News

Rosemary Westwood, Maclean’s September 1, 2013 — The idea of Prairie seafood may seem outlandish, but with soaring demand running headlong into environmental concerns over fish farms, some believe the future of the fisheries industry rests on dry land.  At the Cheslakees Indian Reserve near Port McNeill on Vancouver Island, environmental groups and the ’Namgis First Nation recently opened North America’s first commercial-scale Atlantic salmon farm based entirely on land.

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Elisabeth Fischer Intrafish.com April 4, 2013 — The views on land-based salmon farming are ambivalent, but the call for a move onshore seems to be growing louder every day.  Up to a dozen new farms are currently in various planning or construction stages all around the world, in addition to the four that have already been stocked with smolts.  And the industry interest is “tremendous” and growing, Steven Summerfelt, director, aquaculture systems research at the Conservation Fund Freshwater Institute, one of the major research institutes into on-land recirculation systems for salmon, told Intrafish.

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CBC.ca  Information Morning St. John  February 4, 2013 — The Conservation Fund’s Freshwater Institute in West Virginia has been experimenting with large-scale, on land salmon farming. The private non-profit is ready to release a report on its findings soon. Steven Summerfelt is the Institute’s director of Aquaculture Systems Research.  Dr. Steven Summerfelt provides an update on the realities and the promising future of land-based closed containment salmon aquaculture with CBC’s Hance Colburne on the Information Morning St. John show.  Highlights include a response to concerns about production costs compared to conventional net-pen ocean farming and illustration of the need for consumers to consider the full value of environmentally responsible sources when making purchase decisions.  

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