AUGUST 2017 • COUNTRY LIFE IN BC
Salmon a cash cow for BC fish farmers Global companies dominate sector, second only to dairy in terms of farm value
Stories by TOM WALKER
SAYWARD – With his eyes glued to a four-part screen and a controller in his hands, Calvin Derkson could be accused of playing on the job. But the 30-year-old is in the control room of Marine Harvest Canada Inc.’s salmon farm on Hardwicke Island focusing six underwater cameras to follow four- kilogram Atlantic salmon as they dart at slowly sinking feed pellets. This is no game. He’s feeding the fish. Outside, it’s a clear, sunny
day in early June. A northwesterly wind is pushing a metre-high chop down Johnstone Strait. A bumpy 20-minute water taxi ride from Sayward on northern Vancouver Island has brought a media tour across to where the 30-year- old farm floats in 90 metres of water behind a point of land. Ten galvanized steel net pens 36 metres square and about 30 metres deep are arranged in two rows of five. The footprint of the operation is about two soccer fields long and one wide. A 30-metre barge about 15 metres wide hosts the office, crew lounge, kitchen and living quarters for the six employees as well as a fresh water supply. The entire ground floor can hold 250 tonnes of feed.
Average site
This is an average site, one of 109 licensed tenures along the BC coast. Between 60 and 70 sites operate at any one time, while the remainder are fallow. The farms are principally owned by four companies: Marine Harvest Canada, a subsidiary of Marine Harvest ASA of Bergen, Norway; Grieg Seafood BC Ltd., a subsidiary of Grieg Seafood ASA, also of Bergen, Norway; Cermaq Canada Ltd., a subsidiary of Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp.; and Creative Salmon Co. Ltd., an organic salmon grower based in Tofino. The newest member of the
BC Agriculture Council, the 40-member BC Salmon Farmers Association includes these farm operators as well as the supply and service businesses that support them. Terry Brooks, president of Golden Eagle Aquaculture, is the sector’s representative on the BC Agriculture Council. Golden Eagle farms sablefish in ocean pens and niche- market Coho in a unique land-based facility in Agassiz.
Above their weight All told, salmon farm
tenures cover about 1,000
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Marcus Fritsch, site manager at Cermaq Canada’s Venture Point salmon farm, shows off a fresh BC-raised Atlantic salmon. CERMAQ CANADA PHOTO
acres, the size of Stanley Park. It’s an area equivalent to just 0.05% of the BC coastline. Put all the pens within those tenures beside each other and they would cover a
square kilometer. But they punch far above their weight in contributing to the BC economy. In 2016, nearly 78 million kilograms of farm-raised
salmon were harvested in BC, worth more than $746 million. That puts salmon second to dairy in value as a BC agri-food product. Farm- raised salmon have been the
number one agri-food export from BC for the past seven years. In 2016, a record 56 million kilograms went out
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