I've actually been thinking about how viable a salmon or whatever pond/lake/farm on private property could be. I looked into it but found hardly anything useful beyond a basic confirmation that it's possible. Do you happen to have any idea as to how small scaled fish-farming could be made and how economical/costly it would be or have any reading pointers otherwise? Basically trying to figure out if it's mostly initial fixed costs or if it'll cost a fortune in sustaining. Would love a fucking salmon farm on my property.
I'm not sure salmon, being anadromous, can be reared in ponds, perhaps.
The salmon farms around here occupy valuable estuary areas and are severely infested with some sort of aquatic
lice which then attack the young wild salmon as they come down to the salt water.
Same as it ever was.
Yep, spot on.
Personally I have stopped buying farmed fish. It's not just because of the sea lice, either. Norwegian salmon farms have severe disease problems which - via imported young - have infected and drastically depleted formerly plentiful Canadian Pacific wild salmon stocks. If you knew what wild salmon should look like (and I do), you would never buy the farmed mutant version supermarkets sell you as so-called 'sustainably sourced' fish.
There is a fight in Iceland (with good wild Atlantic salmon stocks like those which were once everywhere) to stop farming in areas where wild salmon run. I support this and I do know a little about it. However, commercial farmed fish is now almost all you can buy if you want to buy 'salmon' in a supermarket in many parts of the west. Most people don't realise what this actaully means - they think fish is just fish and don't care.
It's not just salmon, either. In Turkey, sea bass are being bred with appalling quality control and dubious growing methods. Fish that is possibly not chemically fit for human consumption is being fed into the European market - again described as 'sustainable'.
Fish farming is not a simple solution and is woefully unregulated, it is actually decreasing wild stocks and giving us unquestioned production of unhealthy fish in the pursuit of profit. Plus ça change. Fish is a great food, but wild stocks are collapsing and human kind will lose yet another food resource that it really needs and could save with better husbandry.
Dismissing all environmental cocerns as 'socialist' and
namby pamby shit is puerile and flies in the face of any eruditely researched evidence. It even affects the food from our once-abundant sustainable envrironment. We need to look after it, and open our eyes to how big business provides solutions that are actually not solutions at all, but dangerous and unhealthy (if very profitable) alternatives, which reduce the option for a healhier choice by killing it off.
'Be careful what you eat' is not a bad maxim, but fish stock destruction is just a symptom of a wider malaise. And if that makes me a socialist for just saying I want the right to eat healthy, real natural undoctored food, well... shoot me?
I think we are gradually destroying the plants, animals and environment we live in and I cannot respect anyone who considers it is not - at the very least... a problem.
EDIT: spelling
