Welfare benchmarking allows salmon farms to compare their performance against industry peers and best practice standards. This drives competitive improvement and identifies both outliers and exemplars.
Benchmarking creates welfare improvement incentives that persist independently of regulation or consumer pressure. When farms can see their own performance relative to peers, the competitive instinct to perform at or above average drives continuous improvement. Building robust, standardised, independently verified benchmarking systems is an important systemic welfare intervention for salmon farming.