent approvals for new leases at Storm Bay near Bruny Island.
Tasmania is one of the smallest salmon-producing regions of about 10 such areas in the world, with Norway king, followed by Chile, Canada and Scotland. Norway produces more than a million tonnes of farmed salmon a year, compared with our 55,000 tonnes, which is about 1 per cent of global production.
Generating about $800 million a year, our industry is ahead of its $1 billion annual sales revenue by 2030 target. It is the largest agribusiness in the state and the largest fishery by value in the country. It provides about 2500 direct jobs, about 70 per cent of them in regional communities, and 10,000 more indirect jobs through its massive reinvestment in the cash-hungry business. Peter Bender estimates that in the past five years, Huon has spent $500 million on capital works, with the vast amount of that staying in Tasmania where other companies build their boats and pens and develop the world-leading technology for which our companies are internationally renowned.
The companies’ community commitments are growing too. Support programs are in place to help Tasmanians who have had it hard over the years. They include literacy and numeracy coaching at Huon over many years.
At Tassal, head of engagement Barbara McGregor facilitates the development of community projects chosen by locals, working hard to help secure the company’s social licence with an “above and beyond” approach. She visits high schools to offer career advice, stressing the importance of completing Year 12 by opening students’ eyes to a hi-tech operation that bears little resemblance to primary industries of yore.
McGregor says the industry has mostly itself to blame for the backlash it is copping, the extent of which she is also keen to downplay, by failing to keep the public up to speed over recent years of rapid growth.
“Outwardly, there had been no communication, but within any industry you need strong connections with the community,” says McGregor, who joined Tassal from zinc giant Nyrstar 18 months ago. “That lack of information and education has enabled people to create their own perceptions of reality and peddle false information. We encourage people to keep an open mind and learn the facts.”
Bender agrees an information void left people asking “what aren’t they telling us?”. She says Huon’s level of public disclosure, beyond what is required by government and the Australian Stock Exchange as a publicly listed company, is limited mostly by what she describes as Tassal and Petuna’s comparative reticence. Huon itself was accused of tardy reporting over the number of fish escapees from a trial fortress pen during the storm that ravaged Hobart in May. The company says it did the remainder counts and reported a 120,000 loss as soon as practicable, and changed the feed-design element that caused the breach.
“If we released numbers every time something happened — say to 5000 or 10,000 fish — and no one else was, people would think Huon’s not a very good bet. There is the commercial reality, there is the political game-playing and then there’s the reputational damage and you have to weigh up those things … we can’t be the only ones baring our souls to the public.”
The big three companies know they sink or swim together as Tassie salmon. They are learning how easily reputations, good or bad, can be lost or gained, deservedly and undeservedly. And they are navigating unfamiliar waters as they reset with brand protection forefront in mind. “For me, reputation has become number one,” says Petuna’s Alvarez. “I cannot try to build a good reputation for Petuna without a good reputation for industry.”
McGregor would never refer to her work as crisis management – she is too resolutely on message for that – but in a way it is. That’s because most Tasmanian salmon sells within Australia, making it especially vulnerable to reputational damage. The supply chain is short and bad news travels fast. Consumer sentiment can shift like lightning, particularly for food products. So far, the market has signalled indifference to community concerns, with Huon and Tassal making record profits over the same period, but no one knows where the tipping point is.
After 32 years growing salmon, the Benders were uplifted in October when they were named joint 2018 Australian Farmers of the Year, the first fish farmers to win. But the high was shortlived amid news the Australian Marine Conservation Society’s latest sustainable seafood guide had advised fish eaters to say no to Tassie salmon.
Tasmanian Greens MP Rosalie Woodruff wonders at what point a supermarket consumer thinks twice before popping an item into the trolley. “I often think about the shopper tossing up what to get for Saturday arvo drinks, and saying ‘Nah, don’t know about that Tassie salmon’,” she says.
“I am not sure that people [here] grasp the range of products available on the mainland. There’s barramundi, prawns, potted goat and a whole beautiful array of other organic proteins sourced from around the country.”
At the high-profile, nationally recognised Agrarian Kitchen Eatery at New Norfolk, restaurateur Rodney Dunn does not differentiate between Tassie salmon brands. He keeps them all out of his kitchen. Well-known as a Tassie produce champion, he looks a bit sheepish as he tells me this. “People see farmed salmon as incredibly controversial and I would not feel right serving it as it would taint our brand, which is delicate.” He doesn’t feel great doing so, but says with so many other things to deal with, he has simply made the call and brushed the question aside. “I don’t look into it,” he says.
Cookbook author, food stylist and curator Michelle Crawford does a lot of styling and recipe writing for Huon Aquaculture. She has built a strong professional brand, too. She feels uncompromised by the association with her client. “I believe they have integrity. If the consumer wants to dig and find out about what the company is doing regarding environmental and animal health, all the information is there [on its website] for people to make their own choices. There are always concerns around any farmed animal, but I don’t know why the salmon industry is singled out against chicken-and-egg production and all those other factory-farmed meat producers.”
Woodruff says the best image protection for the industry — and the clean, green Tassie brand — is a genuine improvement in its practices and an authentic alignment with Tasmania’s values proposition.
“The State Government needs to press pause on the feeding frenzy to find marine real estate around the state, have a moratorium and remember this thing called the Tasmanian brand,” says Woodruff. “Our concern is for all businesses. How does the Government not understand that the best way to protect jobs is to protect the marine environment the industry is operating in? If you really care about workers, how can you not care about reputational harm?”
She joins a chorus demanding prosecution and the imposition of whopping fines for noncompliance to strengthen commitment to change. She wants the approvals process for new salmon farms to be done at local council level, subject to the same process as land-based agricultural development applications.
A discussion paper called the Salmon Stakes released late last year by the Australia Institute identified reputational damage as a risk to Tasmanian salmon farming. Scotland was identified as a case study of “how the salmon industry can quickly and strongly become associated with ecological damage, mass fish deaths and misrule”. There, as here, calls have been loud and many for a truly independent environmental regulator.
While making the EPA our regulator two years ago appeased some critics, others remain concerned it is too close to government. Though there is no love lost between Woodruff and Huon Aquaculture’s Frances Bender after years of jousting over salmon in the Huon Valley, where Woodruff was previously on the local council, they both question whether the EPA can be truly independent when its director, Wes Ford, is still answerable to the DPIPWE minister. Woodruff thinks an independent salmon commissioner would be a more appropriate arbiter.
A potential outcome of reputational damage highlighted by Salmon Stakes authors Leanne Minshull and Bill Browne is what would happen if Australians changed their salmon habit. If just 20 per cent switched to imported salmon, the report estimates our producers would lose $122 million a year. Such a reduction would reduce earnings “to almost nothing and leave the industry struggling to fund investment in sustainability, leaving it vulnerable to further consumer backlash”.
It follows that flourishing companies are strongly positioned to fund operational changes broadly deemed more sustainable than some existing practices. The biggest of these is the introduction of higher-flow offshore sites (though some question if the Storm Bay leases are far enough off the Bruny coastline to meet that definition).
Frances Bender says Huon’s move into Storm Bay is costing about $200 million, and that it was the need to raise that money that prompted them to float the business. There is also substantial investment in on-land facilities to expand the period the fish spend in tanks rather than shared waterways. It’s an over-the-barrel irony that if a protest movement were to sabotage the industry now, it could jeopardise the very improvements it wants.
The leaping fish dazzles the eye, glinting silver in the sun until gravity slaps it down in an ungainly flop on the water surface and returns it to its element. What most sticks in the mind after a day on the salmon trail in the Huon Valley, though, is the pale, lined hairnet-framed faces of women weighing and trimming slices at Tassal’s cold-smoked facility.
The salmon debate is raging around Tasmania, but in the chilled packing room at Huonville the workers are silent at their posts. Maybe they have gone quiet because we are here, suggests smokehouse manager Nathan Smith. Equally, it could be a result of earplugs they wear to protect their hearing from prolonged exposure to the industrial hum on the factory floor. They smile when they look up and those moments of connection are a reminder that nothing about farmed salmon can be considered in isolation. It demands holistic consideration, including of jobs for ageing women in regional communities where such opportunities are scarce.
The need to come together for dialogue is pressing, yet what is prevailing is a crude crossfire. Everybody is talking, but is anyone listening? Frustration is high on all sides and while there’s no shortage of opinions, shared understanding is in short supply. Factions seem unable to agree even on a given set of facts to argue about. Some Tasmanians default to positions entrenched in the forestry and hydro conflicts. It’s an understandable reaction, given the history, but is it wise for us to impose that past on this situation?
A flotilla protest led last month by commercial and recreational fishermen at Norfolk Bay, near Dodges Ferry, was a reaction of locals feeling threatened by the sudden arrival of salmon pens in a prized recreational fishery and a textbook case of unhelpful loggerhead conflict. In brief, there was Mark Duncan, owner of Mr Flathead Bay Fishing and Sightseeing, saying “I am a poor bloke trying to make a buck and someone is invading my territory”; there was Mark Bishop of the Tasmanian Alliance for Marine Protection calling for an end to “a Claytons system of public consultation” that has locked the public out of meaningful discussions and deprived them of rights to appeal decisions; there were environmentalists flagging potential impacts to the critically endangered spotted handfish; and there was Huon making temporary use of one of its old leases to isolate from juvenile stock an older stock that had been infected with POMV and recovered but still could have been carriers. The fact that all stakeholders, Huon included, agreed the site was ill suited to longer-term salmon farming seemed to get lost in the dispute.
“With the history of the forest wars over three decades, I understand why there is a level of distrust,” says Frances Bender. But she is riled when she hears salmon described as the new forestry. She sees the comparison as an insult to her industry’s intelligence and says that even in its early days, Huon Aquaculture never behaved like the forestry industry.
The legacies of that conflict bring her to the point of tears. “I lived through the forest wars and I saw a community devastated. When the protesters, professional lobbyists and government moved on, they left shattered communities with no employment opportunities, they left bankrupt business and they left suicides. My community was left devastated: dead towns, virtually closed schools, socially battered and mentally tortured. And my industry has picked up that slack as we have grown. So to be called the new forestry is the most inaccurate, offensive comment and I will never accept it.” She says there’s growing nervousness around Huonville. “I go to the supermarket and people come up to me and say ‘I am really worried, it’s not going to happen to us again, is it?’”
Frances rejects the notion of choosing between jobs and the environment. “It’s nonsensical,” she scoffs. “We can’t exist without caring for the environment.”
Ricky Brown sits on a high swivelling chair in front of a wall of mesmerising colour screens swimming with fish at Tassal’s whizzbang new remote feeding centre. Until February, the Dover man was out there battling the elements on slippery pen edges over the same southern waters that now fill his screens. “It’s hard to explain where we have come from over the years, with hoppers and handfeeding,” says Brown, declaring himself chuffed to be working from this comfy perch, dispensing pellets to faraway fish from high in the old Marine Board building on the Hobart waterfront. There are nine more stations like Brown’s here, each staffer monitoring two farms and all comparing notes and giving the vet in the next room a hoy if anything looks amiss.
Asman says the crucial change with this technology is the precision it brings to fish feeding, reducing pellet waste and the resultant build-up that can accumulate with faecal matter beneath the pens. Cameras trained on each pen enable staff to monitor fish and tailor their feeding as never before. Huon has also introduced a remote feeding system.
It is one of many hi-tech advances the companies have rolled out in the past few years. At its $60 million hatchery in the Huon Valley, Tassal is selectively breeding for climate change in a race against the clock for fish that can flourish in the warmer waters they expect. It brings the big picture chillingly into sharp focus on a wilderness-loving island where the most passionate battles have been site-based. Tassal hatches eight million smolt here annually. A crack Scottish team flies in twice a year to vaccinate them against the ulcerating Aeromonas infection. A trial for a POMV vaccine developed by the Fish Health Unit in northern Tasmania gets under way next year. Tassal’s Ranelagh hatchery and Huon’s further south at Port Huon use cutting-edge water rearticulation systems to dramatically cut the need to draw freshwater from river systems.
Continual improvement is the name of the game. But such forward thinking has brought with it a regrettable tendency to disown inconvenient parts of the past, which include seal killing, careless marine debris management, high, if localised, impacts on a host of waterways and the depletion of marine life on the edge of a wilderness World Heritage area.
After badgering my Tassal hosts from the back seat on the drive to Ranelagh, something in me softens when McGregor finally concedes, “Look, no one is more sorry about Macquarie Harbour than we are”. It’s not the shouldering of some responsibility I sought to extract from her elusive boss, Mark Ryan, in my original interview request, but it’s a start.
Hang on, are we talking salmon or tourism here? Questions converge on whether we should stick to high-yield premium products or go for volume. This is the worry that swirls about Storm Bay, where the Huon operation has just been granted another 220ha (on top of its current 100ha) and Tassal 320ha for operations. Petuna awaits an approval decision for 430ha.
Though strongly affiliated with industry, the Derwent Estuary Program is one of numerous groups to flag concerns over the proposed level and rate of expansion at Storm Bay. A partnership forged nearly 20 years ago between government, business, scientists and the community to restore and protect river health, the DEP’s major sponsors include legacy polluters Nyrstar and Norske Skog Boyer, as well as councils, the state government, TasWater, Tas Ports and Hydro Tasmania.
PANEL APPROVES STORM BAY SALMON EXPANSION
The DEP flagged serious environmental concerns in a detailed submission to the Marine Farming Review Panel that reviewed the applications, flagging that with Storm Bay’s marine waters partly driving the circulation of the Derwent estuary, a significant change in nutrient inputs from salmon farming could have far-reaching impacts on the waterway.
Calling for a staged and highly precautionary approach, it said proposed biomass for Storm Bay was “very large” in comparison with both salmon production across Tasmania as a whole (about 55,000 tonnes) and against existing individual systems. Estimated nutrient loads associated with these production levels were also very large, particularly when the longer-term aspiration of 80,000 tonnes at Storm Bay was considered.
Woodruff says the DEP’s submission was inadequately considered by the panel, which advises the government and which has since seen the resignation of two of its eight members. “What we saw was a sham public hearings process the government established around the Storm Bay marine farms. There was no grappling with the issues they presented. Instead the Premier came out and said ‘approved’.”
She sees it as more of the same from a succession of state governments. “We have a history in Tasmania of parties rolling over to big business. We have had Hydro, we had Gunns, we had Federal Hotels pokies with the last election and now we have Big Salmon. We have two political parties who aren’t capable of making decisions for the future of the state. They are trying to please people all the time, but that’s not what we need. We need them to be parents. We need them to tell our fighting teenagers they can’t have everything they want.”
A map in the salmon growth plan shows most of the state is off-limits, a no-go zone ringing most of the coast in prohibitive red. If there’s one document Tasmania’s seasoned environmentalists know not to put too much faith in, though, it’s a map with supposedly inviolable boundaries marking protected areas.
What if we were to use a different map as our guide? Imagine one of Tassie overlaid with transparent sheets mapping the priorities of all ocean users — including industry, energy, conservation, amenity and recreation — to inform decisions. This process is called marine spatial planning and it already exists in some Australian states. If we are not to perpetuate the mistakes of the past, this template may offer a constructive way forward.
Maintaining public confidence tops the Government’s stated salmon growth priorities, suggesting it understands the reputational risks. It is unclear, though, whether or not our leaders realise how critical their own role is in that process. Trust is the essential ingredient in these salmon stakes.
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