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Atlantic salmon pens dot the calm cold waters of Norway’s Hjørundfjord. Some two hundred thousand fish swim in each high-tech pen, where they are fed fish pellets through pneumatic tubes for eighteen months, until they reach about 11 pounds. With more than a thousand deep fjords and strong tides to flush out the fish waste, Norway has become a global leader in salmon aquaculture. Mowi ASA, the Norwegian multinational company that owns the farm, with its processing facility, is the largest producer of farm-raised Atlantic salmon in the world, with 20 percent of all production and five billion euros in annual revenue. The salmon start out in hatcheries fed by the nation’s abundant freshwater rivers, where they are raised from eggs to alevin (opposite, bottom left) until they reach the smolt phase at 7 ounces, when they are transferred into the net pens. After they are harvested, the pens are left fallow for eighteen months to reducethe incidence of disease. It takes 1 to 2 kilograms of captured fish and trimmings—converted to fish meal and fish oil—to produce one kilogram of farmed salmon, but about 70 percent of their feed now comes from crops like soybeans, sunflowers, corn, wheat, and rapeseed. (Wild salmon eat about 10 kilograms of wild fish for each kilogram of weight.) Synthetic astaxanthin, the carotenoid found naturally in shrimp and red algae, is added to their food as a nutritional supplement and to give them the same pink flesh as their wild counterparts. Beginning in the 1960s, Atlantic salmon farms have helped make salmon the second-most-consumed fish in the world after tuna, while wild Atlantic salmon stocks have plummeted and are now critically endangered in areas where they were once abundant.

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Atlantic salmon pens dot the calm cold waters of Norway’s Hjørundfjord. Some two hundred thousand fish swim in each high-tech pen, where they are fed fish pellets through pneumatic tubes for eighteen months, until they reach about 11 pounds. With more than a thousand deep fjords and strong tides to flush out the fish waste, Norway has become a global leader in salmon aquaculture. Mowi ASA, the Norwegian multinational company that owns the farm, with its processing facility, is the largest producer of farm-raised Atlantic salmon in the world, with 20 percent of all production and five billion euros in annual revenue. The salmon start out in hatcheries fed by the nation’s abundant freshwater rivers, where they are raised from eggs to alevin (opposite, bottom left) until they reach the smolt phase at 7 ounces, when they are transferred into the net pens. After they are harvested, the pens are left fallow for eighteen months to reducethe incidence of disease. It takes 1 to 2 kilograms of captured fish and trimmings—converted to fish meal and fish oil—to produce one kilogram of farmed salmon, but about 70 percent of their feed now comes from crops like soybeans, sunflowers, corn, wheat, and rapeseed. (Wild salmon eat about 10 kilograms of wild fish for each kilogram of weight.) Synthetic astaxanthin, the carotenoid found naturally in shrimp and red algae, is added to their food as a nutritional supplement and to give them the same pink flesh as their wild counterparts. Beginning in the 1960s, Atlantic salmon farms have helped make salmon the second-most-consumed fish in the world after tuna, while wild Atlantic salmon stocks have plummeted and are now critically endangered in areas where they were once abundant.

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