New frontiers for fish farming.

• Author: Gay, Joel
• Position: Alaska

While other countries make a booming business out of farming salmon, trout, halibut and flounder, Alaska has made it difficult at best and illegal at worst to practice mariculture. The debate continues as to whether salmon and halibut make sense in Alaska.

It's a cool May day on the farm. but beads of sweat dot Payton's forehead as he bends over his crop and tears at the weeds. Like all farmhands from Des Moines to Djakarta, Payton has no end of work.

Payton isn't bent over corn stalks. however. He's leaning out of a skiff in Jakolof Bay, near Seldovia, tending a crop of oysters at Eagle Rock Seafarms, owned by Jim Hemming and Joe Banta. In a few months, the harvest will be shipped to Anchorage or perhaps end up in Seattle or New York.

Chefs say the cold, clean coastal water is what makes Alaska farmed oysters so good and demand for them so high. But while the future looks rosy for shellfish farmers in Alaska - sales are increasing every year and more than $5 million worth of oysters are in the water now - the same cannot be said for salmon farmers in the state. There are none.

A Protectionist Philosophy

Nor are there trout farms, halibut farms or flounder farms, all of which are a booming business in coastal areas around the world. In spite of Alaska's tremendous natural endowments, its clean water and long coastline, the state's involvement with mariculture has been rocky at best and at times downright antagonistic.

It's paradoxical, says Ray RaLonde, a mariculture specialist with the University of Alaska Marine Advisory Program. On one hand, Alaska has perfect conditions for fish farms of all sorts. On the other, he says, "Alaska is a very special place, and there has been a healthy movement to prevent the problems we see in mariculture elsewhere." That protectionist philosophy has kept most types of mariculture from taking root.

In the management of its fish and game, as in many other areas of state governance, Alaskans had learned from the mistakes made elsewhere, says RaLonde. It was feared, for instance, that if non-indigenous species were imported, they might overrun native populations, introduce diseases or dilute the genetic makeup of local stocks, whether clams or coho salmon. And even those species that grew here naturally, like the Pacific oyster, were allowed in only after rigorous scrutiny and approval by numerous state agencies.

RaLonde says the biology of farmed vs. ranched fish is debatable. Some were worried that penned fish might escape, and the interbreeding with wild stocks could change vital stages in the...