What is a Sustainable Salmon Hatchery?

It’s springtime in the oceans!

The seaweeds are blossoming, marine life is flourishing, chinook salmon are spawning, and young Atlantic salmon are migrating from the warming freshwater areas to the oxygen-rich, cool ocean waters.

After all, salmon love living in cold water and that’s why they thrive in the waters of Norway, especially in the areas of the Arctic Circle, where our home on Kvaroy Island is located.

46 years ago, when Kvaroy Arctic was started by our family of fishermen living in this remote, scenic region of Norway, their dream was to understand how to farm salmon, instead of only fishing for it in the wild. They knew that in order to be truly sustainable and to care for nature and its biodiversity, they needed to help support the ocean’s wild stocks of salmon flourish.

So our family’s grandfather did something quite remarkable. He caught 3,000 wild salmon in order to study how to farm them. And that’s how the important transition from ocean hunters to ocean farmers has begun!

Since then, we have been raising our ethical salmon from egg to harvest. That amazing process is ocean-friendly and climate-friendly. It starts in our hatcheries and it takes between 9 and 12 months to raise the fish to a small size—3 inches in length!

Then we bring the fish to our huge open ocean net pens where the salmon spends the rest of its happy life. In each pen, we make sure there is plenty of space by having a ratio of 2% fish to 98% pristine, clean waters. This gives this mighty, omega-3-rich marine species the freedom to swim and flow with the currents.

It takes 3 years between raising a single salmon from an egg in our hatchery to harvesting it from the open ocean net pens. From there, it starts its journey to your plate. We are proud that we can serve the world a beautiful, nutritious protein with one of the smallest carbon footprints—always raising the salmon with the health of the climate, oceans, and people in mind.