Alaska attracts most aquatic farm applications in 17 years

ADF&G partners with the state Dept. of Natural Resources, which leases the watery acreage where farmers grow their crops.

This year ADF&G received 20 farm applications and 1 hatchery application.

Of those, 2 are for shellfish only, 16 are for kelp only, and 2 are shellfish and kelp combinations.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!

In terms of locations, Pryor added:  “We don’t have defined regions for aquatic farming like we do for salmon enhancement, but we loosely break them down to Southeast (all the SE panhandle), Southcentral (Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet) and West (Kodiak and westward).”

There were 8 applications from South Central (365 acres), 7 for Southeast (6,994 acres) and 5 from the West (286 acres).

Pryor said farm acreage “seems to be of interest to a lot of people.”

“Please keep in mind that this is the requested lease size, which requires anchors etc. to fit inside the leased footprint. A general rule of thumb is the surface footprint will be roughly 40% of the lease footprint,” he explained.  

Kelp farms, which operate late fall through early spring, have the largest footprints compared to oysters and other shellfish.

“There is one really large kelp application in SE that is skewing the acreage there, but I’ll wait until further in the application process before commenting more on that,” Pryor added.

Currently, there are 82 aquatic farms permitted to operate in Alaska and five hatcheries. Forty-three grow shellfish only, 22 kelp only and 17 are a combination.

Forty three farms are located in SE (641 acres), 29 in SC (262 acres) and 10 in the West (313 acres). Pryor added that a kelp farm as far west as Adak is in the 2022 application mix.

LOTS OF POTENTIAL FOR GROWTH

To call Alaska’s aquaculture a “growing industry” is a bad pun but a real truth. It has a long way to go in terms of generating much of a reliable revenue stream.

The tiny state of Maine, for example, has 30 farms and produces 60% of total edible seaweed for the U.S. In 2019, farmed seaweed harvesting and processing contributed $13.4 million to the state’s economy, according to The Island Institute.  

In 2021, Alaska aqua farm sales topped $3 million industry wide. Most were Pacific oysters at just over $2.5 million.

Sales of ribbon and sugar kelp were just shy of $300,000.

For 2020, there were just over $1 million in sales, industry wide (COVID hit). Pacific oysters were almost $900k of those sales, with kelp being just below $200k.

Flip Pryor said small growers fill a niche but it will take bigger operators to scale up the industry’s economic potential for Alaska.

“The small growers can do things like supply local restaurants or that kind of stuff really well because of very low transport costs compared to shipping stuff down to the Lower 48,” he said.

“But it’s going to take those big farms and big processors that have money to invest and can get something going to bring that volume of product up and make those economies of scale happen and provide a constant product. Because people that are buying kelp for biofuels don’t want a boom and bust sort of thing. They want to know that you can count on X number of pounds every single year. And that’s definitely going to take some big operations in the water.”

KODIAK AND CRAIG IN SOUTHEAST BEST AK SEAWEED PROCESSING REGIONS

Kodiak and the Prince of Wales Island region come out on top for the state’s best seaweed processing regions. That’s the conclusion of a study that assessed the suitability of six communities to assist companies interested in operating in Alaska.  The six locations were evaluated based on three broad categories: availability of seaweed supply, costs of doing business, and partnership opportunities.

It lays out the advantages and disadvantages of each.

It was done for the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation by McKinley Research Group.

Ultimately, the goal is to grow a $100 million aquaculture industry by 2038.

Many, like AFDF director Julie Decker, believe that value is conservative due to increasing demand for shellfish and sea plants.

“It’s a matter of putting the pieces in place and everybody rowing in the same direction. That means the state administration, the legislature, the industry and the public. You must have public support for being able to use public lands on public waters. And we have that, for the most part,” Decker said.

NPFMC ASKS PUBLIC FOR IDEAS TO REDUCE BERING SEA CRAB DEATHS FROM FISHING GEAR, REBUILD STOCKS 

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NFMC) is asking the public for comments on ways to reduce crab deaths from fishing gear for Bering Sea snow crab and Bristol Bay red king crab.

The notice was posted this week in the Federal Register. 

Bering Sea snow crab was declared ‘overfished’ last October after a more than 95% drop in the stock.   

The 2021/22 Bristol Bay red king crab fishery was cancelled for the first time in 25 years due to low numbers of crab.

For snow crab, the stock crash followed a surge in 2018 that showed a 60% boost in male crabs and nearly the same for females. Bob Foy, director of the NPFMC Crab Plan Team called it “one of the largest snow crab recruitment events biologists have ever seen.”

NOAA Fisheries now calls it a “a mass mortality event.”

However, defying all logic, the snow crab stock is “not subject to overfishing,” according to a NPFMC report. That’s because the fishery removals aren’t above the level considered to be sustainable. Rather, it’s because the stock dropped for other reasons that scientists and managers aren’t sure of.

Hypotheses on causes of the snow crab decline include a massive migration out of U.S. waters due to climate change, changes in predator behavior or difficulty finding food.

A February report by NPFMC scientists unsuccessfully proposed an amendment to the management plan for crab bycatch in the Bering Sea groundfish trawl fisheries.

It stated: “Crab may actively escape capture from trawl gear, as they can slip under the trawl itself, or over the sweeps, but the damage from the gear results in mortality or delayed mortality due to injuries. The potential for unobserved mortality of crabs that encounter bottom trawls but are not captured has long been a concern for the management of groundfish fisheries in the Bering Sea.” 

The concern over “unobserved mortality” of crab has been voiced for over three decades.

The report said that the majority of crab taken as bycatch by trawl gear trawl occurs when vessels are targeting yellowfin sole. “This is the case across all crab species” the report said.

The Federal Register notice “invites the public to submit written comments on the topic generally and in response to specific questions outlined below.”  The questions were posed in a NPFMC motion in June.

The questions are:

1. What voluntary measures for implementation in 2023 and beyond are there to avoid snow crab and reduce crab mortality in the non-directed fisheries?

2. What measures can be taken in the directed crab fishery to reduce discard mortality of snow crab?

3. What type of research would inform development of more flexible and effective spatial management measures; gear modifications to reduce impacts on the snow crab stock, or to evaluate unobserved mortality in the trawl sector?

Meanwhile, the NPFMC in December “pre-approved” bycatch numbers for 2022 trawl fisheries.

For snow crab, the allowable bycatch is 5.99 million individual crabs, equal to 7.8 million pounds.  The catch for the crab fleet is 5.6 million pounds.

For the closed Bristol Bay red king crab fishery, trawlers can take 80,160 crabs as bycatch, or roughly 520-thousand pounds.

Public comments on reducing Bering Sea crab deaths from fishing gear and ideas for rebuilding the stocks can be submitted through the North Pacific Council’s meeting portal.  (Impossible to find on the NPFMC website.)  (https://meetings.npfmc.org/Meeting/Details/2941)

Deadline to comment is Sept. 23.