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In this short video, bags of fish feed are headed for Cooke Aquaculture’s massive open-ocean salmon pens off the coast of Maine. The pens sit between Black Island and Swan’s Island, just south of Mount Desert Island — home to Acadia National Park.

Industrial finfish aquaculture is often promoted as a “sustainable” way to produce more seafood without putting pressure on wild fish populations. But it takes wild fish to farm fish; the feed contains fishmeal and fish oil made from wild-caught forage fish.

According to FoodRise, it can take between 3 and 6 pounds of wild fish to produce just one pound of farmed salmon.

The industry also comes with serious ecosystem and animal health concerns. Disease and mass mortality events are common in crowded open-ocean pens. In 2021, for example, roughyl 116,000 salmon died across two of Cooke’s Black Island operations.

Video by Jim Vallette