Peace in state’s salmon war lies on the land, not on the water

Land-based farming is the only answer to ensure the future of the state’s salmon industry, argues RICHARD FLANAGAN.

NO matter who buys Huon Aquaculture, the crisis of the Tasmanian salmon industry will only worsen if it continues to be sea-based.

There is only one answer to this indefensible destruction: land-based salmon farms. Land-based technology is to sea-based farms what solar panels and wind farms are to coal fired power stations – the future. The only continent where that future is not happening is Australia.

Sea-based feed lots are floating sewage farms that don’t treat their sewage. There is no scientific evidence that any form of sea-based salmon farming – including deep sea – can effectively contain the immense nutrient outflow and subsequent extensive marine destruction.

And then there are the appalling animal cruelty issues, carbon and plastic pollution problems, and excessive freshwater use.

That’s why sea-based salmon farming is under growing attack globally, with Argentina banning it in June, (with Tasmania used as a warning of what could befall Patagonia) while land-based salmon farms are being built everywhere from the Saudi Arabian desert to Russia to China to Singapore – and even in the motherland of salmon farming itself, Norway.

Nothing has terrified the salmon industry more than the revelation in Toxic that this alternative to sea-based farms not only exists but is the revolution changing aquaculture around the world.

And that’s because Tasmania’s dirty secret is that our government gives our public seas away for next to nothing to the salmon barons. Why invest in something better if you can practice something far worse for almost no cost and with no consequence?

Salmon farms pollute, destroy and ruin people’s lives, and we pay for their profits with our ruined waterways, coastlines and fisheries.

Yet in 2018, according to an Australia Institute report, the entire industry paid $923,008 total for all its licences and leases – or 31 per cent less than Huon Aquaculture’s CEO Peter Bender paid in the same year for his antique Vincent Black Lightning motor bike – a world record price of $1,350,000.

Could this be why the Tasmanian salmon industry spreads unsubstantiated nonsense about land-based salmon farming, claiming it needs huge amounts of land and electricity to work? Because it doesn’t – it just needs money the salmon companies don’t wish to invest.

Peter and Frances Bender on one of their off-shore sea pens in Storm Bay, east of Bruny Island.

Tasmania presently produces 80,000 tonnes of salmon in its sea pens. In Sweden just one single farm at Sotenas is set to produce 100,000 tonnes of salmon on 75ha of land.

In Miami, Florida, Atlantic Sapphire’s land-based facility, which will ultimately produce 220,000 tonnes of salmon, sits on a 65ha site.

A lot of land? No – that’s just under 33 MCG ovals to produce almost three times Tasmania’s total salmon output.

In Norway it takes 6-9kWh of electricity to produce one kilogram of land-based salmon.

If we assume an average of 8kWh and multiply it by 80,000 tonnes (total Tasmanian production) we arrive at a figure of 640GWh – or 5.7 per cent of the 11,192GWh Tasmania generated in 2020.

A lot of power? Not for a major industry – Bell Bay Aluminium alone uses approximately 25 per cent of Tasmania’s electricity.

Tasmania’s dirty secret is that our government gives our public seas away for next to nothing to the salmon barons. Why invest in something better if you can practice something far worse for almost no cost and with no consequence?

Leading Dutch investment bank Rabobank predicted in a major report in 2019 that land-based salmon farms are now primed to change fish farming globally, estimating they would account for 25 per cent of global production by 2030.

Just 12 months later, Rabobank revised its predictions upwards reporting that by 2030 a staggering 1.6 million tonnes – or 70 per cent of global salmon production in 2020 – of salmon would come from land-based farms.

By March 2021 Ernst & Young was predicting 2 million tonnes. And so it grows.

“For those in the salmon industry,” salmon industry news site Salmon Business declared, “now is the time to decide if they should invest in RAS [land-based] or invest to ensure they stay ahead of RAS, as this technology matures, grows, and disrupts the market.”

The key players in the Tasmanian salmon industry are not only aware of all this – they are already investing in land-based salmon farms in other countries.

Skretting, the leading salmon feed supplier in Tasmania, is through its mother company Nutreco investing heavily in land-based salmon farms in Reno, Nevada (15,000 tonnes), near Mount Fuji, Japan (21,000 tonnes) and Ningbo, China (40,000 tonnes).

Petuna has damned land-based technology as an alternative to its planned expansion of salmon farms on the North-West Coast. Yet its half-owner, Japanese seafood giant, Nissui, bought leading land-based Norwegian firm Danish Salmon in 2019.

According to Nissui president Akiyo Matono: “We want to profit from this by getting ahead of our rivals as much as possible, if only by a year or two.”

But why would Petuna use their technology here when our government will give them the North-West Coast for next to nothing?

A Huon Aquaculture off-shore sea pen in Storm Bay.

In Norway the rising cost of the sea for salmon farmers has driven the land-based revolution in which Norwegian companies now lead the world. According to the Australia Institute, if our seas were valued and charged to Tasmanian salmon farmers in the same way as Norway, the return to the taxpayer would be between $703m and $2bn.

To produce our present 80,000 tonnes of salmon on land would need $800m of investment to make a reality.

Peter Gutwein can drive that investment in Tasmania’s future and in Tasmanian jobs.

He could charge the salmon companies the real price for our seas rather than giving them away, at once getting a return for Tasmanians and driving the industry on to land.

The transition could be sweetened with low-cost green electricity packages that would significantly reduce salmon’s carbon footprint – presently higher than pork and double that of chicken.

As carbon pricing becomes inevitable that’s no small thing.

If the Gutwein government chooses to see the industry’s present crisis as an opportunity instead of a problem, land-based farms could be our future here, bringing major investment to Tasmania, securing existing Tasmanian jobs, and creating new jobs in the treatment of the thousands of tonnes of polluting sludge that presently destroy our waterways.

And instead of losing our heart worlds, Tasmanians would finally win.

It is a future that does not involve community conflict, that will not destroy Tasmania’s extraordinary marine environment, that conserves recreational and commercial fisheries and won’t damage tourism businesses, that is future-proofed against our rapidly heating oceans, and will guarantee jobs into the future.

Land-based salmon farming is not perfect.

But if we are to have a salmon industry it is the best existing form of factory farming salmon. But it needs our government to act.

To succeed it needs tough government regulation of an integrity and independence that the discredited EPA and Marine Farming Branch have proven spectacularly incapable of showing. Peter Gutwein needs to restore public confidence by rebuilding those agencies root and branch.

The alternative to this future is our past repeated: growing boycotts of Tasmanian salmon that will finally see mainland entrepreneurs open land-based farms in Melbourne and Sydney that can genuinely claim to be green and clean.

The salmon industry here, and the jobs that go with it, will vanish, leaving our waterways polluted and ruined, one more testament to greed and a government too captive to big business to act.

Is that what Tasmanians want? A Gunns version 2? The salmon barons getting the big bucks and Tasmanians paying the cost until it collapses?

Or do we seek to drive investment into our state on our terms for our benefit?

For there is no saviour coming to rescue the industry. There is, finally, only us. It’s our choice. We can make our island anew in the image of what is the best in us and not, as the salmon industry has been allowed to be for too long, the worst.

Richard Flanagan is an award-winning Tasmanian writer and author of Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry