Dear John,

Southern Oregon salmon are facing a threat back from the dead: salmon hatcheries-in-a-box.

House Bill 3150 would mandate that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife install hatch boxes to disperse hatchery produced salmon into Southern Oregon rivers. But ODFW used this hatchery strategy for two decades up to the early 2000s, and it didn’t work. The state abandoned this effort due to high costs and poor salmon runs.

Tell Oregon Legislative leaders to stop HB 3150

There are major problems with hatch box rearing of salmon, including:

Hatch boxes get buried in spawning gravels and introduce unfed, hatchery-origin fry into any "suitable" river within 100 miles of the Pacific Ocean, competing with wild fish.
The survival rate of unfed hatchery fish is so low that ODFW put a moratorium on this type of hatchery program more than a decade ago.
With the exception of Fall Chinook, salmon reared in hatch boxes cannot be harvested by anglers because they are not marked as hatchery-origin fish. Per state fishing regulations, if any hatch box fish survive to adulthood, the vast majority cannot be harvested by anglers.

This bill makes no sense. HB 3150 does not increase angler opportunity and will harm wild salmon populations.

We need your help today.

Please write a letter to budget writers in the Oregon Legislature and urge them not to support HB 3150.

Thank you for taking action,

The Wild Salmon Center Team