There are all sorts of challenges with a growing fish farming industry, including affecting the natural ecosystems. But it would be a challenge without them, as it would probably put even more pressure on the overfished seas (especially if we can find alternative protein sources for the salmon than fish meal).
My sister works at a large inland hatchery, raising atlantic salmon from egg to smolt, and its been neat to watch the investment, automation, and optimization going on there. For instance, they used to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of smolts by hand, and now there is a machine to do it. They used to lay the eggs out flat in trays and use a turkey baster to pick out duds, now there is a machine to do it. Now most of the human effort comes from moving fish and monitoring the processes.
Do you mean farmed salmon? Aka 'fish' meat which, due to crap the fish are being fed resembles more pork than wild salmon? Not even talking about the amount of antibiotics, growth hormones and god knows what other chemistry pumped into them to get as much $$ as possible.
2 of the most healthy fish to eat on paper are pretty dangerous these days - tuna due to buildup of mercury and other metals since it is a relatively long-living predator (you can't avoid this), and farmed salmon due to stuff above. Maybe a proper wild one is still OK to eat often (and priced accordingly), but farmed ones are generally subpar food I try to avoid.
1- Farmed salmon does not receive growth hormones. Is a fish.
The kind of growth hormone that you could find in the market are from mammals (or humans). I'm not an expert in hormones, but I doubt that fishes could make anything useful with it.
Farmed salmon are genetically selected, so they grow fast. No need to burn your hardly earned money chasing and injecting expensive and useless growth hormones in each one of your 100.000 fishes. Is antieconomic and would be a really stupid move.
2- Farmed salmon COULD receive antibiotics, as any cattle or poultry do, WHEN there is a disease that can be treated with antibiotics. Point.
Treating a big mass of open water with antibiotics is really, really expensive. Giving antibiotics in the food is not easy when you have some hundred thousands of mouths. As farmers do not have a printing dollars machine and is their money what is over the table, I bet that they think twice before to use this weapon and try to cut the medication as soon as possible.
To save antibiotics, and chemicals is the reason for doing the scanning in the article, so there are room for improving with the use of computers, and they are actively trying to improve at least.
On the other hand, antibiotics for veterinary use are legal and regulated by the EU. I bet that the period of days before the fishes can be killed and somebody could buy this meat in a marketplace is carefully followed by the farmers. Because is a REGULATED industry in the European Union.
Not everything is as regulated as you make it appear to be. e.g. virtually every pig farm in Denmark regularly gets antibiotics, and MSRA is found on pretty much every pig farm.
The average antibiotic use in Europe was 152 mg/kg of livestock a couple of years ago, with Spain and Cyprus being up in the 4-500 mg/kg.
On the brighter side, Denmark is starting to seriously reduce antibiotic use in pig farms with a goal of being virtually antibiotic free within 4-5 years.
Norwegian farmed salmon uses virtually no antibiotics, with only 5 of 799 farms performing minor treatments in 2016 . while 20 years ago, pretty much all farms used regular treatments.
Salmon is only seriously breed since 1985 (or so). I'm an ex-biologist 'specialized' on parasites and diseases of marine vertebrates, from fishes to whales and turtles. (Specialist is a big word. Lets say that I spent a few decades studying it, a few hundred pages of my thesis deal with parasites of marine farmed fishes... and still feels like a newbie). A lot of things had improved in our knowledge of marine diseases (and understanding of marine organisms) in the last twenty years.
The pig is a domesticated animal, breeded since many thousands of years. You can pick one and give it a shoot of antibiotic. Then release it and will run happy again.
Marine fishes aren't in the same league. Can be shockingly delicate sometimes and get badly stressed when caught and put off the water. I have killed many thousands of them and would not use antibiotics or mess with the tank just because, without a good reason.
As pointed out below, you’re just wrong on the antibiotics/growth hormones point. And as to taste, I wonder how much of the difference is your incorrect beliefs about what is in the fish.
My wife is from the Oregon coast, and grew up eating wild salmon. Having visited there, I’ve had it as fresh as you can get it. She outright prefers norwegian salmon, and I like it second best (after king and more than sockeye). It’s legitimately tasty. But then again we don’t subscribe to the hysteria about “natural” food so that’s not affecting our palette.
To all the negative commenters -I stand corrected about antibiotics/growth hormones.
But I haven't heard anything about the crap they feed them, which does affect the meat you eat. Some quote from huff post:
"Eating fish is good for you, but that nutritional value is diminished in farmed fish. Farm-raised salmon have been shown to have an unhealthy high fat content and higher levels of PCBs. A recent study warned women, children, and adolescents against eating farmed salmon because salmon feed contains harmful pollutants" [1]
Farmed fish can be on par with wild fish (healthier in some ways, less nutritious in others) depending on the farming methods, which have improved since the old days.
Maybe less mercury, but by definition the fatty acid composition that makes fish healthy should be much inferior since algae are lacking from the food chain.
Isn't food quality constantly monitored by authorities, and isn't that where the real problem lies? I sometimes wonder if governments are more strict on performance enhancing drugs (doping in sports) and recreational drug use than on food additives.
This is one area where they optimize, they use vaccines now when they are young instead of antibiotics in their food.
You are talking about dioxins, they use that in the food and they don't have limits like meat for it. They found that it's still pretty close to the limit of meat and if you don't eat it daily it shouldn't be able to accumulate.
They need some of those for the feeding process, but they know it's bad PR and try to find alternatives.
This is something that can be monitored and optimized for.
Btw they are fed mostly with soy and fish flour (salmon is a predator). It's very regulated, Salmon from Norway is a huge brand and they all would have issues that's why it's very regulated.
The Salmon industry in Norway is a huge billion dollar industry, labor costs there are high so it's dependent on technology.
It's profitable, but also very competitive and every small edge increases it. The ingenuity of optimising every step is inspiring.
It's also in the bigger picture pretty ethical, it satisfies the demand for fish without destroying the natural ecosystems.