Possibly the Best News for Our Fjords: Goodbye to Large-Scale Pig Farms, Hello to a Thriving Sea!

Finally some good news

And now—it’s time! This could actually be the best news ever for the inner Danish waters. If you haven’t guessed already, here it is: There's talk that Denmark will start phasing out large-scale pig farming.

But before the good news, let’s get the—well, let's just call it what it is—the crap background out of the way.

This year’s election? Many parties dubbed it “the pig election.” But the real one paying the bills for the pig farmers’ mess is the SEA.

Since World War II, Danish agriculture has basically been given free rein by politicians to trash the conditions for their sister industry, fishing. Especially in the inner Danish waters. Our fjords are narrow, with little water exchange, and they receive tons of small and large streams—all loaded with nutrients washing off the pig farmers’ fields, fertilized with manure from all those pigs.

The fjords can’t take it

Too many nutrients means too many algae—especially the notorious “fedtemøg,” which showed up earlier and in bigger quantities this year than ever before. This goop goes wild, gobbling up all the nutrients and sticking itself to the bladderwrack and seagrass, sucking up all the oxygen. When it dies and falls to the seafloor, it rots into hydrogen sulfide—a deadly poison that wipes out the seabed. And once that happens, the fish, shrimp, crabs, mussels—everything is gone. Nothing left for the fishers.

There have been endless discussions, lots of more or less clever schemes to limit the impact of industrial pig farming on the fjords, but our inner bays and coastal waters just keep getting worse. Why? Because we're still putting out way, way too many nutrients from farming. Just to get the numbers straight: 70% of all nutrient pollution comes from agriculture. But if you look at just the manmade share—not natural processes—it’s actually 90%.

That’s right. Conventional farming is responsible for 90% of human-caused nutrient pollution in the sea.

So, yup, it’s a real mess. And climate change just adds fuel to the fire: warming seas extend the algae-growing season, making everything worse. Mess on top of mess.

The only way out is to slam the brakes on nutrient leaks. Six hundred thousand hectares have to be taken out of production—an enormous area, over 13.9% of Denmark’s total land area (which is about 4.3 million hectares).

Here’s the thing. Fjords were once wild ecosystems. In those sheltered brackish reaches, freshwater and saltwater species mixed, rolling in endless seagrass meadows. You’d catch perch, pike, trout, eel, and flounder in the same trap! A bit further out? The saltwater fish lived—cod, turbot, plaice, sole, herring. In summer, big schools of mackerel, garfish, mullet. And there were eels everywhere, shrimp by the bucket.

Every harbor had fishers—even deep at the heart of the fjords, people made a living fishing. They caught fish for their neighbors. Imagine that—harvesting from the ecosystem for hundreds of years, and they could have kept going, if it weren’t for the now-dead fjords. Instead, we get pork loin pumped full of antibiotics at 18 kroner per kilo. Hooray, right?

But hang on—what about that good news?

Here it is: we could actually have it back! If Denmark really takes 600,000 hectares out of production, stops raising 40 million pigs, stops spraying 60% of the country in pig slurry—something will happen. And it’s something you’ll actually see pretty fast. It’s just like you learn at first aid: stop the accident. If you stop the accident, you give these mighty ecosystems a chance to recover. And trust me, we're talking about some powerful ecosystems here. I think we’ll be surprised by just how quickly we'll see the transformation—possibly within the next 10 years, if we put a stop to the nutrient pollution now.

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Nature's comeback

One of my favorite ocean stories is about Bikini Atoll. It’s both a terrible and amazing tale. In 1946 and for years after, the US military exploded not less than 23 nuclear bombs right above the coral reef at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. Total devastation, above and below the surface, to the point where no one thought life would ever return. The area’s still radioactive and unlivable for humans, but just a few years ago, scientists from Stanford checked out the sea there—and found an actual explosion of fish, and coral reefs absolutely thriving in the most radioactive spot of all. Fish populations aren’t just bigger, they’re packed with large fish and rare species found almost nowhere else. The sea bounced back quicker than anyone thought, all because humans had stayed out since the atom bombs.

Researchers reckon the coral started growing again within a few years of the last bomb. That gives me hope!

That story just shows how resilient the sea is—if you give it half a chance. If we really make this change, things will bounce back. And honestly, it’s worth it.

So there you go—potentially the best news EVER for the inner Danish waters!

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