“Pot Luck” editorial, from Rural Delivery, December 2010
What’s new? The holiday season is heading into full frantic and Danny Williams has quit the premiership of Newfoundland and Labrador. He leaves office of his own volition much as the last wildly popular Atlantic province premier, Frank McKenna, did. “Thanks, it’s been great. Time for a fresh voice.”
It is too bad more politicians don’t see a decade in office as plenty and get off the pot. Public office should not be a career choice or option. Danny leaves with a deal in place that, once finalized, will pour electricity into Nova Scotia from turbines on Labrador’s Churchill River. Soon as that happens Nova Scotia Power can mothball its Pictou County coal-fired generation plant that creates dirt and consternation among nearby residents. No one in authority says that’s what will be done. It’s fun to dream.
Lobster season starts on this shore as I write. What’s the price going to be? It’s a question on every fisherman’s mind and one that won’t have an answer until the first lobster comes ashore. It’s not as if lobsters don’t come ashore the year around from the few offshore boats owned by Clearwater Fine Foods. When the “experiment” in offshore lobstering began a couple of decades ago it was protected from its critics by lies and deceit. Only an exploratory fishery, inshore fishermen feeling threatened were told. Besides, “offshore and inshore lobsters are distinct populations.” The experimental fishery soon enough became permanent, and when no proof could be found that offshore and inshore populations were distinct that fact was shrugged off. As for a need to disclose what the offshore boats were getting paid for their catches, that went out the porthole once Clearwater had scooped up all of the licenses.
At this point most everyone is resigned to the presence of an offshore lobster fishery. Not so, fishermen in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia trying to curb open-net fin fish farming in our bays and estuaries where they pollute with poop and serve as nurseries for diseases and pests such as sea lice. Groups in the two provinces fighting both expansion and management practices on existing farms deemed detrimental to the marine environment have recently joined forces establishing the Atlantic Coalition for Aquaculture Reform. Meanwhile, a company in Centre Burlington, Hants County, N.S., is heading to market with European sea bass raised on land. “‘We go out of our way to farm sustainably,’” Jeremy Lee, president of Sustainable Blue, told the Halifax Chronicle Herald. “All the operation’s incoming water is sterilized and all the organic waste from the fish is collected and held on land. ‘We don’t discharge effluent.’ The organic material will be used as fertilizer.”
Nova Scotia’s Deputy Minister of Agriculture Paul LaFleche, when asked about bringing fin fish farming ashore, said it would be too costly and push our farmed salmon out of the market. How and why, then, can Jeremy Lee raise his fish on land? The answer, coming from Marshall Giles, director of aquaculture with the Nova Scotia Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture is as follows:
“The fish farm in Hants County growing European Sea Bass is the only facility growing these fish in North America. The wholesale value of sea bass in NA is up to three times that of salmon and is a niche market here. “That being said, sea bass production can absorb much larger operating and capital costs and still be very competitive in NA. Furthermore, European sea bass is not indigenous to North America and it must be grown on land-based farms in a strictly controlled and closed environment. “In Canada, we have laws governing the introduction of new species and generally speaking, species not naturally found in Canada cannot be introduced into our waters…that is a good thing. We want to protect our environment from the introduction of new species in our marine waters, which can compete for habitat and displace indigenous species. “Several studies have been conducted on growing salmon in land-based closed containment and just last year, Fisheries and Oceans Canada completed a study in B.C. That study shows that closed containment is very risky and is not profitable.”
My quick answer to this would echo what’s being said time and again in Atlantic Canada’s agriculture community: “Get out of the commodity market. Niche markets, adding value, and direct marketing are the way to go.” If caged salmon are the dogs of the aquaculture industry, and raising them in open pens assaults the environment, let’s get out of the business.
We had a local bird count yesterday, organized by the Nature Conservancy of Canada on behalf of the incredibly shrinking Canadian Wildlife Service. The Service maintains three migratory waterfowl sanctuaries in the area – Port Joli, Port L’Hebert and Haley’s Lake, and Sable River. Craig Smith with the Conservancy pulled a team of volunteers together. This was his second consecutive year organizing the count. It is fascinating to go afield with people who know their birds. The sanctuaries are there specifically for the protection of Canada geese and Black ducks, but there is so much more. My team of three, two who know their birds and me mostly along for the ride, were assigned Port Joli. The official list of birds spotted by three volunteer teams will be compiled by Sue Abbott of Bird Studies Canada who was in our car driven by Nazo.
The Port Joli list I already know will include several hundred geese along with Black ducks, mergansers, grebes, buffleheads, Common goldeneyes, three varieties of scoters, loons, a cormorant and a Bald eagle, plus a short list of dickey birds. Far across the harbor at one point we picked out with scopes a small flock of Canada geese tending in a quiet little bay just outside the sanctuary boundary, unusual for the fact that all the rest of the hundreds of geese we had seen were well out from shore. The geese in the sheltered cove were obviously feeding, as one was tipped up, bum in the air. Minutes later the cove geese were still there, still feeding, same one with its bum in the air. That’s strange, was the collective thought until Nazo, looking a little to the left of the oddly static flock spied a stone wall blind and announced, “Decoys.”
Sure enough, hunters with a string of Styrofoam geese were hunkered down behind a neat stone wall among the rocks no doubt honk-honking their hearts out with goose calls in the hope of luring feathered cousins of their plastic floats into the cove.
I went goose hunting from a blind once. It was a pit dug into a Missouri cornfield and I was armed with a bow and arrows. My blind-mates weren’t impressed with having to dodge my bow as I wheeled into action each time a bird flew within range. Everyone, geese and mates, survived the exercise.
And a merry Christmas and happy holiday season to all from all of us at Rural Delivery. Best wishes for the new year. DvL
(Go to www.AtlanticFarmer.com and follow the BC-aquaculture link to find the DFO study referred to by Marshall Giles.
