Folks, I knew that salmon aquaculture, salmon farming is bad, bad for the environment and bad for you. But like I said in a tweet last year, I didn't realize how bad it is. And so today, unfortunately, maybe, or maybe fortunately, I would like you to hear how bad it really is. Our guest today is John Aitchison. John is a wildlife filmmaker, but he also is a, I guess environmental activist, you can call him. He. He works in environmental NGO Coastal Communities Network Scotland. And even though this episode is kind of focused on Scotland and salmon farming that goes on in Scotland, everything that we talk here applies everywhere. Where the salmon farms are, whether it's Ireland or Norway or Iceland or British Columbia, the impacts are the same and the problems are the same. And those problems are also not only for the environment, but those problems are also for the coastal communities. And this aspect here, we also touch on it. So yeah, I really encourage you to listen to this episode. And don't buy farm salmon. Just don't buy farm salmon. It's bad for the environment and it's bad for you. And you will hear about it more in a second. But just before that, just a mandatory call to action. Subscribe to my newsletter Thomas Outdoors Newsletter. The link is in the description of the show or you can just go to newsletter.tommys outdoors.com subscribe and that's the best way to stay in touch. You will be notified about new episodes of the podcast, but also some other stuff, blogs, links to an interesting research in a, you know, about environment and wildlife and stuff like that. Nature stuff that we talk about here in Tommy's Outdoors. Also events and some other stuff. So definitely the best way to stay in touch and stay informed. Tommy's Outdoors newsletter. The link is in the description of the show. Go in there, put your email address, hit subscribe. Obviously you can unsubscribe anytime you want it, but I hope you will stay subscribed and that's also the best way to get in touch with me. You can always reply to one of those emails that you're getting and send me your comments, your feedback and I promise I will reply to every single one of them. Okay? So that's my promise to you. And yeah, now without any further ado, Salmon Aquaculture with John Acheson. John, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you.

Thank you. It's very good to be here.

I was really looking forward to this conversation because we covered salmon many times in various angles. But today we are going to talk about communities aspect of it and the aquaculture of salmon. Just right off the bat, do you feel like sometimes there is a level of apprehension when talking about salmon aquaculture that some people are not, you know, because this is a big economic value, that you sometimes feel like people are not willing to tell what they would like to tell otherwise?

Yeah, I think there is some of that. It's a very polarized area and, you know, people feel quite strongly about it on both sides. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground and it's partly because there's no forum to talk about it or very little opportunity to talk about it with the in between the two sides. So, yes, I think that's exactly right. Some people are very reticent, some are angry, some are frightened and it doesn't make for a good discussion. Actually. There seems to be so much bias in favor of consenting the farms that the communities that suddenly find that they're at the receiving end of these things are really worried about it when that happens, because they don't know what to do. So that doesn't help either when you're trying to have a sensible discussion about it.

Yeah. And do you think there is any doubt or any attenuating circumstances, I guess, as expression for salmon aquaculture, that it's. Or is it like all bad? Is there. Is. Is there a discussion there at all on this subject?

Yeah, I think there is. I mean, there are different ways to do it. The way that it's done everywhere in Scotland is the same, with open nets and with feed that has a high marine content. And these are cold water fish and they're kept relatively close to the surface in warming waters, particularly on the west coast, which seems to be causing a lot of problems. And the industry wants to double in size by 2030 from 2000 and 20s or 2018's size, so up to 3 or 400,000 tons of production a year, which is a lot. So that's a really rapid expansion. There was a very thorough parliamentary inquiry into it in 2018 in Scotland and it concluded that there shouldn't be expansion until regulatory, environmental and welfare issues have been dealt with. There was a previous inquiry about six or seven years earlier which concluded exactly the same thing, and there was basically no change between the two, as far as the committees could tell. So, and since then there's been 52,000 tons of new biomass consented since 2018, the beginning of 2018, with another 10,000 tonnes in the planning process and another 30,000 tons in the screening and scoping part of the planning process, that's nearly 90,000 tons on the way. Some of them will be turned down, but mostly they'll go through. 50,000 tons has already gone through for planning permission and it's not safe to do that given that the regulatory, welfare and environmental impacts haven't changed. They're still unaltered from 2018.

That was actually one of my questions that I want to ask. What is the level of compliance or regulation on this for salmon aquaculture in terms of, you know, we know that situation, that. And this is not limited to salmon aquaculture, but often there are some regulations and how things should look like and they're not look like or, you know, and as always, if there is no enforcement of the rules or regulations, then who cares? So how does that look like? Are those those guidelines implemented at all?

Yeah, so there's lots of regulations. They're imposed by Marine Scotland, done by cepa, which is the pollution agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, and they're imposed by the Crown of States Scotland, which is the landlord, effectively the seabed. But there are not many. They have more or less a rubber stamping role at the end of the process. So the regulations are mostly Marine Scotland and seapas. They've been going through some sort of revision and there's an exercise the government's doing at the moment to produce a vision for aquaculture to 2045 which will include regulatory changes, perhaps, it's unclear yet. It's a vision for growth, they call it sustainable growth, but it's not a vision for reducing the size of aquaculture. The government wants to increase it. So the regulatory landscape is really important. And it's around the time in that 2018 review, the inquiry SEPA changed its regulations for seabed impacts of pollution. That's the feces from the fish and uneaten food. That's the only bit that's been updated, really. So the pesticide dumping hasn't changed. It's changed a little bit per pesticide, but it hasn't changed overall. They're still allowed to dump all the pesticide in the sea that they use. The amounts are capped per discharge, but not the number of discharges. Dissolved nutrients, not really properly assessed. The combined effect of all these things are not really properly assessed. And the sea lice, particularly the regulations on sea lice impacting wild fish are being drafted at the moment. The responsibility has been given to CEPA to do that, taken away from local authorities to some extent, but TSEPA are having to fight with the industry to get a usable draft through really for that which is going to be interesting. It's an interesting process. We could talk more about that, maybe. And then there's welfare, because 25% of the fish die in the sea pens. 25% of the fish that go to sea die before they're harvested routinely, year on year. So that's not good. I mean, if there's 25% of your livestock dying, there's something wrong with any kind of farm. And the regulations on that are particularly weak, it seems. So. Then there's enforcement, which is the other part of your question. So it's one thing to have a rule and it's another thing to see if it's enforced properly. When SEPA did its review of regulations in 2018, just for the seabed impacts, they said that aquaculture was the least compliant of all the industries they regulate. And it's the most polluting of Scotland seas. Marine Scotland Fish Health Inspectorate goes to the farms where there are more than where there's large numbers of deaths, but they don't change anything, really. Occasionally they'll issue a stern letter. But the farms, none of them are ever shut down. They might have the biomass reduced, maybe. I think SEPA does cause that to happen sometimes, but the biomass is rarely reduced. I don't think it's ever reduced for fish health reasons. And really, some of these farms are clearly in the wrong places not to be shut. But that's not where this process is going. Unless this aquaculture vision says that, which it might do, maybe. I mean, that would be a hopeful outcome, that some farms just should be closed because they're routinely, systematically poor for welfare, polluting, bad for sea lice, impacts on wild fish, but you have to have a will to change that kind of thing. It's not been there before. It might be creeping in a little bit now, but it's never been there for decades before in Scotland.

Yeah, there's. There's awful lot of things to unpack there. So maybe let's start with a little bit of a groundwork for people who might not know the issue. What is the problem with sea lice? Like, can you. Can you just lay it out?

Yeah. So there's two species of sea lice which affect salmon, and some trout are farmed in the sea as well. So those are affected by sea lice, too. They are a naturally occurring organism. They're a kind of crustacean. They're parasitic, so their larvae float in the sea. They disperse that way. They can go up to 30km over 10 days or so, during which Time they're infective. If they encounter a wild salmonid, a salmon or a sea trap, then they can stick onto it. They become attached after a few days. Some of them die on the fish, some don't. And then they start to eat it. The blood, the mucus, the scales, the flesh. And if they get a really bad infestation in farms, then the fish will eventually die. So it's horrible. Their flesh is exposed and it's disgusting. So the farmers know it's a major problem and they treat the fish with pesticides or physical treatments, which means putting them through steel pipes, heating them up a bit, or flushing fresh water over them, or kind of brushing the lice off. Those physical treatments need to be done every couple of weeks because the lice come back again. Or you can put cleaner fish wrasse or lumpsuckers in the cages, some of which will eat the lice from the salmon. The cleaner fish are all slaughtered when the, when the salmon are slaughtered every 20 months or so, so that tens of millions of cleaner fish killed each, each production cycle as well, if they don't die beforehand. So sea lice, the main issue with sea lice is if a big infestation gets underway in a farm, then the female sea lice on the farmed fish are producing eggs at quite a rate. And those become free floating larvae, naupli, which float away, they develop into copepodids, which are the infectious ones. Those disperse over large areas. The wild fish, particularly the smolts or post smolts that are migrating past fish farms or even 30 km from fish farms, because that's how far the things go. And in areas where they get concentrated, are exposed to infestation by sea lice and they carry them away with them. And for a small fish, if it's got more than 2, there's a 30% likelihood of it dying. So then they won't come back. So the losses in salmon are mostly at sea. You know, they go to sea and fewer are coming back these days, or if they come back, they're in poor condition. There could be multiple reasons for that. There probably are, but one of the likely reasons is that they're being infested by sea on the way out and it's making them just poorer condition or perhaps they even die before they get to grow up and come back again.

Is that something that you were aware of, any research on this issue of the infesting? Some on, on the way out to the sea on that. That's interesting because we, I was just a Couple of episodes ago, we were, I was talking with, with a scientist from Compass Project and he, he said Richard Kennedy was. Was his name, said that it was 30% return rate a couple of decades ago and now it's like in single figures.

Yes.

Return rates, common problems. That's probably one of the things.

Yeah. Across the range of Atlantic salmon that's happening and it's not only happening in aquaculture areas. So there's an impact from climate change as well and other impacts probably too. But there is an impact of sea license. Most of the work's actually been done in Ireland and Norway, so sort of straddling Scotland. The work in Scotland was remiss. I mean, there just hasn't been work done comparable to the Irish or Scottish or Norwegian work. Those kind countries have shown it very clearly. When marine Scotland science finally got round to trying it in Scotland, they got so few fish coming back that they couldn't really conclude anything. So what you have to do is you have to treat some for sea lice and some you don't treat with chemicals. And then the ones that have been treated for sea lice are more likely to come back again than the ones that haven't been treated. That was some of the work that was done in Ireland. There's multiple strands to it. You can, you can measure sea lice, you can count them on wild sea trout which don't migrate, so you have longer to catch those, and you can count the sea lice on them. And their lice burden tells you what the lice burden is likely to be on the wild salmon postmolts as well. And the lice burden on many sea trout is higher than would kill them in time and higher than would kill a salmon smolt too, post malt. So the smoking gun is there. And also, if you look at the conservation status of most rivers on the west coast of Scotland, it's category three, which is the worst. They're not replenishing, they're going to go extinct in those rivers. They're nearly, all category three. There's hardly any in the other categories. So the data is pretty clear. I mean, it's not, it's a hard one because you don't find dead salmon post malts with sea lice on them because they've died and they may die at sea. So it's. You can't point at them and say, there's one that we've caught one with four lice on it that's now dead. It's impossible to do that.

And you mentioned the Cleaner fish. I heard some time ago that there was a issue where there were the wild wrath were caught and kind of moved to those. There was those farms and there was like also, you know, issue raised that nobody's monitoring that. And what is an impact of the ecosystem for so many RAs being removed? Is that something that is still going on?

Yes, it is going on still. Some ras are captive bred now as well. So there are ras farms just for this purpose. But ras farmed wrasse are not as good at taking lice from salmon, farmed salmon as wild rice are. So there's a premium on the wild ones. They're extremely expensive when they're caught. There's a great fortune being spent on them and all these other treatments and the pesticides and everything, tens of millions of pounds a year trying to treat sea lice as the major problem. But the thing with the cleaner fish is the wrasse would live perhaps 30 years in the wild and killed after two. And the lumpsuckers, which are cold water fish, die in the summertime. So. And also neither of them copes with being put through the physical treatment machines, which the salmon can just about survive if their gills aren't compromised. But the cleaner fish are killed by that. Usually they're very sensitive to pressure and crowding and I think the lumpsuckers are particularly sensitive to the temperature going up as well. So if they're put through the thermolycer which warms them up, then that will kill them. So there's a huge cruelty and I think ethical issue to do with cleaner fish, which are touted as a, as a great biological control. It would be somebody compared it to say you were farming pigs and they had ticks. You wanted to get rid of the ticks and you went into the woods and you trapped a lot of robins and then you let the robins eat the ticks on the pigs. And then when you killed the pigs, you killed all the robins because they might carry disease to other pigs. That's the exact parallel to what's happening with the cleaner fish. But it's largely overlooked, like all of this stuff because it's underwater, it's offshore and it's underwater, people aren't seeing it.

I heard this saying that if what's going on in salmon farming was going on above the water, they would be closed within a week. But because it's under the water, nobody sees this.

The very worst examples were people have been going and putting GoPros on sticks in some of these farms and exposing what's happening, I think that's opened people's eyes to it. But the weekly mortality figures are published now. The industry's been obliged to do this now and some of those, when they're correlated by month, are just shocking. I mean, this, the end of the summer, August, September, October this year, which was pretty warm in the second year of production. The farms that have got the most and the largest fish when it's warm are getting really badly hit, many of them by swarms of tiny jellyfish, hydrozoan jellyfish, which get into the fish's gills and sting them. And if the, if the fish have already got gill disease, which they often get and this happens to them, they can't be treated for sea lice without them all dying. So then they often get sea lice as well. Maybe not all of them dying, but a high proportion. So they get sea lice as well. Then they're in this desperate state and you can't keep them alive. So there have been some farms with like 30, 40% of fish dying in a month in September and October in Scotland and multiple farms. So Malik, for instance, was getting deliveries of hundreds of tons of dead fish a day from several of the farms in Loch Nevis and Rum, I think, and Muck, all of those farms in that area had this problem with these jellyfish compounded by gill illnesses on the fish. They must have been having tanker loads of dead fish, many of them, many tankers a day being taking them away and ensiling them or turning them into biogas in digesters, anaerobic digesters in the central belt of Scotland.

Oh my God.

Yeah, it's a kind of horrible thing, but hidden, like you said.

I didn't realize that this is such a massive scale. And listen, just to maybe wrap this part up on the impacts on the ecosystem, although I don't know whether this is. Maybe there's more things to expose, so to say. But then there is also other diseases and stuff that these fish are being fed. They're being fed wild fish that are harvested, wild fish like a sandeel and such that are at the bottom of the ecosystem like a food chain. And they're being basically transformed to fish feed. But I guess there's also a lot of kind of like artificial and chemical substances in this fish feed. Because I remember many years ago I was fishing with my, with my, with my buddy who used to work on the fish farm and he said something I. I don't eat farm salmon. Never eat farmed salmon. And the other guy who's the charters keeper. He looks at him and like what? Because of the shite that goes into them? And he goes like, yes, exactly, yeah.

So this is a big area. I mean it's a really important thing. And it's largely again invisible because the feed is, the feed ingredients, you know, you can find it out. If you really search on the Internet, you can find out what's in the feed ingredients, what the feed ingredients are. But it's, it's not obvious really when you buy a fish in a supermarket, what it's been fed on. I think the marketing implies that these are all somehow wild fish that are feeding on stuff that's in the sea. Naturally, of course, that couldn't be further from the truth. The farms have got three and a half thousand tons of fish in them weighing about 4 kilos, 4.8 kilos at harvest. So you know, that's hundreds of thousands of fish they're being fed. Of course they are. The feed is made from soya from Brazil, mostly from areas that were rainforest at some point. And at some stage they've been turned into fields. Some of them quite recently they're fed on oily fish. So anchovetas, sardines mostly they come from Peru, some come from West Africa. There are oily fish in Scotland as well. So some of those are caught too for this. Sand eels is an example actually. So sand eels are caught to be turned into fish meal to put into fish feed. For salmon, the fish oil is important because it changes the taste of the salmon and it allows the industry to say that the salmon has Omega 3 in it, which is the health, for health reasons it wouldn't have if they weren't fed fish oil. So now Biomar is catching krill in the Antarctic because krill also has Omega 3 in it. They're putting that into fish feed for salmon. That's a dubious thing in terms of sustainability, in my opinion. And then there's, there's other stuff. One of the positive things is that the quantity, the proportion of wild fish in the feed has gone down over time. But as the quantity of farmed fish goes up, then the quantity of feed goes up. So the quantity of wild fish caught hasn't gone down and I think it's only the percentage that's gone down and a lot of it's used for this fish oil, which is inefficient and that's, that's reached its capacity now. So the, particularly the Peruvian anchovy fishery is totally maxed out and you can't get more oil out of those. So there's a competition for the fish oil to go into fish feed, but other things too. So it's a squeeze on marine resources which are used by other things. Other animals, like krill is eaten by penguins and whales, for instance. Sand eels are eaten by puffins, which are in decline. So the UK government's talking about banning sand eel fisheries for that reason, which would be great. But there's a lot of other stuff.

They also use that would be huge if it goes ahead.

Yeah, it would be really good. I mean, they do use off cuts from other commercial fish, so that's a good thing. So if you're catching wild fish which are. Which are overfished.

Right.

So many wild fisheries are fished way beyond what's sustainable and there are bits left that people won't eat, which you can turn into feed for farmed fish. It's a good thing. But there are all these other problems which are massive unsustainability problems, which are built into the fact that in the end, you get one of these fish that's been fed on that and a quarter of them died. So you fed them and they've died. You've shipped the stuff from Peru and fed the fish, know a quarter of them didn't get on their plate.

That's absolute madness. That's absolute madness. John, how. How did you. How did you get into this, working into this work with the. With the, you know, coastal communities and so on? You're a. You're a wildlife cameraman. So was there, like, what was the moment that. That made you, you know, to get involved in this? What happened?

Well, the films that I make as a rather cameraman, they're for television and they're seen by large numbers of people and they're films about nature, so they're, you know, they raise some awareness about the natural world, but they're infrequently conservation films and I'm a conservationist, so I believe that the world is in crisis. We've got a biodiversity crisis and a climate crisis at the moment, and we need to do more to directly change things in that respect. I felt, and I still feel that I could do that through my work to some extent, but I can do it directly, personally as well. And the best way to do that is to be doing so locally where I live. So I've lived here about 30 years on the west coast of Scotland. I know quite a lot about the fish farms. Like, I think many people, initially, I was looking at them thinking it was better than Catching wild fish, farming fish makes sense. It's a better solution than overfishing wild fish. So I would, I stopped eating wild fish and ate farmed salmon for quite some time. Then I started to learn more about what's going on in the salmon farms, looked into the regulations, into SIPA and so on, and found out really what was happening. And it was focused locally by a farm being proposed near a salmon river here, which was just completely in the wrong place. And the community here was very clear that it didn't want it for multiple reasons. And so there was a campaign which I was involved with and the group that we set up for that has persisted and is now part of the Coastal Communities Network of Scotland, which is a multi part marine conservation group of groups. But it does have a salmon farming concern, which is something I'm involved with still after about five, six years now.

So obviously there is an impact of salmon farming on the coastal communities as well, because like you mentioned, those people don't want those farms there. So we covered kind of like environmental aspects of the impact of those salmon farms. Is there anything outside of environmental ones that there's impacting local communities?

So, well, there's, there's the ethical thing which I think affects anybody who's, who might buy the fish or is concerned about what's actually going on in the farms, which is separate from the environmental impact. But it's kind of related because it's the environment that's to a certain extent causing the welfare issues and then the consequences of it are these thermalizers and things. But then there's an aspect which the industry is very keen to get rid of. There's been a review done by a man called Professor Griggs for the Scottish government into streamlining, consenting to speeding up the consenting of fish farms because they take quite some time to get consent Planning Commission and the pollution license from sepa. And Griggs is a pro business, anti regulation person, really in many ways. He's done this before with other industries and he's recommended centralizing the regulation under Marine Scotland. Marine Scotland's part of the Scottish government. The Scottish government is pro aquaculture, pro fish farming. So if you wanted to speed up the process, you would take away from local authorities, the local planning authorities, the process of deciding whether farms should go where they go and give it to Marine Scotland and they'll rubber stamp them mainly. There may be some times when they would say no and there would be sound reasons for it, but the likelihood is they'll speed it up. And I think especially what they'll do is they'll take away the impact on the landscape as a valid reason for turning down some farms. And there are a handful, I mean, it would be probably four that have been turned down on landscape impact reasons. What you have to bear in mind is that small coastal communities in the west of Scotland depend on tourism to a large extent. The west of Scotland has some of the best coastal landscape in the world. And the main reason that people give for coming to Scotland is the landscape. Year after year, when Visit Scotland does surveys, it's the landscape people come for. So the farms that have been turned down have been in iconic bits of coast. For instance, on the coast of Skye under Arran. It doesn't seem unreasonable that there are a few places in the west of Scotland which are unsuitable for fish farms for visual impact reasons. So that's why the planners turn them down from time to time, or the planning committees of the local authorities. And the industry wants to turn that over. They write about it in the industry press. There was one just in the last couple of days, an article about it. They're hoping the government will remove that, give it to Marine Scotland and they'll just ignore it, I think. Dismiss it.

That's really. You know, I knew they're bad, but I didn't realize the scale of what's going on. And so what is the. So you mentioned you're part of the Coastal Communities Network. So can you tell us a little bit about this ngo? This is an ngo? Yeah. What are their campaigns and. And how does that work?

Yeah, well, it's a group of groups, so it's made up in a. In a quite loose way of 23 now, coastal community based marine conservation groups, they're mostly on the west coast. There's a few on the east coast. There's one at Fair Isle. They have a range of interests, actually, so they've. There's always a spark that makes a group form and sometimes it's aquaculture, as it was here, sometimes it's restoration of marine habitats, like it is with Cromack, which is a group off the coast of Ebe to Ardfern. The Fair Isle group wanted to set up a research marine protection area around Fair Isle to see if changing fishing there would increase the diversity in the sea, but also might increase the amount that the fishermen could catch outside the MPA. So there's a range of. St AB's head is another one. There are quite a lot and then there are topic areas. So Marine Plastics is one seabed impact spatial planning is another one. Marine spatial planning. Highly protected marine areas is an area that we're really interested in because that's coming in soon, before the end of this parliamentary term in Scotland, and no one's quite clear yet what it means. One of the things that highly protected marine areas won't allow is fish farming. So there's going to be a big discussion about where they go and if where they go can include existing farms. What happens? Do they shut them or what happens, do they get derogation? So we have a lot of interests, always community based, though. That's the key. The groups have to be based in community somewhere. They don't have to represent the whole community, but they have to be based in a geographical area. So we've done quite a lot here, for instance, with schools and we've done quite a lot with artists. So it's all underwater for most people. It's difficult to see what's here. You can't experience it directly. The water's cold, not everybody swims. So we've been training artists to draw while they snorkel and then to bring the art above the surface and show it to people, work it up and show it to people. So we've been doing that, which is great, actually, because it's another perspective on what's in the sea and it gets people talking and noticing and thinking about it.

Yeah. Wow, that's awesome. And listen, you mentioned about these farms. What's going to happen with them? Is there any case of the fish farm being shut down? Did that happen ever?

An existing farm shutting down? I only know of one that didn't shut down for impractical reasons. Sometimes they just close. So the companies, I think, close them because they don't work. So occasionally that's happened. There's a place called Mahdi which had two farms and they've both shut. So I think the reason that they were closed was that they just couldn't get a. They couldn't farm the fish in them. They were failing voluntarily. One farm, one that's owned by Maui, called Isle of Yew, Isle U, which is in the northwest west of Ross, that's been shut. But they would only do it if they got an equivalent biomass somewhere else of fish, so they could open another farm in exchange for closing that one. So that was a. You know, but you have to sort of at least say, well, okay, so you closed it down and that was the right thing. They did it because the salmon and sea trout that breed in the river, that's Quite nearby were passing the farm and they were declining so fast it was very difficult them to say they weren't having an impact on the wild fish. So they closed it for that reason. They're talking about using semi closed containment pens there instead. Now I don't know if that's happened yet but the idea would be instead of using a net, you make a bag and you put the fish in the bag and you have to pump water into it because the water isn't going to flow in and out like it would with a net. The water can come from quite deep and therefore it doesn't have sea lice in it. And you can capture some of the waste if you choose to and you can remove it. You only capture the solids and only some of them. You can't capture the dissolved waste which is quite high proportion of the waste the fish produce through their gills. Mostly nitrogen which can boost algal blooms which can do harm. So it's a slight improvement. And if you replace like for like, if you have the same biomass in an open net farm and you put it into a closed containment farm, there'd be an improvement. If you instead said, which often is the case now this is a way of getting a new farm somewhere where we couldn't have a farm with open nets because of the pollution, then it's not an improvement. It's increased the likelihood of fish escaping and breeding with wild ones. It's increased the likelihood of. It's increasing the pollution, it's increasing the dissolved nutrients, particularly net net increase overall.

Yeah, we haven't said that as well that one of the impacts is the fish sometimes is escape from those farms.

That's right.

And then they're cross breed with wild salmon. Can you explain that issue?

Yeah. So that's quite a complicated one because the Atlantic salmon are farmed and wild, but the Atlantic salmon in Scotland are all Norwegian or nearly all. So the stock is Norwegian stock and it's been domesticated for whatever it is 13 generations or 15 generations now. So they've been bred to grow quickly. In fact if you look at Maui's annual report, it says far, far down in the report, page 600 or something, it says something about reputational risk that the fish grow so fast that they get distorted, the spines get distorted and their eyes, they get cataracts because they're not, they're not, they're growing faster than they can really, really grow. So these are genetically different now these fish. And if they escape partly because they grow so quick but partly they can, they can interbreed so they can compete with wild fish. But. And they, they're fast growing, so they've got an advantage. But they can also breed with them. They have to get into the rivers to breed. And not all of them will. Some might be too small or too young when they escape to actually do that because it's got to be adult to breed. But when. Now twice two studies have been done in Scotland on the west coast of genetic introgression. It's actually the whole of Scotland, not just on the west coast. Genetic introgression. So how much genetic material from the Norwegian stock is in Scottish fish? And it's about a quarter of them have it. About a quarter of the fish sampled have genes from Norwegian fish in them in Scotland. Now it could be that they're escaping from smolt cages in fresh water and staying in the rivers and breeding. It could be that where rivers have been restocked with Norwegian salmon in the past, that those have bred with Scottish fish. And it could be that fish are escaping from farms. Huge numbers escape from farms. It could be that those are breeding in the rivers. Just Maui, just that one company had four really large escapes from farms in exposed locations in the last few years. The one at carrier lost about 50,000 in one event in a storm in August 2020. 50,000 fish is a lot of salmon relative to the population of wild salmon.

It brings to mind the issue like with the poultry with a broiler chicken that grows so fast that it outgrows its skeleton within the week. So this is kind of like a similar thing. Are those fish farms? Is it like each, each fish farm is a separate business and someone, you know, wants to make money and starts a fish farm? Or are they pretty much like a big multinationals that are owning many of those fish farms? And you know, so once you close one, that doesn't really take the player out of the market. It's just, you know, they have like many of those. How's, how's that structure?

Well, there used to be a lot of different companies and they were quite small. They had a few farms each and gradually they've been bought by the bigger players because they can afford, they've got the capital and they can afford to do economies of scale. They can afford these very expensive million pound thermal icing vessels or the big whale boats that they use to move the fish about and treat them sometimes with pesticides. So there's been a shift towards a few very large multinational companies owning almost all the farms in Scotland. There's about 210 active farms in Scotland and they're almost all owned by just a handful of companies or four or five. And those are almost all Norwegian. There's one Faroese company and there's a Canadian company. So there are no British owned large salmon farming companies at all. There are big ones, there are a few tiny ones. One's Westeros Fisheries just got sold to Maui to. The little ones are being bought up. There's an American owned medium sized, small. Small really One as well, I think so, yeah. They're not, they're not local companies and they're operating in Chile, they're operating in Canada, they're operating in Norway, Faroes, Iceland, the same companies.

So massive multinationals and they'll argue that.

It'S expensive to operate in Scotland and that Scotland's losing out because it's driving the business away. Then you look at what's going on in Norway and Norway's just proposed a 40% extra marine resources tax on fish farms, which the same companies are crying out about in Norway because they're saying, well, we can go, we can go and we can set up in Scotland instead or in Chile, we'll do more there. So it's really not the case that it's more expensive to operate here when Norway's doing that to them. And of course they're doing it because they're using a common resource, which is the sea, and they're depleting its capacity for other impacts by impacting it with pollution and so on. And they're depleting the natural stock of wild salmon, for instance, taking away something that belongs to everybody.

Is there anything, is there even such thing as sustainable salmon farming? Is it even possible? So yeah, what I'm, what I'm going with this. You know, you can answer that question in a second if there is such thing. But would you maybe like a follow up question is, is there any chance of reforming or modernizing fish farming practices or whether they just need to be gone and that's it?

Well, I think about it a lot actually and I read about it a lot and it's a really sensible question and it is the question that everybody needs to be asking, really. Not just NGOs, but the government needs to be asking this as well if they're trying to do a vision to 2045. So first you have to define the word sustainable. Sustainable, when the companies use it, usually means economically sustainable. So what they're talking about is can they keep making a profit year on year from their large capital investment in these Farms which cost millions. The answer is after about five years they pay back the capital cost and then they're getting millions per year per farm if they're big farms. So yes, they can probably, because they're probably not going to poison the seabed so badly that the fish will die every year. But they are now gambling with the sea warming up and this issue with the, with the jellyfish and other problems caused by putting a cold water fish in warmer water. So northern Scandinavia probably. Okay. You know, I'm sure they're expanding in Iceland for that reason as well. It's for the moment a cold place. They've now got massive number of sea lice there, I expect. And probably the wild fish there are in trouble because of that. Faroes is another place. There's a big Faroese company, Bakoprost, that's farming here, but they've got Faroese fish farms too. So what would you do? They use nets, open nets, because the sea goes through, it carries oxygenated water and it carries away the waste. That's why they use open nets. That's how the whole thing is developed. You could go for these closed containment farms, but they've got much more drag. And if you put them in open water in highly exposed locations, they're going to struggle to keep them there because the lines will part. And it's, you know, it's not an exposed weather thing really. A big bag is it in the sea. So then those have to be in sheltered locations. There's a limit on how many sheltered locations there are. There are some in Norway that are connected to Maine's power on the land that have complete closed containment. They capture all the waste. They do probably discharge the dissolved nutrients which may have, you know, that's an issue, especially if the sea is warm and it stratifies in the summer as it would here in some of the sea locks. So you could do that, that's an improvement. But you can only gain the improvement if you replace like for like. If you use it to expand, like I said before, it doesn't really give you a net gain. It gives you more pollution and more risk of escapes and perhaps pesticides and so on. And then you've still got the feed issues. So you can do something about feed. You could use algae to grow omega 3 oils. Instead of taking oily fish out of the sea to feed to other fish before you then sell them to people to eat. People can eat the oily fish. You know, why feed fish to fish to eat the fish at the end when you could just eat the anchovies. It doesn't make sense. People may not like them as much, but you can still eat them. You could be more careful about where you got your plant protein from. So it didn't all come from Brazil, but aquaculture is slated to grow and grow and grow and there's no intention here of slowing it down, really. So sustainability, I think it's very difficult. I really do. I think environmental sustainability not impacting future generations with what we do now is extremely hard. With fish farming, you can only really weigh it up against wild capture and it may be slightly better than that. And the industry also says it's got a low carbon footprint. But then having said that, they ship about a third of the catch of the, of the harvest to the Far east in America, as far as I can make out by air because they don't freeze it. So it's air freighted. So, you know, you import the ingredients from Peru and then you air freight it to China after you've made the fish. That's not low carbon.

No, not at all. Wow. So now people are listening to this and they're saying, like, this is absolutely terrible. What would you recommend, what people should do? You know, how to support, you know, what you're doing or what the Coastal Communities Network is doing. I read about the off the Table campaign.

Yeah, well, Wild Fish is the organization running that, that used to be called Salmon and Trout Conservation Scotland. The off the Table campaign. They're trying to get people to just not eat, not buy farmed salmon until the procedures for growing the fish change, until they don't have an impact on wild fish and the environment. So that's one way of doing it. Just don't buy the stuff. There are organic salmon. I don't think the organic status works for salmon, really, because they still can use pesticides in the farms. The feed isn't organic. So some of these certifications that you see RSPCA assured, supposed to prevent welfare abuses, but actually I'm not persuaded by that either. My solution is not to buy it. I don't buy it at all. I think the best way to get involved is to say to, if you're in Scotland, especially to say to your MSPs that you don't agree with it. And the Coastal Communities Network's involved in campaigning, so we're always interested to hear from people. I don't think we can stop it being here. I think the best we can hope for is to try and get it radically improved. You can farm fish on Land, you need a lot of land. It takes more power. You can use renewable power. Of course, in Scotland there's tons of that that could be better in that it doesn't need pesticides and that you can capture all the waste. You don't have to dump waste. They're not going to get sea lice. They might not get disease. But if the pumps go wrong, then they will die. And if you had that sort of system, you wouldn't farm them on the west coast of Scotland. You'd farm them near an airport or near a city. Ideally near a city. And then the jobs here would be lost. Some of the coastal communities that we're involved in have jobs in fish farming. So I just think what it needs is some really responsible thinking, some planning ahead for this problem of climate change, some honesty about what's actually happening in the farms from the industry and the government and the government agencies, a willingness to do something about it and then that should fall out into action. That may be that you shot some of the farms, maybe you shot all the farms. If they can't do anything about the welfare issues, you wouldn't keep, you wouldn't keep land farms open with those welfare issues. So get the best ones that people can be proud of, change all the things that are wrong and see if you can make it work and make it economical. If you can't, maybe it's a lost cause. But making it cheap isn't an excuse.

What do you say about buying and eating wild caught fish? Wild caught salmon? Because the original issue was that to protect the wild caught stocks, we all, we're going to farm salmon.

Yeah.

And now it turns out like, oh, like there's probably even bigger problem with that. So what, what use is, is it better to buy and like a wild caught salmon which I know is not available all year round. It's at least in Poland, where I'm, where I come from, there are certain months in a, in a, in a year where you can order, they're super expensive, but they're also high quality. So is that any better? Is that fishery sustainable or is it equally bad or as bad as it, as it was?

I think in Scotland there's no wild salmon fishery anymore for sale and in England there might just be one. So the price of those fish would be astronomical. And given their decline, the rate of decline, I think probably unethical to, to eat them as well. There are Alaskan salmon, of course, so you can buy wild Alaskan salmon even in the big supermarkets, they have them frozen and I think cooked in some things as well and it's probably tinned but it's not the same type of fish, so it's not the same experience. But the well managed big Alaskan salmon runs, which they shut if they haven't got enough fish so they do properly manage them, are probably the most sustainable salmon fisheries that there are. But then they're, you know, they're, they're brought from America and they're probably processed in China. So you, if there's an ethical issue to it as well for carbon footprint then that doesn't really help. So yeah, I've, I've just stopped.

Yeah, that's, that's exactly the problem. And I think that the salmon population in Alaska and in America and in Canada are also in trouble, at least some populations.

So there's several species of salmon in the Pacific and some of them are in trouble and some less so. The climate's changing rapidly there, especially in the northwest area of North America. Really, really rapid change. And they're cold water fish, they need cold fresh water when they're breeding. They're not necessarily getting that anymore. And the knock on is enormous. But the sea lice issues on there as well. And in British Columbia and Washington state in the US there are radical changes happening. So Washington state has banned open net salmon farming. Well I think all salmon farming in the sea actually to protect wild salmon just recently in the last month and the British Columbia, the Canadian government said that, Trudeau's government said that they would make open net farms on the west coast come out of the sea. I think it's some areas, I think it's the whole of B.C. i'm not entirely sure but they are closing or destocking, not stocking some of those farms. And the impact on the post malt wild salmon passing by seems to have been immediate. So the number of lice on the fish has changed instantly. Alexandra Morton is really worth looking at social media and elsewhere. She's a scientist and has been following us for a long time. It's very robust her information. So yeah, so it's mixed I think what's going on? I mean salmon seem to be in trouble pretty much everywhere. Climate's definitely playing a part in it.

Well, but that's kind of like an optimist optimism, a little bit of optimism here with those farms being closed or the governments are, are making move to limit them. Listen, I gotta ask that question. What are your views on the rod and line called salmon? Obviously substantial portion of my viewers are anglers. And what's your view on that? Is your view that this is the only sustainable and okay way of sourcing farm on to eat? Or your view is like, yeah, go and fish and do what you do, but, you know, return the fish? Or is your view, don't even fish for them, don't, you know, put the hook into the fish because they're in trouble and everything matters. What's your view?

Yeah, it's a good question. I'm not an angler, so I don't have direct experience of this. I'm a, you know, I'm a naturalist. I like, I like the fish. I don't have anything against fishing, against angling particularly. I can imagine if the, if the water's warm and the, you know, and they're pretty stressed, then having to fight for a long time on the end of a line and then being taken out of the water and roughly handled isn't great. And there might be, there might be a consequence for the fish in that. And I'm sure anglers know much more about that than I do and would be the good ones will be conscious of that and would try and avoid doing it and would do the right thing in terms of whether it's right to catch fish to eat. What I know about is Scotland, really. And there are these three categories of wild salmon breeding rivers, categories one to three. Category three is not recruiting, not fast enough to replenish its numbers. And in those, it's all catch and release, possibly in category two as well. So catch and release is the way to do this, isn't it? If you. It doesn't make sense to kill an animal that, you know is declining very quickly. So on that basis, I would say that that seems to me the right thing to do is not to deplete the numbers. So there's multiple factors. There definitely are lots of things you can shade the rivers better. There's dams, there's water extraction, there's warming in the sea, there's warming in the freshwater, there's the sea lice, there's fisheries, there's fisheries at sea and bycatch. There's all sorts of stuff going on that's affecting the salmon. But we do have control over a few of those things. So when we can do something and if we like salmon, which presumably all salmon anglers do, then, you know, maybe the time is right to do the absolute best we can for them as a. As a rapidly declining species that we like. That's my position anyway. That's why I think it's the right thing to do.

I think you're right. And it's, it seems like salmon is off the menu, at least it should be in, in its all forms, which is, which is very un, very unfortunate. How do you think, how do you see the future of salmon and salmon farming for that matter? Are you optimist in any capacity or do you think that this is not going in the right direction? Because on one hand you said like, you gave example from, from across the Atlantic where there were like a, you know, correct moves by the governments of banning or destocking. Then on the other hand you're, you're saying like really in Scotland where we focusing this episode on the government is pro aquaculture and you know, let's deregulate and you know, so how. What's your overall prognosis for the next decade?

Well, I think with wild fish they'll probably continue to decline. And for the farmed sector, when I look around at what's going on in other countries, I get a bit of hope. So Sweden decided they weren't going to have more pens in the sea with fish in them because of pollution. So did the Danes. They're not going to be allowed in national parks in Chile anymore. Chile's got terrible record for this. Argentina's decided not to have salmon farming at all. In Patagonia, the Falkland Islands, the same. So there are sensible decisions being made in some places where the harm hasn't happened yet. So then in places where there's the very, very high value industry, hundreds of millions or billions of pounds a year being earned by these companies, much of it removed from here and given to shareholders in Norway particularly. They aren't very interested in their costs going up or in having a smaller operation. But the thing that I think needs to happen is a recognition that there's a shared resource that's being depleted by this and that there are two things. One is don't deplete the shared resource. Let's find a way to not do that. If it's possible to do that. Show us that it is, prove it and maybe people will accept and re renew the social license to operate, which is what's being eroded by this whole thing of doing it the cheapest, most dirty way at the moment for maximum profit. That's where we are I think, is it's just cheaper to do it like this and they'll make more money but they're losing public support. So they're going to have to at some point wake up to the fact that they can't expect to Sell so many fish if they lose public support and that they need to win back some trust. But you can't win back trust with just PR and spin. You have to do it by actually changing. And if the Scottish government wants to be seen as a, I don't know, a progressive organization that isn't just about depleting what Scotland has, which is amazing for quick profit, to be able to become an independent nation, it needs to have a healthy sea, you know, and salmon are part of the healthy sea. So let's not throw it away. There's some good talk at the moment from the government, but it hasn't translated into much action yet. We'll see if it does, whether it's enough. You know, there's a big lobbying industry with a lot of money pressing down on the government just now, so whether they'll bow to that pressure, I don't know. It's up to us to try and put the other half of the argument, I think. Really.

What are those good talks that you're. That you said? Like, there are some puzzles, positive signs.

So Scotland, when it, when it wants to be independent, initially it was keen on oil and gas. So the largest part of Scotland is its seabed, and a lot of the seabed has oil and gas underneath it. So if Scotland was to separate from the uk, it would have taken with it large oil and gas reserves. It would take with it. But Scottish government's pretty rational on oil and gas and recognizes that climate change means we can't burn all the oil and gas that there is in reserves that are known about, including in the North Sea. So the economic case for Scotland being independent can't rest on oil and gas anymore like it used to. So food and drink are the next biggest export from Scotland. It's salmon and whiskey. Salmon farm salmon is the biggest food export from the UK and whiskey is the biggest drink export. So both Scottish, both associated with this nation. And if you're going to make an independent Scotland, you want a strong economy. That's why the referendum failed last time, was on the economy, really, on the economic case for independence. Only 5 million people in Scotland. 5.3, I think. So somehow you've got to say, well, we're going to make it work because we're going to sell a hell of a lot of salmon. And so the pressure to not kill off this industry is absolutely immense politically. But there's a sort of blinkedness about whether or not it's. It can be environmentally sustainable. They just use the word sustainable, not environmentally sustainable. And if there's some honesty, the politicians, the ministers responsible, will look at whether it really is environmentally sustainable or not and what would be required to make it that way. And the ministers have changed. The old minister has gone. He was very pro industry. There are two younger ministers now who are. They feel a bit more balanced, but they are under this immense pressure from the industry. So we'll see whether they make different decisions to what would have gone before in this vision. I think it'll be a recipe for growth. I'm pretty sure it's going to say, yes, expand to 2030 and double in size by then, but do it without crippling the environment. And the industry will say that it can do that and we'll find out that it can't, probably.

John, if there was one thing that you want our listeners and viewers to remember after watching and listening to this, what would that be? What would be your, you know, words of wisdom for the listeners?

The sea is a really special thing and we live on an island, so we're an island nation. The sea is very important. The health of the sea really matters. The pressures on the sea are increasing all the time. It really is time to start thinking about how the stack up of all those different pressures is causing harm in this time of a biodiversity crisis. And the excuse is always, well, we don't really need to act in our little sector because it's not going to make much difference. It's the same with the climate individually, why should we do anything about it? But that's an excuse for never doing anything and no one doing anything. And if you go down that route, you're guaranteed to get to the outcome that you can see where you're headed at the moment. So we do need to make changes, we do need to take this stuff seriously. Cop 15's just ended in Canada, fairly optimistic, but still without targets, without concrete, measurable metrics. And that's what's lacking in this as well. And the biodiversity strategy that Scotland's doing needs targets. It needs concrete figures for what's going to be achieved after a set period of time. Unless we start doing that. And this is what all of us need to be asking our politicians for. It's not just vague, nice words, but actual action, rapid action, radical change, really, to protect the natural world. We're not going to get there and it's all going to be gone. And then we'll think, oh, we could have done something about it 10, 15, 30 years ago. So that's, you know, this is just part of that big jigsaw puzzle of trying to achieve that, really. It's the bit that I happen to have landed on, but it's. It's a bigger picture and we've all got to play our part. And one of the biggest things we can do is just not buy stuff, you know, if we don't agree with the way it's produced, we don't agree with the impacts. Just don't buy it, don't put your money into it, don't support it.

Yep, that's a very good message. John, thank you very much for your time. It's been great and I'm sure that this episode opened eyes of quite a few people into what's going on, really.

Thanks, Tommy. Nice to talk to.