How we raise our salmon
By Mary Ellen Walling, The Courier-Islander September 25, 2013
"the real answer to the question of how we raise fish on a farm is actually quite simple: passionately and carefully."
Raising a salmon to market is not a quick process. In BC, our salmon are raised right from the egg, collected from broodstock raised by our farmers. Fertilized eggs are incubated in hatcheries and raised there for the first year of their lives. This is a critical stage in the fish's growth.
Once the fish are big enough, they are transferred to the farm sites.
Each farm has between eight and 12 enclosures, each, holding around 50,000 fish. It may seem like a big number, but our farmers ensure the fish have lots of room - the salmon only take up about two per cent of the farm space.
Our farms are staffed 24-7; 365 days a year to ensure our fish are monitored and cared for. Farm workers travel to the sites by water taxi and stay on the farm for multiple days, in a floating residence attached to the farm.
The farm technicians monitor the fish to ensure they are healthy and happy.
Regular fish health monitoring, sampling and testing, ongoing environmental testing (water quality and ocean bottom conditions), site safety and biosecurity, maintenance of nets and structures are among the many procedures farmers must undertake to ensure success.
It can take up to two years at the farm sites for salmon to reach market size of between five and six kilograms. When they reach that size, the salmon are harvested and taken to processing plant. From there, it's transported to your local store ready to be purchased and put on the grill.
They are busy days on the farms: lovely in the summer sun and harrowing in the winter storms. While the process is complex, the real answer to the question of how we raise fish on a farm is actually quite simple: passionately and carefully.
