Fish Farming Limitations

Farm-Fresh Fish -- With a Catch
Aquaculture Boom Raises Concerns

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 20, 2009

By the end of this year, the world is projected to reach an unheralded but historic milestone: Half of the fish and shellfish we consume will be raised by humans, rather than caught in the wild.

Reaching this tipping point is reshaping everything from our oceans to the livelihoods and diets of people across the globe. It has also prompted a new round of scientific and political scrutiny, as researchers and public officials examine how aquaculture is affecting the world's environment and seafood supply.

"Hunting and gathering has reached its maximum," said Ronald W. Hardy, who directs the University of Idaho's Aquaculture Research Institute and co-authored a study on the subject in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We've got to grow more."

The drive to bring fish "from egg to plate," as Hardy puts it, has the potential to answer a growing demand for seafood worldwide, as well as reduce some of the imports that compose more than 80 percent of the fish and shellfish Americans eat each year. But without technological advances to improve efficiency, it could threaten to wipe out the forage fish that lie at the bottom of the ocean's food chain and potentially contaminate parts of the sea.

And consumers will have to accept that they are eating a different kind of fish than the ones that swim wild: ones that might have eaten unused poultry trimmings, been vaccinated, consumed antibiotics or been selected for certain genetic traits.

Although there is still debate about farming's share of the world fish supply -- the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization estimates it stood at 44.3 percent in 2007, whereas the PNAS study says it will reach over half in a matter of months -- no one questions that aquaculture has grown exponentially as the world's wild catch has flattened out. In 1970, farmed fish accounted for 6.3 percent of global seafood supply.

This trend reflects global urbanization -- studies show that as more people move to cities, they are consuming more seafood -- but it is changing the world's seascape as well. Vessels now venture to the Antarctic Ocean to catch the tiny krill that have sustained penguins and seals there for millennia, and slender poles strung with farmed oysters and seaweed jut out of Japan's once-pristine Matsushima Bay.

Chinese freshwater fish farms are replacing traditional agricultural plots there, according to Karen Seto of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and Nature Conservancy senior scientist Mike Beck said some Chinese bays are so crammed with net pens that they are no longer navigable.

Moreover, fishermen such as Shannon Moore, who catches salmon in Washington state's Puget Sound, worries about how farmed fish's parasites are affecting wild stocks. "These young wild critters are pretty small, and they can ill afford to have these hitchhikers on them," Moore said, referring to parasites that plague juveniles migrating near Canadian fish farms.

But aquaculture's proponents suggest that farming represents the best chance of giving people a chance to make a living off the sea. Sebastian Belle, executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association, noted that three-quarters of his group's members are either current or former commercial fishermen, and although the average age of Mainers with a fishing lease permit is 57, the average for those with a fish-farm permit is 33. "It's really the next generation of watermen," Belle said.

Jane Lubchenco, who used to write about aquaculture's environmental impacts as an academic before taking the helm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced this month that her agency will come up with a national policy to address fish farming. "It's important that aquaculture be done in a way that's sustainable," she said in an interview.

America now ranks as a minor player in global aquaculture: It accounts for 5 percent of the nation's seafood supply, but the $1.2 billion in annual production is 1.5 percent of the world's total. In 2006, China supplied 62 percent of the world's farmed fish and shellfish, according to FAO.

But farms are expanding in traditional U.S. fishing strongholds, such as New England, the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Northwest, and freshwater fish farms continue to operate in states such as Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi. Freshwater species such as catfish, trout and tilapia still dominate the nation's farmed fish production, but such niche products as oysters with regional appellations and sustainably raised shrimp and caviar now fetch a premium in the United States.

Michael Rubino, who directs NOAA's aquaculture program, said he envisions a future in which the country is "producing seafood from a range of technologies, with wild catch on one side, aquaculture on another, and a whole range in-between."

This prospect has set off a flurry of activity and experiments, as scientists and entrepreneurs try to resolve the environmental challenges fish farming poses. The biggest one involves a fundamental quandary: one needs to feed many small fish to bigger fish to produce ones consumers crave.

One-fourth to one-third of the world's fish catch is landed just to produce the fish oil and fish meal that fish, poultry and pig-farming operations demand, depleting stocks of forage fish such as anchovies, sardines and menhaden. Aquaculture has become more efficient. In 1995, it took an average of 1.04 kilograms of wild fish to produce 1 kilogram of farmed fish, according to the PNAS study, and in 2007 it took 0.63 kilograms to achieve the same result. The sector's share of global fish-oil and fish- meal supplies has doubled in the last decade, as the industry has boomed.

Patricia Majluf, who directs the Center for Environmental Sustainability at Cayetano Herida University in Lima, Peru, watched fleets decimate Peruvian anchovetta stocks in the 1970s and again in the 1990s, setting off an environmental chain reaction in which the area's seabird populations crashed.

"There was no supervision, no control whatsoever," said Majluf, adding that it took a change in government in 2006 to institute a more restrained fishing policy that guarantees at least 5 million tons of anchovies remain in the sea to sustain the ecosystem. "Since then, you're seeing this amazing recovery."

"We've got to solve the feed problem," said Stanford University professor Rosamond L. Naylor, the PNAS study's lead author. "We've got to come up with an alternative that breaks the connection between aquaculture and wild fishing of forage fish."

Hardy experiments with everything from pulling out corn protein right before the corn is fermented into ethanol to stringing together algae to form the omega-3 fatty acids people expect from their fish.

Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.), who sits on the House Natural Resources Committee and plans to introduce legislation in the near future to help establish a national aquaculture policy, said the current situation "requires a comprehensive response" from the federal government.

"There are commercial demands; we can't ignore that," Capps said. But she added: "Doing it at all means doing it carefully."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/19/AR2009091900928.html

Organic Is Mainstream Now!!!!!

I was at a conference in the mid 1990's sponsored by Americans For Safe Food which was a project of the Center For Science In The Public Interest. There was a speaker from Whole Foods who declared in her talk that "We are the mainstream!". Now it is official - the government says so too! As Bob Marley has said, "Babylon paper say so......". Glad to know that time is catching up to me! Now if we can get through all the green wash....... http://earth911.com/blog/2009/09/23/usda-reports-organic-food-now-mainstream/ published on September 23rd, 2009 USDA Reports Organic Food Now Mainstream by Lori Brown In a recently updated Organic Market Overview, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports the market for organic foods is now "mainstream," with organic sales accounting for more than 3 percent of total U.S. food sales. Three percent may seem like a small piece of the pie, but that small piece resulted in $21.1 billion of sales in 2008 alone and is estimated to reach $23 billion in 2009, according to the Nutrition Business Journal. Organic food is sold to consumers via three main venues in the U.S.: To receive the USDA stamp of approval, the National Organic Program requires three years without the application of prohibited pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. Photo: Amanda Wills, Earth911.com Conventional grocery stores- Nearly three of every four conventional grocery stores offer organic food products for sale. Natural food stores- Approximately 20,000 natural food stores offer organic products for sale in the U.S. Direct-to-consumer markets- This includes farmers' markets, foodservice and marketing channels other than retail stores. The Organic Trade Association (OTA) estimates 93 percent of all organic food sales occur through conventional and natural food supermarkets and chains. A few common themes have occurred in various studies conducted by researchers in the public and private sectors regarding the buying habits and demographics of consumers of organic foods. Consumers often prefer organic food products because of concerns regarding health, the environment and animal welfare and are willing to pay the price premiums associated with the products. As stated in the overview, "organic products have shifted from being a lifestyle choice for a small share of consumers to being consumed at least occasionally by a majority of Americans." American food producers struggle to meet the demand of an increasing consumer base. Though certified organic acreage has doubled in the U.S. since 1997, organic food sales have grown much faster, increasing from 3.6 billion to 21.1 in the same period.

Roof Top Urban Farming In Brooklyn

Raising The Root Some City Dwellers Are Hoping Rooftop Farming Will Bear Fruit By Robin Shulman Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, September 12, 2009 NEW YORK Like many a farmer, Ben Flanner rises with the sun. Like most crops, his need water and weeding -- bright tomatoes and fragrant basil, delicate nasturtiums, mottled melons and black eggplants, mustard greens, puntarelle, peas, beets, beans, kale -- about 30 fruits and vegetables in all, and then there are the herbs. But his farm is not like most farms. His farm is three stories off the ground. Beyond it is a sweeping view of the Manhattan skyline. Below it is a TV and film soundstage. Flanner's 6,000-square-foot farm is on a rooftop in the industrial Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. He hopes it can become a model for others who want to grow food but lack space. The problem in cities such as New York is always land. It's expensive and valuable, and it never makes more sense to plant than build apartments. But from a bird's-eye view, much of the city is rooftops. Most roofs are flat. They get direct sunlight, a rare commodity in a densely built place. In recent years, enthusiasm has grown for green roofs, hailed for harnessing rainwater that can overwhelm urban sewage systems, and keeping buildings warmer in winter and cooler in summer, lowering electricity use. But amid increasing interest in fresh, local food, this season seems to herald the era of the rooftop farm. It's as though somewhere someone decreed, "Roofs shall not lie fallow." And a colony of entrepreneurs, residents, schoolteachers and restaurateurs set to work. "All right, open the floodgates!" Flanner says to a volunteer assistant holding a hose on a recent morning. "Sweat these babies down!" says Flanner, speaking of the mustard seeds just laid into the earth. A Brooklyn restaurant ordered 10 pounds of mustard greens to be delivered next month. Mustard greens take exactly one month to grow. Flanner is working on deadline. Flanner, 28, considered going to the country to farm -- only to realize he didn't want to leave the city, he just wanted to be a farmer. He quit his job at E-Trade and partnered with Annie Novak, 26, who had farming experience. The green-roof design firm Goode Green agreed to do the installation for free and the production company Broadway Stages agreed to pay for it, as an experiment on the roof of its Greenpoint building. It took two days for cranes to haul 200,000 pounds of soil made of lightweight expanded shale, like crushed brick, onto the roof. It cost $10 per square foot, or $60,000. Now it is up to Flanner and Novak to make a profitable farm. Flanner harvests in the mornings, barters vegetables for lunch at local eateries, and in the afternoons bikes dozens of pounds of produce to restaurants that have commissioned them. He and Novak run a Sunday farm stand. Across the country, a handful of commercial-scale rooftop farm start-ups have fashioned a rough formula for profit: It involves the distance vegetables must travel from farm to table, their consequent price and quality, and a city's food culture and population density. New York City seems to calculate high on the benefits, and hundreds of other rooftop gardens are in the works, some even large-scale. In the Jamaica section of Queens, the start-up Gotham Greens just signed a lease to build a 10,000-square-foot greenhouse on a roof and grow 30 tons of greens and herbs for sale. The company has a $1.4 million budget and will grow hydroponically, using recirculated water and dissolved nutrients to produce enormous yield without soil. "We see it as a compelling business opportunity," says co-founder Viraj Puri, who hopes to expand to larger rooftops and farm an acre or two at a time. In the South Bronx, an affordable-housing developer is designing a 10,000-square-foot rooftop greenhouse for an eight-story building to be run by a local food co-op. On the Upper West Side, the Manhattan School for Children is building a 2,000-square-foot greenhouse both for food production and environmental education. And this spring on the Lower East Side, Amber Kusmenko, 27, an animator, and her boyfriend hauled 4,000 pounds of soil to the roof of their co-op to build a 200-square-foot farm. "It feels like a big accomplishment," says Kusmenko of the cucumbers and bush beans she has been harvesting. The biggest obstacle is cost. A structural engineer must assess the roof's ability to bear weight. A base layer of heavy-duty plastic may be laid on the roof, and it may be retrofitted for drainage or even outfitted with a greenhouse -- though plenty of food can grow cheaply in a Toys R Us kiddie pool or a basic wood box. Other aspects can be difficult, too, such as providing the amount of water plants need under direct sunlight, dealing with high winds, and hauling soil and other materials upstairs. The benefits are the sun, the ability to custom-engineer the soil for each type of plant, and the lack of pests -- snails, insects and rats, on ground level in the city. "Our biggest pests were the squirrels and the landlady," says Kerry Trueman, 49, who kept an edible garden on the roof of her West Village apartment until her landlady shut it down. Certain cities have led the way to the roof. In San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom has required all departments to audit their land, seeking places suitable for urban agriculture. Chicago, where the mayor's office has a green roof, also has the country's first organic-certified rooftop farm, 2,500 square feet over a restaurant. Toronto just passed a law requiring green roofs on new buildings above a certain size, and many could include food. In the District, the Pug planted tomatoes and chilies above the bar for use in bloody Marys. Sara Loveland of D.C. Greenworks says her nonprofit company is helping four other restaurants build rooftop farms. "Some of the most expensive things for them to purchase can be grown on their roof pretty easily," she says. "It's unused real estate. People need to reevaluate the use of space." Meanwhile, Sky Vegetables envisions building commercial-scale 10,000- to 40,000-square-foot rooftop farms in cities across the country and selling the produce to grocery stores and restaurants. The company is negotiating for test sites in the District, San Francisco and Boston. The dream: after a year, 20 farms; after two years, 100. "In the Northeast, half the year fruits are coming from California and elsewhere, and it's picked prematurely to survive the thousands of miles to get there," chief executive Robert Fireman says. "We have the competitive edge from savings in transportation costs." In New York, there used to be more room on the ground. In the 1990s, there were several thousand community gardens, but as the city boomed, they were sold for development, and now the number is about 600. Willie Morgan, 71, has kept a vegetable garden in Harlem for 40 years, moving to a smaller plot when his previous garden was developed. Now buildings are being constructed on three sides of him. "It's blocking my sunlight," Morgan says. Of course, rooftop farming is not an altogether new solution. Just after the turn of the past century, a utopian vision of self-sufficiency led the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side to keep a rooftop barnyard including 500 chickens, many ducks, six goats -- and a small bear. Then in the 1990s, Upper East Side supermarket owner Eli Zabar became a rooftop pioneer of contemporary times. He built a greenhouse that could harness the heat of his bakery's ovens below for the plants. "I had always wanted to grow tomatoes out of season," Zabar says. Now, he has about a half-acre of greenhouses on two buildings, staffed by two full-time employees, and he sells the produce in his stores. Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, which represents companies that create green roofs, says the number of projects its members constructed in the United States grew by 35 percent last year, though no one tracks how many involved vegetables and fruits. The group is seeing so much new interest in farming that it is starting an agricultural committee, President Steven Peck says. "Everyone has in their mind that you have to start small, but we decided to just start big," says Novak, the partner on the Greenpoint rooftop farm. "People we work with say, 'Let's start with basil in planter boxes.' I say, 'Let's cover your whole roof in dirt and start a farm.' " "It's different from the farm movement in the '70s, when people just wanted to get away," she says. "I want to change people's minds about food, and I can do that in the city. And also I love opera. When I'm off in a remote farm, I think, 'Wow, I can't go to the Met.' "

Tomatoe Sauce for winter

Here are some of my tomato seconds just before becoming sauce. This year I have made small batches of sauce and freeze them. I don't get overwhelmed with a half day adventure. And I get all sorts of variety of tomato as more heirloom varieties become more common - and thus have more seconds!
I have seen seconds priced from $1.00 / 1.50 / lb to $2.00 a basket. I find that when I buy them regularly from the same farm stands, especially if at the end of the market hours, free tomatoes are added to the amount.
After sieving the boiled tomatoes, not much boiling off of water is needed. No additives and I have great salt free tomato sauce for the winter. Beats the canned stuff.