Category: News

Chairman: ????? ?????The Senator is right about that. The representatives of FISSTA were anxious to address the committee today and to express their concerns on foot of the presentations we have had from the Minister and BIM. We will also be inviting representatives of the Donegal islands and other island fisheries to share their views, because that is part and parcel of the discussion. Deputy Noel Harrington has given an overview of the broader issue and referred to the concerns of the different parties, whether drift-net fishermen, anglers or the aquaculture sector. It is undoubtedly a complex issue. In fact, the more one learns the greater the realisation of just how much one does not know.

Deputies Michael Colreavy and Harrington and Senators Martin Comiskey and Mary Ann O??????Brien raised several specific points to which Mr. Carr may now respond.

Mr. Noel Carr: ?????The Chairman will be glad to know that I have taken notes. I do not want to be a killjoy, but the reality is that aquaculture is not the great white hope that will solve all the problems in coastal communities and replace all the jobs that have been lost there. I am from Carrick – 11 miles from Killybegs – and in 90% of our hinterland, from Burtonport down, all of the jobs are fish factory jobs. We have a crab factory on our river, Errigal Seafood, which produces GB ?????25 million worth of seafood per year. Effluent from that factory goes into the river on a controlled basis, and we can work with that. Fish factories and fish production units can work quite well. Interestingly, this company actually invested in a treatment plant because it recognised that it was necessary for the survival of the river. With EU standards and guidelines and advice, the river was allowed to sustain itself every year. I take this opportunity to congratulate Errigal Seafood on being 50 years in operation. It was founded as a vegetable factory by Father James McDyer as a means of providing local employment for young people. That river has had 555 fish above the quota this year, which is a commendable achievement for the company. It is not a fish farm industry but a seafood production unit and it supports almost 200 jobs in our area.

The answer to the problems we are discussing can be found in that type of enterprise, and we need more of them. Instead of damaging the environment, this type of activity and co-operation protects and respects it. Farmers have shown the same willingness to engage with us. Years ago we had a serious problem with the spawning beds, when it was common for mountains to be overgrazed. Some of us here will remember mountains in Mayo and Donegal specifically where this was a particular problem, with spawning levels very much down. Instead of objecting to the grants coming from Europe, we sought to work with the Irish Farmers Association at that time. It was out of this engagement that the farm waste management scheme was eventually introduced. I am not saying we were responsible for it, but it was partly as a result of lobbying by the European Anglers Alliance in Brussels and everywhere else that the waste management scheme and rural environment protection scheme, REPS, were devised. Our partnership with farmers worked to the advantage of both, with spawning levels restored and farmers receiving the same money, albeit under a different scheme. There are ways that we can work in partnership together to ensure a sustainable environment for all. We have had a great deal of that in the past 30 to 40 years.

I was asked a broad range of questions, but I remind members that I am an amateur in this area. The rod licence costs ??????100 for my area and we pay that to Inland Fisheries Ireland every year, in return for which it works with us to protect the rivers. Whether or not we object to some of the positions it takes, we respect IFI as an arm of the State whose function is to protect our rivers. It also has a role, along with the Irish Marine Institute, in monitoring farms. The regulations are not dissimilar to those in operation in Norway, according to BIM??????s presentation. I do not want to say that what was proposed in this regard is impossible or that it cannot work. However, the way it is currently structured makes things difficult, with BIM saying there is absolutely nothing wrong with the fish farming sector. We have spoken about the decrease in the incidence of sea lice in the past five years, but the amount of chemicals required to achieve that decrease has grown significantly. This has a serious impact on the environment in a variety of ways and not just on salmon and sea trout. There is a joke that fish farmers should now be called fish ??????pharmers?????? because of the amount of chemicals they use

 

The Guardian -????? London ?????Monday 17 December 2012?????

Fishfrom plans to farm salmon untainted by chemicals and sea lice in a Kintyre facility run on renewable electricity.

Scottish salmon is facing a challenge to its reputation as one of Britain’s best loved everyday luxuries, with scares over diseases and sea lice,?????heavy use of pesticides?????and?????seal killing?????raising fears about its environmental impact.

A new fish-farming company called?????Fishfrom?????believes it can help solve the industry’s problem, and even partly solve future crises over food shortages. Its answer: take salmon farming entirely out of the sea.

It is planning to build a vast new warehouse on the west coast of Scotland where it hopes to farm salmon on dry land, cultivating thousands of tonnes of fresh salmon untainted by chemicals, sea lice and seal-control, in a self-contained facility run on renewable electricity.

That factory, at Tayinloan, just opposite the Hebridean island of Gigha, will be powered largely by solar panels and a small hydro scheme nearby, feed its salmon on its own supply of a specially farmed marine animal called ragworm, and will recycle nearly all the water it needs onsite.

“It does hit all the right parts of sustainable nutrition, grown by authenticated methods. We know that they work,” said Andrew Robertson, the firm’s director.

“Closed containment has got to the point where we can deliver a robust business model and it will be energy efficient. But most important, it’ll deliver a fantastic product in a short period of time, with a minimal footprint compared to conventional aquaculture.”

The firm argues that using farmed?????ragworm, a burrowing creature which is abundant in estuaries and mudbanks, will save the wild sand eels, anchovies and other fish currently used to feed conventional salmon farms from damaging exploitation. Even the factory’s waste could eventually be used to make power.

Fishform plans to ship out 800,000 salmon a year from that single site, supplying retailers such as Marks and Spencer, Waitrose, Youngs Seafood and in France, Carrefour and Auchain. It already supplies Heston Blumenthal’s Michelin-starred restaurant in Berkshire, the Fat Duck, with farmed trout fed on its inhouse fishfood.

Eventually, says Fishfrom, it hopes to open a vast farm four times that size nearby on the tip of Kintyre on the former RAF air base at Machrihanish and then a further plant at Port Talbot in Wales, next door to the fishfarm where it grows the ragworm. It claims its purpose-built “kits” can be built anywhere with the right supplies available, and is in talks with buyers in New Zealand, north America and Romania.

Fish are already being farmed in other “closed containment” facilities in Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland, north America and China. They produce sea bass, catfish, and Atlantic salmon. There is a 1,000-tonne salmon farm recently opened in Denmark, and two more of a similar size being built in China. But nothing, say Fishfrom, on this scale.

It has huge ambitions: if all those factories opened, it would end up producing up to a tenth of the UK’s farmed salmon, which stands at about 158,000 tonnes a year.

Fishform will file its first planning application to Argyll and Bute council in January, and hopes to begin production in 2014. And it is optimistic of success. “The council loves the idea, for so many different reasons but fundamentally jobs,” Robertson said.

To ensure its fish are disease free, the infant salmon, called smoults, will be raised and screened on site. The maturing and adult fish will swim in interconnected circular ponds where a form of whirlpool will form a current to swim against.

Its proposals are being treated warily by the conservationists who are harrying the conventional offshore salmon farming industry over its impact on the marine environment.

The conservation movement has seen such hopes raised before: attempts in Shetland to farm organic cod ?????? its future in the North Sea endangered by over-fishing ?????? collapsed. Efforts to create much hardier GM salmon have so far failed.

Piers Hart, an aquaculture specialist with WWF UK, said these plants, which rely on pumps, filters and monitoring equipment, were expensive to build and to run. The Tayinloan factory will pump 32m litres of water an hour round the tanks.

“This is not necessarily a silver bullet,” Hart said. “It is not going to solve all our problems and it has its own problems. This is new technology and its potentially exciting but we do need to be careful until it’s actually put into practice.”

Fishfrom’s proposals for its first factory at Tayinloan will face close scrutiny.

It plans to build on the derelict site of a previous but failed attempt to farm fish on land in the 1970s, using a much cruder technique. But the new factory will be 12 metres high and 160m long ?????? similar in scale to an Amazon or Tesco distribution centre.

It is also right on the boundary of one of Scotland’s most important sites for migrating geese, a heavily protected site of special scientific interest for Greenland white-fronted geese, and it borders a popular coastal path, promoted to tourists and walkers.

There may be concerns too about the welfare of Fishfrom’s salmon. There will be up to 200,000 fish being farmed each time. To ensure it is economic, the vast indoor tanks of water will see stocking densities up to double that of conventional fishfarms: it will be at least 50kg of fish per square metre compared to 22kg of fish per square metre at sea.

But Robertson believes his fish will be far less stressed than those in outdoor cages: their ponds are interconnected, allowing the salmon to swim longer distances, and they will be free from parasites, diseases and the stresses of seal attacks. So, he adds, far fewer will die during production.

“The agencies involved in food production wouldn’t accuse us of battery fish-farming here,” he said. “What we know more than anything else, working through all the research we’ve done, is that the mortality rates of the fish are extremely low. All our fish will be kept in stress-free environments.”

His firm is in talks with the Freedom Foods animal welfare scheme run by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, to see if its strict definitions can be widened to include closed-containment cultivation. Robertson must now wait until May 2013, before he knows whether his scheme will get the green light.

 

BARRY ROCHE – The?????Irish Times?????- Monday, December 17, 2012

Anglers and environmentalists have called on the Minister for the Marine Simon Coveney to intervene to prevent the establishment of a number of major salmon farm projects at various locations off the Irish coast.About 200 campaigners from as far away as Donegal, Fermanagh and Galway as well as from Cork, Kerry and Tipperary converged in Carrigaline in Co Cork on Saturday, from where they marched to Mr Coveney??????s constituency office and handed in a letter of protest.Mr Coveney was not at the office at the time, but the protesters held a rally where speakers urged him to heed warnings that further salmon farms at sea would lead to an increase in sea lice and damage wild Atlantic salmon stocks.Bord Iascaigh Mhara has applied for a licence for a ??????60 million deep-sea salmon farm on a 500 hectare site in the lee of Inis O?????rr, the most southerly of the Aran Islands, with the promise of creating 500 jobs in the area.Separately, Norwegian owned company Marine Harvest Island is proposing a ??????3.5 million salmon farm for Shot Head off Adrigole in Bantry Bay in west Cork as part of a ??????14 million investment in its 16 aquaculture sites in Irish waters

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