Richard Buchanan is excited about salmon poo. Very excited.
To the untrained eye, the view surrounding the fish feces is far more compelling. A brooding sky is reflected in the dark waters of Vancouver Island's Middle Bay, framed by mountains and the green hills of British Columbia's Gulf Islands and then, in the centre of it all, the fish themselves, thrashing the water as they feed inside a black plastic pen.
But it's what those 70,000 salmon are offloading into the water that Mr. Buchanan wants to show off. With the push of a button, his salmon poo filter roars to life, screening a mixture of food pellets and offal from the water.
If this seems a little odd, consider that Mr. Buchanan, the president and chief executive of AgriMarine Industries Ltd., which is preparing for a May public offering on the TSX Venture Exchange, is a salmon farmer, and salmon farmers do not, as a rule, do this. Standard practice in the $500-million B.C. industry is to allow the feces to be carried off by ocean currents, and eventually processed by the environment. What Mr. Buchanan is doing is new, and this is just the beginning.
In May, he plans to launch what's known as a closed containment salmon farm here, a technology he is designing for export to Chinese waters, but which could radically redraw the way fish are grown in Canada.
Salmon today are raised in net-cages open to the waters around them, a system that has provoked fierce criticism from activists and fishermen, who accuse the fish farmers of spreading diseases and waste that damage the marine ecosystem and, worse, kill wild salmon.
The farmers have adamantly denied those charges, but public opinion has grown so overwhelmingly against salmon farming that on Thursday, the B.C. government announced a moratorium on salmon farms on its north coast, immediately cancelling three farm licence applications in that area and putting the industry on notice that farming as it is done today is in rough waters.
The province has lost the "moral authority" to expand fish farming, Mr. Buchanan said. Enter AgriMarine's closed-containment system, which solves the waste problem, makes inroads on the disease problem and could provide the only way forward for the industry in B.C., which is watching its development closely.
"Waste collection is really unique. It's never been done in the marine system to this point," said Clare Backman, director of environmental compliance for Marine Harvest, the biggest player in the B.C. industry. "If this works, it's a function I think we would be very interested in exploring further, because removing waste is a key interest of ours. But we know it's a fairly high technological challenge whether he can do it."
The environmental lobby is more effusive.
"If the technology proves itself to be financially viable, then we have the solution to this problem at hand," said Jay Ritchlin, marine conservation director for the David Suzuki Foundation.
The question, then, is will it work?
History has not been kind to those who have tried before. A 2008 Department of Fisheries and Oceans science advisory report obtained by the Financial Post came to a dismal conclusion on 40 previous such efforts.
"None was producing exclusively adult Atlantic salmon and ... many previous attempts to do so had failed," the report found. "Reasons for failure were numerous."
Mr. Buchanan, a civil engineer and long-time director of the Vancouver Aquarium, is himself no stranger to failure. He began salmon farming in the late 1980s, but fell into insolvency less than a decade later, after plankton blooms and storms wiped out more than half of his fish in three seasons.
He concluded the only way for the industry to survive those natural disasters would be to create solid pens - and, in 2000, the B.C. government handed him the chance to prove it with an experimental closed containment farm on land. The fish grew, but the money did not. The cost of pumping seawater was prohibitive, chewing up as much as $11,000 a month in power bills – fully 20% of operational costs.
To much of the industry, that experiment proved what they had already suspected: closed containment may sound good, but it doesn't work.
Still, eight years and many plans later, Mr. Buchanan is ready to try again, with floating tanks made of fiberglass and foam that will hold 100,000 salmon, similar to a standard net-cage. Construction has already begun on his first, which should be in the water by May and, by his calculation, he has slashed pumping expenses to 5% of his costs.
But even Mr. Buchanan is skeptical enough of the "bureaucratic horse****" that would precede building closed containment farms in B.C. that he's hedging his bets on the other side of the world, where he has bought himself a $1-million fish hatchery in northern China, and negotiated the rights to test his system growing trout in three hydro reservoirs. Closed containment could be a particular boon in China, both because of lower input costs and because its technology can pump up cold deep water so it can grow valuable large fish that normally would die in China's hot surface waters.
His first tank will hit the waters there in July. If it works - and if he can upgrade his hatchery to produce enough trout, and if he can raise enough money for more tanks, and if he can keep his tanks from splitting apart in winter ice, and if he can train Chinese workers to care for his facilities - he says the sky is the limit.
"If we can get our hatchery production up we can in five years be equivalent to B.C.'s industry" - producing 80,000 tonnes of fish a year - he said.
"But we'll make more money in China. Faster."
Of course, whether he can get his unproven technology to that level remains very much a valid question. And though it wishes him success, the Canadian industry remains skeptical.
"We've been down this road so many times before," said Mary Ellen Walling, executive director of the B.C. Salmon Farmers Association. "Whether it's achievable is a question."
