Today, salmon farming is also taking place in Australia, Faroe Islands, Iceland, Ireland, and New Zealand. The salmon farming production cycle lasts about 3 years. The first year of production takes place in controlled freshwater environments, and then the farmed salmon are transported to seawater cages.
These escapes are frequent enough that wherever there are Atlantic salmon being farmed near wild Atlantic salmon, they are mixing. Farmed genomes, often Norwegian, are showing up in the wild salmon of Norwegian, Scottish, English and Irish rivers. They turn up in the genetics of wild fish in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Maine.
[1] Salmon fish farming started on an experimental level in the 1960s, but became an industry in Norway in the 1980s, and in Chile in the 1990s. The farmed salmon industry has grown substantially in the past 40 years, and today approximately 60% of salmon produced worldwide is farmed .
Why farmed salmon is healthier than you think?
While they have roughly the same amount of protein, there’s 50 percent more potassium and nearly three times as much iron in wild salmon, while farmed is much higher in B vitamins, particularly thiamine and folate (and, of course, the omega-3 fats).
When I was writing we ran into the question “Why you should never eat farmed salmon?”.
What’s more, studies show that farmed salmon is more likely to contain harmful contaminants like PCBs, which are pollutants linked to insulin resistance, obesity, cancer and stroke. They’re also often treated with antibiotics and tend to be higher in inflammatory omega-6 fatty acids.
The import of Atlantic salmon eggs into the Pacific for farming has raised concern about possible transfer of disease to wild stocks. Today, most of the salmon available for us to eat is farmed. Omega-3 fatty acids in fish are derived from plants (algae, leaves, grass). Some more things to take a look at: references, or summary.
Farmed salmon also contain far higher levels of contaminants than wild, in part because of their elevated fat content. Many toxins readily accumulate in fat, which means even when raised in similarly contaminated conditions, farmed salmon will absorb more toxins than the wild fish.
Where do Atlantic salmon come from?
Atlantic salmon farming has traditionally been dominated by a small number of farming regions – Chile, Norway, Canada, and Scotland – as several natural conditions often have to be present to ensure optimal salmon farming production.