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From music scales to fish scales: Dave Porter

June 17, 2013

Filed under: Uncategorized,What We Do — Tags: aquaculture, Big Sugar, Canada, Dartmouth, Dave Porter, fisheries, Freshwater, german shepherd, Hatchery, marine harvest, music industry, Nova Scotia, Ocean Falls, Sabre, Toronto, Universal Music, Vancouver Island University — marineharvestcanada @ 12:48 pm

By Gina Forsyth

On the north coast of BC’s mainland lays the small community of Ocean Falls, where one of Marine Harvest’s hatcheries is located. Accessible only by boat or plane, this Marine Harvest facility is where Dave Porter, Fresh Water Technician, has worked since 2011.

Dave Porter and Sabre

“I’ve found my place here,” says Dave with a smile in his voice.

Although Dave was born in Vancouver, he grew up and graduated from high school on the other coast, in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. “I was mad crazy about the music industry”, said Dave, which led to a 26 year career as a talent scout for Universal Music in Toronto. He signed such bands as The Matthew Good Band and Big Sugar before leaving the hustle and bustle of the industry and the big city in 2008, when he was offered a buy-out. “I took the money and ran,” he says.

After coming out to the West Coast, which he was familiar with through his musical scouting trips, Dave enrolled in the Fisheries and Aquaculture diploma course at Vancouver Island University, where he learned about the company through human resources presentations and summer jobs. He graduated with honors and joined Marine Harvest soon after.

In addition to the usual tasks involved with his position and due to the remoteness of the hatchery’s location, Dave has the ongoing opportunity to increase his equipment maintenance skills, something he’s particularly enjoying.

Sabre, Dave’s German Shepherd/Blue Heeler cross, who he describes as “a good bear-scarer”, keeps him company at home, where he’s kept busy chopping wood to fuel his furnace. He enjoys the opportunity to listen to music for pleasure instead of analyzing it and his 70,000 digitized songs give him a wide range to choose from.

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Farmed fish an efficient source of food

November 30, 2012

Filed under: Letters to editor — Tags: aquaculture, british columbia, Campbell River, coldblooded, conservation, cultured fish, Dean Trethewey, diet, efficient, farmed fish, farming, farms, fish farmers, fish food, fish meal, food woes, Freshwater, gravity, Harvey Williams, Jacques Cousteau, letter to editor, Lloyd Erickson, marine, ocean, population, salmon, sea, sustainable, Times Colonist, Victoria — marineharvestcanada @ 9:54 am

The following letter was published in the Victoria Times Colonist in response to letters penned by Lloyd Erickson and Harvey Williams, both of Victoria.

By Dean Trethewey, Times Colonist, November 30, 2012

The two letter-writers perhaps don’t appreciate the benefits of raising fish for food.

Putting aside the obvious health and conservation benefits of cultured fish, freshwater and marine fish are coldblooded, so unlike land animals, they don’t require energy to heat their core. Also, water provides neutral buoyancy so they don’t fight against gravity. Both of these key energy-saving facts mean fish are one of the most efficient converters of feed to edible meat at a ratio of about 1: 1. This is important as we search to find efficient ways to feed more than seven billion of us.

I agree with the writers that farmed fish must be fed a sustainable diet and encourage them to learn more about how B.C. fish farmers are leading the way in using sustainable ingredients.

The benefit of raising fish for human consumption is not a new revelation, as ocean conservationist Jacques Cousteau wisely stated decades ago: “We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters.”

Dean Trethewey
Campbell River

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Spawning Success at Marine Harvest Canada

January 30, 2012

Filed under: Uncategorized,What We Do — Tags: aquaculture, atlantic, brood stock, Canada, Dean Guest, Duncan, eggs, enhancement, families, farming, fish, Fresh Water Farms, Freshwater, generation, genetics, Hatchery, hybrid, marine, marine harvest canada, McConnell, MHC, milt, Mowi, Norway, performance, Phil Heyward, RAS, recirculating aquaculture systems, salmon, Scotland, strians, Technician — marineharvestcanada @ 4:11 pm

“Closing the cycle” is how farming began. It was what turned us from hunters and gatherers to farmers. It began with terrestrial farming thousands of years ago and has only recently, relatively speaking, become possible in the water environment thanks to the relentless endeavors of aquaculture pioneers.

Salmon have been raised at stock enhancement hatcheries around the world since the late 1800’s, but these hatcheries have historically and currently relied on annual capture and spawning of adult salmon returning to rivers to produce the next generation. It wasn’t until the 1960’s that Norwegian and Scottish salmon farmers managed to raise salmon in a contained space for their entire lifecycle and, while most captive salmon were harvested for profit, kept some fish back in order to produce the next generation.

Phil Heyward and a future proud parent pose at Freshwater Farms Hatchery

Today Marine Harvest Canada annually produces approximately 25 million green eggs, in house, to meet its ongoing production requirements. In BC, there are no independent egg producers and importation of eggs to Canada is very rare and if allowed, is strictly regulated. It is therefore important that salmon farmers protect the genetic integrity of the stocks they have while making improvements to their performance.

“The egg production cycle takes considerable time and requires several years of planning,” says Dean Guest, MHC’s Freshwater Production Manager. “Each fall, brood stock are selected from saltwater sites and transported to a freshwater water brood site. For example, brood selected in the fall of 2011 will produce eggs in the fall of 2012, that will first feed as fry in 2013, smolt in the spring of 2014, reach market size in 2015, and brood again in 2016.”

The majority of MHC’s brood stock are currently reared in salt water, but at MHC’s Fresh Water Farms site in Duncan, BC, 10 million eggs are spawned per year from brood that never see salt water. “They are kept in fresh water to add another layer of protection for our brood stock,” adds Dean.

Two unique strains of brood stock, Mowi and McConnell, are used at MHC. To date they have been reared as separate brood lines and only crossed as production fish.

“In the past, 150 new families were created each year to continue the brood lines into the next generation,” explains Dean, “and a family is created by mating a single male with a single female.”

Starting this fall, MHC will be creating 600 families that include both pure strains and hybrid crosses. The families will be mixed at the eyed egg stage to produce smaller groups of 2500 smolt, and grown to harvest size at sea. By taking tissue samples at the time of harvest, each fish can be identified by stock and family. Collecting information on these fish at the processing plant, such as weight and maturation, allow MHC to select families for the next generation, with a focus on improving performance.

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Varied career leads to aquaculture passion

August 12, 2010

Filed under: What We Do — Tags: BC, Campbell River, Chile, Cranbrook, Freshwater, Ken Maddison, Langley, Lower Mainland, Malaspina, Mexico, Nelson, Ocean Falls, Ocean Falls Hatchery, Omega Salmon Group, Port Hardy, Saga Seafarms, Shelly, Skytrain, Taffy the Yorkie Poo, Trout Farm, United Hatchery, Vancouver — marineharvestcanada @ 1:35 pm

For Ken Maddison, the manager of the Ocean Falls hatchery since it opened in 2003, his passion for the industry as well as his ability to adapt to change and be constantly challenged means a high level of job satisfaction.
He joined Omega Salmon Group in 1992 after completing his degree in fish health at Malaspina. Ken has also run a trout farm in Langley that supplied eggs to Chile, helped to build Skytrain as a crane operator in Vancouver’s Lower Mainland, and operated his own fish guiding business in Campbell River. He began his aquaculture career with a year at United Hatchery doing lab work. That led him to the saltwater side of the industry, first with Saga Seafarms and then Omega in Port Hardy. Ken soon realized he was most happy working with fish earlier in their lifecycle and made the change to freshwater permanent without any regrets.
There are no better people than those he works with, enthuses Ken, adding that it’s the quality of the relationships he’s built that adds such an important dimension to his job.
Ken was born in Nelson and attended high school in Cranbrook. He’s been married for 30 years to his childhood sweetheart, Shelly. They have two kids, a 16 year old daughter and a 21 year old son . The Maddison family is rounded out by Taffy the Yorkie Poo.
He enjoys vacationing in Mexico – ‘it’s a special place” – and would like to retire there when the time comes. Ken has a passion for hunting, fishing and enjoys doing home renovations. He’s done extensive work on both his Campbell River home as well as on the house he and Shelly bought in Ocean Falls five years ago.

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Recirculation innovation at Sayward North

February 25, 2010

Filed under: Sustainability,What We Do — Tags: ammonia, carbon dioxide, Danish, Denmark, Freshwater, FW technical Operations Manager, InterAqua Advance, marine harvest canada, MHC, north america, organics, Phillip Redmond, recirculation, sayward north — marineharvestcanada @ 1:18 pm

It is an exciting time in MHC Freshwater. Construction has begun on Sayward North’s new turnkey recirculation system provided by InterAqua Advance from Denmark. This will be the first of their systems in North America. Work began with falling the trees, removing the stumps and scraping off all of the organic layer. The next step involves excavating the site to the base of the footings and tanks to begin the concrete work and the installation of the pipe work. Construction of the building is scheduled to begin the middle of March with the completion of the first system by July 1st.

The new building will house two separate systems each designed to recirculate an incredible 99.1% of the water. Each system will contain four 12m tanks which will flow into a treatment facility with two 4m deep bioreactors which are the heart of the InterAqua Advance system designed to convert toxic ammonia into safe nitrate, digest fine organics, degas off excess carbon dioxide and saturate the water with oxygen, exciting isn’t it! The water is then pumped back to the tanks with a small side stream of the water being supersaturated to help meet the oxygen requirements of the fish.The existing Hatchery uses approximately 15,000 Lpm of water to produce 1.8 million smolts. The new recirculation systems will triple the smolt production of the site using only an amazing 600 Lpm of new water while increasing smolt size and quality at the same time.

We look forward to continuing to work together with our Danish colleagues to make this project a success. We are all eager to have the project progress to the operational phase with the first fish scheduled to be added to the system already being first fed in the Hatchery. Between now and then, there is a lot of work to be completed but there’s no turning back now!

By Phillip Redmond, FW Technical Operations Manager

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Marine Harvest tells city the good news

December 3, 2009

Filed under: What We Do — Tags: atlantic salmon, BC Coast, Broughton archipelago, Campbell River, Chile, City of Campbell River, closed containment, Community Support, Courier Islander, Dan MacLennan, DFO, Duncan, farmed salmon, Faroe Islands, Freshwater, Ian Roberts, Ireland, Klemtu, marine harvest, marine harvest canada, Nass, Norway, PHPP, pink salmon, Port Hardy, Port Hardy Processing Plant, s, Sayward, Scotland, Sea Lice, Skeena, Vincent Erenst, wild salmon — marineharvestcanada @ 4:00 pm

by Dan MacLennan, Courier-Islander
Published: Thursday, December 03, 2009

Saying Marine Harvest suffers from bad press, company officials attempted to set the record straight in a presentation to city council Tuesday.

“I think it can be said in general that salmon farming gets a lot of press attention in BC and also in Campbell River, and unfortunately for us the attention is not always very positive,” managing director Vincent Erenst told councillors. “Most of the news stories originate from our opponents or our critics and they are usually not positive.

“At Marine Harvest we believe that the public does not really get a fair view of what our industry actually is and the things that we are doing.” Erenst outlined that Marine Harvest, the largest Atlantic salmon farmer in the world, employs 550 people directly on the BC coast, roughly 200 of whom call Campbell River home.

Marine Harvest Canada managing director Vincent Erenst, right, and communications manager Ian Roberts spoke to Campbell River city council Tuesday night.

Globally, Marine Harvest will produce 322,000 tonnes of Atlantic salmon this year, Erenst said, roughly a quarter of global production, through operations in Norway, Canada, Scotland, Chile, Ireland and the Faroe Islands. He said the company produces 38,000 tonnes of fish annually in BC, enough to fill 1,900 trucks, for roughly $220 million in annual sales. Operations include six freshwater facilities from Duncan to Port Hardy producing brood stock and smolts, and processing plants in Port Hardy and Klemtu.

The company has 71 fish farming licences on the coast but only 41 salmon farms sites have been used in the last couple of years and no more than 30 are in production at any one time, while the other 10 sites are fallowed from two to six months. Marine Harvest Canada has a monthly payroll of $3 million and spends $10 million a month on goods and services, Erenst said, while the company has been investing $10 to $15 million per year on the Island.

“The last four years, from 2006 until now, have been profitable years for this company,” Erenst said. “They’ve been very good years in fact. They have allowed us to invest in our business, not so much in growth but in making our operations much more solid, more efficient, more robust and more environmentally sustainable.”

Major investments in the works include a new waste water treatment plant worth more than $3 million for their Port Hardy processing plant. More will go into Sayward. “Next year we will make a big investment in Sayward,” Erenst said. “We have a hatchery there which we will rebuild and make much more efficient in order to use less water and produce bigger and stronger smolts. That will be a five or six million dollar investment.”

There are social benefits as well. “We support the community in many ways,” he said. “I believe around 40 per cent of our $240,000 community support budget is actually spent in Campbell River.” As for the more contentious issues, Erenst acknowledged no lack of debate over the impacts of fish farms and sea lice on wild salmon stocks.

“Whatever the truth may be, I believe we can say that during the last five years we’ve worked very hard to minimize the amount of sea lice on our fish through a combination of good farming practices and treatment with a de-licing agent called Slice just before the out-migration season,” he said. He said DFO data shows the amount of sea lice per wild fish in the Broughton Archipelago has decreased from 2005 to 2008 and 2009.

“It basically means that by 2008, only one sea lice was found on every 13th pink salmon fry. That number in 2008 and 2009 was lower than the amount found in the Skeena/Nass estuary where there are no salmon farms at all. I believe we can say there’s been a very clear decrease of sea lice on wild salmon in the Broughton Archipelago.

If that really comes from our improved sea lice management or if there are other biological factors at work, we don’t know, but what is sure is that as of now, we’ve reached levels of lice on wild salmon in the Broughton that are lower or equal to natural background levels. So if there is an impact, in the case of the Broughton, this impact must be very small.”

He pointed to strong pink salmon returns in the Broughton area and elsewhere around the Island, saying they “prove that sea lice have not yet destroyed these stocks.” Erenst said Marine Harvest must work to continually increase the sustainability of fish farming. “For us this clearly means minimizing or eliminating completely the interaction of farmed salmon with wild salmon, minimizing the effect we have the sea bottom and the quality of the sea water, and minimizing the amount of marine ingredients in our feed.

I honestly believe that we’ve demonstrated over the last five years we have made lots of progress in this direction and it’s definitely our intention to continue to do so.” As for closed containment, Erenst said Marine Harvest has a small-scale pilot project waiting for funding assistance from the federal and provincial governments.

“So far we’ve not been able to convince either the feds or the province to support us in this,” he said. (See more in next Wednesday’s C-I).

photo credit – Dan MacLennan

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Phase One Recirculation Flourishing at Dalrymple Hatchery

December 10, 2008

Filed under: What We Do — Tags: ammonia, aquaculture, atlantic salmon, Big Tree Creek, british columbia, broughton, Campbell River, Cyrus Rocks, darymple, Fish Farm, Freshwater, hatchery tour, Larsen Island, moving bed, nitrate, Orca Chief, Project Management, recirculation, smolt, technology, water treatment — marineharvestcanada @ 10:27 am

First was the installation of Dalrymple Hatchery’s new recirculation system followed by staff training and now the first fish produced by the system are thriving in the Campbell River South and the Broughton areas. This initiative represents a number of significant milestones for Marine Harvest.

Jamie Gaskill, Production Director, said recently that this system represents phase one of a four year freshwater management plan. Both Dalrymple and Big Tree Creek Hatchery will be expanded under this regimen. At its conclusion, both facilities will be able to produce four million smolts each by 2012 using recirc technology.

“These fish (from Dalrymple) are the first benefits we’ve reaped through the moving bed technology”, added Gaskill. Moving bed technology is a newer style of water treatment for the conversion of ammonia to nitrate.

Also noteworthy in this endeavor is the successful use of the Project Management style of planning spearheaded by Dalrymple Manager Craig Schelter and Philip Redmond, Freshwater Technical Operations Manager.

Developed by Priority Management, a workplace skill development company, the key is starting with both the deadline and end product in mind. From there, the project is “worked backwards” until reaching the initial task while assigning a deadline for each one. This method clearly shows how being late on one task can cause numerous tasks to fall behind.

“The contractor was involved up front with our plan and helped with the budget and timeline. Without the planning the project would not have finished on-time and under budget”, said Schelter.

And naturally smolt quality is a most important component of the entire picture.

“We recently shipped our first group of smolts from this system and they were some of the nicest quality produced in the Freshwater Department. The fins were in excellent condition and the size was right on budget”, said Phillip Redmond.

Manager Len Wells agrees. His Larsen Island site received 300,000 smolts during the third week of October. “These are awesome, big, healthy fish with extremely low mortality”, he enthused.

This positivity about the Dalrymple fish was echoed by Jeanine Siemens, Manager of Cyrus Rocks, which took delivery of 125,000 smolts.

“The fish entered well and grouped up right away”, Siemens said, adding that the move to the site “went like clockwork”, a testament to both the Cyrus site staff, who did an excellent job, and the Orca Chief crew, who paid a great deal of attention to the many details.

Benchmarking, both internally and with an outside company, hasn’t been overlooked either.

Schelter remarked, “If we don’t know how we are doing not only against ourselves but others we have no measure where we sit… we grew larger, better quality fish, cheaper and easier than before and we have data to prove that so we know the project was successful.”

“You have to know where you are to know where you want to go”, he observed. Clearly where this innovative technology is headed, backed by a team of committed employees, is in the right direction.

By Gina Forsyth

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