CAFOs vs. Free Range

Editor's note: This is the second column by Lawrence Reichard addressing a 40-acre salmon factory farm proposed by Norway-based Nordic Aquafarms. More about the project here.

In my last column I wrote about plans by the Norwegian company Nordic Aquafarms to build one of the biggest salmon factories in the world in Belfast. In that column, I cited a number of misrepresentations made by Nordic. There are more.

Ask most organic egg and poultry consumers what they imagine organic chickens’ lives are like and they’ll probably describe a bird scratching in the soil, digging for bugs, and kicking up a dust bath on a quaint farm pasture.

However, in reality, many organic chickens are subjected to the same factory farm horrors as conventional birds — their entire lives spent crammed with tens of thousands of other hens in barren, fluorescent bulb-lit sheds with little access to soil or sunlight. 

Analysis of proposed $150-million salmon factory farm in Belfast, Maine

Scale of the project:  The land-based industrial fish farm being planned by Nordic Aqua Farms (NAF) would be one of the largest in the world, raising between 25,000 and 30,000 tons of salmon a year at full production. Many questions about the operation of such a facility can only be answered in theoretical models. A land-based industrial salmon farm of this magnitude has not been built and is not in operation at this point in time. 

Siting and Zoning of the

Two poles that once hoisted a clothes line stand rusting and unused in Elsie Herring’s back garden in eastern North Carolina. Herring lives next door to a field where pig manure is sprayed and the drifting faecal matter wasn’t kind to her drying clothes.

“The clothes would stink so you’d wash them again and again until they fell apart,” said Herring, whose family has lived in Wallace since her grandfather, a freed slave, purchased land in the 1890s.