‘Loophole’ means full fish farm death figures are not made public
SCOTLAND’S major salmon farming companies use software to record fish deaths which are hidden from public reporting, according to documents reviewed by The National.
Inspection reports, company manuals and emails seen under Freedom of Information (FoI) law show that farmers digitally record full death tolls internally, and that Government officials are familiar with the apps farmers use by name.
Despite this, the Government has repeatedly claimed that requiring fuller reporting would place an unjustifiable “burden” on companies.
“What exactly is the burden, pressing a button to share it?” said Abigail Penny, executive director of welfare charity Animal Equality. “It’s clearly a deflection and it makes you wonder: what exactly are they hiding?”
With protesters lining the entrance to Holyrood, a parliamentary inquiry heard its final, follow-up evidence session into a salmon farming inquiry last week.
The Scottish Government then released “preliminary research” which concludes that “no new regulation [is] needed on salmon mortalities”.
Campaigners such as Penny say that “loopholes” in how deaths are reported undermine both the government’s position, and industry claims about “best of record” survival rates.
Rural Affairs Secretary Mairi Gougeon did not respond to questions about the software and officials’ knowledge of it, but repeated that “the administrative burden of processing, standardising and quality assuring further data by regulators cannot be justified”. It and sector representatives Salmon Scotland said that farmers are already held to high levels of transparency.
When fish die unexpectedly, farmers report some of these “mortalities” voluntarily to officials. “Culls”, where staff kill ailing salmon pre-emptively, go entirely unreported. Chance onsite
inspections offer glimpses of the scale of this underreporting.
Last April, for example, a Bakkafrost farm off the Isle of Lewis recorded 0.1% deaths despite killing just under 200,000 fish, because they were recorded as culls.
Campaigners and MSPs have been calling for this “loophole” to be closed since a parliamentary inquiry in 2018, but have repeatedly been told by Gougeon that publishing cull numbers in full would present an unjustifiable “burden for producers”.
Official inspection reports from Cooke, Scottish Sea Farms, Bakkafrost and three other smaller companies refer to staff recording deaths in “fishtalk”, a Norwegian aquaculture software platform. Staff manuals published with planning applications likewise describe the app in flowcharts for recording fish deaths.
Mowi instead uses a similar software called Mercatus Farmer, according to site plans shared with officials and seen under FoI law. These plans instruct staff to record all deaths, distinguishing between culls and mortalities.
One former Highland loch site manager familiar with fishtalk said the platform makes reporting culls “as easy as checking a box”. “Say the Government turned around and said they wanted to know mortalities and culls from the industry: that’s a very simple report to set up on the system that could be uploaded every single month,” said the manager, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional repercussions.
Green Britain Foundation founder Dale Vince said excuses about reporting burden are “pure fantasy”.
“The data exists. It just isn’t being published,” he said. “That lets the industry present a cleaner picture of their dirty truth. Ministers have the power to require full reporting tomorrow if they want to.”
Emails seen by The National under FoI law show the government’s Marine Directorate mentioning fishtalk in emails with producers. In one a farmer sends “fishtalk squares” with exactly weekly stocking figures; in another an official asks Bakkafrost staff: “Did you have any luck with logging into FishTalk today?”
Regulators and sector representatives admitted as much in Holyrood last month. Neil Purvis, delivery lead of the government’s Fish Health Inspectorate, told MSPs “we see a lot more information than we publish”. Salmon Scotland’s director Ben Hadfield said: “As a manager of a large company in Scotland I see every single reason for fish death … you could just say ‘publish the lot,’ but there has to be a reasonable level of transparency”.
Vince said it was “disappointing” to hear the government “repeat the industry’s line that this would be too difficult”. He added: “The least the public should expect in return of environmental destruction is complete transparency about how many animals are dying.”
Salmon Scotland said farmers “already operate with a level of transparency that exceeds other sectors” and that average monthly survival last year reached 98.3%.
“No-one cares more about these fish than the people who look after them, and survival rates, which are voluntarily published, reflect the sector’s £1 billion investment in fish health and welfare,” it added.
Gougeon said transparency is “world leading” and current data collection “is already sufficient for regulatory purposes”.