CAFOs vs. Free Range

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.

The way we grow our food and raise livestock has changed significantly over the past several decades. Independent, small-scale family farms are increasingly giving way to industrial factory farms.

Factory farms have problems, one of which is their contribution to global climate change.

In November 2015, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved AquaBounty salmon, a genetically engineered (GE) “frankenfish” engineered to grow about twice as fast as typical farm-raised salmon. In Canada, the GE salmon are already being sold and eaten, to the tune of 5 tons in 2017, and could be coming to U.S. grocery stores as early as 2019, with no labels as such. Farmed fish facilities, often described as CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) of the sea, pump water from rivers into their hatcheries, then pump it back out to the river once it’s no longer clean.