Alaska's "half-farmed" salmon

[letsdoiteczema]

This is making me really reconsider buying my "wild-caught" Alaskan salmon, although the past 3-4 times I've had it, it tasted very rich and delicious and nothing like the restaurant farmed salmon - tasteless and bland.

I was fooled as well by all the claims that there are "NO" farmed salmon in Alaska.

Alaska's half-farmed salmon
Alaska's love affair with farming of salmon (despite words to the contrary) is slowly coming under scrutiny. Fish people in Alaska should be up front about their salmon hatcheries that are really a lot like fish farms.

Blogfish has noted previously that Alaska's so-called wild salmon include some fish that are raised for part of their lives in fish farms called "hatcheries." These fish live for up to half of their lives in farms, before being released into the ocean. When caught and sold, half-farmed fish are called "wild."

The problem is worst for less-preferred species like pink salmon and chum salmon, but even some sockeye and a very few chinook (king) salmon begin their life in hatcheries (fish farms).

Just this week, a letter to the editor of the copyrighted and subscription news service Intrafish has a scathing critique and a new term that just might begin to stick (excerpt below). Fish farmer Neil Sims of Kona Blue refers to Alaska's hatchery fish as "half-farmed" and writes about the hypocrisy of Alaska's opposition to fully-farmed fish, while simultaneously half-farming huge numbers of salmon. 

[letsdoiteczema]

http://blogfishx.blogspot.hk/2007/05/fish-farms-produce-so-called-wild.html

It's a dirty little secret of the "wild" salmon industry that the difference between some so-called "wild" salmon and "farmed" salmon is really just a matter of degree. Numbers vary with region and salmon species, but anywhere from 40% to 90% or more of so-called "wild" salmon come from salmon hatcheries that are essentially large-scale fish farms. The numbers are lowest in Alaska and higher in Washington, Oregon and California. For some species, notably chinook and sockeye from Alaska, it's likely (but not certain) that a fish called "wild" has never been inside of a bucket, tray, tank, or pond.

This is not the same problem as the mislabeling of farmed salmon as wild salmon. Hatchery fish are actually considered to be wild fish by all seafood standards currently in place, and hatchery-raised fish are considered to be wild fish by all seafood standards currently in place.

Definitive numbers are not available, but about 80% of west coast "wild" salmon from major rivers come from hatcheries. Even in Alaska, hatchery fish can be 70% or more of the catch of so-called "wild" salmon. So for many if not most salmon, a fish called "wild" has probably spent a major part of it's life in captivity being fed by people. Sort of blurs the distinction between wild and farmed fish, doesn't it?

[Haai]

One day I am going to take up fly-fishing and catch my own wild salmon!

[HIT_it_RAW]

One day I am going to take up fly-fishing and catch my own wild salmon!

you'd better move then

[Haai]

you'd better move then

I intend to in the future. But the main reason I want to move is because of the short shit summers and the long and even shitter winters in NL lol