In Norway, one man's solution to the threat posed by farmed salmon and the impact on the fjords they swim in.
“The Salmon Eye,” run by Eide Fjordbruck, is an education center located at the mouth of Norway’s Hardangersfjord. It is the world’s largest floating art installation and a vision of the company’s CEO Sondre Eide.
Wengaard is headed to one of the fjord’s several salmon farms, known by their cylindrical pens made from nylon netting, some holding hundreds of thousands of salmon each under the surface of Hardangersfjord.Norway is the world’s largest exporter of farmed salmon; more than a fifth of salmon consumed by Americans comes from the Nordic country.
But for now, they’re here, eating and swimming, the only thing separating them from the open ocean is a thin nylon net.“We need to inspect it every single day and look for holes, because we really don't want the salmon to escape,” says Wengaard, pointing to a television screen inside the Lingalaks facility where the company is able to monitor both the health of the fish and whether the net holding them is compromised in any way.
“I’ve never fished it myself, but sometimes you see people in the river and they report nice catches,” he says. “These sea lice have lived for ages on wild salmon swimming by and attached to them,” says Saetre. “And then when you gather millions of big salmon in the fjords and the sea lice get into that, it's like a heaven for the sea lice, and they grow and adapt.”ending in 2020, Norwegian scientists discovered that in the fjords of western Norway mortality rates among farmed salmon from sea lice infestation reached more than 30%.
Eide’s closed loop farming system raises the question: Why isn’t the entire industry farming salmon this way? While Norway’s government has been slow to explore this new technology, the government of Canada, another major salmon exporter, is phasing out open pens for its salmon farming industry to push companies to build pens like the one Eide has engineered. Eide says when he and his team looked for the technology to accomplish this, it simply wasn’t there.
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