Factory farming

What is farmed salmon? Healthy, sustainable, ethical?

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Millions of salmon are raised in farms in the UK each year. But there are environmental, ethical, and health issues you may not know about.

Farm-raised salmon

Much of the salmon sold in UK supermarkets today has been raised in huge, intensive fish farms off the coast of Scotland and never experienced life in the wild. Read on to find out the truth about farm-raised salmon and its impacts on your health, the environment, and the fish themselves.

Atlantic salmon are by far the most farmed fish in the UK, with estimates in 2017 varying between 22 and 52 million fish killed each year, and the industry is growing to meet increased demand. This unsustainable demand for seafood has led to cruel industrial farming methods designed to maximise profit at the expense of fish welfare. As demand grows, so too does the number of fish who are being intensively reared in densely packed pens, their short lives spent in total captivity while an expansive ocean is tantalisingly close but out of reach.

In the industrial environment of fish farms, salmon are confined to pens and denied many of their natural behaviours, which include making incredible journeys to return to the river where they were born in order to spawn the next generation. They are unable to bond with each other and instead swim round these pens in endless circles until slaughter (at which point there is insufficient regulation to ensure these fishes are protected under UK law).

The industry treats these fishes as a product, as a countless mass with no thought spared for the millions of individual, sentient, sensitive creatures who experience pain and suffering every day.

What is Farmed Salmon?

A lot of the farmed salmon you'll find in UK supermarkets comes from Scotland, where the salmon industry is the 3rd largest in the world, following Norway & Chile. The Scottish salmon industry is valued at approximately £1.8bn annually, and there already exist over 200 salmon farms. The industry is expected to more than double its production by 2030.

This is big business, yet still the millions of fish in these farms spend their whole lives packed in dirty, overcrowded pens with no chance to pursue their natural instincts. In the wild, Atlantic salmon migrate huge distances as they swim from the stream where they were born to the wide open sea. They can travel thousands of miles before eventually returning to the freshwater streams where they were born in order to reproduce. Salmon bred for fish farming (also known as ‘aquaculture’), by contrast, were not born in flowing streams but in hatcheries designed to produce as many fish as possible.

How Are Salmon Farmed in the UK?

Salmon are typically raised in sea pens, spending their whole lives in confinement, never to explore the open ocean that extends beyond the boundaries of their enclosures.

Farmed fish begin their short lives at freshwater hatcheries. The juvenile freshwater stage of Atlantic salmon takes 24-36 months in the wild, and 6-12 months in farms, forcing the farmed salmon to grow quickly and mature at a rate that is inconsistent with their wild counterparts.

They will then endure the trauma of transport to the pens where they’ll live out the rest of their days. Because these pens are so densely packed, salmon often endure illness, skin lesions from parasites, and violent handling by workers.

Once they reach “market weight,” the salmon are killed on-site at the fish farm or elsewhere at a slaughter plant. This can occur in a variety of ways, including stunning the fish, and clubbing them on the head. Undercover footage shows these beautiful creatures enduring horrendous cruelty as their gills are cut or ripped while they’re still conscious, causing pain and suffering for their tortuous final minutes.

The Government has admitted there are no routine checkups on fish welfare at slaughter, after an investigation found no department would take responsibility. While they claim the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) did checkups in Scotland, freedom of information requests submitted by The Humane League UK to the Scottish Government reveal there is no established process for regular welfare inspections at fish processing sites and the APHA confirmed that it did not have “a routine programme of official inspections at fish processing sites”.

Wild salmon commonly live to be five to eight years old, whereas farm-raised salmon often live for just two or three years, their lives cut short by the greed of industrial aquaculture. From birth to death, these salmon receive little to no protection—despite the fact that they’re killed in astonishing numbers. Their lives as farm-raised fish are miserable, unnatural, and largely invisible.

Farmed Compared to Wild-Caught Salmon

Wild salmon is no longer fished commercially anywhere in the UK, and since 2002 it has been illegal to sell any Atlantic salmon caught by rod and line under Scottish law. Farmed salmon are selectively bred over multiple generations to grow extremely fast. However, although farmed salmon are extremely fast-growing, they only grow for a short time and never achieve the size of the more slow-growing wild salmon.

Sadly, their diets often consist of wild-caught fish. A new report by Feedback Global calculated that in a single year, the Scottish salmon industry, Britain’s largest food export, the 179,000 tonnes of salmon produced in Scottish aquaculture farms consumed fish meal and fish oil produced from 460,000 tonnes of wild-caught fish, 76% of which was edible.

Is Farmed Salmon Bad for You?

Salmon is often praised for its health benefits, offering a high-protein option filled with omega-3 fatty acids, and rich with vitamin D. But the packaging in UK supermarkets doesn’t always tell you the full story.

With more calories, twice the fat content, and over 20% more saturated fat, farm-raised salmon is far less healthy than its wild-caught counterpart.

And, much of the salmon that people consume today is loaded with contaminants. A 2016 study by the British Geological Survey found that half the fish samples purchased from UK supermarkets contained DNA from Salmonella species and two fish species contained Campylobacter DNA; both are associated with foodborne illnesses. The worst offenders were the farmed fish whilst wild-caught fish contained less bacterial contamination.

Antibiotics

In their densely packed pens, thousands of salmon are crammed together and subjected to dirty water that is full of waste and disease. Unlike wild salmon, it would be impossible for them to get enough nutrients from their environment in these intensive factory farms and disease is rife.

Salmon farmers routinely include rounds of antibiotics as part of the rearing process. As the industry grows, so too does the volume of antibiotics being used, with reports showing an 82% increase in antibiotic usage between 2017 and 2020.

The side effects are proven to be detrimental to human and environmental health. Not only do they pollute the natural habitat of wild fishes living nearby, the use of these drugs further increases human antibiotic resistance.

Cancer-causing Chemicals

If you eat farmed salmon, you could be consuming chemicals linked to cancer: polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. PCBs are persistent environmental toxins that promote cancer and are on a list of chemicals for global phase-out due to the well-documented side effects and the environmental impact.

A large study published in 2004 found that PCBs in farm-raised salmon were about eight times higher than concentrations in wild salmon, according to Harvard Health publishing. Lab tests commissioned by the Environmental Working Group revealed that farm-raised salmon in particular are “likely the most PCB-contaminated protein source in the U.S. food supply,” because the fishmeal they eat often contains PCBs.

Mercury and Other Trace Metals

Unlike meat from other species of fish, salmon contains fairly low levels of mercury but this doesn’t mean that mercury isn’t present in either farm-raised or wild-caught salmon. However, farm-raised salmon has been found to contain other dangerous metals on top of this including arsenic. For example, one study by researchers at Cornell University and the University at Albany found “significantly higher” levels of organic arsenic in farmed salmon than in their wild relatives.

Risky Pollutants

When it comes to raising salmon for food, the health risks outweigh the benefits. A global study of salmon from farms in northern Europe, North America, and Chile in 2004 concluded that the levels of pollutants were “significantly higher” in farm-raised fish than in their wild counterparts. The researchers cautioned that “consumption of farmed Atlantic salmon may pose health risks that detract from the beneficial effects of fish consumption.”

Worms and Lice

Sea lice are a common parasite that thrive in the unnatural, intensively packed environments of fish farms, which are a breeding ground for lice outbreaks. The lice feed on fish blood and skin, then the affected fish will develop skin lesions that can lead to infection and death. Fish mortality has more than quadrupled, from 3% in 2002 to about 13.5% in 2019 in Scottish salmon farms alone. About a fifth of these deaths are recorded as being due to sea lice infestations, but about two thirds are unaccounted for - so the real mortality owing to sea lice could be much higher.

Farmed salmon are dying in enormous numbers from sea lice infestations, as the unnaturally over-crowded conditions in which they are kept means there is no escape from this cruel and painful affliction.

Why is Farmed Salmon Bad for the Environment?

Salmon are carnivorous by nature, and in the wild their diet would regularly include smaller fishes. Farm-raised salmon are fed wild fish (known as fishmeal) taken from the oceans. For every 1kg of farmed salmon produced, they are fed up to 3kg of wild fish. At its core, salmon farming is inefficient: it removes wild fish from our dwindling oceans to feed farmed salmon, born and raised in captivity.

It isn’t news that intensive overfishing is already destroying our oceans but these industrial aquaculture farms are adding to an already expansive worldwide problem that has had a devastating effect on wild fish stocks.

Contamination

Many aquaculture farms contaminate the surrounding habitats. Waste from uneaten food and the fish themselves contribute high levels of nutrients to the aquatic environment surrounding open net pens, which in turn can result in excessive algal growth to produce toxic ‘blooms’ that can have harmful effects on people, fish, shellfish, marine mammals and birds.

Escapes

The vast majority of farmed salmon will never escape their heartbreaking fate, however some do manage to quite literally slip through the net. In 2020, the North Western Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority reported that almost 50,000 fishes escaped from a farm in Scotland after their pens became detached from seabed anchors during Storm Ellen. Despite efforts to manage and mitigate the escape, however, it was confirmed that farmed fish were caught in local rivers (distinguishable by damage to their fins).

These escapes present a substantial risk to wild salmon, not only by exposing them to disease and parasites, but also by threatening their genetic integrity. If wild Atlantic salmon breed with farmed salmon, their descendants grow faster and mature at a younger age, undermining the ability of the wild species to survive and reproduce in its natural environment.

Pollution

Our oceans are already battling against plastic, rubbish, and toxic chemicals, yet fish farms only add to the problem by creating huge volumes of waste that have got to go somewhere. According to Dr Richard Luxmoore. Senior Nature Conservation Adviser for National Trust Scotland, “a moderately large fish farm will dump the same amount of sewage as a town twice the size of Oban… and, unlike human sewage, it is entirely untreated.”

The effects of this pollution is astounding, changing the ecological habitat of the surrounding area, affecting water quality and biodiversity. The latest official pollution inventory reveals that discharges of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and zinc from salmon cages rose by more than 4,000 tonnes between 2019 and 2020. Overall emissions of pesticides used to kill sea lice also increased by 45 kilograms.

Sea Lice

Lice infestations at fish farms are commonly treated with toxic chemicals, and just like the antibiotic treatments these chemicals threaten the environments of wild fishes. It was reported that despite spending nearly £300 million on chemicals to treat sea lice in 2017 the problem was bigger than ever. The antibiotics and pesticides used to combat infestations left Scottish waters severely polluted.

Transfer of Disease and Parasites

Water can move freely between the pens on salmon farms, and into the surrounding oceans, leading to increased opportunity for diseases to pass from farmed fishes to wild species.

Aside from the devastating effect that issues like sea lice have on farmed salmon, according to the National Trust of Scotland, the prevalence of sea lice infestations are also having a damaging effect on wild salmon and sea trout. Senior Nature Conservation Advisor, Dr Richard Luxmoore, commented in 2018 that the impacts on wild fish are harder to measure, but they add to other factors leading to the collapse of wild salmon and sea trout stocks, for instance on the River Awe.

A further publication in 2021 from the Marine Scotland Directorate concluded that “the body of scientific information indicates that there is a risk that sea lice from aquaculture facilities negatively affect populations of salmon and sea trout on the west coast of Scotland”.

Is Farmed Salmon Ethical?

In this article, we have looked at some of the health risks and environmental concerns posed by the UK salmon farming industry. The industry itself remains steadfastly lucrative with demand growing year on year, yet as the farms increase in size, number and capacity, who is considering the welfare of the millions of fishes at the centre of it all suffering from pain and stress every day?

Undercover investigations at these farms have exposed salmon suffering unnecessarily from infections and sea lice infestations. Thousands of fish die every year in pain from their injuries, and as a result of mis-handling. Furthermore, although it’s a legal requirement in the UK for animals, including fish, to “be spared any avoidable pain, distress or suffering during their killing and related operations”, farmed fish are not protected by detailed legislation about how exactly they should be slaughtered to spare avoidable suffering. Because of this, investigations at fish farms have revealed salmon having their gills cut while fully conscious, and being repeatedly clubbed to death. It’s as cruel and gory as it sounds.

Factory farms for fish are just as intensive and miserable as those for land animals. Results from a recent YouGov poll of the British public conducted by The Humane League UK found that 71% of those questioned agreed that fish should have the same legal protections as other farmed animals. Yet because their suffering happens beneath the surface, usually in remote areas of the UK coastline where they are hidden away from public view, the suffering of these sensitive and intelligent creatures often gets forgotten.

What You Can Do

Fish are sensitive, sentient creatures and millions are suffering every day in an industry that is prioritising growth and revenue over the welfare of fish and the environment.

Join us in our fight against the abuse of fish by signing our petition calling on the Government to give fish the same legal protection at slaughter as other farmed animals.

Note: Why 'fish' and not 'fishes'? In his book ‘What a Fish Knows’, ethologist Jonathan Balcombe points out that referring to their plural as ‘fish’ lumps them together ‘like rows of insentient corn.’ But the truth is that fishes are individuals with personalities, relationships and the capacity to feel. The Humane League UK wants to set an example of recognition and inclusion in the language that we use as well as fighting to improve the rights of fishes farmed for food. We advocate for using the plural ‘fishes’ instead of ‘fish.’ For the purposes of this article, we have used the more commonly-used ‘fish'.