Shrimp farming and healthy mangrove ecosystems…Can the two go hand in hand?

The past few months have been an exciting time for seafood at Whole Foods Market. In July 2008 we released our newly enhanced standards for farmed finfish and shrimp. In launching these standards, we set a high bar not only for how our seafood is raised, but also for environmental performance in aquaculture globally. Our commitment to sustainability reaches beyond our own stores, which is why we’ve posted our standards on our website and contribute to share and discuss our work at conferences and meetings worldwide.

As we have received several questions from customers particularly interested in shrimp and wanting to know what Whole Foods Market is doing specifically to protect mangroves from the impacts of shrimp farming, I’ll focus this posting on the topic of mangroves.

What are mangroves, anyway?

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Sometimes you meet people who are truly remarkable. I met such a person in September 2007 on a trout farm visit to Idaho. Following two days of presentations at the U.S. Trout Farmers Association meeting, my fellow fishmongers and I were greeted by Leo Ray, who loaded us into his truck for an all day tour of the Snake River Canyon of South Central Idaho. A tall, fit man of undeterminable age, Leo is a zoologist, fish farmer, and naturalist. What’s remarkable about Leo is that he not only possesses tremendous knowledge of aquaculture and knows every inch of the vast land around him—the geology, river systems, the wildlife, etc.—but he shares it. With his wisdom and appreciation for nature, Leo transformed for me what first appeared as a dry, rough, rocky landscape into a living ecosystem that interacts each day with large agriculture and aquaculture industries.

Trout at Leo’s farm are raised in concrete raceways situated on a down-sloping hill. This set-up allows him to utilize gravity for water to flow, which is critical for maintaining healthy oxygen levels, among other things. The water in this system flows downhill from one portion of the raceway to the next. Sediments are collected at the end of each level of the raceway and then flushed to settling ponds before the water is released back into the river or into irrigation canals for local farmers. Farms must have Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) permits and monitor water quality according to the Total Maximum Daily Load limits. In Idaho farms are required to monitor water quality each month and report results to the EPA and the Department of Environmental Quality. In addition, these agencies do annual spot checks on the farm. Allowable discharges are based on assessments of what the river can assimilate.

While currently all of the trout we sell at Whole Foods Market comes from flow-through raceway systems like Leo’s, we continue to keep our eye on developments of other types of systems such as closed, re-circulating systems. However, a major benefit of the flow-through raceway system is that there are no energy inputs to create flow in the water. In contrast, closed, re-circulating systems require energy inputs, which have a carbon footprint.

What about feed?

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This past Wednesday, Whole Foods Market launched our enhanced aquaculture standards — standout stuff for the industry. Our seafood quality standards team spent the last couple of years researching and investigating all of the issues surrounding farmed fish. They worked with the fish farmers as well as environmental groups and scientists to develop the very best standards out there. In this podcast, I talk to Carrie Brownstein, our Seafood Quality Standards Coordinator, and David Pilat, our Global Seafood Coordinator, to find out all of the scoop on these standards.

 Aquaculture Standards: Play Now | Download (377)

I am at the new Whole Foods Market store in Tribeca, NYC perusing the seafood counter on a most exciting day. Today we launched our new quality standards for farmed seafood at Whole Foods Market, a culmination of two years work to set the bar high for aquaculture practices worldwide. I watch as an inquisitive customer reads through our brochure detailing the key highlights of the new standards while the team member wraps up her salmon. Her eyes shift from the brochure to the salmon in the case. “Does this salmon that I’m buying come from this farm, pictured here in this brochure? Does it meet your standards?” she asks the team member. “It sure does,” he replies proudly to the customer’s delight, “all of our farmed seafood will need to meet our standards and be approved through an independent third party audit.” “That’s so cool,” she declares, and away she goes, pulled by the hand by an impatient toddler.

As I scan the seafood case, I see fish from many of the farms that I’ve visited over the last two years-salmon from Norway, trout and catfish from North Carolina, shrimp from Vietnam, and Arctic char from Iceland, to name only a few. It’s been a stimulating and inspiring process developing these standards. Learning about the problems and finding solutions-my favorite kind of work. Speaking with scientists, environmentalists, and producers, I investigated every issue related to aquaculture: feed, predator control, water quality, chemical use, environmental contaminants, siting, traceability, etc. With the best available science, I armed myself with all the information. Then I went into the field. I visited hatcheries, farms, feed mills, and processing plants to get a closer look at how farmed fish are produced and to really understand what producers are doing, and not doing.

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