‘Supergreen’ salmon, straight from the farm
BY ABRA BENNETT
PHOTOS BY SHEL HALL
Picture a Norwegian island 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Andøya. Humans lived there in the Stone Age, peat bogs and whales dot the scenery. Fish dominate the region’s economy: fishing for cod, and salmon farming. This is where Per Heggelund grew up.
Today, Heggelund owns the AquaSeed Corporation in Rochester, southeast of Olympia. It’s the state’s only closed-containment salmon farm, and it’s home to the SweetSpring brand of Coho salmon.
You might be ready to turn the page, thinking you’d never eat a farmed salmon. You might think farmed salmon are the scourge of the fish counter, the ruination of the ecosystem. You wouldn’t be alone in thinking that, but you might be wrong.
Heggelund’s farm-raised Pacific Coho salmon were recently awarded the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s (MBA) SuperGreen status, awarded only to fish that meet three criteria. They must contain very low levels of contaminants like mercury and PCBs, be rich in of omega-3s, and be classified as a Seafood Watch “Best Choice.” To make it to the SuperGreen list a fish has to be good for our health without harming the ocean. It’s the highest eco-status awarded to a fish, and it’s been awarded to a farmed salmon. Amazing, isn’t it?
This is AquaSeed’s year. In January, Scientific American published an article about them, then March found SweetSpring salmon featured on the NBC Nightly News, and in May the Association of Washington Business jumped on the bandwagon, awarding AquaSeed its Environmental Innovator award for 2010.
All this is thanks to a transplanted Norwegian visionary, a guy who’s in step with the times. “Our goal is to save wild salmon, to take the pressure off the wild salmon harvest by removing the waste from traditional salmon farming, and from there we can get to salmon sustainability,” says Heggelund.
Heggelund followed a circuitous path from remote Andøya to rural Washington: a high school exchange program in New York, a return to Norway for a few years, studies at the University of Washington resulting in two graduate degrees, one from the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences, and then an MBA. In 1991 Heggelund bought the Domsea Farms hatchery in Rochester and AquaSeed was born.
In the beginning raising fish for food wasn’t on the AquaSeed agenda. As its name suggests, what they did was raise salmon breeding stock for sale to customers abroad, primarily in Japan. Later they began supporting a conservation program, under contract to Grant County, breeding endangered stock from the Columbia River as part of the utilities’ dam impact mitigation program. They no longer do conservation work, which was transferred to a Federal hatchery, but in the process they learned something important: how to raise native Pacific Coho salmon for food production.
According to Heggelund there was no ‘eureka’ moment leading to the system that may well turn the U.S. salmon farming industry on its head. Rather, “it was a gradual progression, an incremental development, with innovation.”
Since salmon are normally anadromous fish, spending about half of their lifecycle in salt water and half in fresh, AquaSeed’s selective breeding program has worked through 18 two-year generations of Coho to select fish that can thrive in a freshwater environment. Today 20,000 fish at a time call the AquaSeed farm home.
In addition to innovations on the fish-breeding front, AquaSeed’s salmon farming methods are far from the norm, where Atlantic salmon are raised under crowded and dirty conditions in net pens that are open to the ocean. In contrast, AquaSeed is a land-based facility located far from coastal waters. They pump 3,500 gallons of fresh ground water per minute, about half of which goes into the brood stock and hatchery operations, and half to the food fish grow-out tanks. The water makes a single pass through the brood stock and hatchery tanks, since pathogen-free water is required in order for the eggs to be shipped overseas. Water from this part of the operation currently goes directly to the settling ponds, but could be used in the next phase of the process should AquaSeed ever need additional water for food fish production.
On the food fish side of the house, fresh water pumped for the small fry is re-used and cleaned 50 times before going to the settling ponds, while water is reused and cleaned 7 times for the large tanks containing the bigger fish. The water is crystal clear, the fish swim freely and vigorously in it, and this approach meets the MBA’s definition of a closed system.
Since no chemicals or antibiotics are added to the fish tanks, the pass-through effluent water, regulated under a Clean Water Act National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit, requires no other treatment than filtering out the solid waste before being discharged to a series of settling ponds, where it rests on its way to the Black River. A portion of the solid wastes from the fish tanks are removed by the natural anaerobic digestion process of the settling ponds, while much of it is collected weekly by a local composting company. The system is rated by the MBA as “Low” in terms of concerns about environmental contamination.
So why haven’t you heard of SweetSpring before? American’s appetite for salmon is enormous. Heggelund says, “The U.S. imports about $1.5 billion worth of salmon annually, mostly farmed, but also Alaskan salmon that’s been sent to China and Thailand for processing and gets imported back in processed form. Costco alone sells half a million pounds of farmed salmon per week.” In this vast marketplace SweetSpring represents only a tiny share of the market. And therein lies the rub.
Currently, if you want to eat SweetSpring salmon, there are only three places you can go. One is Mashiko Sushi in Seattle, the second is Microsoft’s corporate cafeteria, and the third is to take a trip to British Columbia, since most of AquaSeed’s 200,000 pounds per year production goes to stores in B.C. In light of its recent success and universal accolades, AquaSeed is planning to dramatically increase production and its direct local sales, so there’s still hope for discerning Seattle-area consumers. Heggelund estimates that there’s a 6-12 month waiting list for local chefs and retailers who wish to stock SweetSpring salmon.
But SuperGreen though it may be, any farmed salmon invites discussion. “It seems like there’s a segment of consumers that want to eat salmon they feel good about,” says Heggelund. “Unfortunately at this time we’re still stuck with the stigma that we are farming salmon, but we’re doing it in a different way that mitigates some of the issues that people have pointed out.”
So what are those issues? There are two “needs improvement” items on AquaSeed’s plate. One is to reduce energy consumption, since pumping and heating all that water comes at a cost to the environment. As AquaSeed expands production to meet the rapidly rising demand, it plans to utilize a methane generator, producing energy from methane derived from the decomposition of fish wastes.
The other is to reduce the amount of wild-caught fish that goes into the feed of the SweetSpring salmon. The MBA has developed a complex rating system to evaluate this issue. The food pellets used to farm salmon contain wild-caught fish, and salmon farmed traditionally consumes a ratio of three pounds of wild-caught fish products for every pound of salmon produced. At AquaSeed the ratio is 1.2 pounds of ocean fish to each pound of salmon, which the MBA classifies as “moderate” consumption. While the ocean protein portion of AquaSeed’s feed comes primarily from non-endangered anchovies, menhaden, and sardines, SweetSpring salmon are also fed vegetable proteins. Although AquaSeed requires its feed supplier to deliver non-GMO vegetable proteins, since they are derived from soy and corn, these products are increasingly difficult to obtain.
But Heggelund remains upbeat. Fresh from a Meet the Chefs event at the Monterey Bay Aquarium where SweetSpring salmon was the featured fare, he exults “There was a lot of interest on the part of the sustainable seafood people, and there was a definite demand for our product. It’s very exciting.”
Sidebar: Use It or Lose It
Abra Bennett is a freelance writer and former environmental regulator, who once had a personal chef business where she served her clients as much salmon as they would eat. Personally, she’s a sockeye girl.