DURHAM, N.H. (AP) – Fish farming in deep sea waters has long drawn interest from institutions and businesses in Maine and New Hampshire developing equipment and expertise for offshore operations, even as critics debate its environmental impact and practicality.
At Ocean Farm Technologies of Searsmont, which exports fish cages designed to withstand rough ocean conditions, company President Steve Page says Maine’s experience with inshore salmon farming, combined with research at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Maine, gives the region an opportunity to be an industry leader.
“There is a real synergy between what’s going on the universities and the experience of the salmon industry that gives our state a huge head start in terms of commercial-size aquaculture business,” he told the Maine Sunday Telegram.
Michael Rubino, who manages the aquaculture program for the National Marine Fisheries Service, says fish-farming interests elsewhere are adopting U.S. technology and promoting the industry aggressively.
For American policymakers, he said, “The biggest challenge is: ‘Do we want to do this or not?”‘
Fishermen and conservation groups express concerns.
One worry is that large-scale aquaculture of groundfish species could depress prices. Another is that oceanic fish-farming could disrupt the natural food chain: Harvesting smaller fish the commercial species prey on and using them for fish-farm meal would leave fewer for free-swimming fish to eat.
“It’s not removing pressure from fish stocks,” said attorney Roger Fleming with the Conservation Law Foundation, “but making things worse, by removing a forage system that our stocks need to recover.”
Putting it another way, Portland fisherman Curt Rice said, “It’s a very delicate balance. I think it’s better to let Mother Nature rather than man feed the fish.”
New Brunswick-based Cooke Aquaculture is raising 750,000 cod in pens in the Bay of Fundy and is ramping up production because it sees a strong market, said spokeswoman Nell Halle.
Conflicts with landowners limit the location of inshore pens, she said. Moving pens offshore has advantages, but may require more expensive equipment. “It’s an unexplored frontier the farther out you go,” she said.
Great Bay Aquaculture, a commercial hatchery in Portsmouth, N.H., supplies Cooke Aquaculture with the juvenile cod for its ocean pens. George Nardi, the company’s chief technical officer, said the company would like to establish a commercial offshore farm in the Gulf of Maine once technology becomes commercially viable.
More work needs to be done to assure that automated feeding equipment and pens can withstand heavy wave action, he said.
At an experimental fish farm about six miles off the coast of New Hampshire just south of the Isles of Shoals, the University of New Hampshire has been raising fish – flounder, halibut, haddock and cod – since 1999.
The feeding is so efficient and the waste so dispersed that water just 100 yards from the cages is unaffected, according to Rubino.
“You can’t tell the difference,” he said.
Richard Langan, a former groundfisherman who directs the Ocean Aquaculture Program at UNH, said fish is a globally traded commodity and that a U.S. ban on offshore aquaculture would not affect the market.
He said fish farms help wild stocks by reducing fishing pressure. “There will always be wild fishery,” he said. “It’s simply not enough to supply the demand without hurting the fish population.”
But Fleming says environmental effects – such as generating concentrations of fish-farm waste – can be troubling.
“Just the notion of using the ocean as a dumping site for this waste doesn’t set well with a lot of folks,” he said.
The Bush administration wants to allow ocean farming for shellfish, salmon and saltwater species in federal waters for the first time, hoping to grab a greater share of the $70 billion aquaculture market.
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