“The Salmon Eye,” run by Eide Fjordbruck, is an educational center located at the mouth of the Hardangersfjord in Norway. It is the largest floating art installation in the world and the vision of the company’s CEO Sondre Eide.
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HARDANGERSFJORD, NORWAY – Jørgen Wengaard circles the rocky islands of the fjord, his boat skimming the surface of the still water, sending ripples onto the quiet forest shore. But in the Hardangersfjord in western Norway, the water is still deep: more than 2,000 feet.
“The Norwegian coast is perfect for farming Atlantic salmon,” says Wengaard. “We have the optimal temperature. We have good oxygen levels. We have the right salinity and the water is always changing because of the strong current. It’s great for farming.”
Wengaard headed to one of the few salmon farms in the fjord, known by cylindrical pens made of nylon netting, some holding hundreds of thousands of salmon each on the surface of the Hardangersfjord.
Norway is the world’s largest exporter of farmed salmon; more than a fifth of the salmon consumed by Americans comes from the Nordic countries. And as Norway exports more salmon to the world, the industry has come under fire from environmental groups who say salmon farms are irreversibly affecting the pristine environment of Norway’s fjords.
Wengaard’s boat glides to a stop on a floating walkway around two open water areas, about 50 meters in diameter, lined with bright yellow nylon netting: an open salmon farm by the Lingalaks company. Wengaard, who has worked most of his life in salmon farms, is a tour guide here.
A salmon farm managed by Lingalaks company in Hardangersfjord, Norway.
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“This is a small fish farm,” he said, climbing out of the boat. “We have two pens with only 15,000 salmon in each. That may sound like a lot, but in a normal-sized fish farm, there are one million salmon.
Above this open water pen, a mechanical arm swivels in place, taking out food pellets. This causes silver lines in the water below: a feeding frenzy. Pens are home to these Atlantic Salmon from March to December. In those nine months, the fish grow to a weight of between 10 and 15 kilograms, then are taken to a processing plant where they are shocked before being slaughtered, filled and exported around the world.
But now they are here, eating and swimming, what separates them from the open ocean is a thin nylon net.
“We have to check every day and look for holes, because we really don’t want the salmon to escape,” Wengaard said, pointing to a television screen at the Lingalaks facility where the company can monitor the health of patients. fish and what net holding them compromised in any way.
“We don’t want them mixing with wild salmon,” Wengaard continued. “So even if these salmon come from wild salmon, we don’t want them to mix genes and destroy wild salmon spawning grounds.”
But according to many industry experts, it’s too late.
Jørgen Wengaard, a tour guide at the Lingalaks salmon farm in Hardangersfjord, Norway, uses a mouse to point a camera at one of the open netted fish cages containing 15,000 Atlantic Salmon.
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Hundreds of miles east of the fjord in the capital Oslo, writer Simen Saetre sits on a bench in a local park next to the waters of the Akerselva river, where wild salmon, he says, can sometimes be seen, in the middle of Norway. the biggest city.
“I’ve never been fishing myself, but sometimes you see people on the river and they report a good catch,” he said.
Saetre, the co-author New Fish, book about the Norwegian salmon farming industry, said that the wild salmon population of Norway has been cut in half in the past twenty years largely due to the impact of tens of millions of farmed salmon. Every year, an average of 200,000 farmed salmon escape from open net cages, a significant number when you consider there are only about 500,000 wild salmon left in the country, Saetre said.
“These farmed salmon then move and swim to random rivers and then mate with wild salmon, and they weaken the stock of wild salmon because this is farmed salmon, they are made fat and slow and effective for the industry,” Saetre. “But when they mate with wild salmon, the wild salmon offspring become slow and fat and easy to catch by predators.”
That’s a big reason, says Saetre, why wild salmon stocks in Norway are dying so quickly. A study this year by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research and the Institute for Marine Research found that almost a third of Norway’s wild salmon have “significant genetic changes” due to interbreeding with farmed salmon. But Saetre says there’s a bigger problem with Norwegian farmed salmon: sea lice. It is a small crustacean that attaches itself to salmon, eats it, and reproduces.
A pilot project carried out by salmon farming company Eide Fjordbruck is a closed pen tank containing 200,000 salmon. Closed pens protect salmon from sea lice and prevent salmon inside from escaping and interbreeding with wild salmon. Salmon waste is transported to a biogas tank, which is used to create energy.
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“These sea lice have been living in wild salmon swimming for a long time and attached to them,” Saetre said. “And if you collect millions of big salmon in the fjord and sea lice come in, it’s like heaven for sea lice, and they grow and adapt.”
In a four-year study in 2020, Norwegian scientists found that in the fjords of western Norway, the mortality rate among farmed salmon from sea lice infestation reached more than 30%. Salmon farms use chemicals like pesticides to treat the fish, but scientists have discovered that sea lice have evolved to become resistant to the chemicals.
But one salmon farmer says he has a solution to all these problems.
In another part of the Hardangersfjord, Sondre Eide, the young CEO of the third generation of the family salmon farming company Eide Fjordbruck, navigates the boat through the rain to what he calls the winter salmon farm. When he arrived, Eide pointed to a black cylinder barely out of the water, surrounded by floating gangplanks. It’s a cover that looks like a tank.
“The tank is 72 meters down. If it were on land, it would be the tallest building in western Norway,” said Eide. “It contains 200,000 fish.”
Sondre Eide, the third generation CEO of Eide Fjordbruck, has spent tens of millions of dollars to build a massive closed pen to test and innovate in the salmon farming industry in Norway.
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This, says Eide, is covered in salmon farming pens: no salmon escapes and no salmon lice.
“So it’s all about giving the fish an optimal life inside,” explains Eide. “And, of course, if you eliminate salmon fleas, you have no salmon care, so you have no handling, and are responsible for 60 to 70% of all deaths in the industry. So, you can focus on how to make the best life possible for the fish than the next flea treatment.
Eide and his team of company engineers put years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars into this closed pen, which funnels seawater inside and keeps ticks out. It also filters salmon waste – a big contributor to the rise in nitrogen levels in the fjord – by bringing it through a series of tubes to a separate tank that eventually creates biogas that can be used as energy to power this facility. , Eide’s next project.
Eide’s closed-loop farming system raises the question: Why doesn’t the entire salmon industry farm this way? While the Norwegian government has been slow to explore this new technology, the government of Canada, another major salmon exporter, has eliminated pens that are open to the salmon farming industry to encourage companies to build pens like the one designed by Eide. Eide said he and his team looked for technology to accomplish this, but it just didn’t exist. He had the money to try and build it, he said, so he did.
“For me, it’s the right thing to do, and I 100% believe it from the bottom of my heart,” Eide said. “I know my father would do the same thing today. My grandfather would do the same thing, because times have changed and we have to change with them.
Sondre Eide built The Salmon Eye as an educational center and Michelin star restaurant. It is the largest floating art installation in the world.
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To emphasize this push for sustainable salmon farming, Eide climbs back to the boat and navigates to an even more daring project that he built: the largest floating art installation in the world, just 10 minutes by boat from his salmon farm. It’s a reflective silver sphere that looks like a UFO falling into the ocean. Eide called the Salmon Eye, and when our boat arrived at the dock attached to it, we entered what looked like the slender birth of the villain James Bond, but what is actually an educational center about threats to the environment.
Inside, visitors watch images projected on the walls and floor while listening to stories about a dangerous environment before participating in a role-play about the sustainability of salmon farming. After that, those who have managed to secure a reservation for the Michelin-Starred Eide restaurant above participate in the 18-course tasting menu of sustainable seafood.
“We need 50% more food to 2050,” says Eide. “And we have used 50% of all land that can be used for food production. And we only use 2% of the calories that come from the sea, but we know less about the sea than about space.
And somewhere in the wide, deep waters, says Eide, lies the answer to feeding the world.
