Fishing - Farmed salmon

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- - Farmed salmon (http://www.fishingbanter.com/showthread.php?t=3435)

"Sierra fisher" wrote in message
...
Half of the people exploit the environment: if you work with metal, you
pay
someone to go mine the metal; If you work with plastic, you make it
necessary for the oil companies find more oil: if you make clothes, you
make
it necessay for the farmer to raise cotton ( and use naurual gas to make
fertilizer for the crop). the other half of the people are in the
service
industry and their purpose is to allow the people who are exploiting the
enviornment to spend more time at it.
If you want to preserve the environment completely, we ought to sit on
our
hands and starve

Who mentioned wanting to "preserve the environment completely"? This reminds
me of trying to converse with a ditto-head. Everything is a 1 or a 0. Have
you come to the conclusion that it's preserve all or preserve none?

Danl

Who mentioned wanting to "preserve the environment completely"? This
reminds
me of trying to converse with a ditto-head. Everything is a 1 or a 0. Have
you come to the conclusion that it's preserve all or preserve none?

Thats all it is, a 1 or a 0 and there t'ain't no shortage of them. Hell,
supply is keeping up with demand, so byte me. ;-0
--
Frank Reid
Reverse email to reply

"Frank Reid" moc.deepselbac@diersicnarf wrote in message
...

Thats all it is, a 1 or a 0 and there t'ain't no shortage of them. Hell,
supply is keeping up with demand, so byte me. ;-0
--
Frank Reid
Reverse email to reply

Frank, that's the kind of thinking that just doesn't register with me.

Danl

Sierra fisher wrote:

Half of the people exploit the environment: if you work with metal, you pay
someone to go mine the metal; If you work with plastic, you make it
necessary for the oil companies find more oil: if you make clothes, you make
it necessay for the farmer to raise cotton ( and use naurual gas to make
fertilizer for the crop). the other half of the people are in the service
industry and their purpose is to allow the people who are exploiting the
enviornment to spend more time at it.
If you want to preserve the environment completely, we ought to sit on our
hands and starve

snipped some necessary context because this was top-posted

Since you were replying (in top-posted style) to me, I'll feel free to
say that's a specious argument. It's not only specious, it's trivial.
Obviously, we all exploit the environment to some degree, but politics
is about policy. The question is: What is the best public policy
regarding the environment?

The "Conservative" (big C) position seems to be that we should feel free
to consume resources for short-term benefit (e.g., drill for oil in
ANWR, catch all the fish in the ocean, etc.), while ignoring long-term
strategies such as alternative energy sources and conservation (little c).

That such a position should be called "Conservative" is strange. It's
more accurately laissez faire. "Conservatives" seem to believe that the
invisible hand of free markets driven by self interest will magically
result in the best environmental policy. What it really results in,
unchecked by public policy, is a race to the bottom.

--
Cut "to the chase" for my email address.

"Warren" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
...

Already posted this, in another thread, but you might have missed it;
http://www.panda.org/news_facts/news...m?uNewsID=5921

You should also download this PDF;
http://www.panda.org/downloads/marine/foodforthoug.pdf

The other links provided are also very interesting indeed.

TL
MC

Mike Connor wrote:

It is not possible to compare marine aquaculture with other farming methods,
as marine aquaculture relies almost exclusively on wild fish protein.

It is perfectly possible, in fact, to compare one form of
environmentally unsustainable industrial food production to another.
It's instructive, for one thing. It's also part of what I do for a
living. Salmon farming is a particularly egregious example, in part for
the reason you mention below, but given the total amount of food
production it represents, it is far from being in a class entirely its
own.

One does not ( at least if one is sensible) feed cattle on dead animals.

And yet that is precisely what people did for decades, isn't it?
Sensible, practical, hard-headed realistic people, people who called
those who objected to the practice "whackos". How many people in your
native land had to die before that particular bit of whackoism suddenly
became the only, and obviously, sensible thing to do?

They can survive on grass.

And yet very few do, do they? And people who warn of the environmental
damage and health risks inherent in modern industrial beef production
are dismissed as "whackos".

Soybeans, potatoes, and similar crops obtain
their nutrients from the soil.

You need to have a good look at how potatoes and soybeans (the second
mainly grown to feed cattle, BTW) are actually produced, starting with
the economics of the synthetic fertilizer industry and the energy
(primary fossil fuel) balance sheet that characterizes modern crop
production.

Farmed fish are fed directly on wild fish protein, which is taken from the
oceans, and a great deal of which is wasted in processing.

All other disadvantages, including medicines, chemicals, hormones, diseases,
etc etc, serious though these may be, pale into insignifance in the face of
this simple fact.

This is not "environmental whackoism", merely common sense based on well
known and documented facts. If you still want to be fishing for salmonids
in twenty years time, or indeed practically any other fish, or want your
children to be able to, then you ought to be worried about it.

ANY sort of caring for the environment (as Warren put it, being
"interested in the well-being of people and our environment")--caring,
that is, in any real way, enough to actually do want something about it,
rather than just feel-good lip service--IS very widely considered
whackoism.

Apathy is not an answer, and neither is ridiculing those who are worried,
and looking for something positive to do about it.

Sorry my tongue-in-cheek welcoming of Warren to the Wacko Club (my club,
BTW) was apparently interpreted by Warren and you as some sort of
anti-environmental apathy or riducle. What IS the emoticon for
tongue-in-cheek, anyway?
Apathy is not only not the answer, it is in fact the very root of the
problem. I've been fighting (and spending) for years in the fight in
the US PNW to save Pacific salmon and steelhead. Again, salmon farming
is a big part of the problem, but Pacific salmon and steelhead aren't
going to be saved just by ending salmon farming, if all the other
factors contributing to their decline (including loss and/or degradation
of riparian habitat, dams, misguided hatchery policies, etc) remain as
they are. The problems of Atlantic salmon I know somewhat less about,
though I recognize that fish farming plays a larger role in the mix.

My point, apparently not very clearly made, in my original response to
Warren, was that a large and particularly disheartening part of what I
have learned over the past few decades is that most people's
environmental awareness (their highly laudable and welome conversion to
whackoism) comes too late, despite whatever they might have been hearing
and dismissing as extremist alarmism for decades. It only come when the
resource is lost or completely fukkkkked. As the saying goes, they
don't miss their water till the well runs dry.

JR

"JR" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
...
SNIP
They can survive on grass.

And yet very few do, do they? And people who warn of the environmental
damage and health risks inherent in modern industrial beef production
are dismissed as "whackos".

SNIP

Actually, it was the Thatcher government which allowed cattle to be fed on
certain types of offal, up to that time it had been strictly forbidden, and
no sensible farmer would have knowingly done it anyway. The vicious
competition among agribusinesses for cheap feed, and their powerful lobby,
was mainly responsible for this particular tragedy. It is almost certain
that the feeding of offal from diseased sheep set the ball rolling. This
was a wilful decision of the then conservative government. The miserable
swines who allowed it, despite all warnings, have never been taken to task
either. Such is the way of governments, quite irrespective of their
particular ideologies.

My point was, that aquaculture in it´s present form, is not only
unsustainable, the final consequences are also completely unforeseeable.
When the seas die, the human race will not be long after. If large numbers
of people die, or are damaged, as a result of diseased or otherwise
contaminated meat, then that is very unfortunate, but it is about the only
thing which brings governments, and others responsible, to their senses.

Beef cattle and other animals, chickens for instance, among a host of
others, are also being fed rubbish of course, ( including also large
quantities of fish-meal), apart from being treated with large numbers of
chemicals and drugs, and the consequences there are not pretty either, but
this is not as fatal as emptying whole oceans of fish, and completely
destroying complex food chains, will eventually be.

Practically all aquaculture is entirely dependent on wild fish protein.
Cattle and the like, are not. They can survive on grass. That some people
decide to feed them rubbish etc etc, is most regrettable, but this is not
necessary, and the consequences are not quite as severe.

With aquaculture, the wholesale destruction of wild fish is an absolute
necessity, as there is no other feed available, and as long as the wild fish
protein is cheap enough, there is not likely to be. It will only become
prohibitively expensive when it has been exploited up to, and well beyond
any sensible limits. This has already occurred in some places.

You are indeed correct that many people become aware of the problems far too
late. Or are continually confronted with hogwash and bull**** instead of the
plain truth, and never even realise that there is a problem. However, if we
all simply give up, then the cause is lost.

I will almost certainly die before many of the things I have been working a
long time for, along with many others of course, will be realised, and I am
obliged also to accept that some may never be realised. Quality of life as I
once knew it, has deteriorated steadily within my lifetime, as has much of
the environment known to me. I feel it incumbent upon me to at least
protest, and do all within my small and extremely limited means to change
things. For many years now I have been a member of various organisations
which fight against these things. None of them are "Whackos" in any sense
of the word. Progress is often slow to non-existent, and frustration is
often rife among our members, but we do not give up.

Lastly, I don´t fish for cattle. I fish for fish, I know more about fish
than I do about anythimg else, and my main interest is preserving these, to
the general good of mankind of course, not simply because I want to catch
them. My knowledge of other farming procedures is patchy, and it would do no
good at all to protest about everything. This would indeed be "whacko", as
it would lead to nothing.

If only one other person on this newsgroup, realises the truth, or even
better, takes up the cudgels, by whatever means, and even if it is only by
informing family and friends of the problems associated with farmed fish,
then we have made progress. All these things are, in the final analysis,
consumer driven. If we reach enough of the consumers with the truth, and
they accept it for what it is, then we will make progress.

If we don´t do anything at all, then our children and our children´s
children, assuming they are ever born, will quite rightfully curse us to
their dying day, after a short and miserable existence on a wasted planet,
devoid of hope or pleasure as we knew it.

Regards and tight lines!

Mike Connor SACN Executive, and proud of it.

Mike Connor wrote:

Practically all aquaculture is entirely dependent on wild fish protein.

I won't reply to the rest of your post since you and I pretty much agree
on most points. Regarding the sentence above, and referring to jeffie's
earlier post about striped bass and catfish farming, it's worth
mentioning that catfish grown in farm ponds are fed pellets made
entirely of plant products (primarily soybean, but some maize, rice,
etc.). When I was doing a bit of farming systems research in north
Florida many years ago, catfish farming seemed to me one of the
most environmentally benign ways of converting grain into animal
protein. Besides, I think catfish tastes great. Hybrid striped bass
culture in ponds OTOH, while moving toward decreasing the amount of fish
meal and fish oil in feeds, still relies heavily on these.

Other relatively benign forms of aquaculture include farmed tilapia and
farmed mussels, clams and oysters.

Conscientious anglers who are also consumers (g), might find these
interesting or even useful:

http://www.mbayaq.org/cr/cr_seafoodw...w_regional.asp
http://www.newdream.org/consumer/edseafood.html

JR

"JR" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
...
SNIP
Other relatively benign forms of aquaculture include farmed tilapia and
farmed mussels, clams and oysters.

Conscientious anglers who are also consumers (g), might find these
interesting or even useful:

http://www.mbayaq.org/cr/cr_seafoodw...w_regional.asp
http://www.newdream.org/consumer/edseafood.html

JR

You are quite correct of course. Shellfish farming is generally relatively
harmless, indeed in many cases positively beneficial. Relatively large
amounts of catfish ( pangasius) are being imported into Europe, and these
are mainly grown on in rice paddies and similar. They are native to the
Mekong Delta, among other places. ( I don´t like the taste of this, but many
apparently do).

Carp farming is also relatively benign, and has a very long history and
tradition.

Research is being done into alternative feeds for salmonids and other more
or less pure predators, but as usual, too little and too late!

Unfortunately, at the present time, the massive use of wild fish protein
outweighs any other feed. Plans are also afoot, and quite well advanced, to
start whitefish farming at various locations in Europe. ( Cod). This will
doubtless cause further havoc!

TL
MC