Salmon Farming Is Factory Farming

Salmon farming is sold as a solution. Less pressure on wild fish. Efficient protein. A smarter way to produce food. A step forward. It isn’t. It’s the same system. Same logic. Same outcome. Take individuals. Turn them into commodities. Optimise their use. Scale it up. Hide the cost. The only difference is this version happens underwater.

In Scotland, nearly 36 million farmed fish died “unexpectedly” in just three years. That figure doesn’t include those killed during transport, those culled, those who died early in production, or the millions of “cleanerfish” used and discarded by the industry.

That’s not a failure.

That’s the system working.

You don’t build an industry around using bodies as units and expect low death rates. You expect loss, waste, inefficiency, and constant replacement. Because the individuals don’t matter. Only output does.

And when the numbers get too big to ignore, the response isn’t to question the system. It’s to redefine the numbers.

Exclude certain deaths. Reclassify others. Narrow the scope. Control what counts.

Then call it transparency.

Regulation follows the same pattern.

Out of more than 200 salmon farms in Scotland, just 21 were inspected over three years. The worst sites, linked to over 10 million deaths, weren’t inspected at all.

This isn’t oversight failing.

This is what oversight looks like when its job is to protect an industry, not challenge it.

The same story repeats elsewhere. In Tasmania, millions of farmed fish are dying as warming waters make conditions incompatible with the animals forced into them.

And still, the farms remain.

Because the goal was never to respect them. The goal is to use them for as long as possible.

Even the sustainability argument collapses the moment you look at it properly.

Salmon farming doesn’t replace wild fishing. It depends on it.

Wild fishes are caught, processed into feed, and fed to farmed fishes. Entire marine ecosystems are mined to sustain enclosed populations that will be killed anyway.

When researchers accounted for what the industry leaves out, including trimmings, by-products, and uncounted deaths during capture, the picture changed.

Farmed fish can require more wild fish than they produce.

For salmon, it can take multiple pounds of wild fish to produce a single pound of farmed flesh.

So what is this, exactly?

It’s not production. It’s conversion.

Take one group of animals, reduce them into inputs, and pass them through another group of animals to produce something people recognise as food.

Nothing is solved. The violence is just rearranged.

And when the industry tries to escape that reality by shifting to crop-based feeds, it doesn’t reduce impact. It relocates it.

More land. More water. More resource extraction.

The system doesn’t become efficient. It becomes distributed.

Marine exploitation on one side. Terrestrial exploitation on the other.

All to sustain the idea that using animals is necessary.

It isn’t.

And that’s the part everything else is built to avoid.

Because if you accept that animals aren’t resources, the entire structure collapses.

No amount of “better farming” fixes a system based on ownership. No feed innovation changes the fact that individuals are being treated as means to an end. No regulatory tweak transforms exploitation into something justifiable.

So instead of questioning the premise, the system defends itself.

It hides inputs.

It obscures numbers.

It relies on voluntary disclosures.

It withholds data.

And when exposure breaks through, it targets the people doing the exposing.

Activists documenting conditions at salmon farms have been followed, surveilled, profiled.

Not because they were wrong.

Because they were visible.

That’s how you know what you’re looking at.

A system that claims legitimacy but behaves like it has something to hide.

Because it does.

At its core, salmon farming is not a sustainability solution.

It’s the expansion of the same mindset that created overfishing in the first place.

The belief that other animals exist as resources.

That their bodies are inputs.

That their lives are units.

That their value is what can be extracted from them.

Until that is rejected, nothing changes.

Not the methods. Not the outcomes. Not the scale.

Just the story being told.

And right now, the story is that farming fish is progress.

It isn’t.

It’s just exploitation, industrialised, optimised, and submerged.