Evidence of meeting #24 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was imta.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Open Ocean Systems Inc.
We're in the process of doing that.
Liberal
President and Chief Executive Officer, Open Ocean Systems Inc.
They'll be ongoing. We've done our first experiments with the St. Andrews Biological Station. There will be more carried on in this coming year, and in more locations as well.
Liberal
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
Okay, thank you.
I believe this committee has heard that some major aquaculture-producing countries require discharge permits for open-net aquaculture operations, but Canada does not.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Open Ocean Systems Inc.
I'm sorry, what kinds of permits?
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
Discharge permits. Is the lack of discharge permits or is DFO's current system of benthic monitoring a barrier to further adoption of IMTA?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Open Ocean Systems Inc.
I don't think so, but I'm not sure I'm the one qualified to answer that one.
Liberal
Executive Director, Huntsman Marine Science Centre
Whether the lack of permits is a barrier to—
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
Yes, or whether DFO's current system of benthic monitoring is a barrier to the further adoption of IMTA.
Executive Director, Huntsman Marine Science Centre
That wouldn't be my point of view, no.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
Could you elaborate on what your point of view would be, please?
Executive Director, Huntsman Marine Science Centre
The current system is based on some chemical testing, trying to find one that will say you have an impact if you exceed this level, or you don't have an impact if you're below this level. It's a bit crude and rudimentary, but that's the system that exists today. As I said, it's the same test, but we operate in multiple environments so we have this issue of trying to use one test to fit all of these parameters.
The IMTA system, as I understand it, is a fantastic option for mitigating some of that if your tests show you're starting to creep over into the impact side, because you're able to manage the nutrient loading through biological filtration. It's complex. It's species-specific. It's location-specific. That's what it is. But I'm not aware that it's restricted by the current environmental testing that exists in place.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rodney Weston
Thank you very much.
Before we conclude, I want the committee to have an appreciation for the involvement you've had in the aquaculture industry since its early introduction in New Brunswick into the Bay of Fundy. I know that Mr. Walsh has been involved for many years, also Mr. Storey.
I'm not trying to pick on Mr. Donnelly here, but your comment earlier that they're looking for new developments or innovation speaks to the admission that there's something wrong in the industry.
I want to point out that the gentlemen sitting before us today have been involved for many years with the industry. I'd also point out that this industry has been very innovative since its early introduction into the Bay of Fundy. That's where my experience comes from.
I want to ask the gentlemen whether they could highlight some of their involvement.
Mr. Storey, you talked about your company starting in 2006, but your history in the industry did not begin in 2006.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Open Ocean Systems Inc.
You can tell by the youth of our faces here that we're all pioneers in our own way in the industry. For a point of reference, in 1986 the company I worked with at the time put 30,000 fish in ten cages, and I was wondering, okay, what do we do now? It was very interesting.
I have a biology degree and a chemistry and math background, and I learned about the business of the seafood side of things as we came up. My company, back in 1987, actually commissioned the first study, with Dr. David Wildish, at the St. Andrews Biological Station on benthic productivity around the site.
This is part of where we're going with the iCage and smart farming systems and the things we're doing. We appreciate that when a cage of fish goes in the water it becomes part of the ecosystem. The ecosystem impacts the fish themselves, and you also have to make sure that the ecology within the cage has a low interaction, shall we say, in staying within the ecological boundaries.
At the end of the day, Mother Nature gives us all these wonderful gifts, and it's kind of corny, but it's our job, as fish farmers, as regulators, as government, to make sure we are converting the protein as efficiently, sustainably, and respectfully as we possibly can.
Chair, Board of Directors, Huntsman Marine Science Centre
I started out as a canner with Connors Brothers back in 1970 and went from there to aquaculture in 1987 as the first trout farmer in New Brunswick. We started with about five cages off the wharf at one of our canneries in Deer Island, and as aquaculture evolved into being much more dominant and it started to work, we went into the feed business. This was all part of a Connors Brothers aquaculture division component, and we said to ourselves that this thing was starting to catch fire and we should start to expand it. Consequently, we set up a division within that particular company to explore our operations and build upon them.
We originally set into manufacturing moist feed to feed all of our particular fish, and then a number of individuals and independents got into the business, and we became the feed source for the rest of the industry at that point in time.
As the feed business evolved, other people got into it with dry feed and much more highly sophisticated feeds and things of that nature evolved. Then Connors Brothers said they would like that division to move forward, and we started hiring a number of candidates from around the world for the New Brunswick venture. We eventually hired Bill Robertson to run one of our new hatcheries of the day. He moved from there to become the director of our east coast operation. During that timeframe we had moved into the U.S. and set up some operations along the Maine coast. Then we took over British Columbia Packers operations on the west coast in Campbell River and around that area, and then we went to Chile and took over operations down in Chile and functioned from there.
At the end of my period there, I eventually moved from my canning background into an aquaculture component and ended up running this particular entity for six years as president of North America's largest aquaculture component in Atlantic salmon. We had operations in Chile, the east and west coasts, and in Maine. Consequently, the branded product of the day was Heritage Salmon, which you probably saw as a premium salmon product around all the major stores across Canada and deep into the U.S.
So we do have a fair amount of exposure, experience, and understanding about where the aquaculture business is and where it has to go.
I've retired from aquaculture and have gone on to become the chair of the Huntsman Marine Science Centre lab. The exercise here is to say there's been a lot of talk about closed containment in aquaculture. We're thinking that we understand what's happening here in the ocean and the waterfronts and all the bays and all the changes. We've looked at the economics, and today the economics are far outstripped in the traditional manners. But there are some issues and some faults, as obviously you people have heard over time.
The economics say it's marginal to go onshore, but no one has done it. We've all talked about it and its math on paper. To make a long story short, what we're saying is why don't we try it and measure it and put it to bed or make it work? If you have the facilities, you get to tweak a lot of this stuff. Right now there is a whole genetic program going on as to how we rid ourselves of sea lice, how we grow this particular product this fast. We were all part of that and we agree 100% with that.
If you were in tanks, all your criteria would be different. You wouldn't be out there fighting the sea lice component, because in theory it wouldn't exist. You might be able to cross your fish or develop your fish so they would grow better in confined and controlled containment. Those are the things that in this day and age we should look at and the government should think about. It isn't the final answer--at least not in our career--but it is a step that will take us through Andrew's exercise in the traditional fishery and into this particular exercise to see whether it works.
Do you buy that? We've argued for this a number of times.
Conservative
Executive Director, Huntsman Marine Science Centre
Thank you. How do you top that?
I started my career as a fisheries biologist, and I worked for the Ontario government in the north channel of Lake Huron beginning with lake trout enhancement. I put in some of the first freshwater cages in the early 1980s as a cheaper alternative to building fish hatcheries to support the enhancement of lake trout and what in those days was called lake trout backcross, which was a cross between lake trout and brook trout.
I got picked off by Connors Brothers and came back to the east coast, as Fraser suggested, to help with the development of their aquaculture division, which eventually morphed into the company Heritage Salmon.
The only part I would add, which Fraser left out, was that he and I were involved in establishing the very first certified organic Atlantic salmon farm in the Americas in the late 1990s or early 2000s. That was in Chile, and it was certified through an organization called Naturland. We went through that whole process of trying to farm organically and trying to get premiums out of the marketplace.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rodney Weston
Thank you, gentlemen.
On behalf of the committee, I want to thank you all for taking the time out of your busy schedules to appear before us today. It's been informative, and we really do appreciate it.
We'll take a short break, committee members, to allow for a change of our witnesses.
Thank you.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rodney Weston
We will begin again.
Dr. Chopin, I'd like to thank you for taking the time today to meet with the committee. I know you were listening at the back of the room when I was explaining how committee procedures work and how we have certain time constraints for questions and answers. Anytime you'd like to proceed, the floor is yours.
Thierry Chopin Scientific Director, Canadian Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture Network, University of New Brunswick
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
First, I would like to thank the committee for this opportunity to speak with you. My name is Thierry Chopin. I am a professor of marine biology at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. I am also the scientific director of the Canadian Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture Network.
Today I would like to talk with you about three topics. First, we should not be viewing this subject as closed containment versus open water systems. Second, we believe there is a third course: integrated multi-trophic aquaculture. Third, in preparation for today, I read the transcript of previous sessions, and I would like to respond to some statements that were made.
Why do I say it should not be closed containment versus open water systems? In fact, the salmon aquaculture industry is already a closed containment industry for approximately one year of the cycle of salmon. Then salmon grow in open water nets for a year and a half to two years. I am sure you have already heard about the issues of open water aquaculture. I would like to spend some time on closed containment systems and mention that they are not necessarily the remedy for everything.
Moving to closed containment on land does not a guarantee zero escapees. There are well-known cases of escapees from land-based operations. I know this committee is working on Asian carp. It was introduced in the seventies. Escapees started to be reported in the late eighties and nineties. Now, 2000 kilometres and 20 to 30 years later, they are at the lock system of the Great Lakes, on the point of entering the Great Lakes themselves.
The number of escapees from land-based facilities is not as well documented as it is for cage-net aquaculture. This is because land-based fish escapees are more likely to occur as a continuous trickle instead of one big event that is reported in the news. That's maybe the reason they are not making the news. I would say that nobody can guarantee you a zero-escapee facility.
Another point is that a large amount of energy is required to pump, filter, and aerate waters. A few weeks ago, Peter Tyedmers explained to you that it's a question of trade-offs. We have to be careful that we are not practising problem-shifting instead of problem-solving.
We have to talk about the acquisition of land and at what price, the designating of land for different uses, and what we want in the way of permanent infrastructure. We are not talking about fallowing or rotation techniques. That is not possible. We also need to look at greenhouse gas emissions. We must consider the carbon footprint, or maybe I should say carbon finprint.
To be economically viable, the density of fish will have to be very high. This will result in fish health issues that will have to be addressed. One thing that is missing when we are bio-engineering or over-engineering the recirculation aquaculture system is that we lose the buffer capacity of natural ecosystems and all of the important interactions between species.
Another point to consider is that moving to land for closed containment does not necessarily resolve the issue of effluents, which have to be treated. Nutrients and solid waste are poured back into the water or sent off somewhere. Often this material is trucked off the sites. This results in more cost, more energy, and a bigger footprint.
I think we have to change our attitude regarding nutrients. We have to talk about integrated metatrophic aquaculture. I like to talk about the duality of nutrients. If there are not enough, they are limiting. If there are too many, they create problems. We should not automatically consider nutrients as waste. After all, there is a good old saying, “What is waste for some is gold for others”. That is what we have to work on.
So the solution to nutrification is not dilution or simply land relocation; it's extraction or conversion through diversification. We have to recapture these nutrients.
What is integrated multi-trophic aquaculture? I know it's a mouthful, and maybe some will use the shorter version, which is IMTA. If it is still too complicated and you cannot remember, you can even sing it. Do you remember YMCA? You can do the same thing with IMTA. So now you will remember IMTA. Now it will stay in your memory. You will have this crazy guy with a French accent singing IMTA.
You were given a diagram illustrating one of the variations on IMTA. In this case it's IMTA farming with species in proximity--species that are at different trophic levels of the food web--and with complementary ecosystem functions. We want one species' uneaten feed, waste, nutrients, and by-products to be recaptured to serve as fertilizer feed and energy for the other crops. We also take advantage of synergy interactions between species.
So in this case, we combined fed aquaculture of finfish--for example, salmon--with extractive aquaculture that utilizes organic particulate nutrient, like shellfish and other components that use inorganic soluble nutrients like seaweed.
We also understand that shellfish are efficient at filtering small organic particles, but they are not efficient for the larger ones. That's why, at the bottom of this, we are now at the present time developing a fourth component: deposit feeders such as sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and sea worms. So really, IMTA is doing nothing more than mimicking natural ecosystem processes. The aim is to ecologically engineer a system for environmental sustainability, economic stability, and societal acceptability.
Really, for me, the concept of IMTA is extremely flexible. To use a music analogy, not from Frédéric Chopin but from Johann Sebastian Bach, I would say that IMTA is the overarching theme on which we can develop many variations. As a matter of fact, for me, IMTA can work in open water. It can work also in land-based operations; that's what some people sometimes call aquaponics. It can work in marine or freshwater systems and in temperate and tropical systems.
One thing that we also don't talk much about, but should, and that we should recognize and account for, is the fact that the extractive components of IMTA are providing ecosystem services. We hear a lot about carbon-trading credits, but as a matter of fact, I think in coastal environments we should talk about nutrient credits, because the extractive components of IMTA can play a significant role in the sequestration of nitrogen, phosphorous, and carbon. It's about time for us to give a value to the ecosystem services of extractive aquaculture. As a matter of fact, I think we should be able to use them as incentive tools to encourage the practitioners of mono-specific aquaculture to contemplate IMTA as a viable marine agronomy option.
Now, one thing that should be very clear is that the conversion of traditional monoculture sites into IMTA sites will not occur overnight. Changes take time; they rarely happen overnight. Because what we are really talking about here is a major philosophical change in our approach to the food production system.
We also have to understand that aquaculture companies that will embrace or are already embracing IMTA need to develop markets and distribution circuits to absorb the co-cultured biomass. If we grow a lot of IMTA biomass but we don't have an application or it cannot be sold, we will again be into problem-shifting and not problem-solving. If we don't sell this IMTA biomass, we will have to dump it somewhere else.
At the present time in southwest New Brunswick we have 96 aquaculture sites. Sixteen of them have been amended to become IMTA sites. But a site does not become an IMTA site overnight. We need to gradually equip them and to check that things are okay and that it has the proper design and all these things. As a matter of fact, out of these sixteen amended sites, only eight of them have been gradually equipped with IMTA rafts and all these things.
So for me, it is inappropriate to compare an aquaculture site in year one—when we have very few fish eating very little and we have low sulphide numbers—to the same site in the next year, because when fish are in year two, they eat much more and there are consequently higher sulphide numbers, irrespective of the site having just been equipped with some preliminary IMTA rafts or not. So for me, there we are comparing apples and oranges; therefore, concluding that IMTA doesn't work using such a comparison is totally misleading.
Change will occur. There will be progressive.... As a matter of fact, I just want to mention that there are three very interesting developments with IMTA. The first one is that because we grow the species together, we start to better understand their interaction. One very interesting thing we see is that mussels can inactivate the ISA virus. We also see that blue mussels and other shellfish can ingest early-stage sea lice. The whole idea is to develop biological control to reduce chemical treatments. That's the first aspect.
The second aspect is the use of IMTA seaweed. At the present time, we are working on feeding trials to do some fishmeal substitution. As you know, one of the debates is about little fish being used to grow bigger fish. Can we do substitution? People say that we have to replace animal proteins with plant proteins, and the usual things people turn to are land plant proteins. It's exactly the same problem with biofuels.
As a matter of fact, the solution is not on land, the solution is at sea. If I want more corn and more soya, I will compete. With this, the price of staple food crops will go through the roof, as we have seen with first generation biofuels. It will need more farmland, more deforestation, more irrigation, and more fertilizing. With seaweed, I don't have to cut more trees. I don't need to irrigate. My seaweed is already in the water in an IMTA setting, and I don't need to fertilize. The fish are doing it for me. So there is a lot of interest in doing some substitution with seaweed.
Finally, the last aspect is that we are now working on the land-based closed containment hatchery operation of salmon aquaculture. We are developing aquaponics. It's not seaweed this time, but other plants, such as herbs and legumes, that will be used. We are also working on that to have IMTA both in fresh water all the way to sea water, or as some people say, from the egg to the plate.
To conclude, I would say, as the previous speakers mentioned, that there is no magical solution, and there is no silver bullet. There are no universal practices. It's a combination of approaches that will allow us to enter into a new era for aquaculture. To me, this means the era is ecosystem-responsible aquaculture. It's indeed time to make the blue revolution greener, and that is why I like to talk about the turquoise revolution—blue and green combined gives you turquoise. I think that IMTA will contribute to the success of the turquoise revolution, both in open water and closed containment systems.
I thank you very much, and I would be glad to answer any of your questions.