Fish-farming Tilapia in B.C.

Image by: Nik West

It’s lunchtime at the Redfish Ranch Tilapia Farm and Hatchery; owner Barry Sjostrom tosses scoops of brown feed pellets into what resembles an above-ground swimming pool as 6,500 fish battle to the surface in concert, voracious and feisty as Amazon River piranhas. But these tilapia are far from bloodthirsty piranhas: for one thing, they live on a dry-land fish farm on the east coast of Vancouver Island, just north of Courtenay. And the pink and red farmed Nile tilapia in question thrive on near-vegetarian diets in tanks of recirculated fresh well water, in stark contrast to both piranhas and the millions of farmed Atlantic salmon raised in open-net cages just up the coast from here.

Sjostrom has been in business since 2000, and with North American demand mushrooming, he is now one of more than 100 tilapia farmers in the U.S. and Canada. Annual consumption of tilapia in the U.S. quadrupled between 2003 and 2006, making it the fourth most popular seafood, behind shrimp, tuna and salmon.

Sjostrom’s venture into fish farming was motivated, at least in part, by what he witnessed over 35 years of commercial fishing for salmon, halibut, tuna and herring. Concerned over the damage to stocks and habitat caused by certain wild B.C. fisheries, the Port Hardy native embarked on a second career as a dry-land fish farmer when he was in his mid-50s – right around the time he sold his salmon troller and got out of commercial fishing for good.

Little did he know when he started that his sustainable farming approach would present a potential avenue forward for the B.C. salmon-farming industry, which is currently under siege by environmental groups and fish lovers of all stripes for its impact on marine ecosystems and wild Pacific salmon.

Not far up the coast from Sjostrom’s tilapia farm, salmon native to the North Atlantic Ocean are raised in open-net cages concentrated in coastal waters along the Georgia, Johnstone and Queen Charlotte straits. The fish raised here comprise the province’s most valuable agricultural export: B.C. produced 77,000 tonnes of Atlantic salmon in 2008, with a total farm-gate value of more than $380 million. (Chinook and coho salmon are also farmed in much smaller quantities.) Nearly 90 per cent of this salmon is destined for U.S. restaurants and supermarkets.

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  • Christopher Pollon, 
  • Entrepreneurship, 
  • Food and Agriculture