Salmon feed converts wild fish and crops into pellets for farmed salmon, with around 2.5% of global marine fish caught feeding Norway’s industry. This supports year-round growth but masks overfishing, monoculture pressures, and hidden social and ecological costs.
A feed barge restocks the automatic feeder at a salmon farm
Salmon feed relies on complex, global supply chains, combining wild-caught fish and industrial crops into protein-rich pellets for intensive aquaculture. Large-scale soy production in Brazil drives deforestation, soil degradation, and loss of biodiversity, while fish caught off the coasts of West Africa, diverted from local artisanal fisheries, undermines food security, disrupts local economies, and intensifies pressures on communities, sometimes forcing migration. The environmental impacts ripple across oceans, rivers, and farmlands, linking distant ecosystems to the production of farmed salmon in ways that are largely hidden from consumers.
These intertwined supply chains concentrate wealth in industrial salmon markets, ensuring steady growth and year-round availability, while spreading environmental and social costs across regions that are geographically and politically distant from the benefits. Small-scale fishers, farmers, and coastal communities often bear the brunt, losing livelihoods and facing ecological degradation, while consumers enjoy affordable salmon with little visibility of the hidden impacts. This disparity highlights the unequal distribution of benefits and burdens in globalised food systems, where convenience and profit mask the human and ecological tolls behind every pellet.
Producing just one kilogram of farmed salmon demands several kilograms of wild-caught fish, which are processed into protein-rich feed pellets. This high feed conversion ratio reveals the hidden inefficiency of intensive aquaculture, where a significant amount of marine life is used to produce relatively small amounts of farmed fish.
Feed is loaded from huge sacks of dried pellets onto a diesel-powered automated feeder
A factory that redistributes feed across a wide area, serving dozens of farms
The diversion of forage fish to industrial salmon farms reduces the catches available to small-scale artisanal fisheries, threatening the food security and livelihoods of coastal communities in often poorer nations. While consumers enjoy affordable salmon, these local fishers bear the hidden social and ecological costs of each kilogram.
A salmon farm is restocked with feed
Salmon feed links distant ecosystems and communities to our plates, from deforested soylands in Brazil to depleted coastal fisheries in West Africa. Understanding these connections reveals the true scale of aquaculture’s impact, highlighting the environmental and social trade-offs behind every kilogram of farmed salmon.