Good afternoon. Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before you today.
My name is Nell Halse. I'm a spokesperson for Cooke Aquaculture, which is a family owned salmon farming company in Atlantic Canada.
I work closely with the CEO, Glenn Cooke, and I am very pleased to be here today to represent him, his family, and the 2,500 employees we have who now make a living from aquaculture in Atlantic Canada, in Maine, and now in southern Chile and southern Spain.
I wanted to also mention that my colleague, Alan Craig, who is the vice-president of sales for the company, was able to accompany me here today. He is not going to make opening remarks, but if there are questions that are specifically relevant to the marketplace, he could perhaps help out during the discussion period.
Over the past 25 years, Glenn Cooke, his father, and his brother have built a world-class Canadian company that now enjoys a prominent place as a leader in Canada and that also has taken its place as one of the top five salmon farming companies in the world. Annual sales of half a billion dollars are projected for this year.
We have been named one of Canada's 50 best managed companies, and just last spring, Glenn Cooke was awarded an honorary doctorate of science by the University of New Brunswick. Both Glenn and the company have been presented with numerous business awards in both Canada and the U.S.
Through our sales and marketing team we have built an excellent relationship with both retail and food service customers in Canada and the U.S. So if you were to go and buy fresh Atlantic salmon in your local grocery store, whether it's Loblaws, Sobeys, or Metro, or in a small fish shop, such as the one in the Halifax market, you will probably be buying one of our fresh Atlantic salmon that was swimming on the east coast just a few days earlier.
Our success and our growth has not come at the expense of our communities and our neighbours. We understand the need to earn and also to maintain our social licence to farm. The Cooke family and all of our employees, in fact, live in the communities where we operate. We have deep roots that go back many generations, so we're building on a valuable marine heritage. We rely on the long-term health of the ecosystem. Together with the fishery and conservation communities, we see ourselves as partners in a dynamic and vibrant working waterfront. We have co-existed for the past 25 years.
It's very good news for all of us that the lobster sector continues to see record landings. It's also good news that we are seeing the returns of wild Atlantic salmon improve in many areas as well.
In fact, I was interested in one of the comments in the earlier session about me being a member of the Atlantic Salmon Federation. We, as a company, collaborate with ASF on a number of critical salmon conservation projects, specifically on the south coast of New Brunswick. The company also owns a fishing lodge in Miramichi. We are avid anglers and also lifelong members of the Miramichi Salmon Club. So there are many common connections here.
Our commitment is to a healthy and sustainable seafood sector in Atlantic Canada--not just an aquaculture sector--a sector that respects the rich marine heritage that sustains us all.
Our motto is “refusing to go with the flow”. It's a clear illustration of our strategy as a company. We've built our own road to success, with year over year strong financial performances, in spite of many challenges, the kinds of challenges all farmers have to face. They include hurricanes, floods, abnormally warm water temperatures in the summer, extremely cold temperatures and super chill in the winter, fluctuations in currency and in the marketplace, and losses to disease and parasites.
In spite of these challenges, the Cooke family has successfully recruited a professional management team and in-house scientists to help build a fully integrated company that now manages our operations from egg to plate. That means that we have our own brood stock program, our own hatcheries, our own farms, and our own processing plants. We design, manufacture, and service our own equipment. We produce our own feed. We make our own packaging. We operate our own trucking division. We have our own sales and marketing division as well.
I think this background is really important as we move to your topic today and to the question of whether or not we should or could move the entire Canadian salmon farming sector out of the ocean onto land, into closed containment, into tank farms.
I'm glad you asked us to participate in this review, because we are experts in closed containment and we have a great deal of experience and expertise to bring to this discussion. Too often the debate has been about growing fish on paper and not about growing salmon in the water as a real-life business. So our answer to that question today is no.
Our salmon spend the first half of their lives in closed systems. Our company operates about a dozen hatcheries in Atlantic Canada and Maine. We are just about to open a 38,000-square-foot state-of-the art new hatchery on the south coast of Newfoundland, in St. Alban's. This will have the capacity to grow three million smolts a year and it will reuse 98% of its water.
We welcome hundreds of visitors to our freshwater headquarters in Oak Bay, New Brunswick, every year, and we would certainly welcome this committee if you could find time to come and visit and see a modern, progressive, commercial hatchery in person.
Our broodstock, or carefully selected parent fish, spend their entire life in a disease-free, closed, recirculation contained system. We know how much it costs to grow these fish. The cost is prohibitive and could not be sustained for all phases of our production. We only do this on a small scale to protect these broodstock for future generations. We know the fish health challenges. We know which stocking densities are right for maximum growth and optimal health.
Our production fish are spawned from these broodstock in our hatcheries. The eggs are incubated and hatched there and then they spend the next year or so in fresh water, just as salmon do in the wild, until they become smolts and, just as in the wild, they're ready to move to their natural saltwater habitat for another 18 to 24 months until they're ready for harvest.
We also have a DNA traceability program that's being developed by our freshwater team that tracks the fish right from egg to plate.
One of the important points we'd like to make is that the capital costs that would be required to develop land-based facilities to support Cooke Aquaculture, just our company's production capacity in Atlantic Canada and Maine, is close to $1 billion. This does not include the cost of finding and purchasing the enormous amount of land that would be required, nor does it consider the need for a consistent and abundant water supply. No coastal land is available from Nova Scotia to the Maine border that would accommodate the equivalent of 8,000-plus football field-sized plots that would be required for grow-out facilities.
Even if land were available, however, the increased pumping and heating and cooling costs for water would be cost prohibitive and would also result in a very environmentally unfriendly carbon footprint. It's often said that the industry is worried about costs, but there are so many other issues.
So rather than move our fish from the sea to the land, we believe we have demonstrated with certainty that we can grow Atlantic salmon in a natural environment with minimal impact on wild stocks or on habitat. We have many tools for minimizing the environmental impacts of our ocean farms. These include a government-audited ocean floor sampling program; a performance-based approach to the issuing of government approvals to operate, which we have to have every year before we stock fish; sophisticated feeding management regimes to prevent waste; better science-based diets and feed formulations, just to make sure we get maximum feed conversion; and careful siting of farms in areas of good tidal flow.
Also, for more than 10 years we've been exploring an ecosystem-based approach to farming called IMTA, or integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, and this is because salmon are a fed species. They generate valuable nutrients that can then be used to grow other species, such as mussels and seaweeds. This experimental work that we've had with Dr. Thierry Chopin of the University of New Brunswick and Dr. Shawn Robinson of DFO in St. Andrews has been under way for almost 10 years now. But it has moved from a biological experiment to a commercial scale with a recent partnership we have with Loblaws and their WiseSource salmon program.
Our position is that the provincial, state, and federal regulatory requirements that are already enforced on the east coast of Canada and the United States have established stringent environmental and fish health standards. Our production systems either meet or exceed these standards.
In addition, our company has been certified to the internationally accredited Seafood Trust eco-label. This eco-label, which focuses on continuous improvement, has required us to set standard operating procedures for our hatcheries, our farms, and our plants; to develop an internal auditing system; to submit regularly to external audits; and then to continually set new goals each year.
Atlantic salmon that are raised on our east coast farms are healthy native stocks that swim in their natural environment. They are contained on the farm by a system of nets, cages, and mooring systems that are specifically designed by our in-house team of experts to meet the challenging, high-energy environments of the Bay of Fundy, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Gulf of Maine. Our company's track record on containment has been exemplary in both Canada and the United States.
We know that you've already heard, and you've heard again today, a list of concerns about environmental impact, salmon escapes, and concerns over fish health. I can tell you that we certainly share those concerns. That's why we've continually invested in science partnerships and innovative technologies together with local universities and groups like Genome Atlantic and the Atlantic Veterinary College. Because of that, there is now an extensive body of science in the areas of fish health, fish biology, oceanography, secure cage and net mooring systems, and environmental impacts of salmon farming. The science is all there now because of the aquaculture industry.
So we're not working in the dark. We're no longer a biological experiment. We're a mature, sophisticated, science-driven industry with a huge potential for Canada's coastal and rural communities.
I would like to close my comments by saying that there have been enough studies conducted, enough firestorms generated by the well-financed anti-salmon-farming lobby, into diseases that don't exist, into environmental devastation that did not occur, and into doom and gloom scenarios about the displacement of a fishery that did not happen.
You are sitting here with a healthy entrepreneurial Canadian success story that needs to be encouraged and not stymied by impractical and unnecessary concepts that are not meant to succeed but are deliberately designed to orchestrate the demise of our sector. Our industry represents one of too few bright spots to grow the Canadian economy, a fact that should be regarded as especially important in our current climate, fraught with economic uncertainty.
We are asking our government to consider the facts, to accept the science from its own departments and from colleagues around the world, and to develop and then implement a very clear strategy for the healthy growth of Canada's aquaculture sector. We need federal legislation that is written and designed for aquaculture--legislation to regulate it properly but also to enable it to grow.
If we get that support from the federal government, we will stand behind you. We're a company that's going to invest, continues to invest, and continues to grow, and we will have to invest overseas--but we want to invest in our own backyard. With the right business climate, we will continue to build healthy companies and healthy communities while maintaining a healthy environment that's good for Canada and good for Canadians.
Thank you.
