Norway relaunching Atlantic cod farms after earlier failures
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Oslo — Norway is relaunching cod farms in Europe’s ice-cold northern waters after mass escapes and failure to thrive condemned its earlier attempt to become the first country to try large-scale breeding of a species declining in the wild.
The handful of companies raising Atlantic cod in pens in Norwegian fjords say they have learnt lessons from a wave of bankruptcies of cod farms earlier in the millennium, as well as the success of Norway’s multi-billion-dollar salmon business.
They are hoping to emulate that success with cod at a time when wild Atlantic cod are seeing mixed fortunes.
While stocks off Iceland and in the Barents Sea are sustainable, those off Canada, the US, Ireland and Britain are low, as are those in the Baltic Sea and the non-British part of the North Sea.
Norcod, the biggest of the new farms, is raising 1.8-million fish along the craggy Norwegian seacoast and plans to begin sales in the second quarter of 2021.
“We are targeting northern and Western Europe first,” said Christian Riber, Norcod’s commercial director, adding that the firm has also seen interest in their product from US customers.
The company aims to produce an initial 6,500 tonnes in 2021, rising to 25,000 tonnes in 2025. That would exceed the high of 21,000 tonnes recorded in official statistics across the country in 2010 before the industry collapsed.
“They used wild fish for breeding and the cod was escaping by biting into the nets,” said Øyvind Hansen, who heads the national cod breeding programme at Nofima, the only research institute that works with the selective breeding of cod.
About half of the fish raised in a pen died, including from cannibalism, he said. Growth rates were also slow and the 2008/2009 financial crisis starved companies of credit. By 2015, Norway produced no farmed cod at all.
What changed?
Nofima continued the research into cod breeding it had conducted since 2002/2003 thanks to public funding from a ministry of fisheries keen to develop new industries around fish. It has now bred five generations of farmed cod.
“Through selective breeding, the fish has adapted to farm life. It has become more domesticated,” said Hansen. “We have learnt a lot about the biology and we have selected the fish best suited for fish farming.”
Mortality rates in the pens are down to roughly 15%, there is less cannibalism, faster growth and the fish no ...
The handful of companies raising Atlantic cod in pens in Norwegian fjords say they have learnt lessons from a wave of bankruptcies of cod farms earlier in the millennium, as well as the success of Norway’s multi-billion-dollar salmon business.
They are hoping to emulate that success with cod at a time when wild Atlantic cod are seeing mixed fortunes.
While stocks off Iceland and in the Barents Sea are sustainable, those off Canada, the US, Ireland and Britain are low, as are those in the Baltic Sea and the non-British part of the North Sea.
Norcod, the biggest of the new farms, is raising 1.8-million fish along the craggy Norwegian seacoast and plans to begin sales in the second quarter of 2021.
“We are targeting northern and Western Europe first,” said Christian Riber, Norcod’s commercial director, adding that the firm has also seen interest in their product from US customers.
The company aims to produce an initial 6,500 tonnes in 2021, rising to 25,000 tonnes in 2025. That would exceed the high of 21,000 tonnes recorded in official statistics across the country in 2010 before the industry collapsed.
“They used wild fish for breeding and the cod was escaping by biting into the nets,” said Øyvind Hansen, who heads the national cod breeding programme at Nofima, the only research institute that works with the selective breeding of cod.
About half of the fish raised in a pen died, including from cannibalism, he said. Growth rates were also slow and the 2008/2009 financial crisis starved companies of credit. By 2015, Norway produced no farmed cod at all.
What changed?
Nofima continued the research into cod breeding it had conducted since 2002/2003 thanks to public funding from a ministry of fisheries keen to develop new industries around fish. It has now bred five generations of farmed cod.
“Through selective breeding, the fish has adapted to farm life. It has become more domesticated,” said Hansen. “We have learnt a lot about the biology and we have selected the fish best suited for fish farming.”
Mortality rates in the pens are down to roughly 15%, there is less cannibalism, faster growth and the fish no ...