The farm certification standards used by Salmon Safe were first developed by Pacific Rivers in 1996 at conferences held at the University of Washington and Oregon State University, and have been updated regularly since then. They are informed by National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration Fisheries and its Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, particularly as related to stormwater and impacts of pesticides on salmon, Kent says. The standards take a holistic approach to farm management: You can’t certify just a part of a farm, but its entire operation.

To get that certification, farmers must target standards in six key areas.

To improve in-stream habitat, they remove alterations that help humans but not fish. This means taking out stream-bank armoring (like rocks that reduce erosion but keep salmon from accessing shallow water), reintroducing wood into the streams and “channelizing” the streambed.

What happens just outside the stream also impacts fish, so farmers replant vegetation that stabilizes riverbanks with roots while adding nutrients to the ecosystem and providing crucial shade. They also remove surfaces like concrete that don’t drain, which worsens stormwater runoff.

To help fish get around these newly available sections of stream, farmers must improve fish passage by replacing culverts with better alternatives. But a navigable stream is no good without enough water, so farmers also increase and stabilize streamflow by reducing and more evenly regulating water use. Adding water to a system also cools down water that, through low volume and lack of vegetation, is too hot for salmon. Water quality measures happen beyond the stream and include removing excess nutrients and pollutants like pesticides from fields.

Lastly, growers must cultivate biodiversity on the farm by increasing the number of animals living in and around the river system, which helps ecosystem resiliency in the face of disease and disaster.

Third-party certifiers ensure farms keep up with the standards by auditing them once a year and visiting every three years.

“The components of it seem to make a lot of sense,” says Mike Cox, a scientist who retired in 2017 from a 30-year career with the Environmental Protection Agency, where he focused mostly on water quality, toxics and climate change. In the course of his work in Puget Sound and through the Columbia River Toxics Reduction Working Group, he became familiar with Salmon Safe and researched its certification standards.

“You hear about these third-party certifications all the time, and there's some greenwashing going on,” he says, referring to the business practice of using deceptive marketing language to overpromise environmental benefits. “[But] when you start looking at the core elements of [Salmon Safe], especially for farms, to me it captures the breadth of the things you want to look at” when it comes to salmon habitat improvements."

Brewer Leslie Shore of Reuben's Brews pours hops into a brew kettle inside the brewery's facility in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood. Reuben's is one of the many Seattle-based brewers using Salmon-Safe hops from Roy Farms.

Lauren Bauernschmidt, a habitat biologist with Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, has never interacted with Salmon Safe, but says that Salmon Safe’s listed core certification standards are excellent.

“I personally believe they do have a strong sense of what improves habitat," she says. "They identify key habitat features such as large wood debris, off-channel habitat, riparian buffers, canopy cover, stream bank stability and sediment delivery prevention. All of these features are what I look for to evaluate the habitat value of a water body and the surrounding ecosystem. These features are also what I identify as needs for restoration projects, where we can get the most ecological bang for our buck. They have identified those features and more in their core standards, so I think they have someone on their team who understands fish habitat.”

Along with the certification, farms receive assistance in applying to sustainability grants; public recognition; and access to Salmon Safe’s branding materials, like those found in Two Beers’ Southern Resident Killer Whale IPA marketing releases. It can help farms reach new markets by easily integrating with other sustainable certifications like USDA Organic, GLOBALG.A.P., Demeter Biodynamic, and others.

“It’s a good thing, but it’s also a marketing tool,” Cox says. “I have no problem with that.”

In addition to Salmon Safe’s scientific soundness, what most impressed Cox was its ability to persuade farmers to get on board. The group says that it prioritizes farmer education and acts as a resource for land management. “Through the certification process, I saw farmers really become more aware of things they could do that wouldn’t have a big economic burden but would have a little benefit for [salmon] streams,” Cox says. “I thought they did a really nice job.”

For farms like Roy’s, trading pesticides for “beneficial predator” insects like ladybugs, lady beetles and predatory mites that control hop pests like two-spotted spider mites and aphids has not been a very difficult transition.

“We have been seeing better results than what we thought we would,” he says.

Katie Wallace, New Belgium's director of social and environmental impact, says the certified farms the brewery works with have reported saving money on fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides while maintaining a healthy yield.

Despite those claims of some financial benefit, there are costs associated with certification that can act as a barrier to some operations. While the certification itself runs about $500 to $900, depending on the industry, the actual cost of bringing a farm up to code can require hard labor and renovation.

“For a lot of farms, switching to these softer [pesticides] is kind of a big gamble.… There’s a pretty substantial increase in cost when it comes to labor [since] we do all of our weeding in baby [hops] by hand rather than applying [pesticides] such as [high-hazard] Solicam,” says Jeff Perrault of nearby Perrault Farms.

That might not seem worth every farmer’s while.

This is especially true for growers who sell to large food manufacturers rather than directly to consumers or craft brewers. When a crop is just one of many ingredients, and the buyer doesn’t have a personal ethical benefit from the purchase, the cost-benefit analysis feels different.

“The challenge we have is influencing large-scale diversified agriculture, particularly east of the mountains. So many crops are commodity crops that don’t carry a message from the farm back into the marketplace, and their [products] are mixed with other growers,” Kent says.

If more breweries or grocers pushed for sustainably grown hops, farmers might respond.

“I think if the end customer wanted it you’d see traction immediately, but the end customer being the breweries, I don't see a whole lot of interest beyond what is there already, quite honestly,” says Roy. The certification aligned with his farm’s personal sustainability goals, but he says, “I don’t think it's going to gain a whole lot of traction in the short term … because the focus to the end consumer is on the beer style and the brewing process in general and not necessarily on the growing practices of the raw materials.”

VandenBrink at Two Beers agrees, noting that financial incentive for brewers isn't there, and he’s not making more money off per-unit sales of SRKW IPA relative to other beers. “[Beverage] consumers are pretty price aware,” he says. “What [brewers] have found over time is that the consumer is not willing to pay more for organic beer," he says, noting that organic ingredients are harder to source, and more expensive to source.

"I assume the same would be true with Salmon-Safe hops," he says, "and we just aren’t able to ask a premium for the product unfortunately."