The Hill News

It’s not every summer that a fish lands on the cover of TIME Magazine. But that’s just what happened this July, signaling that the future of our nation’s fisheries has become a pressing issue to be seriously debated among the federal government, environmental and consumer groups and of course, fishermen. Unfortunately, this debate was heating up at a time when Congress was mostly focused on issues like the debt ceiling â€" and right before they left town for congressional summer vacations.

Now that the summer is over, it’s time for Congress to weigh in.

“There's no denying that aquaculture [fish farming] can be messy,” the TIME story acknowledged. “A badly run near-shore farm of 200,000 salmon can flush nitrogen and phosphorus into the water at levels equal to the sewage from a town of 20,000 people.”

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