"Why I won't buy Australian farmed salmon ever again."

I’d always thought fish the ‘better’ food choice. It’s the clean, safe option in between chickens that are pumped with hormones and pigs in pens where they can’t stand up and cows getting stunned and still not killed at abattoirs.

Fish felt like the safer, cleaner, kinder and more environmentally sustainable choice.

Until Monday night’s Four Corners on the ABC exposed the intensive farming and use of chemical colouring that fish farming in Australia involves.

The 45-minute program called ‘Big Fish’ painted a very different picture to the one seen on the packaging of smoked salmon or salmon fillets in the supermarket’s cold section. Forget open water and free, jumping fish. Instead think over-crowded nets, damage to the environment and chemicals that are used to replicate natural conditions.

The program has changed me.

I’m never buying farmed salmon again.

I’m not naive. I know that the farming of any animal needs to be profitable. To be profitable, it must involve high numbers. It can’t be all open spaces and wild animals and nothing industrial in sight.

But it doesn’t need to be this bad.

Fish farms in Tasmania are hurting the ecosystem.

Macquarie Harbour – on Tasmania’s West Coast – has a small opening to the ocean called Hell’s Gates. This harbour is used by the three biggest Australian salmon retailers – Tassal, Huon and Petuna – to intensively farm salmon.

Macquarie Harbour is struggling:

• The harbour is filled with fish faeces: “Hell’s Gates is one of the reasons why it’s incredibly stupid to intensively farm salmon in Macquarie Harbour,” Laura Kelly strategic director of Environment Tasmania told Four Corners. “Wave energy from this tiny narrow opening is what’s being relied on to flush the faeces. The harbour is now full of faeces.”
• According to the regulator, EPA, 21,000 tonnes of fish feed has ended up in the harbour in the past year alone. This is creating massive areas of waste on the sea floor.
• In May 2015, 85,000 salmon suffocated to death in Macquarie Harbour when oxygen levels suddenly plummeted following a storm. “At the point where they have oxygen levels this low, [the salmon] are experiencing high levels of stress,” Dr Tim Dempster an expert in sustainable aquaculture examined the area after the May incident. “They’re swimming around with mouths open to get more oxygen to flow across their gills, they’re swimming more slowly, not interested in feeding. They’re essentially in a survival mode.”
• Following Dr Dempster’s findings, and the 85,000 dead salmon, the government increased the volume of fish in the harbour by 15,000 tonnes.

Then there is the chemical side of things, which shocked me again.

You see, farmed salmon is not naturally pink.

In the wild, salmon feed on insects, invertebrates and plankton. Adult salmon can also eat other fish, squids, eels and shrimp. The nutrients from this diet provides the pigment that makes salmon flesh pink.

Farmed salmon are not fed anything that resembles a natural diet. Because of this, farmed salmon are not naturally pink.

With its trademark piercing journalism Four Corners Meldrum-Hanna went to the factories of Skretting Australia – the country’s largest supplier of fish feed and the brand that supplies Tassal, Huon and Petuna.

She asked about the ingredients in fish feed, and discovered it contains chicken feathers (yes, chicken feathers) and animal off-cuts from lamb and beef (organs and blood).

The feed also contains Astaxanthin – a chemical that mimics the pigment salmon would normally attain from crustaceans in the wild. Except Astaxanthin is synthesised.

To decide how much Astaxanthin should be added to the feed, there is such a thing as a “salmofan”, which looks like a paint chart.

It’s a scale of different “degrees” of the colour salmon. From grey to dark pink. Fish farmers can choose the degree of pigment they want their fish to have, using the salmofan. The corresponding amount of Astaxanthin is then included in the feed.

Without this chemical additive, the flesh of farmed salmon would be grey in colour. All of a sudden, it doesn’t sound so appealing.

There are so many problems with this. The most glaring of these is lack of transparency.

Fish farming companies in Australia are not required to tell consumers about the chemical colouring. This week however, after Four Corners’ program went to air, Tassal announced the company would begin using naturally derived Astaxanthin in its fish feed, instead of the synthetic version.

There is also the issue that companies like Tassal pay the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) around a quarter of a million dollars each year. This is part of a conservation partnership between Tassal and WWF, and means the fish farming company can display the well-known WWF panda logo on certain product packaging. A move that certainly helps raise awareness around conservation, but also increases consumer trust in the product, as Four Corners points out.

One thing is crystal clear (unlike salmon farming practices): I’m never buying farmed salmon again.