Not quite on topic, but Arthur C. Clarke wrote The Deep Range (1957) about future sea exploitation, including whale-herding in the oceans
Consumers of a resource are often woefully underinformed about the processes by which those resources come into existence and the network of dependencies beneath them.
Sounds to me like this is a case of that - from his POV as part of a whaling crew, the whales just sort of grow in the water. Lakes are full of water, so we could just grow the whales in there (and as a bonus, they would be easier to hunt in the confinement of the lake).
Bold mine
Salt water offers more buoyancy, so while swimming in salt water holds you up out of the water a bit more (which may lower water resistance while swimming for a person) making it easier for someone to have their head in a good position to breathe. This is particularly noticeable for those who have little body fat who may be negatively buoyant (start to sink) at some point of their breathing cycle. The more fat someone has the less noticeable this is, so I think that in this respect whales may not find this a issue, also since they are comfortable submerging for long periods of time.
I think, for the purposes of “whale farming”, we can assume we’d be feeding the whales so roaming for food wouldn’t be an issue. At the time the OP’s author was writing, whalers primarily hunted sperm whales,* which can eat all sorts of things even if they primarily eat squid. Their comfort probably isn’t a concern from a commercial perspective, provided your fjord-farm is big enough that they don’t sicken and die prior to maturity.
*I assume baleen whales were also hunted since the “whalebone” used in hats and corsets was baleen.
But think of the economics of this. Where do you get the whale food? The point of whale hunting is that the whales swim around and find their own food for decades, and then you sail up and murder them and eat them. It’s a lot easier to find a whale to murder than it is to fish up metric ton after metric ton of krill and squid, feed it to the whale for a decade until the whale is at harvestable size, and only then process the whale.
Cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens can take grass, grain, and otherwise unusable agricultural byproducts and turn them into human-edible products.
It’s not like there was an insatiable demand for whale meat. During the golden age of whaling the primary harvested material was the oil, and secondarily the whalebone, the meat was just dumped over the side. Now that we have petroleum and cheap vegetable oils, there’s no demand for whale oil. So what’s the market for farmed whale? Setting aside culturally determined disgust issues, that is.
In the 1950s, Antarctic whaling concentrated on blue whales and their baleen cousins (e.g. fin, sei & Bryde’s whales) - the valuable product was whale oil. Sperm whales were certainly taken as well, but they were less preferred.
The efficiency of the large factory ships of that era, with their ability to haul large whales aboard for “inboard flensing” was a disaster for Antarctic whale populations, and consequently for the whaling industry. Hints of the looming collapse are apparent in the book (mentioned above) - which is a “must read” for those interested in the subject.
It looks like most southern species are now steadily recovering, though they still have a long way to go. Another ~30 years without significant setbacks may see them in good shape.
Right whales were hunted even more than sperm whales, because they were slow. (In fact, the name comes from the fact that they were the “right” whale to hunt.) But right whales and bowheads were overhunted very early. The rorquals (Blue, Fin, Sei, Minke, Bryde’s Whales) were generally too fast-swimming to be overtaken in a rowboat, so they were not exploited much until motor launches were available.
And if you did happen to “get fast” to one of these, their powers of swimming (and diving) made them hard to kill (and easy to lose your whaleboat - or life - while trying).
But another big factor is that the rorquals (at least the large ones: blue and fin whales) don’t reliably float when dead. So even if you managed to kill one, you were unlikely to profit from it. Modern whaling dealt with this by pumping compressed air into the carcass, so it would float at least long enough to be made fast to - or winched aboard - the factory ship.
I think it was Jared Diamond discussing domestication that mentioned if the life cycle is too long, it is difficult to select a species for domestication. IIRC, elephants for example are not domestic. the ones used for domestic purposes are typically wild ones captured and trained, or the offspring of captured wild animals. Same with whales. It would take millennia to transform them into non-wild animals.
There’s a reason humans herd domestic animals, and not wild ones. the wild ones are not docile enough. If you trapped a pod of whales in a fjord, for example, would they realize not to tangle with the net blocking their route? (There’s the story that bison are difficult to domesticate, because if they put their mind to it (or their head) they will not stop when they encounter a fence at full speed).
So essentially you want a game farm. Then you have to figure out ho to feed the darn things efficiently. We still don’t know why they beach themselves from time to time.
The biggest problem, though is the slow growth - cows are read for food in a year or two, and ready to bred by then too; so you can replace your herd - or harvest a complete herd’s worth -every few years. The turnover rate for whales appears to be much much longer.
There are a few species out there that you can see today at an intermediate stage of domestication (and that you could call ‘semidomesticated’). In certain parts of Africa, including where I lived for about three years, the guinea fowl is one:
They’ve been fully domesticated in other parts of the world, including North America, but where I was the farmers hadn’t figured out how to get them to breed in captivity. Instead they would collect the eggs from the forest and raise the animals in captivity and eventually slaughter them.