As Don Staniford brews his coffee in a car park on Scotland’s west coast, he whispers: “I’ve got to make sure no one sees me.” He pulls his cap deeper into his face, stuffs his hair underneath, and puts up the hood of his jumper. Looking at his sandals and Hawaiian shorts, he explains: “I’ve dressed up as a German tourist.”
Staniford has been fighting the salmon farming industry for 20 years. He has held demonstrations in front of fish food factories, flown drones over the nets and placed ads of fish that resemble monsters. Here on the shore of Loch Linnhe, a three-hour drive northwest of Glasgow, he is about to resume his campaign.
“I want to take down the industry,” he says, adding that, to do so, he must “make its horror visible”. Over the next ten days, he will drive more than 300 miles along the coast, paddling out to salmon farms at dawn in his kayak and boarding them — then filming the conditions in which the fish live. He has to do so undercover because he is already in legal trouble. The Norwegian company Mowi, the world’s largest salmon producer, has launched a court case against him in the hope of banning him from approaching its farms.
Mowi said it was seeking a court order against Staniford to address “dangerous, unauthorised incursions that breach our strict health and safety protocols and have an unacceptable impact on the mental health of our staff. Despite repeated requests not to do so, he has continued to put himself and the company’s employees and animals at risk.”
The salmon farms Staniford has visited along the west coast consist of huge nets up to 25m deep, suspended from rings of floats bobbing on the surface. He says that some farmers manage to cram up to 100,000 salmon into these nets. Salmon faeces and pharmaceuticals leak out of them, providing the nutrients for algal blooms and leading to dead zones on the seabed. Farmed fish can also pass on sea lice to wild fish, and breed with them if they escape. At the same time, these farms don’t just produce fish, they consume them in vast numbers. Worldwide, about a quarter of all fish caught end up as fishmeal for farms.
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Many environmentalists such as Staniford oppose the farms not only for these reasons, but also because they believe the fish live short, unhealthy lives, often infested with sea lice and viruses. According to the environmental organisation WildFish, 4.6 million salmon died in Scottish farms in the first half of this year.
One farm filmed by Staniford’s fellow campaigner, Corin Smith, two years ago:
The farm above declined to comment when contacted by The Times.
Staniford is beginning his tour in Loch Linnhe because it is the location of some of the salmon farms with the highest mortality rates. At Scottish Sea Farms’ facility in Charlotte’s Bay on the loch’s southeastern side, for instance, the figures for July show that 48 per cent of the farm’s fish died during their production cycle. At the company’s facility at Dunstaffnage, down the coast, the figure was 56 per cent. The company says this was due to warm waters bringing large numbers of micro-jellyfish, which harmed the fishes’ gills.
Yet despite concerns about farmed fish and the wider environment, the salmon industry is booming. There are 205 farms in Scotland. The country is the third largest producer in the world after Norway and Chile, and the fish was the UK’s biggest food export last year, bringing in £578 million.
Last year alone, according to the industry association, salmon consumption in the UK rose by almost 8 per cent compared with the previous year to more than 63,000 tonnes. Many consider it the greener and healthier alternative to chicken and pork – and see the farms as a solution to overfishing.
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Loch Linnhe is not only the site of some of the farms with the highest mortality rates. It is also the planned location for a facility which — its developers argue — could provide an example for the industry’s more sustainable future. The company Loch Long Salmon is consulting with local communities in the hope of gaining permission to build a facility in the loch three times the size of an average farm.
A cleaner, greener method?
At this, the first “semi-closed” salmon farm in the UK, the salmon nets would be wrapped in a membrane to limit the escape of fish and pollutants into the sea. The company claims that this method will be “cleaner and greener” and that it will help to “save the planet”.
But resistance to the scheme is growing. Staniford and other organisations such as WildFish have argued that the company’s soaring rhetoric on sustainability amounts to nothing more than “greenwashing”.
A local campaign group called Long Live Loch Linnhe describes the farm as a “dangerous experiment” that will only add more pollution into the loch. Members of the Labour Party and the Greens have also spoken out against the new technology.
Less than a year ago, Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park Authority refused the company permission to build a similar facility 90 miles to the southeast, in Loch Long.
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The managing director of Loch Long Salmon, Stewart Hawthorn, denies his company is greenwashing, saying that the new facility would be “a genuinely different approach to producing food with a low carbon impact.” He says that studies have shown that putting a membrane around salmon cages halves the waste escaping into the sea. There are already dozens of these facilities in Norway and Canada. Yet he adds that these facilities are more expensive because of the extra materials they require, and the energy involved in flushing out the waste and processing it. But he expects the salmon to grow better and have fewer lice. “That saves money,” he says.
In which case, why did the authority reject the company’s previous application? “Because they didn’t understand it,” says Hawthorn. Now, he’s confident that Argyll and Bute council will approve the facility in Loch Linnhe because it is “much more experienced” in dealing with salmon farming. “If we can show that our system works, it will be copied quickly.” The council declined to comment.
Semi-closed facilities aren’t the only way to make salmon farming more sustainable. At the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban, scientists have developed a method using microscopy and water data to detect sea lice as larvae. Until this breakthrough, it was only possible to detect them as adults, by which time they must be washed off the salmon with toxic substances such as hydrogen peroxide.
Yet salmon farms will always have some environmental impacts as long as they are situated in the sea. This has led some entrepreneurs to conclude, drastically, that the salmon must come ashore. Around the world — in the US, China and Japan — there are now dozens of land-based facilities where fish swim in pools, leaving the natural world uncontaminated by their waste. In the UK too, there are plans for land-based salmon farms in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, and the village of Tayinloan on the Kintyre peninsula.
For land-based salmon to succeed, however, companies must overcome formidable challenges, including breeding fish that thrive only in fresh water. This is because many on-land farms do without salt water altogether, so as not to corrode the equipment.
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Hawthorn is sceptical of land-based farming, citing its high energy usage and space requirements. Staniford is unswayed by the promise of these technologies. In his view, no form of salmon farming can “make a bad thing better”. He sees any way of enclosing these migratory animals as “pure torture”.
The only salmon he’s willing to eat is a vegan substitute, made from wheat and peas, coloured orange, and tasting — he says — very similar to the real thing. It’s already available on some Tesco shelves.