According to Marine Harvest Faroes, the ideal place for Atlantic salmon farming has to be close to the natural home of the wild species — and to include a diet consisting of marine feed sourced in the fish’s own natural environment.
Backed by the expertise and muscle of the world’s largest seafood company, Marine Harvest Faroes presents a convincing case for its product — farmed Atlantic salmon bred and grown in a place that offers the optimal nutrition and natural environment together with the most effective practice and legislation to prevent disease and pollution.
“It’s essentially about the marine environment in the Faroe Islands, which is also host to wild Atlantic salmon,” says sales manager Hans Jákup Mikkelsen. “It’s about the fact that our farmed salmon here is fed with marine feed made from fresh fish caught in the same environment; and it’s about superb product quality achieved through the high levels of health and welfare enjoyed by this salmon.”
Founded in 2004, Marine Harvest Faroes is a subsidiary of Norway’s Marine Harvest Group, an international giant focusing on Atlantic salmon as well as white fish products.
The Atlantic salmon is known for having two distinct habitats, freshwater rivers and ocean — it begins life in fresh water and later undergoes a physiological transformation to enable it to live in salt water. Thus the wild salmon leaves its river of origin at juvenility and moves out to oceanic sea, only to return to its place of origin to spawn after a period of one to three years.
For wild Atlantic salmon spawned in Norwegian and Icelandic rivers, the waters surrounding the Faroe Islands offer a natural oceanic home.
Mr. Mikkelsen says: “When salmon leave the rivers of Norway and Iceland, they swim to the Faroe Islands to grow. Hence the saying that the Faroes is their natural play ground. As for aquaculture, it’s a proven fact that the clean, cool waters and strong currents around these islands provide excellent conditions for salmon farming.”
To produce high quality fish with the right content of Omega 3 fatty acids, marine feed is needed. This may not be self evident everywhere, however, as feed producers often add vegetables to their fishmeal products or replace marine oils with vegetable oils.
It’s a different story in the Faroes.
“The feed we use is original fish feed,” Mr. Mikkelsen says. “The salmon we produce here are given a natural diet which includes high content of fish meal and where only fish oil is used. Therefore the Omega 3 profile is high in our products.”
Fish welfare: The source of the fish meal and fish oil used to feed most farmed salmon in the Faroe Islands is fresh fish caught in Faroese fishing grounds.
“It takes less than 3 weeks from the point where the raw material is caught at sea until the feed is processed and consumed,” Mr. Mikkelsen says.
The regulation governing fisheries in Faroese waters is known to be one of the world’s most rigorous and respected, with key emphasis placed on sustainability — by necessity, as fishing has long been the mainstay of the Faroese economy. Fisheries science and international cooperation play a major part, Mr. Mikkelsen points out.
“The marine feed sourced here is made from raw materials taken from sustainable resources fished in Faroese waters with catches based on scientific recommendations and international agreements.”
After having struggled earlier with disease and pollution issues, the Faroese have implemented what is believed to be the world’s toughest legislation on aquaculture. The aquaculture industry has been through a period of consolidation and fish farmers agree that the measures taken have cleared the way for today’s success in the business.
One of the implications is the mandatory process of generation based production with extensive fallow periods to prevent the spread of disease and stop organic pollution from accumulating on the seabed under or nearby fish farms.
After a maximum 16 months in the sea cage, the fish has to be harvested, with all equipment removed and cleaned before fish is restocked following the fallow period.
Another aspect of the legislation involves health surveillance based on monthly site visits by the inspection authorities. Pollution is closely monitored by frequent sampling of the seafloor, a key determinant for the maximum biomass stocked.
“Our salmon has good appetite at all times and has no diseases,” Mr. Mikkelsen adds.
“We use no antibiotics and the average population density in the on-growing cages is below 10 kilograms per cubic meter. To ensure its wellbeing the fish is never graded at sea.”
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