The article is presented as propaganda and the media format is trash but it raises good points. Still it fails to point out growing use of insect, plant, and byproduct feeds. It also fails to mention that feed conversion ratios in farmed fish are better than any of the land animals commonly farmed, so overall i/o is about as sustainable as it gets for animal husbandry. We also fail to recognize that forage fisheries have short generation times and are easier to measure, so maintaining healthy stocks is easier than trying to do the same with wild caught pelagic fish. Sustainable fisheries are beautiful resources. When managed and informed properly they can afford more production than would otherwise happen under maximum exploitation. They require science based management and compliance of course. But there are a lot of success stories as we have adopted fisheries science and I find it annoying that these articles send people to despondency rather than to grounding their consumption choices in science.
The research project they linked in the article [1] talks about 700 sardines needed for 1 farmed salmon which is not a great i/o but supposedly there's a shift away from fishmeal towards soy, algae, insect protein, etc to where fishmeal is more like 15% of farmed fish diet. Note these are wild fish as input so the notion of farming distinct & preserving wild stocks isn't accurate. Per the comments, there were plenty of NYT readers who were not aware of the downsides so I'm not as critical about it as you. Besides yield there's other considerations like disease spread and genetic degradation to wild stocks, sealice, pollution spillover, and so on.
The article is presented as propaganda and the media format is trash but it raises good points. Still it fails to point out growing use of insect, plant, and byproduct feeds. It also fails to mention that feed conversion ratios in farmed fish are better than any of the land animals commonly farmed, so overall i/o is about as sustainable as it gets for animal husbandry. We also fail to recognize that forage fisheries have short generation times and are easier to measure, so maintaining healthy stocks is easier than trying to do the same with wild caught pelagic fish. Sustainable fisheries are beautiful resources. When managed and informed properly they can afford more production than would otherwise happen under maximum exploitation. They require science based management and compliance of course. But there are a lot of success stories as we have adopted fisheries science and I find it annoying that these articles send people to despondency rather than to grounding their consumption choices in science.
The research project they linked in the article [1] talks about 700 sardines needed for 1 farmed salmon which is not a great i/o but supposedly there's a shift away from fishmeal towards soy, algae, insect protein, etc to where fishmeal is more like 15% of farmed fish diet. Note these are wild fish as input so the notion of farming distinct & preserving wild stocks isn't accurate. Per the comments, there were plenty of NYT readers who were not aware of the downsides so I'm not as critical about it as you. Besides yield there's other considerations like disease spread and genetic degradation to wild stocks, sealice, pollution spillover, and so on.
1: https://theoutlawocean.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20261009180702/https://www.nytim...
So, it's like every other animal farming.
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