Wild vs. Farmed vs. Hatchery

A salmon is a salmon is a salmon, right? Well, not quite. Wild salmon hatch in gravel nests, or redds, and return to spawn in the streams of their birth. Rivers, estuaries, and marine shorelines provide refuge and food for young salmon preparing for life in the ocean, where they reach adult size before returning to their natal streams to spawn the next generation of wild fish.

Declines in wild populations gave rise to hatcheries in the Northwest beginning more than 100 years ago. Built primarily to produce fish for harvest, hatcheries compensate for freshwater habitat loss by increasing the survival of salmon through the early stages of their life cycle, and by receiving returning adults. Hatcheries now provide 70 percent of the salmon caught in Puget Sound—but they have also been identified as a contributor to the decline of wild populations. Comprehensive hatchery reform, however, aims to revolutionize how hatcheries are managed so they can help recover threatened and endangered wild populations and support sustainable fisheries.

Farmed salmon are the livestock of the salmon world. Like hatchery fish, they are born and spend the early stages of their life cycle in human hands. While hatchery fish are then released to spend the majority of their life in the wild, farmed salmon are fed and matured into adults in large saltwater enclosures, usually along marine shorelines, before being harvested as food. The rapid growth in the farmed salmon industry in the last two decades has raised new questions about the environmental, social, and economic effects of salmon farms.