Until a few years ago, salmon used to be a rather upscale delicacy. Not something the average household wouldn’t consume from time to time, but certainly a food from the higher price segments. Nowadays, it seems to me as if salmon has somewhat become a mass product. You’ll get it at most supermarkets, and prices have dropped, making salmon slices a popular substitute for ham to put on bread and for a variety of other uses. Why is this? Were fish farm techniques improved in the last years to increase output? Or are the quantities of salmon which enter the market the result of increased trawling fleets (making salmon consumption part of the widespread concerns that oceans are overfished and fish populations endangered)?
it’s the large scale farming of atlantic salmon (on both coasts) that has increased the availability & lowered the price of fresh salmon.
wild / free range pacific salmon can still be hard to come by, and quite expensive as well, especially as you move further east across north america.
Transportation makes a difference, too. When I was a kid (back when dinosaurs ruled the earth) we often had salmon – from a can. I hated it. Wasn’t til recent decades you could even get real, fresh salmon in most places.
Demand for Omega 3-rich foods probably increased demand, too, and farmers responded to the opportunity to cash in.
You have Wal-Mart to thank (or blame). They demanded cheap salmon, and the fish farmers responded. Charles Fishman (ironic, I know) devotes about a dozen pages of his book *The Wal-Mart Effect * to just the cheap salmon phenomenon. It’s a fascinating read. I totally recommend it.
I just reread the pages I cited in my post, so let me clarify what I said because it is not entirely correct.
It seems that around the early 1990s Chilean investors decided to bring salmon farming to Chile, which had no prior history in that industry. Southern Chile’s coastline resembles the Norwegian fijords, so the Atlantic Salmon adapted superbly to the otherwise totally alien environment. Salmon production soared. At the same time, Wal-Mart wanted to ramp up its grocery product line.
The bottomless demand that Wal-Mart’s stores created was fed by Chile’s turbo-charged supply of farm-raised salmon, driving the availabilty up, and the price down. The net result (har, har) was that Chile now leads the world in salmon production. Canada, which also got into the mass-farming game around when the Chileans did, is the second place supplier. Also, Norwegian salmon suppliers got pushed out of the marketplace virtually entirely, and many Alaskans suppliers nearly so.
Seems to have come full circle, then. Canned salmon (caled “goldfish”) was as ubiquitous to the doughboys of WWI as Spam would be to the GI’s of WWII.
Salmon prices dropped recently because of reports that farmed salmon might contain dangerous levels of some toxics. With production already geared up, the sudden drop in demand drove down prices.
Fish farming is incredibly efficient.
They produce thousands of eggs in the expectation that a minute proportion will survive, with a bit of intervention from us, rather a lot can and do survive.
It is not particularly expensive to set up, as the maturing stage is just a large floating cage.
I am aware that in 2002 the Norwegians ‘dumped’ a load of salmon on France, but I’m not sure that it was really down to overproduction.
Fish farming is not confined to salmon, the Japs are currently working on Tuna, Sea Bass is an old one and I find this link intriguing (the numbers don’t add up to me) :
http://www.defra.gov.uk/rds/em/news/24-10-05.htm
Personally I would be inclined to pay people to release viable fish into the wild.
Bad idea. Farmed salmon are more prone to parasites, and transmit them easily to wild fish, who have lower resistance. Intentionally releasing farmed salmon would be a significant threat to wild stocks.
Aren’t **all ** farmed animals at greater risk for lowered immune systems?
I can’t believe I have Wal-mart to thank for making my favorite food affordable. grumble grumble Buzzkill, man.
I would like to officially lobby Costco to create a salmon/asparagus hybrid to top Wal-mart’s achievement. Who’s with me?
Well, you certainly picked the right partner. According to Fishman’s book, Mal-Mart *and Costco * are the top two distributors of salmon. In fact, Costco may even exceed Wal-Mart – the author can’t say for sure, probably because of W-M’s insanely secretive attitude toward its sales figures.
I think that the pick up the parasites when they are in the maturing pens, which are essentially large floating cages in the sea.
Those things must be a smorgasbord for sea lice.
I was thinking more of releasing ‘nursery’ fish - it would be an interesting experiment.
Oh, that went way behind the farming!
Farms, it’s all the farms. It went from being something which pretty much had to be caught by hand to being “stabled”.
In Spanish we say that something is “more expensive than salmon”, but that stopped making sense about 20 years back.
Now I’m waiting for someone to figure out how to farm anchovies…
FYI, ABC-TV’s Nightline is doing a segment about cheap salmon. It should air in a few minutes.
I wish farm-raised and wild salmon had different names because the quality of the meat is so different. It’s like two different sorts of fish.
Farm-raised has a light orange color and has a more fishy taste to it. Wild has a darker redder color and has a more meaty taste. I don’t like farm-raised salmon, but I love wild salmon. Unfortunately, the wild stuff is more expensive. It’s like $14/pound in the store, but I think it’s worth it.
I have also heard that the sought after omega-3 is produced more in wild salmon due to their diet and activity.
The rather bland tasting fish farm atlantic salmon is running $7.99 lb here.
Fresh caught wild spring chinook will run you $15 - $20 lb and looks like prices are going to go even higher this year.
I don’t know if all are, and I doubt free-range animals are. But animals raised in High Health facilities, like hogs and chickens in Manitoba (I won’t speak for other regions) are at a greater risk. The High Health concept allows the animals to spend more of their caloric intake on growth rather than fighting illness and parasites.
The concept also demands strict control of access to facilities. Like showering in and out of hog farms, restricted access to property, etc.
Er, well, it depends what you mean by expensive. Those cage systems are simple in design but they must be made strong enough to not be ripped apart by storms and of the proper materials not to rust out at sea. They also need substantial anchoring and miles of heavy chain to keep them in place. One pen system (100’ x 100’ cage) all assembled, properly anchored, with nets and other tidbits will cost well over 100G. Then you need another floating or land-based building to store feed in, to house any compressors or generators, office equipment, spare nets, radios, etc that will add to that price. Lastly in N. America at least you'll need to do several years worth of environmental monitoring, licensing hoop-jumping, and application work to get a grow-out site approved. Once you've got that then you need the actual smolts, feed, and labour (plus boats to get it to your site). I'd say you're looking at the better part of a million to get started using modern equipment and techniques. I’ll admit though that this might be “cheap” compared to starting say, an oil refinery 
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Actually there’s no need to speculate about how it would turn out. This has already been happening for the past 50+ years all up and down the west coast of N. American as well as numerous other places in the world, and still continues. I believe the most extensive example is in Alaska where salmon ranching has been popular for decades. There are numerous hatcheries that release litterally millions of fry into the sea every year. There is a huge seine fishery up there in which boats net up those salmon when they return to the rivers to spawn and concentrate in estuaries after a couple years at sea. There are also government hatcheries from Alaska right down to California that hatch and release salmon fry to enhance wild stocks; they’ve been doing this large-scale since the 60s.
It works OK but there is always conflict with the commercial fishery and negotiation of how many of those fish can be harvested/what percent are wild/what stocks need protection/who can fish which runs as they migrate over thousands of miles/what effect do the altered genetics have on wild fish/is it more cost-effective to produce bigger faster-growing fish to boost numbers when they get to the wild or to encourage the runts and not-so-desireable-to-culture fish to maintain genetic diversity, and on and on and on.
I also found this interesting; back-to-back posts describing the taste of farmed fish completely opposit to each other. It’s a pretty good indication that there really isn’t much of an objective difference in taste; it’s mostly in the tongue/mind of the beholder 
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