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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 2
October 2007
NH’s GreatBay zeros in on cod aquaculture
NEWINGTON, NH – Is Atlantic cod the next big species in American aquaculture? The principals at GreatBay Aquaculture think it could be and last year were successful in convincing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that the idea was worth further investigation.
GreatBay received an approximately $412,000 National Marine Aquaculture Initiative grant over two years to support the development of sustainable, farmed Atlantic cod production.
The project is now in its second year and anticipates putting 100,000 juvenile fish in growout cages off the Maine coast by the spring of 2008.
Once the premier species of New England’s wild harvest fishing industry, cod stocks in the region are at record low levels and commercial and recreational fisheries are operating under extremely strict limits.
“Atlantic cod … is one of the prime candidates for expansion of aquaculture in the US,” said US Sen. John Sununu (R-NH), chairman of the Commerce Committee’s National Ocean Policy Study Subcommittee, in his announcement of the GreatBay grant. “This funding will support the development of technology that will help further the sustainable growth of this species for both nursery culture onshore and offshore growout operations.”
Step by step
Located on the grounds of the New Hampshire Public Service Company’s Newington Station power plant, GreatBay has spent the last 10 years focused on producing summer flounder juveniles and, more recently, cobia juveniles for growout operations. Cobia is a tropical and temperate seawater food fish that is becoming increasingly popular among aquaculturists around the world because of its fast growth rate, which is as much as three times as fast as Atlantic salmon.
“We ship our fingerlings all over the world,” said George Nardi, chief technology officer for the company. “We have shipped juveniles as far as China and most recently to the Dominican Republic.”
GreatBay started working on Atlantic cod about seven years ago, inspired by the University of New Hampshire’s (UNH) Open Ocean Aquaculture project, according to Nardi.
During the first two years, GreatBay produced a few thousand juvenile cod during the winter months and built production slowly in order to gain experience and address any problems.
In the third year, the company successfully began producing hundreds of thousands of juvenile cod, sending some of those young fish to the growout cages at the UNH open ocean aquaculture demonstration site about six miles offshore.
“This grant to produce Atlantic cod is helping us establish ourselves in the region,” Nardi said.
The NOAA grant is being used in a partnership with UNH and also with the University of Maine’s Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research.
Nardi said that GreatBay has provided the Maine center with $79,000 of the grant money to operate a land-based cod nursery at its location in Franklin.
Natural feed
Working with UNH scientists David Berlinsky and Chris Neefus, GreatBay recently completed a 12-week feed trial, which used nori seaweed grown at GreatBay to partially substitute for fishmeal in a cod diet.
“As a land-based facility, we grow nori in our effluent stream. We don’t have to feed the plants because the effluent provides the nutrition and the nori cleans the effluent,” Nardi said. “The nori plants are then harvested and dried and sent to a feed plant to be made into feed.”
In recent years, there has been a lot of criticism of the use of fishmeal in aquaculture operations and the feed industry has been substituting other sources of protein such as soy, pea, and flax seed.
“It is our belief that those other plant protein sources are good for freshwater species, but they do not provide the lipids and omega3 fatty acids that marine plant proteins would provide to a native coldwater marine species such as cod,” Nardi explained.
As part of the project, the partners conducted feed trials on small fish – about 5" – to compare these three diets:
l A traditional diet, made up of all fishmeal and oil;
l The UNH diet substituting nori plant protein for 15% of the fishmeal protein; and
l The UNH diet substituting nori plant protein for 3% of the fishmeal protein.
“The findings were positive. The growth with the substituted diet was as good as the all fishmeal diet, which means we can continue to look at plants as a substitute for fishmeal,” Nardi said.
He added that the plan is to conduct similar trials with larger, older fish.
Maine growout
The remainder of the grant money is being used to produce the 100,000 juvenile cod, which will be placed in two commercial-scale cages, and to hire an environmental engineer who is working to identify potential growout sites in the Gulf of Maine.
The company recently filed an application with the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) for an experimental lease site in Sorrento off Preble Island within an existing larger mussel culture site that was at one time used as a salmon aquaculture site.
Nardi stressed that GreatBay is committed to finding appropriate sites and approached the process mindful of three specific goals:
l Identify an inshore site that can be used for a nursery and to hold inventory of product until processing;
l Identify an offshore site for commercial-size cages that are selected with environmental sustainability and visual impact considerations in mind; and
l Work with the commercial fishing industry and coastal communities to determine appropriate site locations.
Cod interest growing
One of GreatBay’s largest cod customers is Cooke Aquaculture Inc. in Black’s Harbour, New Brunswick, an Atlantic Canada family-owned company with annual sales of over $230 million. Cooke’s has acquired salmon farms in several Downeast Maine locations, including purchases of Heritage Salmon and Marine Harvest’s East Coast operations.
As of late summer, Cooke had three cod growout sites in New Brunswick– Kelly Cove, L&J, and Fundy – with around one million fish in the water, according to Nardi.
In addition, Cooke is participating in a cod growout joint venture with GreatBay in New Brunswick.
Atlantic cod also is farmed on a commercial scale in Norway and on the Scottish island of Shetland.
Johnson SeaFarms introduced its “No Catch … Just Cod” brand at the 2006 European Seafood Show. According to Johnson’s web site, the product is the world’s first totally natural, sustainable organic cod.
Johnson’s organic cod are fed a diet produced from the “off-cuts” of herring and mackerel processed into human food. On May 29, Johnson announced that its “No Catch” brand of cod would be sold in 198 Tesco stores and in several other specialty and major retailers throughout the United Kingdom. The company plans to be producing 4 million cod a year by 2010.
Marine Harvest, the world’s largest aquaculture company, farms its “Norwegian Fresh Cod” in the fjords of southwest Norway.
According to a report issued last year by the British Marine Finfish Association conference, farmed cod exports from Norway were 800 metric tons (mt) in 2004 and 2,300 mt in 2005. Marine Harvest accounted for 60% of that figure. The majority of that cod goes to multiple retailers in France, although a good amount is also exported to Denmark, mainly to processors.
Rosanne Mizzoni
Lorelei Stevens
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