Where does the water come from and where does the waste go? A big fish farm needs a lot of water and it has to be kept clean so even though the farm is landlocked it doesn’t necessarily follow that there is no environmental risk.
The article specifically mentioning the price it was sold at made me think it was sold at a different price than other salmon. That wouldn’t mean that customers were informed about it in any way.
Oh. Fair enough! 
Exactly! There is no issue with salmon carbon footprint in any way, shape or form. Unless they were previously being fed on fossil fuels and farting CO2, this is like advertising olive oil as “gluten-free”.
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Fixed, Thanks!
I’m personally super-excited for this development. Meat consumption worldwide is only increasing, it is increasingly critical that we find solutions that make livestock farming more sustainable as a result.
As much as I would love there to be “engineered meat” that doesn’t come from a sentient animal, we aren’t there yet, so instead of having animals bred to be lower-footprint is a great interim step while we wait for an alternative.
Closed-loop aquaculture systems are heralded by Seafood Watch, the Marina Standards Council and Canada’s own Ocean Wise as the absolute best way to raise fish, so the fact that they are raising fish with a lower footprint, in the most environmentally sound method currently available, at a pricepoint that is competitive should be applauded.
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there are a couple kinds of fish farms.
“totally landlocked” isn’t the sort they can escape from - at least not -to- anywhere. It means they’re not beside a river, and they’re not -in- a river. In fish farming that means something, as fish can’t travel across land.
Depending, of course, on their degree of genetic modification. They may well have feet and lungs by now.
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Because they haven’t got any.
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One could posit outlandish scenarios wherein a mustache-twirling villain plots to kidnap fish from the farm and raise them in his own private pond so he can have all the jumbo salmon he wants (mwahahaha).
But the line has to be drawn somewhere between what is actually feasible and what can be used for sci-fi plotlines that sow unwarranted panic.
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The fish are triploid. Or most of them are, anyway. That renders them sterile.
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Is work of moose and squirrel.
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THE MOOSE-stache and his henchman NUT BOY!!!
We used to have a koi pond where the water ran into a smaller pond filled with permeable clay and water plants, then came out clean to go back into the fish pond. It just ran for years, until we had a crazy hard freeze. The only maintenance it needed was to occasionally clean the pump intake.
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This is a positive step, we can’t control our weather and population control is practically non-existent in most of the world. So using our growing knowledge of genetics and the ability to manipulate it we can hold off the collapse of civilization a little longer by ensuring everyone has enough to eat.
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Unfortunately, the opposite is likely to happen. As it stands, we’ve already bred many food animals in ways that are so unnatural that they couldn’t live out their normal lifespans in the wild, even if they were permitted to do so. Unless we actually start accounting for the quality of life of the animals we eat, GM is only going to make things even more perverse.
I think there’s a passage in Oryx and Crake where animal rights activists “free” genetically engineered food animals that, it turns out, lack the physiology to move. We’d be going from putting animals in prison to creating animals whose bodies are prisons.
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I have no problem with this.
I think the next step would be to modify/breed anencephalic species for meat production.
We know what causes this in humans and most likely we could do this reliably in other mammals, if we wanted. Less brain to feel anything, less ethical problems. Of course this would be seen as “unnatural” and “perverse”.
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And present yet another example of a slight preference by consumers outweighing the ridiculous amount of suffering necessary to cater to it.
But, yeah. I would go for that.
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5 tons is a vanishingly small percentage of the total fish ‘production’ in Canada.
As a point of comparison, I spent a couple of summers collecting biological samples on the foreign hake fleet off the West Coast. Roughly 10-12 massive factory ships, each processing between 100 and 250 tonnes per day, for about 120 days. A total ‘allowable catch’ of about 90,000 tons (half of which went onto those ships, half into processing plants ashore).
That was 20 years ago, but that fishery hasn’t gone away. And it is a relatively minor fishery (though fairly high volume). So 5 tons isn’t exactly breaking the market (though if they ramp up production dramatically it will probably kill off some of the salmon fishermen and open water farms, for better or worse).
Bigger food isn’t always better … haven’t you seen Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs?
No one mentioned this yet?
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