Four reasons why land-based salmon factory farms should be banned – Inside track

This post is by Amelia Cookson, industrial aquaculture campaigner at Foodrise in the UK.

When you hear the words ‘salmon farming’, what comes to mind?

Perhaps an open-net sea cage in coastal waters? Or the fish you buy in the supermarket? Or maybe you had no idea salmon were farmed in the first place.

Either way, it’s unlikely that the first thing that comes to mind is on-land factory farms: huge windowless warehouses where salmon are crammed inside artificial indoor tanks.

Absurd – and dystopian – as it sounds, this technology is swimming under the radar and being presented as the new frontier of the salmon industry, while bringing with it a new wave of environmental harm and animal suffering.

That’s why Foodrise and Seastemik have published a new policy briefing to give this emerging technology the scrutiny it needs.

The briefing exposes land-based salmon farming for what it is: a catastrophic new form of factory farming. It calls for governments to ban land-based salmon production altogether, a call now backed by 20 other organisations including Communities Against Factory Farming, Greenpeace France and the Green Britain Foundation.

Here are four reasons why a ban on land-based salmon is urgently needed:

This is factory fish farming Land-based salmon farms are nothing more than industrial factory farms. These warehouses are sterile, artificial, unnatural and built for mass production. Salmon are crammed into barren indoor tanks, denied natural light and space, suffering until slaughter or premature death. It’s factory farming at its worst and it has no place in our food system.

It is a risky experiment where thousands of fish die These new technologies are experimental, unreliable and already causing catastrophic harm.  In 2023, Sustainable Blue, a Canadian land-based salmon company, lost 100,000 salmon to a system failure, which pushed the company into receivership in 2024.

In May 2025, 170,000 salmon died prematurely at a Proximar Seafood site in Japan due to a human error which led to a pump failure, leading to the fish being starved of oxygen and dying.

These are not isolated events. There have been at least 17 mass mortality incidents at land-based fish farming sites since 2020.

Not only does this illustrate the shocking animal welfare consequences linked to these production systems, but it also represents a shocking loss of resources (ie feed and energy) that go into producing the fish in the first place.

Salmon production extracts wild-caught fish to use in feed Salmon are carnivores, meaning they depend on wild fish in their feed no matter where they are produced, whether on land or at sea. The industry’s appetite for vast numbers of wild-caught fish is driving the plunder of vast numbers of fish whose populations are already struggling. These fish are often taken from communities in Global Majority* countries, processed into fishmeal and oil and exported to feed salmon raised thousands of miles away. Research published in 2024 shows that it takes up to 6kg of wild fish to produce 1kg of farmed salmon. This is a staggering level of inefficiency and ecological harm, illustrating the inherently extractive nature of this food production system.

Communities do not want them Around the world, from the UK to France, Belgium and the US, communities are pushing back. In England, proposed sites in Cleethorpes and Wiltshire have sparked protests and hundreds of objections. In France, only one of three proposed projects has secured permits and it remains stalled. Following an initiative by Seastemik and Welfarm, a cross-party bill was introduced in 2025 which calls for a ten year moratorium on land-based salmon farms, with support from over 100 French MPs. In Belgium and the US, strong community resistance and legal challenges have already shut proposed sites down.

It’s time to ban-land based salmon production
Whilst communities around the world are rising up against this practice, the responsibility to prevent the expansion of such a destructive industry must not rest with people power and local authorities alone:  governments must step in now to ban land-based salmon production before it takes hold and causes irreversible damage.

We need radical food system transformation that creates just and sustainable alternatives, not a new technology that deepens the industry’s existing harms and cements corporate power. The UK can be a frontrunner in rejecting this dystopian food production scenario.

That’s why Foodrise and Seastemik, as part of a coalition of 21 organisations, are calling for governments to take immediate action to ban land-based salmon farms, before it’s too late.

‘Fish out of water: pulling the plug on land-based salmon factory farms’ has just been published by Foodrise and Seastemik.

* Global Majority is a collective term referring to people who are Black, Asian, Brown, dual-heritage, or indigenous to the global south, challenging the negative implication of being racialised as ‘ethnic minorities’. Global Majority does not include people of White ethnic groups seen as ‘minorities’ in their countries of residence, such as some people of Irish descent, Jewish people and Travellers (see: rosemary m campbell-stephens, educational leadership and the global majority: decolonising narratives (Springer Nature, 2021).