Who’s your farmer?

As someone whose work is mostly concerned with the placement of words on pages, I’ve always liked the apocryphal story about Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence attending a social event where she was introduced to a man who was a brain surgeon. The doctor expressed great interest in Laurence’s career, and he told her, “I actually intend to take up writing when I retire from medicine.”

“What a coincidence,” she replied. “I’m planning to take up brain surgery when I retire from writing.”

I think the role of the writer in that gag could just as easily be a farmer. Most members of the general public have a vaguely positive view of agriculture, but they are largely clueless about what the vocation involves – other than getting up early to breathe the fresh morning air, and tooling around on tractors. This is not to say that people cannot take up farming as a part-time endeavour or a second career, but it’s not a simple matter. Those who do it well understand that it is not just a hobby, and not just a job.

I was reminded of this in October when the federal Liberals made a campaign pledge to phase out open-pen salmon aquaculture on the B.C. coast, and the industry went on the defensive – not only out West, but here in the East. The Atlantic Canada Fish Farmers Association and the Aquaculture Association of Nova Scotia took out full-page newspaper ads calling on candidates in this region to “stand up for their salmon farmers.” Readers may have wondered who these “farmers” are.

I have no quarrel with people in coastal communities who work on aquaculture operations. A job is a job. But they are employees of an aquaculture company, not farmers. As for the companies – well, we’re not talking about mom-and-pop finfish producers here. Cooke Aquaculture Inc., for example, is “the world’s largest independent seafood company, with billions of dollars in annual revenue, shipping one billion pounds of fresh seafood annually to 67 countries,” according to a recent Globe and Mail report. They are fish farmers in the same sense that JDI (J.D. Irving, Limited) is a tree farmer.

There’s little to be gained from debating a matter of semantics, but surely we can agree that – except for its end purpose of producing food (and money) – salmon aquaculture bears no resemblance to agriculture. Agriculture involves the cultivation of land and – notably – the management of nutrients. Perhaps raising penned fish in the ocean is more comparable to raising deer in fenced-off woodlands; it is an attempt to fatten a semi-domesticated wild animal in semi-wild habitat, expecting Nature to cover a large portion of the production costs. Things tend to go awry.

This became apparent again last fall when Chronic wasting disease (CWD) was discovered on a venison operation in Grenville-sur-la-Rouge, Quebec (northwest of Montreal). Previously identified only in Alberta and Saskatchewan (and in 24 U.S. states), CWD is a prion disease like BSE (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy) in cattle and scrapie in sheep, though it affects only cervids (including caribou, elk, and moose). Some 3,000 farmed deer were culled, and vast quantities of soil were removed from the site, under orders from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. In the surrounding area, Quebec’s Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks is continuing a cull-and-test program, because wild deer may have had nose-to-nose contact with the fenced-in deer. Thus far they have found no cases – but CWD is thought to persist in the environment for years, and it has an incubation period of 16 to 36 months.

DIE-OFF

The timing of the aquaculture industry’s PR campaign was a bit awkward, because it coincided with a catastrophic die-off of penned salmon along Newfoundland’s southern coast, on operations of Northern Harvest Sea Farms – a subsidiary of Norwegian-based multinational Mowi, which is the world’s largest producer of salmon and trout (with more than 25 percent of the global market, and annual revenues equivalent to more than $5 billion). The die-off in Fortune Bay started in late August, but in October it was revealed that mortality rates were higher than the company had let on: a total of 2.6 million dead fish, averaging about four and a half pounds each. Decomposing salmon gunk was washing up on the beach, and fowling the diving gear of workers who were removing carcasses from the pens.

Gerry Byrne, the provincial minister of Fisheries and Land Resources, suspended Northern Harvest Sea Farms’ licences on the 10 affected sites, and said the Aquaculture Act would be amended to force companies to publicly disclose such incidents – but Ches Crosbie, leader of the opposition PCs, accused Byrne of being complicit in a cover-up. James Dinn, an NDP member representing St. John’s Centre, called for an investigation by an arm’s-length body, saying Memorial University’s Marine Institute cannot do the job because it is too closely allied with the industry. Dinn also called for an overall shift to land-based aquaculture in Newfoundland and Labrador.

As the messy cleanup and the political finger-pointing continued, early test results indicated no sign of disease, seemingly supporting the company’s claim that the fish died due to a “temperature event” – i.e., warmer-than-usual water on that particular coastline. Mark Lane, executive director of the Newfoundland Aquaculture Industry Association, took this opportunity to complain about people being mean to members of his organization. “If the same situation was a farmer of beef or a wheat farmer (who) had a massive crop devastation due to drought, people would be feeling empathy and sympathy,” he told CBC News. “This is no different than any other farming activity anywhere else on the planet.”

This is absurd on a couple different levels. For one thing, penned salmon do not resemble a crop of wheat. Since the aquaculture industry promotes itself as a purveyor of high-quality protein, and since salmon are not plants but animals, it would make more sense to compare them to broiler chickens. If a large poultry operation started to notice high mortality in its barns, and allowed the death count to reach 2.6 million birds over the course of about a month, there would be hell to pay. Claiming that the die-off was caused by hot weather just wouldn’t cut it – not with the public, and not with regulatory authorities. Everyone knows that heat waves are becoming more common (and that ocean temperatures are rising). Any industrial chicken producer in this country will tell that they are required to have contingency plans in place, including generators to ensure continued ventilation and water supply in the event of a power outage.

Furthermore, Lane’s notion of “sympathy” is very odd. Presumably he means we should feel sorry for company shareholders, because in this scenario there is no farmer with whom to sympathize. I’m sure everyone involved feels crappy about what happened – from Mowi CEO Alf-Helge Aarskog (remunerated to the tune of €2.2 million last year), right down to the Newfoundlanders shoveling rotten salmon goop – but that’s not quite the same thing as bearing personal responsibility and suffering personal costs.

That full-page newspaper ad goes to great lengths to discredit the notion of shifting to land-based finfish aquaculture. It makes a case for ocean pens being more natural and less crowded, but it focuses more on questions of sustainability, citing high rates of energy and water consumption, as well as higher costs, if today’s salmon industry were moved ashore. Extrapolating data in this manner is a common tactic of those seeking to preserve the status quo. For decades, oil interests have thrown around figures that purportedly showed how renewable energy could never meet our needs – neglecting to factor in ongoing gains in efficiency and improved technology, not to mention the compounded costs of our continued reliance on fossil fuels. The salmon industry clings to the false premise that this tasty fish is a staple; it is actually a luxury food, and instead of scaling up production – at sea or on land – we should probably be looking to other aquaculture systems, such as producing freshwater fish like tilapia. There may even be ways to do this without vast amounts of capital, putting it within reach of real farmers.

There’s another straw-man argument you sometimes hear, about the impossibility of converting the global agriculture industry to organics. Wild figures are thrown around – again, ignoring a whole series of structural changes that need to occur as we make our food systems more sustainable. In reality, no one is proposing to maintain the existing model minus all the chemicals – although perhaps this simplistic view is common among the general public.

When I talk to successful organic farmers, what strikes me is the sophistication of their management strategies; refraining from using pesticides doesn’t even enter into their thought process. What impresses me is how knowledge-intensive the business is, and the fact that this knowledge is not mechanistic. These are not people who claim to have perfected a system. They are always learning, always adapting, always becoming more intimately acquainted with their land and their crops, and more attuned to their environment – including “temperature events.” When things go wrong, it’s on them – but due to the sane scale and the diversity of their operations, it’s generally not a catastrophe. DL