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THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, JUNE 22, 2021
Aquaculture: Will require support from the state to expand
Continued from Page A2
state.
“You can design these
systems to be really sustain-
able, actually,” said Naylor.
“The question is how do you
get them there and still get
the profi tability.”
have been tied to pollution,
disease, invasive species and
lax animal safety.
And so boxing out aqua-
culture in Oregon, directly
or indirectly, has been seen
as protective of the environ-
ment, wild fi sh stocks and
commercial fi shing.
But
as
aquaculture
becomes more important to
food systems of the future,
Moehl and other advocates
see potential to grow the
industry in Oregon — and to
learn from other places that
already have.
“We don’t have a lot of
things to undo in order to
develop a modern, state-
of-the-art program,” Moehl
said. “We’re at the bottom,
but we can actually build
now the best pathway to the
top.”
‘As wild as it gets’
Getting here
A 2018 report from the
World Resources Insti-
tute, backed by the United
Nations and World Bank,
says aquaculture produc-
tion needs to more than dou-
ble by 2050 to meet the sea-
food demands of 10 billion
people and help restore wild
fi sh stocks, a growing num-
ber of which are overfi shed
at unsustainable levels.
Yet seafood produc-
tion on U.S. aqua farms has
remained pretty stagnant
since the 1980s, when peo-
ple had a much more criti-
cal view of the industry. The
late comedian Garry Shan-
dling even joked about vis-
iting a fi sh farm in his 1984
stand-up special “Alone In
Vegas,” pretending to stamp
on a sickly bass crawling on
land in search of food.
“There was a lot of con-
troversy over whether this
was good or bad for the envi-
ronment,” said Roz Naylor,
an economist and the found-
ing director of the Center
on Food Security and the
Environment at Stanford
University.
Naylor was the lead
author on a paper in 2000 that
warned aquaculture wasn’t
sustainable in the long term,
despite being a net contrib-
utor to world fi sh supplies.
The paper won support of
environmentalists and com-
mercial fi sheries, which saw
aquaculture as a threat.
Since then, as other food
production sectors like beef
have come into focus for
their outsize contributions
to climate change, aquacul-
ture’s appeal has grown. Fish
generally have fewer calo-
ries and saturated fat than
red meat, and they have a
lower carbon footprint than
Photos by Bradley W. Parks/Oregon Public Broadcasting
Bass fi ngerlings swim in a tank in one of the ‘fi sh houses’ at Santiam Valley Ranch.
beef, poultry and pork.
Naylor and a team of
researchers published a new
paper in the journal Nature
this spring that looked at
improvements in aquacul-
ture since their inaugural
study sparked controversy
decades ago.
They found that the aqua-
culture industry has become
signifi cantly more effi cient
and sustainable. However
sustainable it may be these
days — especially when
compared to other meat pro-
duction chains — fi sh farm-
ing is still not ecologically
benign, Naylor said. Many
of the problems that plagued
the industry when Shandling
was delivering zingers on
Showtime are the same prob-
lems it faces today: escape-
ment, pollution, disease and
pathogens.
The risks associated with
aquaculture grow as the
industry grows, Naylor said.
“We have to look at the
experience that we’ve had
with the industrial livestock
sector,” she said. “As that
has scaled, these kinds of
issues have come up, and we
would be foolish to be blind
to those kinds of issues com-
ing up (in aquaculture).”
Less is more
Washington state is giv-
ing up on farming Atlantic
salmon in net pens after one
collapsed in Puget Sound in
2017. Disease and market
consolidation are shrinking
the trout farming industry in
Idaho.
Industrial fi sh farms prob-
A fi sh pond at Santiam Valley Ranch.
ably won’t be dotting the
Oregon Coast any time soon,
but proponents still see room
for aquaculture in the state.
According to the World
Resources Institute report
from 2018, feeding future
generations will require
humans to produce more
food without mowing down
forests, devoting more land
to agriculture or squeezing
water sources dry.
Sustainable farming is a
game of inputs (land, labor,
water, fertilizers, etc.) and
outputs (commodities). The
goal is to reduce inputs and
increase outputs. In other
words, to get more with less.
“I’m trying to get more
out of an existing box of
resources,” said Moehl.
“Basically, we now know
that our resources have fi nite
limits, so we have to be able
to multiply the benefi ts that
we get from those fi nite
supplies.”
Moehl says aquaculture is
one way to do that. Fish can
be integrated into existing
terrestrial farm systems or
greenhouses to reduce inputs
and increase outputs. For
example, water impounded
for irrigation on terres-
trial farms could be used to
grow fi sh. Same input, more
output.
Earlier this year, NOAA
Sea Grant awarded $700,000
to an Oregon State Universi-
ty-led project building soft-
ware tools to help small- and
mid-sized investors identify
such opportunities.
“This could be a new
business in Oregon with the
right ideas,” said Gil Syl-
via, a marine resource econ-
omist and professor emeritus
at Oregon State.
The university has part-
nered with other agencies to
build a custom version of its
“Oregon Explorer” mapping
tool specifi cally for aquacul-
ture. The new tool will show
things like available land and
water resources, aquatic spe-
cies options, start-up cost
estimates and more for any
particular location in Ore-
gon. Work began on the proj-
ect in 2018.
Sylvia, who is the grant’s
principal investigator, said
that expanding the fi sh farm-
ing industry in Oregon will
require support from the
Fitzpatrick and his par-
ents, who own the neigh-
boring ranch in Turner, have
tried to raise fi sh for food
since the ’80s, but the reg-
ulatory and fi nancial bars
have always been too high.
Sitting in the duck blind,
Fitzpatrick recalled a time
about a decade ago when
he wanted to rear stur-
geon for meat and caviar.
He expressed interest to the
Oregon Department of Fish
and Wildlife, which regu-
lates private aquaculture in
Oregon.
To keep sturgeon in
his private ponds, Fitzpat-
rick would have had to pay
$3,573 a year for the proper
permits under Oregon law.
“As a young fi sh farmer
at that point I said, ‘No way!
Why would I do that?’” he
said.
Fitzpatrick later learned,
to his dismay, about poach-
ers reeling in hundreds of
thousands of dollars for wild
sturgeon. Had starting a stur-
geon program not been so
cost-prohibitive when he
was starting out, “I would
have had something going,”
he said.
“It just didn’t go any-
where, but it has potential. It
really does,” he said.
Pond stocking is good
business for Fitzpatrick
and — combined with land
leases for honeybees and
beef cattle, and deals with
waterfowl hunting clubs —
provides enough money to
pursue his primary interest,
which is restoring these wet-
lands for migratory birds on
the Pacifi c Flyway.
“We can farm fi sh in a
way that promotes so much
habitat for things,” he said.
“It doesn’t need to be like
a confi ned animal feedlot
farm. This is as wild as it
gets.”
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