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New Zealand’s largest salmon producer is rechecking the results after half of its farms failed to meet environmental standards.
The Marlborough District Council issued two fines and a warning after the Cawthron Institute’s inspection of New Zealand’s King Salmon farms found that five out of nine were not in compliance.
A farm in Pelorus Sound’s Forsyth Bay was even deemed “significantly non-compliant” due to contamination underneath its pens, caused by fish waste and uneaten fish food falling into the bed.
Compliance was judged based on a farm’s resource consent conditions and guidelines established by the central and local government to encourage “environmentally responsible” aquaculture, which the Forsyth Bay farm violated.
John Kirk-Anderson / Stuff
NZ King Salmon produces around 8000 tonnes of king salmon, pictured, per year.
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NZ King Salmon CEO Grant Rosewarne said the company was “concerned” about the results and how they were achieved, so they were reviewed by another scientific vendor.
“We invested more money, we hired a company to do a more thorough review and it was determined that we were compliant, what we think salmon farms were at the time,” Rosewarne said.
He said that once the report was finalized, it would be presented to the council, which had agreed to review the new figures.
“In my opinion, some insight into the advice has been lost on what the true environmental effects of salmon farming are or not. There has also been a reinterpretation of the resource consent conditions, ”he said.
Braden Fastier / Stuff
NZ King Salmon Grant Rosewarne says the company is concerned about the Marlborough District Council’s results and has reviewed them.
Rosewarne said that in the past compliance was evaluated holistically against environmental standards, not individual conditions, which put NZ King Salmon “at a loss.”
Some of the salmon farms were rated non-compliant because bacteria under their pens were forming on a mat, violating the conditions of consent. NZ King Salmon was trying to remove this from their consents, arguing that the mats changed weekly.
“We have gone back and checked under those farms, and the mats are no longer there… It shouldn’t be an indicator.
“It was placed there for good purposes at first, but the evolution of science shows that it doesn’t indicate what we think it indicates, but we are still held to that standard.”
The Cawthron Institute found that three of the farms had complaints, three were non-compliant and one was “technically non-compliant.” One had no resource consent conditions to compare compliance and two farms were not tested.
The main areas of non-compliance were the enrichment of the seabed.
Marlborough District Council Environmental Protection Officer Claire Frooms said in a report that excessive levels of debris from fish pens could harm seafloor life by depriving it of oxygen.
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Photos taken at New Zealand King Salmon’s Te Pangu Bay Farm, found to be non-compliant.
Their report, which summarizes the results of the Cawthron Institute, was shown to councilors at an environmental committee this week.
The results showed that five farms exceeded the recommended guidelines for zinc, plus another three for copper, but none of them caused a violation of the resource consent conditions.
Frooms said copper and zinc don’t break down over time.
Copper was the main ingredient in paint that was used to prevent organisms from growing on farm structures, while zinc was added to fish feed, thus being spread by fish waste and uneaten food.
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NZ King Salmon’s Waitata Bay salmon farm in Te Hoiere / Pelorus Sound.
Four other farms did not comply with the sampling and reporting conditions established in their resource consents, and three did not meet the environmental quality standards of their consent.
Three of New Zealand’s King Salmon farms, one in Te Hoiere / Pelorus Sound and two in Tōtaranui / Queen Charlotte Sound, did not need to track their waste discharge, but did so voluntarily.
These three farms received low water flows, which facilitated the accumulation of waste materials under the salmon pens.
The pens on two of the farms were marked according to the above guidelines.
Two salmon farms in Crail Bay, in Te Hoiere / Pelorus Sound, were not monitored because they were not occupied last year.
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Highlighted in red is the new open ocean farm proposed by NZ King Salmon, for which it submitted a resource consent in July last year.
The findings were reviewed by a compliance peer review panel, which recommended that NZ King Salmon be fined for its significantly non-compliant farm in Forsyth Bay and for a non-compliant farm in Kopaua in Te Hoiere / Pelorus Sound. .
The other non-compliant farm, in Tōtaranui / Queen Charlotte Sound’s Te Pangua Bay, had received a formal warning.
Frooms said in its report that the council will continue to work with NZ King Salmon, but will distribute “appropriate levels of enforcement action” in response to breach of consent.
