News

Whitney Pipkin, Bay Journal, BayJournal.com 14 May 2014 — Salmon skins glisten in the waters below as three men wait, nets in hand, for the right catch to swim near the surface. The fish, grouped into one corner of an expansive pool, flop against its surface as the nets swoop in, splashing water that’s conspicuously salt-free onto the metal platform. This, of course, isn’t the wild, where 2-year-old Atlantic salmon like this rarely venture south of the Connecticut River and have seldom been spotted in the Chesapeake Bay. This is The Conservation Fund’s Freshwater Institute, located nearly 80 miles inland in Shepherdstown, WV.

Read More

Whitney Pipkin, The Washington Post, WashingtonPost.com, 18 April 2014 — Still have farmed salmon crossed off your short list of eco-friendly fish? A local version that’s available for a limited time in the Washington area could temporarily rewrite your rules. Most farmed salmon are raised in open nets or pens in the ocean, where their waste and potential to introduce parasites, diseases or non-native fish to the wild present serious environmental concerns. The Freshwater Institute, a program of the Arlington-based Conservation Fund, has been trying another way.

John Randolph, FlyFisherman.com 18 March 2014 – Can wild Atlantic and Pacific salmon be saved from extinction if floating open-net-pen fish farms are replaced by chemical- and disease-free, closed-cycle farms on land? The idea sounds too good to be true to an editor/writer who for more than 30 years has been following the first-promising and highly promoted birth of industrial floating fish farms from Norway, to Scotland, Ireland, the Faroe Islands, the Canadian Maritimes, British Columbia, and Chile. It has been a failed promise. The new hope is land-based, closed-containment systems for fish production.

Read More

Summerfelt and Christianson, World Aquaculture Magazine, March 2014  – The Aquaculture Innovation Workshop #5 – An International Summit on Fish Farming in Land-Based Closed-Containment Systems was hosted by The Conservation Fund Freshwater Institute, Tides Canada (TC), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF) and the Atlantic Salmon Federation (ASF) at the National Conservation Training Center (NCTC) in Shepherdstown, WV, 4-6 September 2013. This international summit provided an opportunity for aquaculture producers, scientists, engineers, aquaculture industry suppliers, regulators and investors to communicate progress on the technical, biological and economic feasibility of culturing fish – particularly salmon – to food-size in land-based closed-containment systems.

Read More

Christine Pratt, The Wenatchee World, 27 February 2014  —  BAKER FLATS - Healthier fish, 70 percent less fresh water use, easier care and maintenance, cleaner water.  At a time when fisheries biologists are tasked with improving efficiency and reducing the cost of raising and releasing young salmon, an experiment undertaken by the Chelan County PUD in 2008 is turning heads around the region.

Read More

Evelyn Boychuk, CBC.ca CBCNews, January 6, 2014 – “It’s no longer possible to say that recirculation aquaculture systems … are not possible for Atlantic salmon, because we’re living proof that is [not] the case,” says Jackie Hildering, community liaison for the Namgis closed-containment project.

READ MORE

Jonathan Carr, Atlantic Salmon Journal Winter 2013 — Forty years ago, in 1973, a small group of scientists gathered at the College of Cape Breton in Sydney Nova Scotia, to hear a presentation about salmon aquaculture in Norway. The idea of net pen aquaculture in Atlantic Canada garnered much skepticism at that time. Read Jon Carr’s assessment of how we got here and where we are going in Atlantic salmon aquaculture.

Read More

HeraldMailMedia.com, December 2, 2013. — Tucked away off the back roads of Shepherdstown is a typical-looking farmhouse. A gravel drive winds behind it, leading to a nondescript building, a research lab that is the heart of the Freshwater Institute, an internationally recognized program of The Conservation Fund.  Nature is teeming in that lab, the centerpiece of which is a tank filled with 40,000 gallons of water and 5,000 Atlantic salmon, each weighing about 4 to 6 pounds. That tank and the fish within it feed the research into sustainable aquaculture conducted by the staff, including Senior Research Associate John W. Davidson III.  VIDEO: Watch this great piece by the Herald Mail featuring our work producing Atlantic salmon.

Read More