Hatcheries supplied 90% of the American River's spawning salmon in 2023. The fishery's goal counts hatchery and wild fish together.

In 2023, an estimated 37,321 fall-run Chinook salmon spawned in the American River. About 33,717 of them were born in a hatchery and 3,604 were not, according to the Constant Fractional Marking report for 2023, the Central Valley's hatchery tagging program, dated October 2026. That is a hatchery share of 90%. The same river read 90% in 2021 and 85% in 2022. On the Feather River, the fall and spring spawners read 85%, 84% and 90% over the three years.

The fishery's own accounting does not report that split. The Pacific Fishery Management Council's Review of 2025 Ocean Salmon Fisheries says 164,763 adult fall Chinook returned to the Sacramento River Basin in 2025, a preliminary count: 34,331 to hatcheries and 130,432 to natural spawning areas. The goal is no fewer than 122,000 hatchery and natural-area adults, and 2025 cleared it. A footnote under the Review's escapement table says fish spawning in natural areas "are the result of hatchery and natural production." The text adds that hatchery-origin fish "generally constitute a large portion" of them. It gives no figure.

A count by place, not by birth

A spawner survey asks where a fish is. A hatchery share asks where it was born. Surveyors walk the banks and count carcasses, and a hatchery fish that strays into a river looks like any other unless it carries a mark. Since 2007, at least a quarter of the hatchery fish raised at the Central Valley's five hatcheries have received a microscopic coded-wire tag, under a millimeter long, and a clipped fin to flag them. Those hatcheries produce about 32 million fall-run salmon in a typical year. Biologists recover tags from carcasses, scale the recoveries up to the whole river, and subtract: natural-origin fish are the total escapement minus the expanded hatchery recoveries.

Across the sampled natural areas of the whole Central Valley, a region that includes the San Joaquin's rivers, so not a Sacramento number, hatchery fish were 69% of fall-run spawners in 2021 and 68% in 2022. In 2023 they were 88%, which the 2023 report calls the highest since the program was fully implemented. From 2010 through 2022 the average was 69%, in a range of 51% to 81%.

On the Sacramento River above Princeton the swing was wider. Hatchery fish were 39% of fall-run spawners in 2021, 26% in 2022 and 90% in 2023, when biologists estimated 3,560 spawners in that reach. The Review's "upper river" is a different stretch, everything above the Feather River, and it reports 6,284 natural-area spawners for 2023. The two numbers measure different water and do not conflict.

The report's authors say the 2023 jump was "likely" tied to the drought of 2020 through 2022: hatchery fish released downstream, away from the low rivers, survived better than fish that spent their first months in them. That is their explanation, and the report does not test it. A second finding is easier to measure. Of the hatchery-origin fish spawning in the Sacramento River in 2023, 72% came from hatcheries outside the Sacramento basin. Releases from the Mokelumne River Hatchery into a coastal net pen at Pillar Point supplied 26% of that group.

Why the goal depends on the split

The 122,000 is the run's maximum-sustainable-yield escapement, called SMSY in the Review's stock-status table: the number of spawners the fishery manages toward. The Council's page on the run says the objective was built in the 1980s from data going back to the 1950s, and that a 2022 literature review found it difficult to reproduce from historical data.

The Council's Sacramento fall Chinook workgroup has said why replacing it is hard. In its October 2025 report it wrote that direct estimation of reference points "using standard methods is not appropriate for SRFC" because of "the large contribution of hatchery-origin spawners in natural areas," which means "there is no way to define spawners and recruits such that spawners are the only source of recruits." Put plainly, a count that mixes in hatchery fish cannot say how many young the river's own spawners produce. The workgroup's fallback methods need the natural-origin share of the run, and it notes that this share depends "on the same constant fractional marking program" that supplies the rest of the record.

That program reports slowly. The 2021 report is dated April 2025 and the 2023 report October 2026. The origin split for the 130,432 natural-area spawners of 2025 does not exist yet.

The date and the deadline

The Council meets November 13 to 18 in Garden Grove. On Sunday, November 15, from 8 a.m., agenda item F.3 takes the final report of the peer review panel that evaluated the workgroup's methods for re-estimating the run's spawner abundance at maximum sustainable yield, then closes with Council discussion and direction on next steps. The agenda lists direction, not the adoption of a new goal. I have not read the panel's report.

Anyone can comment. Written comments go through the Council's online portal, which opened October 13 and closes November 12 at 5 p.m.; oral comment is taken at the meeting before the Council acts on each item. Our view is that the question worth putting to the panel's findings is whether the next goal will count natural-origin spawners, and that view would change if the panel shows the split does not move the estimate. The goal needs an origin share published for the run being managed. The newest one now on disk describes 2023.