A Bumper Crop

Cindy Fernandez assumed that the Atlantic salmon she bought at her neighborhood supermarket came from fishing boats off the East Coast. She was surprised to learn it was farmed, grown in pens off the Chilean and Canadian coastlines.

The word “farmed” never appeared on signs or labels with the farm-raised salmon, trout, catfish and shrimp at the grocery.

“I would never have known,” she said.

Aquaculture’s meteoric growth in the last decade has been invisible to most consumers because supermarkets rarely label farmed seafood and chefs are reluctant to add the word “farmed” to their chalkboard menus fearing consumers will balk.

But the world’s growing appetite for seafood, the depletion of ocean fisheries and the generally good quality and low cost of farm-raised fish have fueled a surge in farmed fare.

Globally, aquaculture’s haul has more than doubled in the last decade to 35.6 million tons a year, and small-scale, U.S. aquaculture production hasgrown more than 40% since 1991, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

Farmed seafood makes up about a third of the seafood consumed in the U.S. More than 60% of the salmon, virtually all of the catfish and trout, and two-thirds of the shrimp consumed by Americans are raised in ponds, tanks and pens.

And if Americans keep consuming seafood at the current rate--15 pounds per capita each year--by 2025 the U.S. will need an additional 1 billion pounds of farmed production to meet demand, analysts say.

“Like it or not, we need aquaculture. The wild supply is just not going to give us enough,” said Howard Johnson, a seafood consultant in Jacksonville, Ore.

But as the volume of farmed fish has grown, so have concerns about its safety from environmentalists and consumer activists. They say the federal government can’t adequately oversee the fragmented industry and ensure the safety of farmed fish--a charge that regulators deny.

Limits on chemicals and antibiotics used in raising farmed fish and preventing disease are not rigorously enforced, activists say. Gaps in federal inspection allow imported fish--which have been dosed with drugs, herbicides and pesticides--to enter U.S. ports, they add.

The Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency in charge of seafood safety, tests only a very small percentage of imported prawns and other seafood, and only for certain drugs, said Rebecca J. Goldburg, a scientist with Environmental Defense who was a co-author of a report on aquaculture last year.

Inspection should be increased, experts say, and consumers should have more information about what they’re buying.

Some Consumers Prefer Farmed Seafood

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) is proposing a provision to the U.S. farm bill that would require more information on labels about the origin of seafood, including whether it was farmed or caught wild.

Although Stevens’ intent is to bolster sales of wild fish, there are many consumers who knowingly choose farmed seafood.

With farmed fish, “at least you know where it’s been and what it’s been fed,” said Nelson D’Angelo, a culinary student who was shopping recently at a Los Angeles Albertsons. “It’s cheaper, it’s cleaner and it’s tastier.”

Michael Massingill, executive vice president of Kent SeaTech Corp. in San Diego, one of the nation’s largest fish farms, said that in blind taste tests most people can’t distinguish between wild-caught striped bass and the farmed bass Kent produces at its tank farm in Mecca, east of San Diego at the tip of the Salton Sea.

“Our fish has more oil content and even higher omega-3 acids because the feed has higher fish oils than a wild fish gets,” Massingill said. “I think it has more flavor, but I don’t think the average person could tell them apart.”

Kent produces 3.5 million pounds of striped bass a year--a third of the nation’s production. It is one of the largest of California’s 120 farms, which also raise catfish, abalone, mussels and sturgeon. Other leading farmed-fish-producing states are Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas and Louisiana.

Kent is as much fish factory as farm; everything from the feed to the water temperature is calculated to deliver the perfect 1 1/2-pound to 2-pound whole fish to white-tablecloth restaurants and seafood markets in 18 months--half the time a wild bass would take to reach that size.

Computer models track the growth of its fish, electronic equipment dispenses food four times a day and an elaborate waste water system recirculates 25,000 gallons of water each minute.

It’s a large and highly efficient operation, yet it has trouble competing with seafood shipped in from around the globe, Massingill said. Imported seafood has been declining in price and accounts for about two-thirds of the seafood on Americans’ plates.

Salmon fillets from Chile, for instance, which in 1995 cost retailers $3.34 a pound, dropped to $2.17 last year, according to data firm Urner Barry. That allows Albertsons and other retailers to offer bigger discounts.

To compete, Kent and other U.S. fish farms are constantly striving to cut costs and become more efficient.

“Seafood is different from other meat choices in that we have so many options,” Massingill said. “All of our customers say, ‘If the prices go down, we’ll buy a lot more.’”

But shaving 25 cents off the $2.50 per pound Massingill charges wholesalers is no mean feat.

Water and labor are more expensive in California than in most other producing regions. And U.S. fish farms are subject to more regulation than some competitors in places such as South America and Southeast Asia.

Indeed, it’s the lack of scrutiny of imported seafood that worries scientists and consumer groups. They say that many farms in other countries operate with few health and environmental restrictions.

Although foreign fish farms are required to abide by U.S. limits for antibiotics, herbicides and pesticides if they ship here, industry analysts say they often use drugs banned in the U.S. or use approved drugs in much higher amounts.

In two small surveys, toxicologist Miriam Jacobs of the University of Surrey in England found residues of PCBs, pesticides and flame retardants in much of the 15 farm-raised salmon from Scotland she sampled.

Farms in Chile, the world’s second-largest salmon-producing nation after Norway, have been accused by several groups of dosing fish with large amounts of antibiotics.

And more than 200 tons of farmed Chinese shrimp were shipped back from Europe last year after they were found to be laced with chloramphenicol, a potent antibiotic that can disrupt blood cell production in humans.

Just last month, shrimp imported from Thailand were found by European Union agriculture officials to contain traces of the banned antibiotic nitrofuran.

Concerns About Antibiotics, Chemicals

Since these findings, the EU has begun testing 100% of shrimp coming from Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar.

“There are some unsafe practices being used,” Environmental Defense scientist Goldburg said. “And my concerns are greatest about seafood produced in developing countries.”

The General Accounting Office said in a report issued last year that products barred elsewhere could be winding up in U.S. supermarkets, because FDA inspectors look at less than 1% of the food coming in at the ports and because they inspect overseas plants so infrequently.

No outbreaks or cases of illness from antibiotics or chemicals in seafood have been reported in the United States, said Brett Koonse, director of the FDA’s seafood enforcement division. He said the FDA’s inspection system is effective at catching most offenders here and abroad.

Although the agency doesn’t inspect every shipment, he said, the FDA carefully selects and samples seafood from companies with a history of problems and from rumored offenders.

If the agency finds contaminants or anything that might pose a health risk, it issues an alert banning the product until the company can prove its products are safe.

“We have been doing this for a long time,” Koonse said. “If we know a country or a product is having a problem, we’ll target it” for inspection.

One potential gap in the process: The FDA doesn’t inspect U.S. fish farms in the same way it does meat and poultry operations.

Instead the agency goes out to processors and warehouses every few years on average. It requires these firms to test occasionally for antibiotics and other chemicals, and show that they are keeping products in a clean environment at the right temperature.

Certainly, U.S. fish farmers use antibiotics far less than do their poultry and pork counterparts.

FDA officials say that at the mandated levels, antibiotics do not leave a residue in the fish that could trigger problems.

But environmental and consumer groups say they are concerned about routine antibiotic use, especially given the limited oversight of the industry.

There also are serious environmental questions about the unprecedented growth of fish farming.

Although it is intended to protect most native fish populations, scientists say farming is beginning to put a dent in some smaller species, such as herring, sardines, mackerel and other fish used to make fish feed. Two pounds of this meal is needed to grow a 1-pound farmed fish.

And analysts say that if farmers don’t reduce their dependence on fish meal and search for other sources of protein such as soy, they will in effect be taking away food from other wild fish, cutting their numbers.

The construction of shrimp and salmon farms along coastlines in Southeast Asia and Chile have taken habitat away from native fish populations and brought large amounts of waste runoff, said Jennifer Dianto, manager of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, which identifies sustainable fishing and aquaculture practices.

She and others say most U.S. farms are following health and environmental rules because it’s more expensive not to. And Massingill said that In addition to being illegal, dosing fish with large volumes of antibiotic-laced feed would be too expensive.

Using and dumping lots of waste has its costs too.

Kent came up with its own waste water treatment and recirculation system so it could slash its water costs and sell some of its water to nearby farms.

It’s not an appetizing process. But it is effective, analysts say, and ultimately it may serve as a model for other farms.

First, water leading from its 98 tanks is pumped into a channel where thousands of live carp and tilapia--which later will be sold live in Asian American fish markets--eat much of the feces and other solid waste.

The water then passes through filters and a pond with tiny floating plastic rings that grab bacteria and convert it into nitrate, which isn’t toxic.

It’s then pumped out to constructed wetlands and back for use at Kent and other farms nearby.

By that time, said Tom Levy, general manager of the Coachella Valley Water District, “it’s pretty clean waste water”--cleaner, in fact, than most treated municipal water.

Because fish farming is a newer and smaller industry than meat and poultry enterprises, farmers such as Kent don’t have much of a rule book to play by.

No federal rules govern how these farms must dispose of their waste. Yet Massingill and others in private industry keep tweaking their operations, seeking cleaner, cheaper ways of raising fish.

“This is a state-of-the-art farm in the U.S., but in our minds there are some things here that are now obsolete,” said Massingill, looking out over the racetrack-sized prototype for its next tank. “We’ll change that on our next farm.”