New investment boosts the salmon supply chain as farmers face down the sector’s critics in Scottish parliamentary inquiry, writes Jenny Hjul in this month’s round-up of industry news

Salmon farming is a safe bet, or so says Anne Hvistendahl, the head of seafood at Norway’s DNB bank, which handles the majority of loans to the sector. With around NOK 90 billion (£6.5 billion) at play, whatever Hvistendahl says carries great weight.

Talking to a recent Intrafish podcast, both she and her DNB colleague, senior advisor Dag Sletmo, insisted the ‘industry is part of the solution, and not the problem’ in producing food sustainably, but they warned that reputation and social licence must remain a priority.

‘It seems like the industry is recognising that this is a real challenge,’ said Sletmo, which is not just the case in Norway but in Scotland too.

Appearing before a Scottish parliamentary inquiry earlier this month, salmon representatives were forced to defend their businesses against attacks by campaigners determined to undermine the sector’s successes.

Tavish Scott, chief executive of sector body Salmon Scotland, told the Rural Affairs and Islands committee (RAIC), which is looking at how the industry has progressed since a previous inquiry in 2018, that farmers have been subjected to a ‘deliberate, orchestrated, and coordinated campaign by anti-salmon farming extreme activists’.

In the week before, the vegan group Animal Equality, that seeks to end all livestock farming, released video footage of dead fish being removed from a Scottish Sea Farms marine site at Dunstaffnage near Oban, prior to a visit by RAIC MSPs.

The company and, later the government’s Fish Health Inspectorate, debunked claims by the campaigner that it was covering up fish deaths, insisting the procedure was routine and in keeping with best practice on farms.

Scott described the propaganda exercise, which was widely covered by the Scottish press, as ‘an obvious and deliberate attempt to derail this committee’s focus’.

Activists even questioned the value of the 12,000-plus jobs supported by the sector but in the past month alone new investment has created further employment, on farms and in the supply chain across Scotland.

After a long-running application process, Organic Sea Harvest (OSH) won planning permission for a third farm site on Skye, although plans for a fourth location were rejected.

OSH director and co-founder Alex MacInnes welcomed the approval of the one farm, and the opportunities it opens up, but said two new farms would have led to the creation of 14 jobs, on top of the existing workforce of 16.

Every new farm or farm expansion benefits the supply chain too. Inverness based Gael Force, which has built more than 100 feed barges, is fitting out a 400-tonne capacity steel barge, launched last month by Dutch boat builder Nauplius, and due to be delivered to Mowi Scotland.

Gael Force partnered with Nauplius for the first time to meet demand while its own facility was fully occupied with new and refurbished concrete barge projects.

Mowi, meanwhile, marked a ‘significant milestone’ this month with the first of its post smolts from Loch Etive transferred to the company’s farm off the isle of Muck.

Mowi acquired the Loch Etive sites from trout farmer Dawnfresh and repurposed them to grow post smolt salmon in the hope the brackish water in the loch and a new fallowing cycle will ease the transition to salt water.

[New roles]

Also expanding, and boosting the local workforce, is Dundee based aquaculture technology pioneer Ace Aquatec, which has received a grant from French tyre maker Michelin. This will enable Ace to ‘invest in the delivery of more advanced digital data to provide insight to the fish farming community, and to create more new roles in areas including sales, operations and software development in Dundee’, said chief executive Nathan Pyne-Carter.

In the Central Belt, Scottish biotech company MiAlgae, which produces omega-3 for fish feed from microalgae fed on whisky by-products, raised £14 million to scale up. It now plans to develop an industrial scale production plant, with the first phase completed by 2025, and full production expected by 2027, with the capacity to produce 3,000 tonnes of marine omega-3 annually.

MiAlgae also learned last month that it is one of 15 finalists in Prince William’s £1 million Earthshot Prize, to be announced in Cape Town in November.

On Stornoway, fish farming boat builder Coastal Workboats Scotland was awarded £166,547 from Highlands and Islands Enterprise to buy robotic welding equipment to be used in the construction of its ell-electric workboat and other craft.

The company has been recruiting to expand its local team, and expects to create around 25 jobs in total within the local marine manufacturing sector, Fish Farming Expert reported.

And the Scottish government has pledged further support for aquaculture this month, with the announcement of £14 million from its Marine Fund towards a variety of projects, including a £1.7 million grant for marketing body Seafood Scotland; a trial of a waterborne feeding system by salmon farmer Cooke Scotland; expansion for Smolt supplier Landcatch Natural Selection; processing equipment for small salmon at Tiny Fish; and almost £1.1 million for Vonin Scotland’s new net station at Kyleakin on Skye.
But hopes to develop on-land salmon farming in England suffered a setback, when proposals for a £120 million onshore farm in Grimsby were put on hold.

The farm, planned by Aquacultured Seafood – and set to bring 80 jobs – had been approved in November 2023 but Animal Equality challenged the decision. There will now be a judicial review, which postpones construction and could potentially overturn the planning approval, according to Salmon Business.

[Iceland boom]

In the other salmon producing nations, Iceland continued its upward trajectory, with the export value of farmed fish more than £150 million for the first seven months of 2024, up 28 per cent on the same period last year.

Most of this was due to higher salmon sales, and exports are tipped to continue growing as existing salmon companies increase production and a number of new salmon farm projects become operational.

Elsewhere, a changing political climate could make life for beleaguered salmon farmers easier in Chile, where the front-runner in the 2025 presidential election, Evelyn Matthei, promises to herald in a more salmon-friendly regime if she ousts arch sector critic President Gabriel Boric.

And in Canada, the unpopular minority Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, responsible for shutting down salmon farming in its current form in British Columbia, is losing ground to the Conservatives, whose leader, Pierre Poilievre, is more sympathetic to the sector’s plight.

In Norway, if the Conservatives win back power in next year’s election, they plan to reduce the aquaculture tax that has caused uproar among the country’s biggest producers.

But perhaps the best news for salmon farmers this month came from DNB Markets, which forecast a drop in feed prices in the year ahead.

Analyst Alexander Aukner told the DNB Markets Seafood Forum in London ‘costs are declining after a massive surge post-Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a spike in grain prices’, Intrafish reported.

The cancellation of last year’s first anchovy fishing season in Peru had also pushed up feed costs but fishmeal and fish oil prices are now coming down with more normalised quotas.

Keep up to date with the industry’s top stories, all in our next news review.