Norway’s high-stakes gamble on sustainable salmon farming

From a distance, the Jostein Albert looks like an ocean tanker.

The imposing vessel near the entrance to a northern Norwegian fjord faces out toward the frigid and wild Arctic Ocean. Its steel frame plunges 37 metres into the water, and numerous 22-tonne anchors are needed to tether it to the ocean floor.

However, the Jostein Albert is not an ocean-faring ship. It is a farm. From its deck, in a large rectangular chasm, hang nets that are suspended above the ocean floor. Inside, 10,000 tonnes of Atlantic salmon churn.

Atlantic salmon are a cash crop that promises fat margins, economic prosperity for isolated Arctic Norwegians and maybe a model for an industry that could help produce enough protein to feed the world – sustainably. At least that’s what the United Nations wants to happen, with calls for a 35-per-cent increase in sustainable aquaculture production by 2030.

The Jostein Albert is the first of its kind: a 1.5-billion Norwegian krone (about $190-million) experiment in exposed, open-ocean fish farming based on an offshore vessel, where vast currents dilute the spread of disease. The operation is owned by Nordlaks, Norway’s largest privately owned fish farming company, which controls 41 of the 1,757 farms crowded off the windswept coast of the Scandinavian country.

Norway is a mecca of fish farming. It was Norwegians who figured out how to domesticate salmon, and who exported their expertise globally, taking a significant chunk of salmon sales in jurisdictions worldwide, including Canada, which – while far from Norway’s might – was until recently a major player in salmon farming.

However, while the fathers of fish farming are conducting ambitious experiments in open water, Canada’s West Coast is moving in the opposite direction. In June, Canada’s Minister of Fisheries and Oceans announced that British Columbian fish farms have five years to end open-net pens and move to closed-containment systems, which are likely to be land-based. In the announcement, minister Diane Lebouthillier promised to release a draft transition plan by the end of July. To date no transition plan has been delivered.

The announcement came after years of controversy. Critics around the world have argued that farming salmon spreads parasites and kills wild salmon, and they have pressured governments, including Canada’s.

The world’s fish-farming countries – which also include Chile, Iceland and Scotland, among a handful of others – therefore have a choice. They can either follow the path of Canada and others and move to ban open-net salmon farming and take operations out of the ocean, or they can double down on technology in the hope that ingenuity will save the industry and the precious species that it threatens.

There’s reason to believe sustainable salmon farming is the future. The industry has come a long way. But to do so it must buck a trend long established in the history of animal husbandry in which ravenous consumer appetites drive efficient monocultures that dominate wild species and diminish the diversity of the animal kingdom.

If you’ve eaten salmon in the past few decades, chances are it was farmed: 70 per cent of this type of fish comes from farms.

Transforming salmo salar into salmo domesticus took around a decade – lightning fast as far as animal husbandry is concerned. It started in the 1960s with two brothers on a windswept island in the Norwegian Sea, who suspended juvenile salmon in nets and fed them chopped-up herring. When the fish grew fat and ready for consumption, the brothers sold them for a healthy profit – just as wild stocks were dwindling. Within a little more than a decade, domesticated salmon was a going concern, and the basis for a growing global industry.

There are now countless salmon farms around the world, engaged in breeding that selects for animals that quickly gain fat. Wild salmon will eat roughly 10 pounds of food for every one pound they gain. Because of genetic breeding, the farmed salmon aboard the ocean farm eat just 1.22 pounds for every pound gained, according to Nordlaks. This makes salmon one of the most efficient of the farmed meats; for context, a cow’s feed conversion ratio hovers around 6 to 1.

The sector is now a US$323-billion global industry, with nearly 67 million tonnes of fish harvested last year. The biggest global fish farmers – Norwegian companies Mowi ASA, Leroy Seafood Group ASA, Cermaq (based in Norway, but now owned by Mitsubishi Corp.) and SalMar ASA – have set up shop in every corner of the globe, from Turkey, to Chile, to Canada.

And while many wild-salmon populations, fighting a myriad of seemingly insurmountable challenges, have dwindled, salmon farming has only grown. In 2023, 66.6 million tonnes of fish were harvested.

Farming salmon at scale has given the industry global reach. Consider one Arctic Norweigan airport that doubles as a military base. Each week, a plane takes off carrying 100 tonnes of locally farmed Atlantic salmon. It makes landfall in Doha, and from there, its cargo travels to markets across the region. It takes just two days for salmon to go from an Arctic farm to a market in Asia.

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But the demand for salmon – which has pushed the industry into farming at such a large scale – has also created ecological problems.

Silje Flotnes Hansen holds a four-pound salmon in her hands, and points to a small, black dot with spindly strings that clings to its silvery scales. This is one of the downsides of fish farming: sea lice. Native to the ocean, the lice abound in fish farms, where many bodies equal good eating. Ms. Hansen, a veterinarian for Nordlaks, is in the midst of a weekly visit to this fish farm to check on animal welfare and to count lice. She will sample 10 fish. As the number of female sea lice increases, Nordlaks will treat the pen to prevent the count from surpassing the government set limit of 0.5 female lice a fish.

The salmon Ms. Hansen holds is thrown back into the net pen, one of 11 pens at this Nordlaks fish farm. This farm is a more traditional operation than Nordlaks’s larger ocean farm on the Jostein Albert. It is a series of deep, circular nets resting on the surface of the ocean near Vesteralen, a traditional fishing community known for its stockfish: dried cod.

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Farms are the source of more than 97 per cent of all salmon lice in Norway, according to the country’s Institute of Marine Research, but the sea lice aren’t just a problem for the companies looking to profit from salmon cultivation. The lice that proliferate here also attach to the juvenile wild salmon that pass by farms on their way to the wider ocean. The parasites feed on their mucus, blood and skin, boosting the salmon’s cortisol levels, tanking their immunity and affecting their growth rate and swimming ability. It is one more challenge for wild salmon that already face an onslaught of issues: destruction to habitat, ocean acidification, hydro dams and changes in food webs and ecosystems owing to climate change.

But of all these, farming is the top threat to wild populations, according to the Norwegian Scientific Advisory Committee for Atlantic Salmon. The threat of sea lice was one of the major reasons why Canada sought to close ocean salmon farms, although Fisheries and Oceans Canada, unlike its Norwegian counterparts, has yet to reach a consensus on how big of a threat the farms pose to Pacific salmon stocks.

“We’re over the limit,” said Ms. Hanson as she counts the sixth sea lice in a batch of 10. She’s not surprised. She knew this net was infected. It is scheduled for treatment in a matter of days. For her bosses at Nordlaks, it is not good news – but this infestation is not their main concern. They would also argue that they are already tackling the problem on a larger scale, through operations that they believe could be the future of salmon farming.

Aboard the Jostein Albert, a green laser that looks almost like a lightsabre cuts through the deep pools, zapping at sea lice on the bodies of the salmon. It rarely misses. Powered by AI, the laser adapts and evolves with each strike, becoming a better hunter of the parasites.

The lasers were developed by Stingray Marine Solutions AS which, like many companies that service fish farms around the globe, is Norwegian. They are a key part of the ambitious project that the Jostein Albert represents. In order to make open-ocean farms such as this one work, the problem of sea lice needs to be kept in check.

Nordlaks started experimenting with the lasers in early 2022. A year later the company invested in 70 more “nodes” – the name for machines that are submerged in the water. They decreased lice counts significantly, said Nordlaks. In 2023, the lice count didn’t reach the threshold. Not a single treatment was required. As a result, Nordlaks is ordering more nodes, with plans to have a total of 200 in nets across the company’s farms.

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This negates the need for chemical treatments. That option had negative side effects on the ecosystem and on non-target species. The lasers also reduce the need for mechanical treatment, whereby vets would transport salmon into warm water, where the lice would fall off. However, that treatment also boosted cortisol levels, which hurt fish health.

Chemical and mechanical techniques are still used by fish farms when lice counts reach a threshold, but the farms hope that advances in technology will mean less treatment is required.

“With AI and big data, this will be part of a digital revolution in fish farming,” said Eirik Nikolaisen, commercial director of Nordlaks. “If we can solve this, it’s a revolution for us.”

It is just one development fish farms are using to make their operations more efficient and ecofriendly.

Trude Lind has been at Nordlaks since 1999, and remembers feeding pellets to the salmon with a hand-held scoop the size of a garden spade. Now she leads the control room, a Mission Control-like centre at Nordlaks headquarters, which monitors autonomous systems that feed the salmon in more precise amounts. This is more cost-effective for the company, and it reduces buildup on the ocean floor that can negatively affect other species.

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But other problems pale in comparison to the scourge of sea lice, which represent a ticking clock in this industry. Every day that humans farm salmon, sea lice leach into wild-salmon fisheries, a threat to the diversity of wild-salmon species. That diversity is key to the survival of wild salmon. If a population is depleted past a certain tipping point, it will not come back.

In addition to its lasers, Nordlaks is building two 1-billion Norwegian krone (about $127-million) on-land facilities that will raise young salmon before they are released into open-ocean pens. Less time in the ocean means less lice.

The company is also building a less-exposed fish farm in the ocean – its other big experiment in addition to the Jostein Albert. The farm looks like an underwater tank and holds up to 3,120 tonnes of fish biomass.

Much of this innovation is possible because, in 2015, the Norwegian government made a big bet on expanding an industry that had stalled. Companies with proposals for sustainable fish-farming operations were given lucrative harvesting licences if they could prove those farms could expand without further damaging the environment.

“It has always been the view of Norway’s government that we want aquaculture to develop,” said Yngve Torgersen, Director General of Norway’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries.

“When we have all the pillars together then we can produce much more fish in Norway than we do today, without leaving an unacceptable footprint on the environment.”

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Fisherman Steiner Holen is standing on the shores of the Malselva, a river in the Troms region of Norway. This is the land where reindeer wander roads and stop traffic. During the summer, the sun never sets. It is midnight, and the sky is pink, casting long dusky shadows across the river.

Mr. Holen casts his line into the fast-moving Malselva with the ease and precision of someone who has fished their whole life. He is hoping to catch wild giant Atlantic salmon. It’s not unheard of, he says, to see fishermen reel in a salmon as big as a medium-sized dog. But Mr. Holen worries this won’t last long. Arctic Norway’s waters are home to some of the world’s last remaining giant salmon. But numbers are diminishing. This year, 33 of its iconic salmon-fishing rivers are closed to fishing. The past three years have had record low salmon returns.

The Malselva is one of few rivers open owing to fastidious conservation work, much of which Mr. Holen took upon himself to fight for. This includes catch-and-release regulations, strict personal quotas limiting each fisher’s catch, improved fishing techniques and limited time periods for when fishing is permitted.

But Mr. Holen worries all these efforts will be in vain.

To reach him, the salmon must pass by numerous fish farms. That number is set to rise as the farms – already close to capacity in southern and western Norway – move north.

“They are going to milk them cows until there is nothing left,” said Mr. Holen.

He is not alone in his disdain for the likes of Nordlaks and other fish-farming operations. Public sentiment against the industry has been rising. In 2018, a coalition of political parties in Arctic Norway’s largest city – Tromso – voted to stop the expansion of open-net fish farms within its county boundaries. New operations would only be permitted if they were closed, land-based facilities.

Less than one year later, council rolled back the decision, permitting expansion for farms that met certain environmental standards.

But Ivar Bjorkland, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Tromso, does not believe that any fish farms are ecofriendly. Yet he says that the industry is too financially powerful for governments to regulate farms closely.

“It’s like the tobacco industry in the 1960s and 1970s,” he said.

Fish farms employ 8,800 Norwegians directly, and many more who work in related industries such as fish food processing and other service sectors. Since 2017, the Norwegian government has also funnelled a significant share of the fees fish farms pay to start or expand production back to municipalities where the farms operate, plus a 50-per-cent share of a resource rent tax. This can amount to tens of millions of dollars annually for municipalities of a couple thousand people.

In total, Norway’s salmon exports hit 128-billion Norwegian kroner (about $16.3-billion) in 2023.

Fish have also long been a primary source of income for northern Norway. The country’s sea area is six times larger than its land mass. Ocean-based industries account for 40 per cent of total value creation, and 70 per cent of exports.

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For hundreds of years, until oil upended its economy in the 1970s, fishing was a major driver of Norway’s economy. The fishing villages of Arctic Norway can chart their history back 1,000 years to the time of the Vikings.

“The fisheries are, and will hopefully always remain, Norway’s most important gold mine,” wrote the Norwegian parliament in 1816.

In this lies the conflict at the heart of Norway’s fish-farming industry.

As wild fisheries diminish, fish farms offer employment to people in communities decimated by falling fish stocks, and a connection to the ocean for people whose ancestors have depended upon it for thousands of years.

However, the industry also threatens the continued existence of the natural resource that first built this connection and these communities.

To critics, the long-term costs of salmon farming will far outweigh the short-term benefits.

“We just don’t quite see the consequences of what we’re doing,” said Mr. Bjorkland.

Industry giants argue the sector has changed, and adapted to become more sustainable.

Over the past decade, rates of sea lice across Norway have declined. In 2012, an average of 9.4 per cent of aquaculture sites were above sea-lice thresholds. In 2024, that had fallen to an average of just 1.9 per cent, according to Barentswatch, a public service website under the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Fisheries and Industry that collects, develops and shares information about Norwegian coastal and marine areas.

The industry has also been working on other problems. The number of escaped salmon – which pose a threat to wild salmon’s genetic diversity – have begun to decrease. In 2019, 286,662 salmon escaped their nets, however, since then the rates have fallen drastically. From 2020 to 2023, an average of 42,000 salmon a year escaped, according to data from Barentswatch. This is largely owing to changes in design of farm pens, operations and increased monitoring and control, according to Eirik Mikkelsen, senior scientist at Nofima, the Norwegian institute of food, fisheries and aquaculture research. Mr. Mikkelsen was editor-in-chief of the Barentswatch portal on Sustainability in Aquaculture.

Another big transformation was the change in fish feed. In 1990, 65 per cent of fish feed was made from marine protein. By 2016, just 14.5 per cent of fish feed was marine protein, and a further 10.4 per cent from marine oil. The remainder is now plant-based or starch. Research into insects as a food source for salmon is continuing.

From a distance, another fish farm looks like a huge upside-down umbrella, its handle stretching into the sky. However, submerged under the surface in a pen 20 storeys tall are one million farmed salmon.

This is the Shenlan 2, a farm in the Yellow Sea, more than 100 nautical miles off the coast of mainland China.

Launched by Chinese fish-farming companies Shandong Marine Group, Wanzefeng Group and Qingdao Ocean Investment Group, it is an experiment in deep-sea farming. It will help meet the country’s growing consumption of salmon, which rose 10 per cent in 2024.

Salmon are not native to the warm waters that surround China. However, the fish cages of the Shenlan 2 – and other models like it – are submerged deep into the water, where it is cooler and the oxygen levels are higher than at the surface.

It is one of many of China’s investments into salmon aquaculture. Others include the construction of an entire salmon-farming ecosystem in a town on the east coast. The build includes a research and development centre, salmon-processing factories and deep-sea cages. The area plans to produce 20,000 tonnes of salmon annually, injecting US$1.1-billion a year into the local economy by 2025.

“Vigorously developing deep-sea aquaculture is of great significance,” said an opinion from China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, which noted the benefits to national food security and the country’s diet.

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Salmon was once far from the menu of Chinese restaurants and the aisles of Chinese supermarkets. However, it took farmed salmon only a few decades to move from sashimi on menus in Japanese restaurants – a result of a marketing campaign from Norwegian fish farms – to the markets of Beijing and Shandong.

The next step is integrating salmon into Chinese home cooking, according to the China Fisheries and Seafood Expo. Once there, salmon might replace domestic fish as the preferred protein.

But the vast wild salmon runs that once populated Norway and Canada’s rivers and streams are – for the most part – decimated, mere ghosts of what they once were.

Technology has drastically altered the timeline of the domestication and farming of salmon. It took at least 1,000 years to transform a wild, roaming herbivore into an industrially produced beef patty. It has taken farmed salmon just 60 years to evolve from a few suspended nets on a windswept island to a vast global industry.

The only question is whether this technology will save salmon and feed the world, or be a major factor in the species’ demise.