Norway's Salmon Farming Dilemma (Encore)
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This message comes from NPR sponsor Shopify, the global commerce platform that helps you sell and show up exactly the way you want to. Customize your online store to your style. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash NPR. Today on State of the World, what to know about the salmon on your plate. You're listening to State of the World from NPR, the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon.

If you've bought salmon, you've probably bought salmon from Norway. A fifth of all salmon purchased in America comes from there. And much of that fish comes from fish farms, massive cylindrical pens in the open waters made of nylon netting that each holds a few hundred thousand salmon. But sometimes the farmed salmon escape, and that can cause big problems.

And PR's Rob Schmitz boarded a boat on Norway's west coast to see the fish farms for himself. That's not a good sound. Jürgen Vengard manages to start his boat on the second try. And we skim across the calm 2,000 feet deep waters of Hodangesfjord. The Norwegian coastline is actually perfect for farming Atlantic salmon.

So we have the optimal temperature, we have good oxygen levels, we have the right salinity. Vengard listens to Coast Guard alerts as he weaves the boat around islands. He also points out local oddities. And I've been told that in this very place they used to burn witches 500 years ago.

The boat glides to a stop at a floating walkway surrounding two areas of open water 50 feet wide, lined with yellow nylon netting. A salmon farm run by the company Lingelax. Vengard, who's worked much of his life on salmon farms, is a tour guide here. We have two pens with 15,000 in each, which actually might sound a lot, but on a regular-sized fish farm, they have one million salmon.

Above this open water pen, a mechanical arm swivels in place, shooting out pellets of food. It prompts silver streaks in the water below, a feeding frenzy. This pen is home for these Atlantic salmon from March to December. In those nine months, they grow to a weight between 10 and 15 pounds. And then they're taken to a processing plant where they're stunned before they're slaughtered, filleted, and exported around the world. But for now, they're here, eating and

and swimming. The only thing separating them from the open ocean of these fjords is the 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. Why? What happens if they escape? So even though this salmon comes from wild salmon originally, we don't want them to mix the genes and destroy the spawning places for the wild salmon. But according to industry experts, it's too late for that.

Hundreds of miles east of the fjords in the capital Oslo, author Simon Sartre sits on a bench at his local park beside the raging waters of the Akerselva River, where wild salmon, he says, can sometimes be seen right in the middle of Norway's biggest city. Sartre says Norway's wild salmon population has been cut in half in the past two decades, largely due to the impact of tens of millions of farmed salmon. These farmed salmon...

They are made to be fat and slow and, you know, be effective for the industry. Sartre co-authored The New Fish, a book about Norway's farmed salmon. Each year, an average of 200,000 farmed salmon escape from their open net pens. And then, says Sartre, they mate with Norway's remaining 500,000 wild salmons.

Their offspring essentially become the Homer Simpsons of salmon, says Sartre. But there is a serious underbelly to this. Norway's wild salmon stock is rapidly dying out.

A study this year by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research and the Institute of Marine Research found that nearly a third of wild salmon in Norway have, quote, significant genetic changes due to interbreeding with escaped farmed salmon.

The Satre says there is a bigger problem with Norway's farm salmon. Sea lice. They're tiny crustaceans that attach themselves to salmon, feed on them, and reproduce. These sea lice, they have lived for ages just on wild salmon swimming by. They attach to it. And then when you gather millions of big salmons,

In a four-year study 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 percent. Salmon farms use chemicals like pesticides to treat their fish, but scientists have discovered that sea lice have evolved to become resistant to the chemicals.

But one salmon farmer says he has an answer to all of these problems. Back in the fjords of western Norway, Sondre Eide, the young third-generation CEO of his family company Eide Fjordbruk, navigates his boat through the rain to his salmon farm of the future.

When we arrive, Ida points to a black cylinder barely sticking out of the water, surrounded by floating gangplanks. It's the cap of what appears to be a tank. And how far down does this tank go? 72 meters. So this is like basically, if it would be on land, it would be...

the highest building on the west side of Norway. How many fish can that hold? Right now it has 200,000 fish. This is closed-pen salmon farming. No escaped salmon and no salmon lice. It's all about giving the optimal life for the fish inside. And then, of course, when you take away the salmon lice, you have no lice treatment, so you don't have the handling, and that's responsible for...

60-70% of all the mortality in the industry. So then you can focus on how can we create the best day for the fish. Ida and a team of his company's engineers put years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars into this closed pen, which circulates ocean water into it and keeps lice out. It also filters out salmon waste, a big contributor to rising nitrogen levels in the fjords.

This waste creates biogas, which in turn creates energy. Ida is now working on using that energy to power this facility. Ida's closed-loop project raises the question, why isn't the entire industry farming salmon this way? Ida says when he and his team looked for the technology to do this, it wasn't there. He had the money to try to create it, so he did it. For me, it's like...

It is the right thing to do and I 100% believe it from the bottom of my heart and I know my father would have done the same. To underscore this push for sustainable salmon farming, Ida takes me by boat to an even bolder project that he's finished. Ida has built the world's largest floating art installation in this fjord. It's a reflective silver orb that looks like a UFO that has crash-landed into the ocean.

Ida calls it the salmon eye, and once our boat arrives to a dock attached to it, we enter what looks like a sleek lair of a James Bond villain, but what is actually an education center about threats to the environment. I'm worried about the weather, the climate, the increasing temperature. Visitors see images projected on the walls and floors about an environment in peril before participating in a role play about the sustainability of salmon farming.

After that, those who've managed to secure a reservation for Aida's Michelin-starred restaurant upstairs partake in an 18-course tasting menu of sustainable seafood. We need 50% more food towards 2050.

And we have used 50% of all usable land for food production. And then we have only used 2% of the calories coming from the ocean. But still, we don't know anything about the ocean. We know less about the ocean than we know about space. And somewhere in these vast, deep bodies of water, says Ida, lies the answer to feeding the world sustainably. That's The State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.

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