Tim Worstall

Farmed Cod

Had to happen and damned good thing it has:

Just as North Sea cod is being taken off the shelves
by ethical retailers because it is overfished, Shetland’s cod farmers
claim to have answered the supermarkets’ prayers and provided cod you
can eat with a conscience.

Johnson Seafarms will be supplying about 1,500 tons of firm organic cod to Tesco and other retailers from next month.

Forget the organic thing, of little importance. But farming of a resource that we used to collect in a hunter gatherer manner? Got to be the long term solution. One point is that they are using the offcuts of other fish being processed as the feed, thus not going for the sand eels etc.

The other is more odd.  They’re actually collecting juveniles (spawn even?) and then growing them. So this is more of a capture and fatten operation than a true breeding program (not sure if this is a problem or not. Depends on whether the death rate in the wild is much higher than that in capture and fattening.). Whether they can in fact get them to breed will be the most interesting thing. Can they make it a closed loop system, one that doesn’t have to take from the wild?

It’s a long time since I read "Cod" (one friend misheard to title and went into Waterstone’s and asked for "God, the fish that changed the world") but don’t cod take a long time to become sexually mature? In which case they may be harvesting them before that point and we’ll never find out whether the closed system is possible.  Pity

In

3 responses

  1. FishAreFun Avatar
    FishAreFun

    Fascinating article, thanks for spotting it
    The way I read it, the farm company buys fry from hatcheries, which have a ‘broodstock’. The broodstock was wild-caught. Whether the hatcheries choose to catch more wild broodstock in future, or use their own fry as future broodstock is not clear.
    Given the unhappy history of the salmon farming industry (which has wiped out the wild stocks in most Scottish rivers – large external cost to the tourist industry), I would hope that this industry remains under the tightest possible regulation and public scrutiny. Large-scale industrialisation is a dangerous way to go, until all objections can be satisfactorily answered.
    I’m interested in the statement (important for the quality of the product – which in turn is important if you’re paying sixteen quid a kilo) that the farmed fish have no parasites. How did/do they achieve this? A major impact of salmon farming has been the creation of biological barriers to wild fish migration (they can’t swim past a concentration of farmed fish without picking up parasites – or disease – which then kills them because they don’t have a farmer to dose them with medicines).
    Very intertesting to watch how this venture develops

    Reply
  2. P. Froward Avatar
    P. Froward

    …cod you can eat with a conscience.
    Haven’t they tried a fork?

    Reply
  3. Andrew Duffin Avatar
    Andrew Duffin

    “they are using the offcuts of other fish being processed as the feed”
    Woah, stop right there.
    Isn’t this where we came in with mad cow disease (which was real enough, even though the CJD thing wasn’t).
    What do Cod eat in the wild? Chopped up bits of other (farmed) fish?
    I wonder.
    I second “fisharefun” ‘s comments about salmon btw. Farmed salmon are a sad, flabby substitute for the real thing that you can’t get any more.
    Tim adds: Cod in the wild do indeed eat other fish, yes.

    Reply

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