Fish Farmer Magazine October 2017

Fish Farmer VOLUME 40

NUMBER 10

OCTOBER 2017

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Serving worldwide aquaculture since 1977

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SPECIAL EDITION

DECEMBER 2012

SPECIAL EDITION

CONTAINMENT SPECIAL

TOASTING SCOTLAND’S AQUACULTURE SUCCESS

THE FOUNDING FARMERS

SHARING BEST PRACTICE LATEST TECHNOLOGY Training initiatives

THREE DECADES OF PROGRESS

RECOGNISING THE PIONEERS OF SCOTLAND’S SALMON INDUSTRY

REFLECTIONS ON THE PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE

CLASSIC PHOTOS CASE STUDIES Sponsored by

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INDUSTRY TIMELINE

EQUIPMENT INNOVATIONS

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Fish Farmer Fish Farmer VOLUME 38

NUMBER 05

MAY 2015

VOLUME 38

NUMBER 06

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JUNE 2015

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KEY INDUSTRY VETERANS REFLECT ON THEIR LENGTHY CAREERS

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JULY 2015

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INNOVATION

TECHNOLOGY

PROCESSING

Serving worldwide aquaculture since 1977

From land-based to offshore ventures

From lice busters to biomass counters

All the fun of the world’s biggest seafood fair

SOUND BITES

ALL ABOARD

ACROSS THE POND

GROWING SEAWEED

AQUA NOR

BANKING BONUS

CROWNING GLORY

BEANS MEANS FEED

Finding innovative ways to feed fish better

Super barges delivered to Scottish farms

Trans-Atlantic efforts to improve water qualtiy

Insight into an industry ready to expand

Trondheim hosts world’s biggest aquaculture show

Norwegian finance behind the industry’s growth

Future of a Scottish institution in the balance

Stirling work with a new protein alternative

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Serving worldwide aquaculture since 1977

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INVESTMENT

Fish farming fund that makes a difference

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YEARS OF SERVICE

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Fish Farmer Fish Farmer Fish Farmer Fish Farmer Fish Farmer Fish Farmer Fish Farmer VOLUME 39

VOLUME 38

Serving worldwide aquaculture since 1977

NUMBER 10

VOLUME 38

OCTOBER 2015

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NUMBER 12

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VOLUME 39

DECEMBER 2015

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NUMBER 02

FEBRUARY 2016

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CATCHING THE BUG

AN AQUA-TONIC

INDUSTRY PIONEER

ORKNEY OPENING

FUTURE FISH

ARDTOE AT 50

HIE HIGHLIGHTS

SAIC CELEBRATES

SEA LICE SPECIAL

GROWTH INDUSTRY

THE OFFSHORE RULE

OYSTER MAN

The insects for feed business about to take off

Investigating growth potential in fledgling field

From managing salmon farms to managing markets

Scottish Sea Farms’ new site goes live

GM salmon wins US approval but will the world buy it?

Another major milestone in Scottish aquaculture

Fifty years of funding that helped launch an industry

Innovation centre marks year one with new investments

The latest ploys to purge the parasite

Scotland must upscale salmon production

America opens new frontier to aquaculture

Jersey farmer nurtures native species

VOLUME 39

NUMBER 04

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NUMBER 06

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JUNE 2016

NUMBER 08

AUGUST 2016

VOLUME 39

NUMBER 11

NOVEMBER 2016

APRIL 2016

MID EASTERN PROMISE

MUSSEL BUILDING

INDUSTRY PIONEER

ALL ABOARD

How investment is paying off in hot aquaculture spot

Ambitious new growth targets for New Zealand

Fusion Marine boss on future proofing containment

Wellboat breakthrough in battle against sea lice

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HIGHLAND HIGHLIGHTS

INDUSTRY CHEERLEADER

BUSINESS OF THE YEAR

SAFETY AT SEA

Reports from Aquaculture UK in Aviemore

SSPO’s new chairman on ambition and growth

Scottish Sea Farms scoops top food award

How to handle occupational hazards

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ALL ABOARD

RING OF FRESHWATER

RAINBOW RECIPES

MAINE ATTRACTION

ROYAL VISIT

DOUBLING GROWTH

NO ESCAPE

TRAINING MATTERS

AKVA delivers Scotland’s biggest feed barge yet

Marine Harvest has sea lice solution on tap

New production from pioneering Irish trout farmer

The state of US aquaculture development

Prince Charles drops in on Marine Harvest

Industry launches long awaited Vision for 2030

Time to comply with the Scottish Technical Standard

A new way to recruit the next generation

Sposored by

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NUMBER 04

APRIL 2017

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VOLUME 40

FJORD FARMING

ROSYTH REVEALED

VETS GET TOGETHER

DRIVING FORCE

Scottish salmon marks 25 years of French Label Rouge

Norwegians test new nets at traditional sites

Changing fortunes of Marine Harvest’s factory

From pest control to crustacean compassion

Jim Gallagher talks about growing Focus on the future with all the the Scottish industry latest technology

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INNOVATION GAME

MAY 2017

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AULD ALLIANCE

NUMBER 05

EXCELLENT EXPO

CLEAN SWEEP

Global seafood at biggest and best Brussels show

Shetland firm takes delivery of new boat

VOLUME 40

JUNE 2017

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CLEANER FISH

AQUA NOR PREVIEW

LEARNING CURVE

WATERS AND THE WILD

Insights into the species on the front line of sea lice control

Companies bound for Trondheim set out their stalls

Exploring the case for a national aquaculture education strategy

Nick Joy on the thriving marine life around fish farms

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VOLUME 40

NUMBER 07

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CALL OF THE WILD

AQUA NOR PREVIEW

NEW HORIZONS

MUSSEL MOMENTS

Jon Gibb on resetting anglers’ attitudes to salmon farms

More of what’s in store in Trondheim this summer

Shetland boat builder embarks on first trip to Norway show

Nicki Holmyard records her journey in the shellfish sector

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NUMBER 08

AUGUST 2017

JULY 2017

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VOLUME 40

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NUMBER 09

SEPTEMBER 2017

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OTTER FERRY AT 50

INTO AFRICA

EYEING ICELAND

MORE WILD TALK

Serving worldwide aquaculture since 1977

A royal celebration for leading Scottish pioneers

World wakes up to the continent’s potential

Norwegian investors see scope for growth

Our columnists’ take on the angling debate

SHOW REPORTS

WILD DECLINE

COOKING LESSONS

GOOD MANAGEMENT

Booming Aqua Nor reflects health of the industry

Don’t blame salmon farming says Jon Gibb

Martin Jaffa on tackling the fall in fish consumption

Nick Joy defends those in positions of authority

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DOUBLING GROWTH

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NUMBER 11

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NO ESCAPE

Time to comply with the Scottish Technical Standard

NOVEMBER 2016

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TRAINING MATTERS

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Editor’s Welcome

JENNY HJUL – EDITOR

Happy 40th to us all!

T

HE first editor of Fish Farmer wrote in the pilot issue of the magazine in January 1977: ‘Never did an industry make more sense.’

Denis Chamberlain’s words were well chosen, for back then, 40 years ago, no one could have guessed at the leaps and bounds aquaculture would make in such a short period.

In fact, the prevailing view, especially outside the industry, was far more sceptical. The then minister for fisheries, Edward Bishop, said in an interview with Denis in the launch issue of Fish Farmer in November 1977: ‘Fish farming is not, and is not likely to be, a very significant contributor to the nation’s food supply.’

What would he say now, with farmed salmon the UK’s biggest food export and worth £1.5 billion a year to the economy?

As we approached our 40th anniversary at Fish Farmer we thought it offered a perfect opportunity to celebrate four decades of aquaculture and so we have devoted most of this issue to marking not just our own milestone but the industry’s achievements.

We welcome back Denis Chamberlain, along with many names familiar to readers over the years, some of them still regular contributors to Fish Farmer.

We have also tracked down several of the generation of

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter: www.facebook.com/fishfarmermagazine twitter.com/fishfarmerwd

Meet the team Editorial Advisory Board: Steve Bracken, Scott Landsburgh, Hervé Migaud, Patrick Smith and Jim Treasurer Editor: Jenny Hjul Designer: Andrew Balahura Advertising Manager: William Dowds wdowds@fishupdate.com Advertising Executives: Dave Edler dedler@fishupdate.com Scott Binnie sbinnie@fishupdate.com Publisher: Alister Bennett

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Welcome - October.indd 3

pioneers who worked so tirelessly to establish a sector that has rejuvenated communities across the Highlands and islands of Scotland, and exported its expertise and often its experts to the rest of the world.

While reminiscing, those who have spent much of their lives within the industry also look to the future, some with vision and others with advice, but all with optimism.

Many talk about the incredible journey that has seen aquaculture develop from humble beginnings, when farmers knelt on carpets to dispatch their fish, to the technical refinement of today’s businesses. Who, 40 years ago, could have imagined giant offshore farms towed to Norway from China and wellboats fitted with jacuzzis!

Scientific breakthroughs have been equally astonishing, in the fields of diagnostics, vaccination, selective breeding, feed formulation and many more.

The team at Fish Farmer would like to thank everyone who helped put this special issue together and, in particular, our editorial board, whose wisdom continues to keep us on track.

As Jim Treasurer said: ‘The history and content of Fish Farmer over the last 40 years reflects the advances, setbacks, culture and technology in the industry itself and catalogues and follows that whirlwind and rollercoaster progress.’

Here’s to the next 40 years!

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Contact us Tel: +44(0) 131 551 1000 Fax: +44(0) 131 551 7901 email: jhjul@fishupdate.com Head Office: Special Publications, Fettes Park, 496 Ferry Road, Edinburgh, EH5 2DL

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40 years of aquaculture

Contents

4-17 News

What’s happening in aquaculture in the UK and around the world

20-21 Foreword

Fergus Ewing, Cabinet Secretary for the Rural Economy and Connectivity

22-23 Launch editor Denis Chamberlain

24-26 SSPO

56-61 Vaccines

Patrick Smith

64-65 Academic excellence Institute of Aquaculture

66-67 Selective breeding Neil Manchester

68-69 Global view

Malcolm Dickson

Scott Landsburgh

28-31 Marine Harvest

70-71 Reportage Colin Ley

Steve Bracken

32-35 Marine Harvest Inchmore hatchery

36-39 Industry pioneer Sir Iain Anderson

40-43 Cages pioneer Peter Crook

46-49 Fish vets Ron Roberts

50-51 Fish vets

Ronnie Soutar

52-55 Research pioneer

Jim Treasurer

78-79 Reminiscences Nick Joy

80-81 Carp farming Martin Jaffa

82-85 Comment Phil Thomas

88-91 Marketing pioneer Angus Morgan

92-93 Chile pioneer

Jim Gallagher

98-100 Scottish Salmon Company

136-137 HIDB

Alan Scott and Bill Mackenzie

138-139 Crown Estate Alex Adrian

Native Hebridean Salmon

102-104 Nets pioneer

140-142 SAIC Heather Jones

Roger Dehany

106-108 Supply side

146-149 Aqua Nor Erik Hempel

Bob Hyde

110-113 Gael Force Group

150-151 Shellfish Nicki Holmyard

Growing with aquaculture

114-117 Dyneema

152-153 Trout Doug McLeod

Net innovations

118-120 Morenot

156-157 Processing

Vince McDonagh

Ocean Farm 1

124-125 Feed

156-157 Sustainability Jimmie Hepburn

Sarah Cook of BioMar

126-127 Skretting

100 years young

128-131 Solvtrans

154-155 Aqua Source Directory

Find all you need for the industry

162 Last words Gilpin Bradley

Storming ahead

Ralph Baillie

OUR SPONSORS

Dick Alderson

72-75 Reflections

94-96 Scottish Sea Farms

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Contents

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140

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04/10/2017 17:55:51

United Kingdom News

NEWS...

New scheme to train junior executives

Above: Creating a new cohort of aquaculture professionals

THE Scottish Aquaculture Innovation Centre is launching a new training initiative this month designed to attract bright graduates to the industry.

The Junior Executive Development Programme will involve10 graduates who have

secured 18-month internships at leading aquaculture companies.

SAIC is funding a series of training days over the 18-month period so the interns - employed by five organisations, including Marine Harvest

and the Scottish Shellfish Marketing Group - can meet up as a ‘cohort’.

‘SAIC will offer them in-depth training about the whole supply chain, about the interface between companies and regulators, and about

how innovation can help,’ said SAIC CEO Heather Jones. ‘The SAIC training will give them the full set of management skills.’

She said the scheme was partly in response to one of SAIC’s board members asking ‘where’s the supply of quality graduates coming out of the Scottish university base? We can’t hire the people we want’.

Jones said the hope was that the programme would create a group of future industry leaders, who can work together, as many company chiefs do today.

‘Hopefully, they can tell each other what their jobs involve… and get a breadth of understanding about

the industry. We’ll see how it goes and if it’s a great success we’ll have a bigger group next year.’

SAIC supports several education initiatives, including its SAIC scholars – MSc students from Scotland or Europe.

‘In our first year there were one or two SAIC scholars who were Scottish, and the rest were from across Europe,’ said Jones.

‘We went back down the supply chain and thought what can we do with undergraduates in Scotland to get them aware that aquaculture is a great sector, with all sorts of jobs?

‘Then we started doing undergraduate

summer internships with SAIC and companies in our consortium, taking first, second or third year students doing biology, environmental geography and so on, and showing them what a great industry it is, to encourage them to go on and do the MSc and get a job in the sector.’

SAIC also funds the aquaculture student careers day at Stirling, which this year became an all Scotland event.

‘That day resulted in at least half a dozen of the students at Stirling walking straight into jobs in the industry.

The industry has got the pick of the brightest and the best,’ said Jones.

Best in class: page 140

Fish waste model to help growth plans UK marine survey company Partrac recently provided key seabed erosion data to the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) in a project aimed at upgrading a fish waste dispersion model.

The dispersion model (NEWDEPOMOD) will be used by regulators to underpin the consenting process for the aquaculture industry, and contribute to its growth strategy.

Partrac worked on the project, funded by the Scottish government, with scientists from SAMS and led a series of offshore data collection programmes at 11 commercial marine aquaculture sites off the west coast.

The work involved the use of

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benthic flume technology (Voyager II) to measure seabed erosion parameters, which the model needs in order to compute waste erosion, settling and dispersion.

Dr Kevin Black, technical director of Partrac, said: ‘All models require input data to work properly, and it is key that data inputs from the real world are used in the model where possible so that they are as accurate as we can make them.

‘The deployments of the flumes, in waters up to 40m depth, has never been undertaken before at fish farm sites and the new data collected will now help us to improve the seabed erosion module within the NEWDEPOMOD

model.’

The Scottish government believes upgrading the DEPOMOD model will help developers and regulators

to better understand the impact of fish farms on the seabed, particularly as they develop further in higher energy locations.

Above: Deployment of the Voyager II series benthic flume

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04/10/2017 17:26:13

All the latest industry news from the UK

Open day draws 200 to Skye feed plant MORE than 200 people attended an open day held by Marine Harvest last month at the site of its new feed mill at Kyleakin on Skye. The £93 million plant, which is due to be completed by next summer, will have a capacity of 170,000 tonnes and supply fish feed to all Marine Harvest’s salmon farms in Scotland, as well as Ireland, the Faroe Islands and Norway.

The firm said 55 fulltime jobs will be created Above: The Kyleakin feed plant will be completed next year at the plant and recruitment is already underway. some older members of the community ‘perhaps The aim of the open day was to offer tours of wanting to see what was going on’, and the the site, explain the work to date and the next mini bus tours round the site were very popular. stages in construction, and to answer quesWhile it might be difficult to recruit locally tions about the different jobs on offer. for some of the most specialised jobs, Bracken Steve Bracken, Marine Harvest’s business said: ‘Skye is such a diverse island, with an support manager, said: ‘There was a lot of amazing assortment of different skills and good interest, particularly from people who backgrounds, and it will be interesting to see wanted to return to Skye and Lochalsh or what comes out of the open day.’ wanted a career change or just a job.’

Another open day will probably be held at the He said there were youngsters, as well as site closer to its completion.

Honorary degree for seafood chief DAWNFRESH chairman Alastair Salvesen has been awarded an honorary degree by the leading business school, Cranfield University.

Dawnfresh Seafoods is the UK’s leading grower and processor of rainbow trout and owner of RR Spink and Sons, the Arbroath company that holds a royal warrant as fishmongers to the Queen.

Salvesen (pictured

The world moves forward

below) is a past president of the Royal and Highland Agricultural Society of Scotland and of the British Frozen Food Federation, and also acted for a number of years as chairman of the Shellfish Association of Great Britain. He was awarded a degree in advanced engineering before going on to gain an MBA in 1966 and was later made a CBE for his work in the seafood business.

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04/10/2017 17:26:28

United Kingdom News

Staff rise to challenge for colleague

Chef wins ‘dream job’ at Loch Duart

Above: Marine Harvest staff on Ben Nevis last month

SCOTTISH salmon farmer Loch Duart has appointed a chef as a ‘food ambassador’ to bridge the gap between sales and the culinary community.

Patrick Evans, originally from Devon but now based in Edinburgh, has worked across the UK and Europe.

The food ambassador role is a first in the Scottish salmon farming industry, and possibly the Scottish seafood sector, said Loch Duart.

The company’s managing director, Alban Denton, said: ‘Rather than recruit a sales manager, Loch Duart needs a chef who can discuss the cooking qualities of our salmon with other chefs on their own terms.

‘Our staff rear fabulous tasting salmon and it’s our job to share our understanding of the best cooking qualities and flavours of Loch Duart salmon.’

STAFF from Marine Harvest’s Fort William office have raised more than £6,500 so far for the Highland Hospice, following a charity climb up Ben Nevis last month.

Thirty five staff completed the climb of the 4,412ft mountain, while others took part in a 6.5 mile sponsored walk in Glen Nevis.

The fund raising was in memory of Marine Harvest’s Sean Lydon, who died in the summer. He had spent a short time in the hospice after being diagnosed with cancer.

The climb and walk were described by Gideon Pringle, Marine Harvest operations director farming, as ‘a fitting memorial to Sean, who was always up for the next challenge’.

Donations can still be made at www.justgiving.com/fundraising/ jayne-mackay5

Highland awards mark aquaculture success

Above: Marine Harvest’s Steve Bracken receives the Benromach Award for Excellence in International Business from John Swinney. The evening’s host, Marcus Brigstocke, is on the left.

MARINE Harvest was named Highland Business of the Year and Exporter of the Year at the Highland Business Awards on September 29.

The company, which was recognised just last month in the Highlands and Islands Business Excellence Awards, also won the

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Developing the Young Workforce award for the West Highland region.

Another winner from the aquaculture sector was Gael Force Group, which was awarded the accolade of Outstanding Performing Business (25+ employees) at the

awards ceremony, held at the Drumossie Hotel in Inverness.

Gael Force owner and managing director Stewart Graham, collecting the award, said: ‘This is a fantastic acknowledgement and appreciation of the hard work and commitment by everyone at Gael Force... Our highly accomplished and committed team are a great credit to us, and we are very proud to serve the many customers we deal with.’

Marine Harvest Scotland managing director Ben Hadfield picked up the awards on behalf of his team.

Earlier in September, the company was successful in the Highlands and Islands Business Excellence Awards, winning the Benromach Award for Excellence in International Business.

Above: Patrick Evans

Evans will use his chef ’s experience to refine Loch Duart’s blind tasting procedures as the business regularly ‘tastes’ its salmon and compares it to other salmon on the market. He also has an internal education role within Loch Duart with tastings and cooking demonstrations.

Prize firm does it again LOCH Duart has been named Regional Growth Business for Scotland and Northern Ireland at the Food and Drink Federation Awards 2017.

The Loch Duart team was presented with the award at the Brewery in London in front of 500 guests by host, Hardeep Singh Kohli, the comedian and restaurateur.

Winning the award is evidence of Loch Duart’s successful strategy to grow its exports and reach markets and consumers across the globe.

This has been the company’s most successful year of operations since the business was established in 1999.

Managing director Alban Denton said: ‘This really has been an amazing year for the world class team at Loch Duart and to win Regional Growth Business for Scotland and Northern Ireland is the ultimate accolade.

‘Over the last two years we have taken the business of producing our extraordinary tasting salmon to new levels by focusing on fish welfare, innovation, staff development and building our global export networks.

‘We recognise that having even been included alongside some of the UK’s best food and drink businesses is an honour in itself, so this win means a lot to Loch Duart. I’d like to thank each and every one of the Loch Duart team. This one’s for you!’

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04/10/2017 17:26:47

All the latest industry news from the UK

‘Outstanding’ students scoop NAFC honours SEVENTEEN students received awards at the NAFC Marine Centre UHI’s annual prize-giving ceremony on September 29, recognising their achievements across a range of disciplines, including aquaculture, fishing, engineering and navigation.

The Jim Tait Prize for Aquaculture for the best student completing a Modern Apprenticeship in Aquaculture at SCQF Level 5 was awarded to Ross Johnson of Cooke Aquaculture, based in Yell.

The NAFC said that during his apprenticeship, Ross had shown exceptional practical ability and know-how in all aspects of salmon farming and his written work was all completed to a high standard.

The Scottish Salmon Producers’ Organisation Award for the best student completing a Modern Apprenticeship in Aquaculture at SCQF Level 7 was awarded jointly to Matthew Dade and Gary Buchan. Both work for Grieg Seafood Shetland, Matthew at the Setter Ness site and Gary at the Girlsta

Hatchery. Matthew is a chef to trade but has become a brilliant salmon farmer since joining Grieg Seafood two years ago, said the NAFC. He has shown a wide range of abilities while completing his apprenticeship.

Gary has been working as a fish hatchery technician for two years and has progressed well since starting his apprenticeship. He has shown total dedication to his work and is hoping to go on to complete a Technical Apprenticeship.

Stuart Fitzsimmons, NAFC’s section leader for Aquaculture Training, said it had been very difficult to choose winners from all those undertaking modern apprenticeships in aquaculture over the past year - 45 in total.

‘All of our apprentices have shown excellent progress but we have chosen Ross, Matthew and Gary for their exceptional practical and theoretical knowledge as well as their outstanding team-work.’

New general manager at AKVA AKVA Group Scotland has appointed Jason Cleaversmith as its new general manager, replacing David Thorburn, who has moved to a new role as head of export.

Cleaversmith has more than 10 years’ experience in the aquaculture industry, and arrives at AKVA from a senior position as director of Business Development and Operations at the Scottish Aquaculture Innovation Centre (SAIC).

Prior to joining SAIC he was the

Above: Jason Cleaversmith

head of Aqua Health for Novartis on Prince Edward Island, Canada, where he oversaw four biologics facilities, spanning

Above: (From left to right) Gary Buchan, the NAFC’s

Stuart Fitzsimmons, Matthew Dade, NAFC aquaculture trainer Laurence Pearson, Ross Johnson and the NAFC’s Saro Saravanan The NAFC Modern Apprentice of the Year engineering prize also went to an aquaculture employee -Stuart Anderson, who works for Grieg Seafood Shetland at its salmon processing factory in Lerwick.

Golfers in charity drive

both R&D and manufacturing activities.

He has a PhD in marine geochemistry from the University of Edinburgh, and an MBA from the University of Glasgow.

With AKVA in Scotland now employing more than 65 people, Thorburn is heading up the company’s expansion into the export market.

He said: ‘Jason’s operational and business development background will bring great value to AKVA Group Scotland as it continues to develop

and thrive with the Scottish industry, as well as allowing us to develop our export business.’

Cleaversmith said: ‘I’m delighted to be joining the AKVA team at such an exciting time in its evolution.

‘Supporting the Scottish team and the delivery of our strategic objectives will be key, along with ensuring that excellence in customer service and the supply of innovative, and high quality products, is maintained.’

A TEAM from AKVA Group Scotland and the Scottish Salmon Company raised £5,015 for the Macmillan Cancer Charity after taking part in the charity’s Longest Day Golf Challenge.

The team successfully carried out the challenge in 17.5 hours, completing four courses, 72 holes and walking a distance of 23 miles. They smashed their target of £3,000, raised during the 2016 event.

The golfers were Robert Duncanson, Stuart Gordon, Andy Whyte and Andy Lynn from AKVA, and Donnie Sinclair, Chris Smyth, Cammy Gibb and Keith Mctaggart from the Scottish Salmon Company. The team are already planning for next year’s event and would like to encourage others to take part.

To donate, visit AKVA &TSSC Longest Golf Day Challenge 2017 on the Just Giving page.

Co-op launches Scottish salmon group THE Co-op has launched a new Scottish salmon farming group as part of its commitment to selling responsibly sourced fresh fish.

The group will bring together stakeholders across the supply chain, including key suppliers and long-standing processor Farne Salmon and Trout Ltd. It will enable the Co-op to build more strategic, long-term relationships with its Scottish

www.fishfarmer-magazine.com

UK news.indd 9

suppliers while also focusing on best practice and performance, in support of its new salmon farming standard.

Launching at a time when the Co-op’s salmon sales volumes are up 22 per cent year on year, the group will also look to invest in sector research to help future proof the industry.

And it aims to work more closely with local communities in the Scottish mainland and

islands where Scottish salmon is farmed.

Aisla Jones, the Co-op’s fish sustainability manager, said: ‘We’re proud to sell 100 per cent fresh farmed Scottish salmon in our stores.

‘We aslo want to make a positive impact within the Scottish communities that produce our world-class salmon and help future proof the industry for generations to come.’

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04/10/2017 17:27:03

European News

NEWS...

Marine Harvest awaits ‘state aid’ ruling MARINE Harvest is awaiting an important decision after taking the Norwegian government to the EFTA Court in an attempt to avoid the risk of being penalised when selling into European Union markets.

The company believes that the current export tax on fish constitutes a breach of the European Economic Area (EEA) Agreement.

Last year it lodged a formal complaint with the EFTA (European Free Trade Association)

Surveillance Authority - or ESA - claiming that ‘unlawful’ subsidies in the form of funding for

marketing was granted to the Norwegian fisheries sector even though it is largely

funded by fish exporters in the form of a compulsory levy.

Some of the export

tax is used to finance seafood marketing and Marine Harvest is arguing that this is equivalent to state aid and is therefore illegal under the current EEA agreement. The company then asked ESA to investigate its claim.

But after looking at the issue ESA said it had only partial competence to judge the complaint, so the case was moved up to the main EFTA Court, where the presentations have concluded.

Ola Brattvoll, CEO of

sales and marketing at Marine Harvest, said: ‘We are pleased that this hearing has now been completed and look forward to the decision of the court.’

The EU says that a company which receives government support gains a distinct advantage over its competitors.

Brattvoll added: ‘We believe it is in the interests of the seafood industry that ESA should keep a systematic watch on the use of state aid.’

Fish pathology conference a Titanic success IT WAS 40 years ago that the European Association of Fish Pathologists (EAFP) was founded and over the years it has grown to more than 1,000 regular and sustaining members representing some 37 countries worldwide, writes Patrick Smith.

The EAFP has positioned itself as the natural practical link between the aquaculture industry and aquatic animal health researchers, veterinarians and fish health professionals.

Last month the organisation held its 18th biennial international conference in Belfast, attended by more than 500 delegates.

The topics covered, over four days, were wide-ranging and included subjects such as: vaccines and vaccination, immunostimulants, bacterial diseases, viral diseases, myxozoa, emerging diseases, skin diseases, sea lice, cleaner fish, nutrition and health, diseases of public concern, parasitological diseases, host-parasite interactions, bivalve and crustacean diseases, shellfish immunity, gill diseases, fish welfare, aquatic animal epidemiology, diagnostics, and environmental and toxicological diseases.

In addition to the oral presentations there was a poster session including over 300 posters, and the conference also hosted a number of workshops - on student writing, histopathology, myxozoan, emerging diseases in aquaculture, and neglected viral diseases affecting freshwater fish farming.

In addition to the workshops, two industrial forums were held disseminating results and progress

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from two EU-funded multipartner/country projects: TargetFish and Performfish.

The TargetFish Industrial Forum focused on the subject of DNA vaccines to mark the milestone of the European Medicines Agency giving approval for the first DNA vaccine for pancreas disease in fish.

The scientific content of the conference proved only to be the tip of the iceberg and proceedings concluded with a banquet in the Titanic Centre in Belfast, preceded by a drinks reception and ‘ice-breaker’.

The menu at the banquet was based on that provided for the first class passengers on the fateful maiden voyage of the Titanic, which was built in

the city. Good food, drink and traditional dancing ensured that the attendees were buoyed-up and did not leave with any sinking feeling.

There was a general acceptance that this conference, held at the Waterside Conference Centre, was one of the highest quality and one of the best hosted by the EAFP. The EAFP is keen to recruit new members, and sustaining members, and the benefits of membership and details of how to become a member can be found on the EAFP website.

The 19th International Conference of the EAFP will be held in Porto, Portugal, in September 2019.

www.fishfarmer-magazine.com

04/10/2017 18:08:52

All the latest industry news from Europe

First fish in Ocean Farm

Need a friend? Rent a fish A BELGIAN hotel has found itself in the spotlight after offering to rent fish to lonely guests for the night - gold fish in a bowl, that is. The four star Hotel Charleroi Airport near Brussels says the service is not new, but word of it has now gone around the world after a radio producer tweeted a picture of the fish bowl that a friend of his had been offered at the facility in case she felt lonely.

Hotel manager David Dillen told the Independent newspaper that the fish rental was popular with guests, adding that his goldfish were well looked after. Guests, he said, felt better after watching the fish swim around the bowl.

Above: Ocean Farm 1 being transported on board the Hua Hai Long last month

THE first fish are now in the cages of SalMar’s Ocean Farm 1, the semi-submersible offshore fish farm that arrived in Norwegian waters early in September, after an 11-week journey from its builders in China.

SalMar chief executive Trond Williksen told kyst.no the focus now will be the optimum operation of the new technology.

‘We will gain experience and operational knowledge with a new technological concept out in the ocean.’

The 80m high, 110m wide structure, which was constructed by Wuchang Shipbuilding Industry Group in China’s Shandong Province, was lowered into the sea at Frohavet on September 5.

Ocean Farm 1, which has a volume of

250,000m3 and will be able to grow 1.5 million fish in 14 months, was awarded eight development licences by the Norwegian government in February. It was reported this month that the farm will be used as a floating laboratory by a company developing systems for computer modelling of the external and internal status of farmed salmon.

Norwegian engineering and services giant Kongsberg Maritime has a three-year operating partnership with Ocean Farm 1 for the development of its SimSalma and CyberFish systems.

One of its goals is the control of fish behaviour.

SalMar owns 50 per cent of Scottish Sea Farms.

Truly, madly, deep-sea: Page 118

Above: Hotel Charleroi

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04/10/2017 18:09:03

European News

New boss appointed at Coppens after Coppens was integrated into Alltech in June last year.

Faber previously held the role of marketing and sales manager at Coppens International and has been with the company since 1998.

The news follows the official opening of the Above: Ronald Faber Alltech Coppens Aqua AQUA feed company Centre last month. The Coppens International centre received extenhas appointed Ronald sive refurbishment to Faber as managing support the develdirector, replacing opment of its aqua Anno Galema, who has research programmes, decided to step down. as well as advance a Galema worked close- wide range of aqua ly with the company innovations.

Super jumbo to carry salmon to Asia THE logistics giant DHL Global Forwarding has decided to lay on a super jumbo jet to cope with the growing demand around the world for Norwegian seafood.

DHL Global, which is the air and ocean arm of the Deutsche Post DHL Group, moved into Oslo more than three months ago to pick up fresh seafood for distribution to several Far East destinations.

Now the company has announced that it plans to double its freighter capacity from Oslo to the Korean capital Seoul and Shanghai in China by introducing a twice

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weekly dedicated Boeing 747-400 on this route, wet-leased from US capacity provider Atlas Air. This will give DHL’s seafood clients almost 250 tonnes of capacity per week.

The website CargoForwarder Global said: ‘The Norwegian seafood industry, which is next to oil and gas when it comes to exports, has attracted many airlines offering cargo capacity out of the country during the past years.

‘Some airlines are falling over themselves to get traffic rights into Oslo in order to pick up this high paying (seafood) cargo.’

Fish farming relief as Solberg wins again PRIME Minister Erna Solberg and her right wing allies will govern Norway for another four years after her Conservative Party claimed victory in September’s hard fought general election.

It is a result which will bring relief to Norway’s fish farmers who feared higher taxes and tougher environmental restrictions under Labour.

But it may cause dismay among fishing communities

Above: Erna Solberg

in the north of the country who are battling against expansion plans by the oil industry. They argue that further exploration will permanently damage fish stocks.

At one point it looked as if a left wing alliance might cross the half way barrier in the 169seat Storting (parliament), but Labour lost ground.

Solberg will, however, have to govern with a small but reasonably comfortable majority when the new parliament opens this month. Fisheries minister Per Sandberg, who campaigned hard in fishing constituencies, will stay on in the job.

Thanks, in part, to expansion in aquaculture and conventional fishing, unemployment in Norway is down to 4.4 per cent, robbing Labour of one of its main arguments.

Processors rush to buy as salmon prices fall AS Norwegian salmon prices fell to their lowest level so far this year, fish curing companies in mainland Europe have been rushing to buy up large volumes, particularly the frozen variety.

Smokers in the Netherlands appear to be leading the charge, the Norwegian seafood press is reporting.

The price of Norwegian farmed salmon is expected to remain stable at around NOK 50 per kilo, or even slightly lower, industry sources told Reuters last month.

This means buyers are using the new situation to build up reserves.

Harm Ten Napel, CEO of the Dutch salmon processing company Het Urker Zalmhuys, based in the port of Urk, said: ‘Our customers have been building up their stocks so we are doing the same by buying extra volume.

‘It is something we have been doing for a

few weeks now. People are keen to secure salmon stocks over the next few months.’

Like buying any commodity in advance, there is always the risk that prices could fall further, but he believed that risk to be small. The companies that can afford it buy more volume now.

‘Customers who usually buy fresh salmon are also interested in more volume, but we

are seeing no major increase at the moment.’

Napel said he expected prices to remain at current levels for the next few weeks.

‘Last year, prices were also at a low level, but it lasted only two weeks. This time we have already had four weeks with lower prices.

‘This has given us more time to create

larger stocks for our customers, so there will be less upward pressure on prices in the weeks ahead – and we shall also have more volume.’

Another Urk based company, Visscher Seafood, also said it was buying extra volume. Some retailers expect prices to harden significantly by the end of October as processors prepare for the Christmas rush.

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04/10/2017 18:09:19

All the latest industry news from Europe

Go-ahead for Lerøy Pipe Farm project THE Lerøy Seafood Group has been given a provisional green light to build a number of unusual fish farming containment systems known as the Pipe Farm.

The NOK 650 million (£62.7 million) closed seawater project will enable the company to expand its production of salmon and trout purely as a trial by around 7,000 tonnes.

But Lerøy believes this new type of fish farming has huge untapped potential.

The company says it not only involves significant technological innovation, but it will also strengthen the industry’s environmental and sustainability credentials.

The Pipe Farm project certainly reflects the

growing high level of technical innovation that is now part of Norway’s aquaculture sector and it could also provide a welcome boost for the country’s marine construction industry.

The Norwegian Fisheries Directorate gave preliminary approval for the concept, first submitted in April 2016.

Lerøy originally applied for nine licences but the precise number of permits has not been made known.

It is hoped that the trial will eventually lead to the company being able to carry out this type of fish farming on a commercial scale.

While making it clear that approval was not yet binding, the

Above: How the Pipe Farm might look

directorate said: ‘Based on the information available at this time, the Directorate of Fisheries considers that the concept under consideration falls within the

Iceland firm’s protest over farm policy AN Icelandic fish farming company has ended its 15-year membership of the country’s National Federation of Aquaculture (also known as LF) in protest over its policy on developing aquaculture in the Isafjord region.

Háafell, owned by the Gunnvar hf Group, said: ‘For some time, LF’s progress has shifted away from the policy and vision that Háafell wants to build on in the development of aquaculture in Iceland.’

Háafell said it was upset after an LF policy report on proposed plans to develop fish farming in Isafjord was taken off the table, ignoring the wishes of people who live in that area of the country in favour of fishing interests.

Two months ago, Iceland’s Marine Research Institute completed a risk assessment on the impact of an expanded fish farming industry on the country’s wild salmon stocks and recommended that Isafjord should be excluded from any growth plans.

These recommendations are now being studied by the Icelandic Ministry of Fisheries, but it is clear from this latest development that the scale of any future expansion in fish farming is going to raise strong passions. Háafell argued that it made a special effort to exercise due diligence in the application process, with carefully conceived development plans and an exhaustive consultation process with stakeholders - plans which would have mitigated any environmental impact. The company, and its predecessor HG, had successfully farmed in Ísafjarðardjúp since 2002 and had licences to farm 7,000 tonnes of salmon since 2011.

scope of development permits.

‘The directorate now requests Lerøy to justify its biomass needs, and that the company documents that the

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innovation and investment and the Pipe Farm scheme clearly falls into both categories.

So far there has been no official comment from Lerøy.

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project fulfils the terms of ‘significant investment’.’

Such development permits are only usually awarded to projects involving significant

17/03/2017 14:13:49

04/10/2017 18:09:35

World News

NEWS...

BC salmon soars nearly 40pc in value

AN independent economic analysis of the salmon aquacul-

ture industry in British Columbia shows an increase of 37 per cent

over the past three years in its value to the province, resulting in the creation of more than 1,600 jobs.

Overall, farming and processing 92,800 tonnes of salmon in 2016 generated over $1.5 billion towards the BC economy. Total production has grown eight per cent since 2002.

The total output increased 37 per cent in value, from $1,144 million to $1,561.9 million, and the total employment generated by the industry increased 33 per cent from 4,977 to 6,610 full-time equivalents.

Government taxes generated by the sector increased 39 per cent, from $62 to $86.1 million.

British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association (BCSFA) executive director Jeremy Dunn said: ‘The full value chain in the salmon aquaculture sector has turned record high prices over much of the past three years into an unprecedented investment in the sector, including farming infrastructure, process plants, land based hatcheries, and marine vessels.

‘The net result is an increase in business performance, as well as an increase in environmental and biological performance.’

Meanwhile, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch programme upgraded the status of BC salmon last month, from ‘fish

to avoid’ to a ‘good alternative’.

The improved US rating comes as part of a routine review of updated scientific research on the Atlantic salmon being raised in pens in the western Canadian province.

There were also improvements to the effluent, habitat, escapes and introduced species criteria.

The last assessment

by Seafood Watch in 2014 landed the fish in the programme’s lowest ranking, red, but it’s now in the middle category, yellow.

Dunn said: ‘BC’s farming practices have been singled out

by Seafood Watch as world leading. This is an important acknowl-

edgement of the work that salmon farmers have done in British Columbia to increase their environmental performance and increase transparency. ’Before today, Monterey Bay Seafood Watch programme was saying to avoid farm raised salmon from British Columbia and everywhere else, save a couple farms, and today they’re saying they recommend farm raised salmon from BC. ‘There remains work to be done, and our members are committed to leading the world in environmental practices, evidenced by their record in achieving the standards of audited third-party certifications.’

Canada’s $400 million fund for seafood THE Canadian government has opened up a $400 million fund to help the country’s seafood industry modernise and expand.

Titled the Atlantic Fisheries Fund, it is accepting proposals from both the aquaculture and fishing sectors.

The fund is being administered by Fisheries and Oceans Canada and its provincial partners in Atlantic Canada.

The government said the fund will focus on growing opportunities and increasing market value for sustainably sourced, high quality fish and seafood products from Atlantic Canada, an area which includes Newfoundland, Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick.

‘Canada’s fish and seafood sector is an integral part of the economic and social fabric of many coastal communities across the country,’ a government statement said.

‘That is why the government of Canada and our provincial and territorial governments are collaborating to modernise the sector.

‘Innovation in this sector, which is integral to the Canadian economy, means more job opportunities for hundreds of small coastal and indigenous communities in Atlantic Canada, and across the country.

‘Investments flowing from the fund will position the fish and seafood sector in Atlantic Canada for long-term sustainable growth and will support continued industry efforts to provide consumers with high quality,

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World news.indd 14

sustainably sourced, Canadian fish and seafood products.’

To be eligible for the fund, projects must focus on research and development, innovations, sustainability and science partnerships in aquaculture and fisheries.

The government said that it will engage with a broad range of potential participants over the coming months to help identify opportunities and its investment priorities.

www.fishfarmer-magazine.com

04/10/2017 18:10:12

World News

US urged to do more to encourage aquaculture THE US should be more encouraging of responsible aquaculture development, the trade organisation Ocean Stewards said in a recommendation to the federal government.

Responding to a request from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the National Ocean Service for public comments on streamlining regulatory processes, the Ocean Stewards proposed that for offshore aquaculture to succeed in the US, several changes needed to be made to the current permit process.

These include: 1. NOAA needs to be designated as the lead agency for ocean aquaculture; 2. NOAA should designate specific ocean areas as appropriate for aquaculture, where projects do not significantly conflict with other ocean user groups; 3. There needs to be an overarching EIS (environmental impact statement) for ocean aquaculture to identify potential significant impacts, and monitoring and mitigatory measures for projects; 4. There needs to be some assurance of a more timely review process for commercial aquaculture projects; and 5. There needs to be a simplified process for review and approval of experimental offshore aquaculture projects.

‘The Stewards have consistently pushed for changes to the aquaculture permit process,’ said Neil Anthony Sims, president of the Ocean Stewards Institute and co-CEO of Kampachi Farms, which has pioneered offshore aquaculture.

‘We see this regulatory review as an opportunity to offer meaningful, achievable alternatives to the current regulations.

‘We want NOAA to understand the challenges we face, and strive to offer positive, practical solutions.’

The Stewards note in their recommendations that the US has the largest Exclusive Economic Zone (three to 150 miles offshore) on the planet, yet not a single fish has been commercially grown in federal waters.

Much of the technology for offshore aquaculture and biological innovations that allow hatchery culture have been developed in the US, yet are currently being exported to countries in Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia that are more supportive of aquaculture.

In January 2016, after 10 years in the making, a rule was finally adopted to allow aquaculture in federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico. The Stewards applauded this initial step, yet up to now no permit has been applied for, due to intimidating requirements under the NOAA rule and complicated, overlapping requirements from various federal and state agencies.

‘Until NOAA’s regulations are changed to encourage, rather than to discourage, aquaculture in US waters, we will continue to be compelled to knowledge, investment and innovation overseas, to export our the detriment of the United States,’ said Sims.

The Stewards believe that the recommended changes would enable innovative, sustainable offshore aquaculture to flourish in US waters.

‘This could help reverse the imbalance of seafood trade, revitalise working waterfronts, create high paying jobs in the US aquaculture sector and seafood processing sector, and increase the quality and availability of healthful, domestically grown seafood for American consumers,’ said the organisation.

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04/10/2017 18:10:24

World News

North Korean seafood on sale despite sanctions

Aquarium receives rare yellow lobster

A RARE yellow lobster has been donated to the New England Aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts, by a seafood wholesaler in nearby Salem. It was caught by local lobster fishermen and then added to a collection of other brightly coloured lobsters which were orange, blue and one that was orange and black.

BANNED seafood from North Korea is still being sold in a number of Chinese cities, Japanese media are claiming.

This is in spite of a UN Security Council

sanctions resolution against Pyongyang in August.

China is supposed to be supporting the resolution, but North Korean shellfish and other seafood prod-

ucts have been on open sale in the city of Dandong, which borders the rogue state. North Korean seafood is also on sale in other Chinese towns.

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Under control

Norway – Research Council

the next

“

The environment is more stable and the fish use less energy adapting to it

Under control

Above: Project participants at the centre’s opening. Right: CtrlAQUA scientists.

Photos by Terje Aamodt/Nofima.

Joint approach between scientists and industry to address challenges of closed-containment systems

F

our Norwegian research institutions, two outside Norway and several industry partners from technology and the aquaculture industry have started operations at a centre for innovation in closed-containment systems.

The centre, CtrlAQUA, has been given NOK 200 million and eight years to reach its goal of making closed-containment systems for salmon up to one kilogram.

Innovations in closed-containment, where the salmon is separated from the outside environment by a tight barrier, can be important for the further development of the industry,

32

helping to address challenges such as sea lice, diseases and escapes, as well as reduce production times.

Closed systems can be land-based, where water is recycled, or sea-based, in which large floating tanks receive clean water from depth.

In CtrlAQUA, the research will deal with both approaches.

The main focus of the centre is innovation in closed-containment systems for the most vulnerable periods of the salmon production cycle, such as the first sea water, post-smolt, phase.

The centre will also contribute to better production control, fish welfare and sustainability

in closed-containment farms. This will happen through the development of new and reliable sensors, minimising environmental impact through recycling of nutrients and reducing the risk of escape, and diseases transmission to wild stocks.

Senior scientist Bendik Fyhn Terjesen, from Nofima, who is the director of the centre, said that closed-containment systems for salmon up to one kilogram have further advantages than simply preventing lice and escapes.

‘We can control the environment in which the fish lives in a closed-containment system.

The environment is more stable and the fish

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use less energy adapting to it. This means that the salmon has more energy available for growth and good health.’

Closed systems for strategic phases in salmon farming can help to make the Norwegian vision of an eight-fold growth in value creation from aquaculture possible, and lead to an increased number of jobs and the production of healthy seafood.

In the centre there will be three departments: technology and environment, led by Dr Fyhn Terjesen; preventative fish health, led by Harald Takle, also from Nofima; and fish production and welfare, led by Lars Ebbesson of Uni Research.

CtrlAQUA is one of 17 Centres for Research-Based Innovation (SFI), a major programme created by the Research Council of Norway.

The primary goal of the SFI programme is to strengthen companies’ capacity for innovation, and to develop leading industry relevant research.

Nofima is accompanied by five solid institutions in CtrlAQUA: Uni Research, the University of Bergen, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the Freshwater Institute in the US and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

The University of Bergen will have principal responsibility for research education at the centre. The total budget for CtrlAQUA will be

”

NOK 196 million, spread over eight years.

Industrial partners from the supplier industry are Krüger Kaldnes AS, Pharmaq Analytiq, Pharmaq AS, Oslofjord Ressurspark AS, Storvik Aqua AS and Aquafarm Equipment AS. Participants from the aquaculture industry are Marine Harvest ASA, Grieg Seafood ASA, Lerøy Vest AS, Cermaq Norway AS, Bremnes Seashore AS, Smøla klekkeri og settefiskanlegg AS, Marine producers Norway AS and Firda sjøfarmer AS. The formal opening by the Research Council took place at the end of May at Nofima, Sunndalsøra. Norwegian fisheries minister Elisabeth Aspaker, present at the ceremony, said the goal of the CtrlAQUA SFI is perfectly compatible with the government’s ambitions for the aquaculture industry.

‘I have great expectations for the achievements of CtrlAQUA. Even though eight years is a long time, it is urgent that we find solutions to reach the goals. CtrlAQUA is an important part of this.’

The director of innovation in the Research Council, Eirik Normann, presented the SFI plaque to Fyhn Terjesen, saying: ‘You have put together a very strong consortium. I want to point out that the committee that evaluated the application was fascinated by the innovation that the concept brings with it, and it believes that the centre will probably produce important innovations within aquaculture.’ FF

NOFIMA FACTS With 360 employees and customers from 49 different countries, Nofima’s turnover in 2014 was £527 million The company is currently engaged in 620 projects worldwide.

Nofima has several laboratories and pilot plants, which it uses for research, including: BioLab – an accredited contract and research laboratory; NAMAB – a flexible minifactory; and Patogen Pilot Plant – Europe’s first highsecurity production hall.

Nofima carries out research for the fisheries, aquaculture and food industries, including: breeding and genetics; capture-based aquaculture; fish health; and consumer and sensory sciences.

Each year Nofima organises several symposia, courses and seminars in which its scientists share their expertise.

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BioMar buys shrimp feed business

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The odds of catching a yellow lobster are estimated at 30 million to one. The creature will now live out its days hiding in the rocks at the aquarium. A few weeks ago, on the other side of the Atlantic, an even rarer blue lobster was caught off Scotland, saved from the pot and sent to an aquarium in South Wales.

FEED group BioMar has completed the acquisition of the Ecuadorian shrimp feed company Alimentsa, it announced last month.

The deal will position BioMar among the leading shrimp feed producers in Latin America and complement its existing footprint in the region, provided by its business in Costa Rica.

BioMar CEO Carlos Diaz said: ‘It is our strong belief that through an integration of Alimentsa in BioMar Group we will be able to deliver a new high-end value proposition to the Latin American farmers, by merging the highly recognised products and technical services from Alimentsa with our innovative and proven approach to R&D, sustainability and feed efficiency.

‘We have in BioMar during recent years built a strong knowledge base within feed

for shrimp and we can furthermore contribute with extensive research and experience from other species, such as tilapia and marine species.’

BioMar and Alimentsa are now ready to take the first steps towards integration, they said, and will focus on connecting employees in Ecuador with BioMar during the fourth quarter.

‘We believe that in the future, together with the employees in Alimentsa and the customers, we can develop new product solutions based upon our shared interest in sustainability, innovation and cooperation with the customers,’ said Diaz.

BioMar Group will take over 70 per cent of the shares, representing an investment of $119 million. The company believes the market will prove to be very attractive with growth rates of eight to 12 per cent.

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All the latest industry news from around the world

Focus on ‘sea-tech’ in Fish 2.0 finalists Fish Vet Group Asia moves to heart of She said that 70 companies rose FORTY companies have been named Thai aquaculture industry to the challenge in the semi-finals, as finalists in this year’s Fish 2.0 competition, which aims to connect seafood businesses with investors.

The finalists, selected from 184 entries, have been chosen for their market traction, global character and high potential for impact on the seafood sector, said the competition organisers.

They will now have the opportunity to pitch to investors during the Fish 2.0 Innovation Forum at Stanford University from November 7-8, after which winners will be announced.

‘This is the strongest group ever,’ said Monica Jain, Fish 2.0 founder and executive director. ‘The level of innovation is potentially both system changing and very profitable.

‘We’re seeing the rise of ‘seatech’—new monitoring, visibility, production and processing tools for the seafood industry—as well as other advances that remove barriers to growth and sustainability for fishers, farmers and buyers throughout the value chain.’

making for tight scoring in the end.

‘The companies that earned places as finalists are committed to growth and have products and market strategies that resonate with the varied group of investors who serve as online judges.’

At the Innovation Forum, the 24 highest scorers will give three-minute pitches to panels of expert judges.

They will present in four groups: ventures taking pressure off wild fisheries; aquaculture production and related technologies; transparency, traceability and fisheries technology; and supply chain innovations.

The remaining 16 finalists will give 90-second pitches directly to the audience of 300 seafood experts and investors who come to Fish 2.0 to share knowledge and find opportunities.

The audience will vote on the companies they most want to follow up with.

Peru joins China seafood queue

PERU has joined the growing list of South American countries increasing its seafood exports, with China top of the list. Overseas sales of fish, both farmed and wild caught, are expected to triple over the next four years to a value of US $3 billion, creating 500,000 jobs into the bargain.

Peru is due to sign an export agreement with China over the coming weeks. The country has 3,000 miles of coastline, much of which could be developed for aquaculture.

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Above: Closer to the farmers

THE Fish Vet Group has relocated its diagnostic lab from Bangkok to Chonburi, a leading aquaculture region of Thailand.

As well as being closer to the farms, the new facilities are near INVE’s Tropical Aquaculture Research Centre. Both organisations are part of the Benchmark Group.

Hamish Rodger, global director of Fish Vet Group, said: ‘Moving our diagnostic lab to Chonburi allows us to work more closely with our INVE colleagues, forming an Asian aquaculture research hub in a principal aquaculture region of Thailand.’

The move has enabled the group to upgrade its existing challenge facilities, with a second new aquarium already under construction to accommodate increased customer demand for trial work.

The group is continuing to expand its suite of molecular diagnostic tests and industry training courses, for which it has become well known in the region.

A new vet, molecular biologist and scientist have been appointed as part of the establishment of the new diagnostic facility.

Dr Andy Shinn, operations director of Fish Vet Group Asia, said: ‘Our aquatic health

team has been selected for its extensive experience of the region and species-specific expertise of shrimp, tilapia, Asian sea bass, pangasius, all major carps and the other key aquatic species.

‘Disease continues to drive new challenges and obstacles. Being in Chonburi places us at the heart of the farming community ensuring we can better serve farmers.’

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04/10/2017 18:10:56

40 years of aquaculture

from the 40 years of Reporting

ARCHIVE

Above: While some stories remain the same, others belong to the distant past. Fish Farmer still reports on a wide range of subjects but perhaps not as wide as in days gone by (see motoring feature, right)

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From the Archive - 40 years.indd 18

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From the Archive

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04/10/2017 17:25:10

40 years of aquaculture – Foreword

BY FERGUS EWING CABINET SECRETARY FOR THE RURAL ECONOMY AND CONNECTIVITY

Looking

forward Scottish government is committed to working with the sector

M

Y congratulations to Fish Farmer magazine for reaching its landmark 40th birthday. I am delighted for all involved in such an influential and respected publication, and I am grateful to be given this opportunity to write a short foreword to this anniversary edition.

As Rural Economy Secretary, I am a firm believer in the opportunities that aquaculture has brought to Scotland and a committed advocate for its further sustainable growth. I recognise the full potential of the sector has yet to be realised, whether salmon or trout, halibut or shellfish and even the fledging farmed seaweed industry.

These are, indeed, exciting times as aquaculture globally takes over as the major contributor to seafood supply and fish farming

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becomes recognised as the most efficient means of producing animal protein for a growing world population. Of all the main types of food, salmon has one of the smallest carbon footprints.

I am confident that the distinctive qualities and characteristics of Scotland, its natural environment and committed and loyal workforce sitting alongside a pragmatic regulatory regime, will continue to attract investment and further opportunities for all.

Scottish salmon is the UK’s number one food export and is highly valued across the world for its exceptional quality and provenance. There is growing demand at home and abroad for delicious and healthy fish and shellfish produced in Scottish waters. It is a success story and one of which we should be rightly proud.

I take seriously my role to create the conditions for further development.

Domestically, aquaculture is one of Scotland’s real economic success stories of recent years, helping to underpin economic growth, particularly in rural, coastal and island communities, providing long-term quality employment.

The statistics speak for themselves. Fish

Left: Scottish shellfish.

Above: Salmon farming supports more than 10,000 jobs in Scotland

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Looking forward

FISH FARMING

TIMELINE

1965 – Unilever starts rearing trout at Lochailort before moving to salmon

1965 – Ardtoe becomes site of the White Fish Authority’s Marine Farming Unit

1966 – Trials on rope mussel growing in Scotland -68 prove successful 1971 – First salmon harvest (of 14 tonnes) at Lochailort

1971 – Unit of Aquatic Pathobiology set up at the University of Stirling

1972 – Kames Fish Farming established 1973 – Golden Sea Produce established 1977 – Fish Farmer launched 1977 – Wester Ross Fisheries started 1977 – Otter Ferry produces 50 tonnes of salmon 1978 – Unit of Aquatic Pathobiology renamed as the Institute of Aquaculture

1979 – Beginning of oyster farming in Loch Fyne 1983 – Golden Sea Produce acquired by Hydro Seafood

1983 – Scot Trout co-op formed 1985 – First smolt transports by helicopter 1987 – ASSG set up 1988 – Ardtoe produces first halibut juveniles in the UK (and Ardtoe devastated by fire)

and shellfish farming contributes some £620 million to the national economy in gross value added (GVA) every year.

Atlantic salmon production accounts for 90 per cent of all economic impact, supporting 10,340 full-time equivalent jobs and generating £540 million in GVA. On the international stage we are making every effort to create the right market conditions for further export growth.

With the uncertainty created by Brexit, I am committed to ensuring Scotland is the most attractive place for doing business in Europe with a growing, diverse and resilient rural economy.

We are fully aware of the need to maintain access to European markets to ensure the industry’s ambitions to grow can be delivered. Equally, the sector has made clear what it would like to see to secure a positive outcome for the future of this vital industry - the security of the UK market, the free movement of labour and minimal non-tariff barriers. We are determined to ensure the basis for a prosperous future for the sector.

The industry has outlined its 2030 vision to sustainably grow the sector. Similarly, the Aquaculture Industry Leadership www.fishfarmer-magazine.com

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“

1989 – First salmon vaccine (against furunculosis) 1992 – Unilever sells off Marine Harvest 1992 – SSMG formed 1992 – Label Rouge accreditation for Scottish

I take seriously my role to create the conditions for further development

”

Group, which I attend and support, was established last year to ensure a policy and regulatory framework that enables sustainable growth, while maintaining the right balance across our economic, environmental and social responsibilities.

This is certainly a sector that has had to learn and adapt as it has developed and grown. And more needs to be done to create the platform for expansion.

To support these efforts, the Scottish government committed recently, through the Programme for Government, to work with the sector to develop a strategic fish health framework to ensure we make progress in tackling emerging disease and sea lice.

This sector is clearly very positive about the future. I share that confidence, and I am sure that Fish Farmer will continue to report on that journey as we look forward optimistically to the next decade. FF

salmon

1993 – UK joins single market 1994 – Marine Harvest merged with McConnell Salmon

1997 – Scotland votes for devolution 1999 – Loch Duart started 1999 – First elections to Scottish parliament 2001 –Scottish Sea Farms established with 50/50 Salmar/Leroy ownership

2003 – Fish Farmer bought by the Oban Times 2005 – Marine Harvest merge with Stolt Sea Farm 2006 – PanFish Scotland becomes Lighthouse Caledonia

2008 – Scot Trout bought by Dawnfresh 2010 – Lighthouse Caledonia becomes Scottish Salmon Company

2014 – Scottish Aquaculture Innovation Centre created

2015 – HIE (formerly HIDB) is 50 2015 – Ardtoe is 50 2016 – Industry publishes Vision 2030 2016 – Industry Leadership Group meets for the first time

2016 – Prince Charles tours Marine Harvest 2017 – 25th anniversary of Label Rouge Scottish salmon

2017 – Otter Ferry is 50 2017 – Wester Ross Salmon is 40 2017 – Fish Farmer is 40 21

04/10/2017 17:23:02

40 years of aquaculture

BY DENIS CHAMBERLAIN

Quite a journey Fish Farmer’s first editor on dipping a toe in the emerging aquaculture industry

I

N THE mid-1970s there was one word increasingly occupying the thoughts of Britain’s farmers and agricultural advisers – diversification. The boost to commodity prices, initially delivered by entry into the Common Market, was being absorbed by increasing costs and farmers were being encouraged to look at their total assets and resources as a means of earning money, not just the traditional areas of cereals, milk and meat production.

As the then deputy editor of Britain’s biggest farming paper, Farmers Weekly, it was my job to tune into these demands for new ideas and the knowledge and technology required to make them work as income streams on the modern farm. Where fresh, good quality water was available, fish farming (mostly rainbow trout) was ‘obviously’ one such opportunity.

After all, as a potential sector of intensive farming and food production it had its similarities with pig and poultry production.

Success would depend on managing an environment in which large numbers of fish could be bred, grow quickly, convert food efficiently, stay free of disease and produce good quality flesh that the market would pay for at a rate to leave a profit. As the modern meerkat would say – simples!

After presenting a (somewhat sketchy) busi-

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ness case for a new publication, I persuaded my advertising and publishing colleagues that we could dip our toe in the clear, running water of the emerging fish farming industry from the side of my desk at FW. We had a vehicle for such market testing as we regularly published special supplements as free inserts in the magazine. So, the January 14, 1977, issue of Farmers Weekly proudly carried its Fish Farmer supplement which ran to 24 pages, a third of which, crucially, were advertising.

The market had supported my view that there was a place for a specialist publication. We were up and running.

It took almost nine more months of debate, discussion, research, attending events and gauging the development of technology to get the show on the road.

Finally, in November 1977, Fish Farmer was launched. That first issue, like the supplement in Farmers Weekly before it, was almost entirely devoted to the fresh trout industry.

However, in preparing the supplement, I had invested in a trip to Norway to talk to an amazing animal geneticist called Trigve Gjedrem.

Originally a sheep geneticist, he and his colleagues had also collaborated on the development of an all-purpose breed of cattle for Norway, the Norwegian Red, which became ubiquitous on Norway’s farms, capable as it was of performing efficiently as a dairy or beef animal. As the country began to develop a fish farming industry, the sector became a natural next target for the geneticists.

The article I wrote following the visit was about how Norway’s scientists were laying the foundation for their emerging fish farming industry.

By then Gjedrem and his team had been working with trout and salmon for five years, taking along research into cage farming technology as well as fish breeding programmes.

From the early 1970s scientists at the Sunndalsfjord Research Station

The then “Minister of

State did a passable job of sounding convincing

”

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Quite a journey

had worked on the basis that it was not possible to base a farmed fish industry on wild stocks.

Gjedrem told me: ‘We must develop strains that will be productive in captivity. We have done it with rainbow trout; now we must do it with salmon.’

Reading that article 40 years on, it is amazing to reflect on how those simply expressed ambitions have led to such huge developments and the creation of the industry we see today.

So, although trout remained a strong focus in the early issues, Fish Farmer also reported on the developments in shellfish production, the relationship between fish farming and angling (often thorny) and the first tentative steps towards creating farms for turbot and other sea fish.

We engaged excellent contributors – like Prof Ron Roberts from Stirling, Dr Alan Munro from Aberdeen and a pioneer of the trout industry in England, Alex Behrendt, who ran the Two Lakes Fishery in Hampshire and a hugely successful annual conference.

We got in the faces of politicians to ensure that the developing aquaculture industry had a voice that could be heard in the corridors of power. I remember, in the first issue, interviewing the then Minister of State at MAFF, Edward Bishop, who seemed faintly surprised to find that fish farming was one of his areas of responsibility but did a passable job of sounding convincing, if a little defensive, as he responded to our questions.

Above all, we strove to maintain editorial that struck the right balance between practical information for those pioneering a new industry and the transfer of knowledge and technology that was emerging from universities and research stations.

From the first, the magazine was a great believer that the industry had to get its marketing message out with clarity and impact. Many editorials chivvied producers to work together, particularly in the trout sector, to promote their product and boost market share.

But all the time the emphasis swung more and more to coverage of the salmon industry as big companies like Fisons, Booker and, most emphatically, Unilever through Marine Harvest, brought huge professionalism and considerable investment to the industry.

After just over two years I had to relinquish the editor’s chair when I took over as editor of Farmers Weekly but the magazine continued to be produced from the FW stable.

Looking back, it was a tremendous privilege to be in on the start of so many of the developments which contributed to the establishment of the industry we have today.

Many issues currently front of mind aren’t that different despite the passing of four decades; many are new challenges as the industry continues to mature.

Today fish farming is not a diversification from the core of British farming, as we naïvely saw it in 1977, but a multi-million-pound turnover, multi-national, intensive producer of high quality, sought after food, playing a key role in the employment and rural development of so many isolated and in other ways unproductive parts of our country. Quite a journey and it’s far from over yet! FF

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Clockwise from top right: The pilot issue of Fish Farmer published in January 1977; Denis Chamberlain’s ‘Last words’ column; typically robust editorial; Edward Bishop being interviewed for Fish Farmer; packaging trout

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04/10/2017 17:21:20

40 years of aquaculture – SSPO

BY SCOTT LANDSBURGH

Industry at a

crossroads Scottish salmon farmers will work with unity and purpose to address challenges

T

HE Scottish salmon farming industry has progressed remarkably from humble beginnings in the early 1970s to become the third largest producer of Atlantic salmon in the world. The industry has developed a successful export strategy, with Scottish salmon now sold in more than 60 countries across the globe.

Scottish salmon has developed a reputation for quality over the years.

Our Scottish provenance, based on an unrelenting commitment to high standards of fish husbandry, use of cutting edge technology and innovation, the integrity of our supply chain, adoption of responsible environmental practices and the essential good fortune of having a pristine environment for salmon production aids our ability to sell far and wide, and has helped us to build a global brand.

Our reputation for food excellence is certainly deserved, and the premium cachet that we have worked tirelessly to attain has led to Scottish farmed salmon being served at the tables of the world’s finest restaurants. Furthermore, Scottish salmon has twice been voted ‘best salmon in the world’ by a panel of international food writers. Put simply, we produce a food of globally renowned quality.

And in this regard, 2017 marks another historic milestone to coincide with this publication’s 40th anniversary celebrations. It is also the 25th anniversary of our produce being awarded the Label Rouge designation from the French government, an honour bestowed only on products of superior taste and quality. Awarded in 1992, it was the first non-French food, the first fish and one of the very few Scottish foods to have received this prestigious accolade.

An additional mention must go to Wester Ross Salmon, one of our member companies, which also happens to be celebrating 40 years since its foundation. Wester Ross Salmon is Scotland’s oldest independently owned salmon farming company, founded in 1977 by Dr Robin Bradley, father of Gilpin Bradley who currently chairs the SSPO. Robin was a pioneer in the field, and Gilpin and our other members are now custodians of a sophisticated major industry with an annual farm gate value of £1.5 billion.

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It’s fair to say that from the 1970s to the present day, salmon farming in Scotland has come a long way indeed.

Markets But if that’s the past and present, what of the future?

The industry is now at a crossroads. As of this year, it is Scotland’s and indeed the UK’s most valuable food export and, as such, is an important player in local, regional and national economies. This is despite numerous well documented challenges on all fronts, and is very much a testament to the hard work of the industry’s employees. Big challenges lie ahead, however, which will require us to call on our traditional strengths of innovation, our unparalleled work ethic and our ability to work with unity and purpose as an industry.

Uppermost in many minds are political challenges. As an organisation, the SSPO is strictly politically neutral and works with any and all administrations to secure the best commercial environment for our members and the industry as a whole. In practice, this often means securing the most convenient access to the widest possible market to sell our sought after produce.

So the UK’s impending exit from the European Union is undoubtedly a challenge for the industry, but one that we can at least plan for. We will press government for a deal that secures the best possible access to the EU market while al-

Opposite page: A group of Master Chefs of France visit the Scottish Salmon Company’s site in Loch Fyne to see where Label Rouge Scottish salmon is farmed

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Industry at a crossroads

lowing for our industry to enter other international markets with enhanced access.

As far as any of us can tell, Brexit is going ahead and, notwithstanding measures we must take to mitigate potential downsides, we must also take advantage of any potential opportunities arising from it.

If there are to be new free trade deals, the SSPO will look to be front and centre in influencing these deals for the good of our industry. The US and the various countries of the Far East are already incredibly important export markets, as demonstrated by our most recent export figures. We would support moves to facilitate greater access to these markets.

And we are not just blithely accepting the consequences of ongoing closed door conversations in Brussels, either.

The SSPO has produced a paper outlining key concerns and priorities for the industry, aimed at securing the best possible outcome from the UK’s exit from the EU. It will be published imminently and will form the basis of our lobbying efforts.

While Brexit will be the subject of much industry focus for the next 18 months at least, we must not lose sight of the fact that the United Kingdom is still Scottish salmon’s most important market.

More than a million salmon meals are consumed in the UK every day. This domestic demand underpins the economic sustainability of the salmon farming industry. We jeopardise that at our peril and the SSPO will always lobby government to ensure access to this market is unimpeded and that the commercial environment we operate in is protected and, where possible, enhanced.

A healthy commercial environment is good for many reasons. But perhaps most of all, it means jobs.

The industry sustains more than 8,800 jobs directly and indirectly, with the vast majority of these in the Highlands and islands. These jobs are vital to the local economy and community in some of the most remote areas of the UK. Total gross pay stands at nearly £75 million for 2016, evidence of the significant contribution the industry makes to economic output.

Capital investment by the industry, meanwhile, came to a combined £63 million for 2016, showing just how important an industry salmon farming is for the Scottish economy, particularly its rural economy.

Our expenditure on suppliers and services is north of £595 million annually, £164 million of which is spent in the Highlands and islands.

The industry has a wider positive impact, of course. It is a prominent part of the Scottish aquaculture sector which employs scientists across the country and generates continued investment in innovation, putting a virtuous cycle in play that breeds better food and environmental standards, and better animal welfare standards.

Current spending patterns and employment statistics are only one side of the story, however. The industry recognises how vital it is to plan for

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the future. Our members, for example, now have over 100 staff on either Modern Apprenticeships or National Progression Awards.

These people are crucial to the future of the industry. Salmon farming is now being recognised as a career destination and we want to cement our place as a leading industry for the provision of fulfilling careers in locations in which they have been historically difficult to sustain in large numbers.

Communities On top of the employment and training, there are numerous examples of contributions from salmon farming companies and their employees to local projects.

There is the Heart of the Community fund run by Scottish Sea Farms.

There are activities aimed at children and education, such as the Scottish Salmon Company’s sponsorship of the National Theatre of Scotland and Imaginate.

Marine Harvest Scotland, Wester Ross Salmon, Cooke Aquaculture and Loch Duart all contribute time and money to a diverse range of activities including shinty, civic events, fish farm visits, pipe band competitions and much more.

From sponsorships to sports kits and theatre for schools, to technology for elderly people, the projects are increasingly wide ranging. Additionally, our member companies allow employees time off for volunteering commitments, including mountain rescue, fire service and other vital community work.

Our relatively new Community Charter is further evidence of how seriously we take our impact on and role within local communities. It is aimed, specifically, at maintaining open lines of communication with communities, sourcing locally for our production process where possible and providing support for local initiatives (as detailed above), especially if they are in line with the industry ethos of improving health, education and the environment.

On a separate but related point, we at SSPO also recognise the contributions made via EU institutions and initiatives to local communities and industries in remote parts of the Highlands and islands, in particular. This is why our Brexit lobbying will also involve arguing for the replication of funding frameworks provided by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF), among others.

We need to convince more “people of our genuinely high standard of fish welfare ”

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40 years of aquaculture – SSPO

Critics While we rightly shout about our undoubted successes, the industry does not shy away from its critics and their criticisms. We are aware of the work that needs to be done to convince more people of our genuinely high standard of fish welfare, and our robust and constantly improving environmental credentials, but we will keep proudly making our case and improving the way we work.

As an industry, we adhere to and, in many instances, exceed the guidelines set out in our Code of Good Practice. We aim to abide by the letter of the law and engage fully in consultation with the angling, wild fish, environmental protection and other lobbies. We take great care to operate our industry with low environmental impact and, as far as possible, in harmony with nature and other industries. The farmed salmon industry has always taken its responsibility to the environment seriously and will continue in this vein.

Milestone This magazine issue rightly marks a historic milestone. But to continue to be successful, we in the farmed salmon industry must be entirely focused on the future. As ever, it is an uncertain future and uncertainty is never more keenly understood than in primary livestock sectors.

Challenges, be they environmental, political, economic or any other, will always arise in some guise and fish farming will probably always have its detractors.

As an industry, we continue to respond to changes to importing rules in export markets, such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act in the US, which various agencies of the US government are consulting on presently with a view to restricting certain fish and seafood imports.

As ever, we also face ongoing competition for market share from other salmon producing countries.

The industry continues to meet and, in some cases, exceed all existing standards and regulations. Scotland has one of the highest fish health

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rankings in the world because of its independently audited Code of Good Practice.

Approximately 60 to 70 per cent of our salmon is covered by and conforms to the RSPCA Assured scheme. We are demonstrably not lacking when it comes to environmental protection and the welfare of our fish.

There is, however, much more we can and will do. We will continue to invest heavily in research, development and technology in order to overcome the inevitable challenges of primary aquaculture production.

We will also seek out and maximise commercial opportunities. We will look to adapt to global population growth and highlight the nutritional, environmental and production cost advantages of salmon versus other food sources. We will also look to play our part in sustainability minded and sensibly managed food tourism.

One thing we can say, with a degree of optimism looking ahead, is that since our inception as an industry we have never fully satisfied the huge demand for our highly regarded salmon from global markets. As the world’s population grows and looks for ways to feed itself, seafood protein sources will come to the fore. This is both a challenge and an opportunity.

Closer to home, the industry will face more fundamental challenges in operating in remote areas without sustained investment in housing and infrastructure. We will work with others wherever we can to stimulate investment in these areas.

Despite these concerns, I have great confidence in the people who make up the industry. We have adapted to challenges before. I have no doubt that with the same can-do attitude we will do so again in the future and go on to even greater success.

Scott Landsburgh is the chief executive of the Scottish Salmon Producers’ Organisation. FF

“

Left: French chef Christophe Prud’homme with Scottish salmon. Below: Celebrating 25 years of Label Rouge Scottish salmon

We face ongoing competition for market share from other salmon producing countries

”

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04/10/2017 17:19:13

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04/10/2017 17:17:50

40 years of aquaculture – Marine Harvest

Standard bearer Salmon farming pioneer talks about the job – and part of Scotland – he loves

Above: Steve Bracken celebrates 40 years at Marine Harvest earlier this year with managing director Ben Hadfield and colleagues in Fort William. Right: Smolt transport in the 80s.

Opposite page: Bracken showing Prince Charles around Loch Leven in October 2016; with a copy of Marine Harvest’s 50th anniversary magazine, put together with Fish Farmer

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A

GROUP of Marine Harvest executives got together recently in Poland, where the company has a major processing plant.

As part of the team building activities they went kayaking one evening along a beautiful river that feeds into the Baltic. But heavy rain had made the river swollen and the currents strong and, to cut a long story short, some of the group ended up in the water. For those, like Steve Bracken, who had been in fish farming a long time, it must have been almost nostalgic.

Now safely back on dry land, Bracken, who joined Marine Harvest the year Fish Farmer was launched, remembers when such hair-raising scenes were par for the course.

‘Looking back, I think it’s fair to say that health and safety really hadn’t been invented,’ he told Fish Farmer. ‘People would fall in and in the summer it was just seen as part of the hurly-burly of salmon farming. On hot days it was like a bonus.

‘And although we were issued with lifejackets, the checking of these wasn’t done as rigorously as it is today. ‘ Staff comfort was not much of a priority either, said Bracken, recalling what passed then for personal protective equipment.

‘When I started I was given a pair of wellies. I’m a size 12 and although the wellingtons were brand new, one was a size 11 and the

other was a size nine. And there was really nothing else.’

Long before flotation suits, staff wore oilskins

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Standard bearer

and when they got wet inside ‘they were pretty miserable and uncomfortable’, said Bracken, who is Marine Harvest’s business support manager, a title which doesn’t quite do justice to his role. Not only is he the company’s chief spokesman, but he is also widely regarded as the leading ambassador for the industry, the patient voice explaining salmon farming to the outside world.

He came to aquaculture after graduating with a degree in geography, knowing only that he wanted to work outdoors. He had considered forestry as a career but while back home in Edinburgh thinking about his next step, he saw an advert in the Oban Times saying ‘fish farm assistants wanted’.

‘I’d never heard of the industry, didn’t know what fish farming was, and had no particular desire to live in the west of Scotland.’

But he applied anyway and was summoned by Unilever for an interview in the Cummings Hotel in Inverness. It must have gone well because he was ‘promoted instantly’ when they offered him a post as a supervisor and sent him off to Lochailort.

Despite no training, he doesn’t remember feeling daunted either by the work or the remoteness of the location.

‘There was a local pub, the Glenshian at Lochailort, that everybody used to go to, and there was a great community spirit among the people who worked on the farm and our neighbours. I liked it and really took to it.

‘The farm was still feeling its way and the idea was that there would be two supervisors managing small teams of five or six.’

He shared a house with the other supervisor, Alistair Ferguson, who had previous salmon netting experience and, unlike Bracken, a knowledge of boats.

‘I learned a lot from him in the first couple of hours and was then set adrift and told to get on with it. You were learning on the job and you quickly realised there were no standards, no technical manuals, no guidance.

‘There were two or three senior guys who had been there more or less from the start of salmon farming and they realised there wasn’t a

very exciting because “youIt was were making up ways of doing things ” www.fishfarmer-magazine.com

Steve B Int.indd 29

pool of salmon farmers and they had to start new people off.

‘It was very exciting because you were, in many circumstances, making up ways of doing things on the job.

‘The boats we used in the very early days were what were called seaweed boats. These were wooden clinker design boats with an inboard diesel engine and they were noisy and smoky and not always the most reliable.

‘Today, looking around and seeing Polarcirkel boats with large outboard motors that are reliable and efficient, there has been a complete transformation in the industry.

‘I think in the early days if you were physically fit and could lift 25 kilo bags of feed, day in day out, and lift nets in and out of the water, you’d kind of cracked it, you’d got the qualifications. It was extremely physical, it was all manual labour at that time.’

It wasn’t until the 90s that the mechanisation of killing came in and Bracken was of that generation that had to kneel on carpets – ‘Axminster was best’ – and hit fish over the head with sticks, preferably holly because it was heavy.

Four of them would stun three tonnes a day but when it started getting up to five tonnes they realised they’d need a more efficient method of dispatch. Gradual technical improvements made life a little easier, with polypropylene replacing the wooden coshes, and the introduction of a system that did away with carpets.

‘Instead of kneeling on an Axminster you found you could actually stand and kill the fish because somebody had come along with a compressed airlift pump that could bring the fish out of the water, on to a table, and it was much more comfortable.

‘I suppose it’s like any industry, it’s moved on and mechanisation has kicked in and new technology has helped ease the burden.

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40 years of aquaculture – Marine Harvest

Above: Bracken with Ralph Baillie Opposite page: Welcoming Prince Charles to Loch Leven; Bracken at Marine Harvest - in 1977, in the 80s, 90s and this year, with Ben Hadfield.

Pictures Marine Harvest

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Steve B Int.indd 30

‘I don’t hanker after the old days because the old days were tough days. They can still be tough but the equipment we’ve got is far, far better suited to growing fish and that’s improving all the time.’

Although Bracken spends more time at a desk these days he is often at farm sites, with customers and visitors. Does he ever wish he was running a farm again, with all the technical wizardry available now?

‘I would struggle to run a salmon farm when I look at the technology we have today, and at the experience that farm managers and assistant farm managers have, and the technicians on farms. They have all been put through training courses on every conceivable thing you can think of - first aid, manual handling, boat handling, radio usage, you name it, it’s there.

‘When I started there was none of that, of course, you just learned how to do it. I think we’ve got a different breed of salmon farmers today. In the early days you might say it was more artisanal perhaps and rudimentary but I think deep down every farmer would love to have seen the changes that have been made in more recent times – the reduced amount of manual handling and the improvements in fish welfare.

‘Today we’re audited to the hilt and farm

managers are really experienced in dealing with audits. They know their farms inside out, they know the detail to everything and they still need to have time to look at the fish and go, yep they’re good, or there’s something a bit odd about them today. They’ve all got that eye for detail that it’s important for farmers to have.

‘In many cases, farm managers have come up through the ranks and they’ve learned on the job and have also gone for more formal training as well, which is absolutely essential today.’

Bracken chaired the Improved Containment Working Group that devised the Scottish Technical Standard, published in 2015 and due to come into force in 2020, and agrees it is something the industry can be proud of.

‘It took a long time but we got there in the end. The advantage we had was the huge variety of skills and experience in the team that put the standard together.

‘It’s something I’m very pleased to have been involved in. We see that as a standard that is live so when we finished it off you could almost sense that one or two of the items in it would probably change in a very short space of time.

‘We got it well set up in advance to give companies the time to get themselves sorted so each of their farms will comply with the standard.’

The technical standard will help improve containment and reduce escapes which, Bracken said, is one of the three big issues today, along with sea lice and seal predation.

A recent change in US legislation, requiring that all seafood imports are harvested in a way that minimises harm to marine mammals, hangs over the head of the Scottish salmon sector, threatening one of its most lucrative markets.

‘The industry needs to be really live to that one and I think much more could be done,’ said Bracken.

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Standard bearer

He sits on the Salmon and Aquaculture Seals Working Group which is looking at ways to minimise, ‘or ideally eliminate’ the need to shoot seals.

‘It’s easier said than done. It’s something we need to keep focused on because it may well affect our exports to the US. It’s also one of the issues that will come up repeatedly, year on year, and it’s something, personally, I’d rather not have to deal with.

‘If we could fix the need to shoot seals that would be fantastic. For the image of the industry it would be better if we didn’t have to do it.’

The industry’s image is something that concerns Bracken in his position at Marine Harvest and he acknowledges that getting this right can be as challenging as tackling some of the technical problems.

‘I think that as an industry we’ve not been good at communicating what we do and I know from experience of the early days it was a case of just let us get on with this, we’re learning and once we’ve got it cracked we can talk about it.

‘Then there was the competition that existed where companies were trying to develop new methods, new systems, and new technology to try and get ahead of other companies.

‘Today that has changed because there are specialist companies out there making equipment for the whole industry so it’s highly unlikely that you’ve got some secret weapon that no one else has.’

Bracken is also involved in an ongoing dialogue between salmon farmers and wild fisheries groups to address the decline in salmon and sea trout stocks in Scotland.

The presence at these talks of Prince Charles - a long-time champion of anglers but, since his visit to a Marine Harvest farm last October, also in tune with aquaculture - has surely created a new sense of optimism.

‘I think there is a willingness on the industry side and in wild fisheries, albeit not universally, to have greater dialogue. I would like to think it was the majority in wild fisheries - maybe I’m naïve in saying that but I think there are positive indications that we can work together.

‘We need to try and be better at conveying that, yes, salmon farming will have had some influence in the decline of salmon and sea trout over time. However, please don’t put us on the top of that list of likely suspects.

‘We need to look at climate change, warming of sea water, lack of available food, predation, by-catch, so many other factors.’

Attitudes won’t change overnight but working with people who have the same aim - ‘which is all about trying to get salmon and sea trout back in good numbers in Scotland’ – is a start.

‘It’s about building up trust and that takes time. But I would hope

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Steve B Int.indd 31

there’s a greater determination to work together to try and tease out some of these solutions, because I think it’s very easy to say it’s all down to salmon farming, but there’s definitely a realisation that there are other factors at play.’

Bracken is due to retire within the next year but said he would ‘hope to definitely maintain an interest in the industry’. He is not worried, however, about passing the baton on to the next generation.

‘Within Marine Harvest I see a number of people who would be able to fill my boots. In terms of experience in very specialised areas they are extremely competent, and if they can be experienced in one area, they can be experienced in all areas in time.

‘They are bright and enjoy doing what they’re doing and are very good at dealing with the public in all sorts of different situations. It’s just channelling that and making sure they’ve got more of the overall picture of the industry, and that includes the customer base.’

Of all the highlights of the past 40 years, Bracken said he couldn’t single out the best moment, but one thing he has no doubts about is his move west.

‘I have loved living on the west coast of Scotland. Apart from a spell of just under three years living in Sri Lanka farming prawns, which was also fantastic, I’ve lived and worked here.

I’ve loved the fact that our kids have been brought up on the west coast and are very much into the outdoors.

‘When I first came here as young man there was still that hankering for the city and I would have to go back and get a fix of it for a weekend. After a period of time I realised I didn’t need that any more, the country life gets you.

‘I love Edinburgh, and it’s great to go back and see it. But the west coast is definitely home.’ FF

Within “Marine

Harvest I see a number of people who would be able to fill my boots

”

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04/10/2017 17:17:08

40 years of aquaculture – Marine Harvest

Inside Inchmore

Fish Farmer gets a tour of state of the art hatchery as it nears completion

M

ARINE Harvest’s recirculation hatchery at Inchmore, in Glenmoriston, is weeks away from completion, with the first eggs due to arrive before Christmas.

In just over a year, the old plant, built in 1978, has been torn down and a new, steel framed structure has been erected to house 30 fry tanks and 18 smolt tanks, egg incubators, water intake and treatment systems that will recirculate 18,000m3 of water, 4km of underground pipework, lab facilities, offices, an engineering and maintenance area, feed hoppers – and a visitor’s gallery.

The £26.5 million hatchery covers 14,000 square metres, and will produce around 4.5 million smolts for the company’s expanding network of sea sites and 6.5 million parr for on-growing in freshwater lochs.

Inchmore will complement Marine Harvest’s new Lochailort hatchery, opened four years ago, and has the capacity to produce 880 tonnes of fish, a marked advance on the 40 tonnes the old, flow through plant could manage.

Overseeing this monument to salmon farming sophistication is Stephen McCaig, appointed Marine Harvest’s construction manager last year and now fully conversant in the finer points of fish husbandry.

McCaig has several big projects to his name and has worked all over Scotland. But he was also involved in the Lochailort hatchery, freelancing for contractor Robertsons, and when Marine Harvest advertised for a construction manager he jumped at the opportunity.

‘I thought with their growth and development plans, why not. There is the feed mill at Kyleakin and plans to open a new farm on Rum, and a number of

Left: Stephen McCaig, left, with Marine Harvest’s John Richmond, Steve Bracken and group engineer Mick Watts, and Highland Council leader Margaret Davidson at the turf cutting ceremony last year . Above: Inchmore takes shape

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Inchmore.indd 32

other new farming locations are being looked at.’

The company’s current investment alone justifies the employment of a full-time construction manager, and there are further plans on the horizon, including the possibility of a post-smolt plant on Skye, still at the design stage, and the rebuilding of the cleaner fish recirculation hatchery on Anglesey, acquired by Marine Harvest last year.

At Inchmore, McCaig meets regularly with the contractors, Morrison Construction, and with John Richmond, Marine Harvest’s freshwater manager and the technical expert behind both the Lochailort and Inchmore RAS systems.

Richmond has described before how technical advances have made the Inchmore hatchery even

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Inside Inchmore

more efficient than Lochailort, and MCaig agrees that this plant is the state of the art.

‘Lochailort operates very well but this system has been tweaked so it is more user friendly – it’s a luxury to have Lochailort so we can see how to make Inchmore even better.

‘Operating procedures are more or less the same as in Lochailort but in the four years since that was completed the technology has moved on, and John has refined things at Inchmore after listening to the guys in Lochailort.’

McCaig said that once Inchmore is up and running, Lochailort might be upgraded, temporarily operating at two thirds capacity if they can afford the downtime.

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At Inchmore much of the manufacturing was completed off site and delivered pre-fabricated. This has made construction more cost effective with less continuous building on site. Also, it was decided that, as at Lochailort, all concrete would be batched on site, saving thousands of lorry trips. In total, McCaig said some 10,000m3 of concrete had been batched at Inchmore.

Not only has this made commercial and environmental sense, but it has caused less disruption to the local community, with whom the company has forged good relations.

McCaig says he has been adopted by the West Glenmoriston Community

a luxury to have Lochailort so we can see “It’show to make Inchmore even better ”

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40 years of aquaculture – Marine Harvest

Visitors will be able to watch the hatchery “ in operation without having to go through the disinfection procedures ”

Above: The skeleton of what will soon be a plush foyer, visitors’ gallery and ofices and, inset, an earlier drone shot of the work in progress. Opposite page: Concrete smolt tanks; part of the filtration system; Faivre drum filters and water treatment tanks

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Inchmore.indd 34

Company and is project manager on a scheme, partly funded by Marine Harvest, to transform an old school building.

‘This was part of the planning application – we asked what would benefit them and they gave us this school project.’

Inchmore will be 90 per cent complete by December and when Fish Farmer visited towards the end of September the hatchery and the fry and smolt tanks were all in place, and it was mainly the offices, labs, and visitor’s foyer and gallery that were yet to be finished, furnished and painted. In a few weeks, operational tests will begin.

Water quality will be exceptional, recirculated almost completely, with only small percentages topped up from the river once the hatchery is up and running. Waste is treated until it forms a paste that can then be distributed to a network of local farmers.

Incoming raw water is sand filtered and then ozone treated by one of four ozone generators. There are three towering concrete tanks, accessed by a flight of 22 steps, which will be filled to capacity, one for the raw water intake, the second for treated water, and the third for storage. These tanks have to be internally coated as the ozone is very aggressive.

Beneath all the concrete there is ‘layer upon layer’ of pipework, about 4km in total – ‘seventy per cent of the work and detail of the hatchery is underground,’ said McCaig.

Specialist pipe suppliers provided heavy duty, pre-fabricated pipes, which were pressure tested at 10 bar, although they will only ever be subjected to 1.5 bar, a necessarily robust safeguarding procedure before covering

everything in concrete.

One of the few manual processes in the plant is the delivery of the trays of eggs to Hatchery 1 and Hatchery 2. These will produce millions of fry which will be transferred to the fry tanks.

The hatchery is on a higher level and will gravity feed fry into the 6m diameter fry tanks via pipes.

There are 15 tanks in Fry A and 15 in Fry B, all of which were pre-fabricated off site.

A small pipe in the bottom of each tank is for transferring fish to the grading pit and vaccination area. The fish are automatically segregated after grading and gravity fed back into the tanks. The larger pipe in each tank is for waste removal.

Every stage of the process has built-in back up in the event of anything going wrong. ‘If there is an issue we can shut down an area and carry on operating,’ said McCaig. ‘In other RAS units the whole system sometimes has to be shut down.’

The concrete smolt tanks are 12m diameter and 4m deep, with 1m underground, and each has been given a special coating so there are no rough edges.

There are nine tanks in Smolt A and nine in

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Inside Inchmore

Smolt B and GRP walkways will be constructed in an interlinked grid above them for ease of access.

Fish are pumped from the small pipes to the grading area and then gravity fed to lorries, from where they will be transported to the sea pens.

Waste water is channelled through a series of 12 Faivre drum filters – seven in the smolt area and five for the fry – which catch the sediment. From here the water is fed via a controlled gate into deep tanks for treatment with biomedia. Each of the tanks has its own treatment system, keeping everything separate again.

The water is then pumped out to a large basement chamber and injected with ozone, after which it is pumped into a trickle tower and from there back into the fish tanks.

To make maintenance easier, an overhead gantry will be installed with running rails and winches and pulleys. If a fault occurs in any part of the system, sections can be lifted out and taken to the on-site engineering room for repair.

The mains power at Inchmore was due to go live on October 5, to be followed by a massive cleaning and disinfecting operation, after which water will be flushed through the system. Throughout November everything will become operational, ready for the arrival of the eggs on December 18.

Once Inchmore is a working hatchery biosecurity will be crucial but this does not mean visitors will be excluded. Perhaps the most modern touch of all is the visitors’ gallery, a suspended, glass encased corridor reached directly from the foyer and running nearly the entire length of the building.

From here, the fry and smolt tanks can be viewed, and there is even a platform looking out, through glass, on to the vaccination area.

‘Visitors will be able to watch the hatchery in operation without having to go through the disinfection procedures,’ said McCaig.

There will be a board room, displaying video footage of the construction process and drone photographs, all shot by MCaig. Customers will be able to see what the company is doing, as will school parties. Lochailort hosts school tours to encourage the next generation and Inchmore intends on doing the same.

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‘Marine Harvest is focusing on the education element now, telling schools about what they do,’ said McCaig, explaining that there are about 73 different roles in the company. ‘It’s all about progression and developing the workforce for the future.’

With only a few weeks before the staff are on site, a training programme is already in full swing, said hatcheries area manager Chris Munro. Thirteen of the new recruits have been stationed at Lochailort since May, instructed by Inchmore site manager Owen Davies.

‘It is a big training programme – and they’ve been coming up here too and getting a better understanding of things,’ said Munro.

There will be about 25 staff in total, with 15 on site at a time, working rotational shifts; a suite of offices adjacent to the hatchery is currently being rebuilt as staff quarters.

The Inchmore hatchery will supply some of Marine Harvest’s new sites, either approved or waiting approval. It will send smolts – the first ones around August next year- straight to Kyleakin, from where they will be transported to sea by wellboat.

Lochailort will continue to supply nearby sites, or wellboats at Mallaig. The idea is to keep smolts from the two hatcheries separate, to minimise risk and to track any production differences.

Casting an eye over the hatchery now, McCaig said the greenfield site had looked big but the building has taken up most of the space. Construction has been mostly uninterrupted by the weather and he is confident of meeting the deadlines.

By January he expects to be working on his next major project, Marine Harvest’s feed mill on Skye. FF

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40 years of aquaculture – Marine Harvest

Turning

point Sir Iain Anderson recalls the day he decided to focus all research efforts on salmon

I

f the credit for developing salmon farming in Scotland had to go to one person it would probably be Sir Iain Anderson, though he is the first to insist that it was a team effort from the start.

But it was a unilateral decision by Anderson that made Marine Harvest focus all its resources on salmon, rather than other potential candidate species.

Having been brought in by Unilever Research in 1965 to investigate the possibilities in marine aquaculture, Anderson was one of a group of scientists working out of Aberdeen and in a small research station at Findon, south of Aberdeen, where they could ‘play around with fish’.

‘The idea was to single out so called high value marine species of fish and shellfish,’ he said, when Fish Farmer caught up with him in Edinburgh.

At the same time, another group in Unilever had begun trials, farming trout at Lochailort, on Scotland’s west coast.

‘Because I was a marine microbiologist, when the trout thing at

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Lochailort had disease problems, which it did very quickly, they got me involved because I was supposed to have the answers to all these things,’ said Anderson.

‘There were hard working guys at Lochailort but there was no scientific background. It was clear to me and to everyone else around that if this was going to go anywhere they needed to bring some science along.’

That science was ‘a bunch of very capable guys with PhDs’, who had been experimenting with flatfish biology in Aberdeen and Findon, and in 1968 Anderson was put in charge.

Even then he could see it didn’t make sense to go to such trouble with trout when salmon was so much more valuable. After going around the world, including to Norway, to observe pioneering aquaculture operations, he made up his mind.

‘By the time I finished all this roaming around I was still involved in flatfish and prawns but I came to a view that Unilever were on the wrong track.

‘It was too early for a whole bunch of reasons and what we ought to do was close down all of our work on flatfish and prawns and put all of the already accumulated brainpower into salmon. That included trout, which is quite

“

It was so obvious to me that I just did it without consultation

”

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Turning point

Opposite: Lochailort. Above: Prime product. Right: Sir Iain Anderson

diversionary and raises quite different issues.

‘There was a huge reservoir of knowledge already in salmon and virtually nothing about raising Dover sole or turbot, and it seemed to me a load of sense to do that.’

Did his bosses agree?

‘I was so convinced, having done my travels, that what we were doing was a waste of time, and wanted to put all our resources into salmon at Lochailort.

‘I just went ahead. I got everybody together - maybe 20 people, in Findon - and said we’re going to close this whole lab. We had some valuable broodstock which we gave away and closed it all down.

‘It didn’t take long and it filtered up to the top of Unilever. I still remember the guy, who was quite senior, and God did I get a dressing down! It was so obvious to me that I just did it without consultation.

My first lesson in internal politics, you just don’t do things like that.

‘He said, I’m not even arguing with whether your decision was right or not but you just don’t do it. You come to me or others and explain what you’re thinking of.

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Iain Anderson.indd 37

‘That was a turning point, a big event, and changed the way things were going to be.’

Anderson said Unilever was a wonderful organisation to work for – ‘I had remarkable support from my various levels of bosses to travel the world. I was a young guy and I needed to go out there and investigate.’

While abroad, he had witnessed the Norwegians’ efforts to farm salmon, by closing off a chunk of a fjord north of Bergen and having a gigantic but enclosed loch to grow the fish.

‘We didn’t think that was such a great idea for us, we didn’t think the topography of the Scottish seascape was right for it.

‘I went to Japan – they were world leading in aquaculture, not with salmon but with fish as culturally vital to them. Tuna was at the top of their list.

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40 years of aquaculture – Marine Harvest

It’s no “ good saying we’re going to do our best, you have to do it

”

‘They had developed a scheme there, which I was impressed with, built on cages. I thought this makes mush more sense for all kinds of reasons. The Japanese were very open and after that I spent a lot of time in Japan. I gave them a huge amount of credit for where they were, out in the front of aquaculture.’

He also put out feelers to his contacts in the US, where he had lived for several years before Unilever Research. Because of the extensive hydro schemes up and down the west coast, blocking off and interfering with the salmon’s natural runs, the government had an obligation to release young salmon into the sea.

‘So the US was already a leader in raising the little guys. This work was also going on in Scotland, in Invergarry. [Some of Scotland’s best salmon rivers were being harnessed for hydro-electric power.] It was a very small thing in Scotland but there were people who knew everything about growing salmon.’

There was also a research centre in Sweden where they were raising and releasing small salmon smolts, and in Ireland too, so Anderson visited these initiatives as well. The Norwegians alone were trying to keep the salmon growing.

‘What is hard to grasp is that, first of all, we didn’t know anything and, second, there were no other sources, we couldn’t pick up the phone. Everything we were doing hadn’t been done before so we had to work out everything on our own. But we all had the view that it would be done and it could be done.’

The government run freshwater laboratory at Faskally in Pitlochry, set up in the 1950s to monitor wild salmon populations, was the nearest source of professional thinking and a well recognised place for salmon biology, said Anderson.

‘They said it’s okay to raise smolts, which they were in the centre of, but salmon need to go away and what you’re doing can’t be done. I said thanks very much and went off and did it anyway.

‘We had all kinds of things go wrong. Some of the greatest challenges were in engineering. We couldn’t find engineers who knew anything about this and every winter brought new experiences.

‘Because winter made such a huge difference if we were expanding, building something new, getting something ready, any operational thing, we had to be ready before the third week in September. After that there are a lot of things you can’t do anymore because of the weather on the west coast.

‘That taught me a lot about planning. It’s no good saying we’re going to do our best, you have to do it. It’s not negotiable, we have to be ready, end of story. That’s a lesson a lot of managers still have to learn I think.’

Anderson’s team may have looked like mad scientists working away in a cold loch but actually they were quite disciplined.

‘Maybe we were mad scientists! But we couldn’t have achieved what we achieved unless all kinds of different levels were disciplined.’

But mainly they were enthusiasts and Anderson said he just ‘happened to be the lucky guy who was there at the time’ to lead them.

‘Nearly everybody who was involved became captivated with the same enthusiasm. So for most of us the idea of taking a holiday didn’t enter our minds – that is bizarre these days.

‘When some of the people feeding the fish in Loch Ailort demanded time off at New Year, Tom Little [his boss at the time] and I would go and work all through Christmas and New Year and feed the fish. It had to be done. I spent a huge amount of time with welly boots on and waterproofs and hands in the water.’

He said they didn’t really think about the long term but he believed

Above: Two of the first salmon from the first harvest at Lochailort in 1971. Opposite page - top: Lochinvar salmon are dispatched from the Lochailort packing station; the harvest starts as grilse tumble from the net at Lochailort; fouling is a major problem in sea pens - and net cleaning calls for plenty of labour. Below: ‘Ducks’ amphibious vehicles from World War II.

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Turning point

they could produce between 1,000 to 10,000 tonnes.

‘It would have been completely beyond imagination that we could have produced more than that.’

The ground-breaking work captured the imagination of people at the top of Unilever and it became a regular journey for board members and chairmen to come to Lochailort.

‘I got to know all these top people who I would never have met normally. We were in the spotlight, which was good news, but if something went wrong we got a lot of stick.’

He remembers taking a photo in 1971 of two fish from the first batch harvested, salmon that had been fertilised and hatched in 1968.

‘That was right at the very beginning. We raised them as smolts and grew them on and in 1971 we took them out of the water, I don’t remember how many but not much.

‘A lot of people in the salmon world were around, they were fascinated, including Johnston of Montrose, the largest owners of salmon netting rights in Scotland.

‘The wild catch then was about 3,000 tonnes which puts 10,000 tonnes in perspective. I invited a man called Johnathan Stansfeld, director of Johnston of Montrose, to come to Lochailort and I took him out on a boat to see the cages.

‘I can still see the expression on his face; he said ‘this is the most exciting day of my life’. He was completely emotionally overcome by what he was looking at.

‘We didn’t have many pens and they were quite small and very crude.

It wasn’t a commercial operation then, it was tiny. Little boats would go out from the beach.

‘If you were to see how this thing all started you would be as amazed as I was when I was taken around Marine Harvest recently and saw the huge industrial scale development. I couldn’t believe the advance and the knowledge that has accumulated, it’s completely extraordinary.

‘In the early days everybody was a jack of all trades. There were three vitally important specialisms and we had to deal with all of them internally – we couldn’t go and pick up the phone and get in an expert.

‘In no order of priority they were nutrition, engineering and disease.

They are still very important but all had to be generated 100 per cent inside a small group of people. We made all the mistakes.

‘It was not so long since the double helix had been discovered don’t forget. Today even primary school children will give you a lecture on the double helix but then the whole genetic thing was the dark ages as far as we were concerned.

‘We were aware of the possibilities and played around trying to do some selection but it has advanced beyond the imagination.’

Asked how he feels all these years later about having created an entire industry, Anderson said: ‘If people wouldn’t ask me these questions I probably wouldn’t think about it at all!

‘But every time we’d be flying around the world, when we used to travel a lot, we could count on having smoked salmon on a plane and I used to joke to my wife that if we hadn’t done what we did we probably wouldn’t be eating this.

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Iain Anderson.indd 39

‘The other joke was my kids thought everybody ate smoked salmon all the time because we were learning to smoke salmon and weren’t selling it apart from a mail order business and I used to take it home.’

Anderson was invited back to Marine Harvest in 2013 for the official opening of the new hatchery at Lochailort, and spent a day touring around.

‘It was completely moving for me, the way they’ve integrated and the scale of the engineering, and the special ships.

‘We bought superannuated ‘Ducks’ [amphibious vehicles from World War II] from the Ministry of Defence and used them as our first means of working at sea.

‘We could load stuff on the land and then drive it into the water. They would break down because they were completely clapped out.

And then you see what they’re doing now!

‘When you’re at the edge of pioneering you have to defy convention. We were just lucky that it turned out it wasn’t such a bad idea.’

And does he think it feasible that the industry will be able to grow in the way it intends to?

‘How could I look at what’s happened in the last 50 years and see the hurdles that have been overcome and the unimaginable advances that have taken place and been applied as a routine, how can you look at the last 50 years and look to the next 50 years with anything but optimism? How can you do that?’

Sir Iain Anderson was Marine Harvest’s managing director from 1977 to 1979, and ran the early farming operations in Lochailort from the 60s. FF

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40 years of aquaculture – Cages

Scotch

myths

Making hexagonal ‘circles’ from steel and other engineering feats

P

ETER Crook, a former chief engineer for Marine Harvest, was first dispatched to Lochailort after the entire farm there disappeared. The year was 1969, when cage design was in its infancy.

‘In those days the pens were held up with plastic floats which cracked in the winter and so they didn’t work very well,’ said Crook, a chartered engineer by training who was working for Unilever Research at its laboratory in Bedfordshire. Having

recovered the Locahilort farm from the sea bottom, he soon became the engineer member of Unilever’s research team into salmon farming.

His job, as he describes it now, was ‘learning to deal with some of the myths that were in the heads of people in the back end of the 60s’.

‘The very first pens that were made, before my time, used nets and the perception was that the fish were being badly damaged, believed to be by dogfish but actually it was probably seals. There was no such thing as predator nets then.

‘The received wisdom was that we couldn’t use nets so all the early cages, including quite a few that I built, used a steel frame with steel mesh.

Left: Early pens in Lochailort. Opposite: Cleaning a hexagonal cage. Picture courtesy Dick Alderson

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Scotch myths

‘The first ones I made were six sided (each side was about eight foot) and they only held about 32 cubic metres of water and they used the steel frames, which were of course more or less predator proof but quite expensive to build.’

Taking into account that there was a history of this stuff ending up on the seabed, Crook said his steel frames, steel floats and steel mesh had to stay afloat and they did, lasting quite a long time.

‘It was also believed that the fish didn’t like square cages because they liked swimming around in circles, so the cages had to be roughly circular. That’s two myths right at the beginning!

‘So all the early pens were roughly circular, and these tiny ones were hexagonal. Then later we got ambitious and I made some that were ten sided.’

To clean the pens, which Crook said got into a state with the mussel spat, they had to be taken ashore.

Later we got ambitious “and I made some that were ten sided ”

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‘You couldn’t do that in a oner, so you took them half way up the beach when the tide was in and then swung them on to oil barrels; when the tide came in the next time you took them all the way up the beach so when the tide went away you could get down there and clean them.’

This would take a few days for each pen, and the process would be repeated about twice in the course of a year.

‘I thought I’d do something clever with the first ones I made. I made them so that the panels that formed the sides and the bottom all interlocked, rather like a jigsaw, so you could actually take a raft alongside and slide them out. That was a bit advanced but way short of being practical in the long term.’

Gradually, the pens got bigger and, Crook said, ‘we did away with the myth that they needed to be round’. By around 1971-72 he was designing and building pens 24ft square and 12ft deep, all with wooden frames which had the slide-in panels.

‘They were called panel pens and we had them for quite a long time but they were very expensive. The framing was made in Aberdeen and some of the steel work – they had steel collars – was made in Dunfermline, the very first ones.

‘It became clear that that was a very expen-

sive way to go. There were probably about 24 pens, and we were producing about 50-70 tonnes. We had ambitions to produce 1,000 tonnes! That seemed to be the target, extraordinary in hindsight.’

In those days what they were doing was still very much a novelty and inevitably they attracted a lot of interest.

‘You used to get processions of photographers and people with binoculars going along the beach at Lochailort to see what Marine Harvest and Unilever were up to – they were mainly from Scottish companies but from Norwegian ones too.

‘That was something one just tolerated; we were the keepers of the big secrets. But we were offshore so they couldn’t necessarily see what we were doing.’

Crook lived near Aberdeen at the time and used to commute from Lochailort. He remembers sitting in a smoke filled room at the Unilever Research base in Aberdeen, along with about seven or eight others, mainly scientists, discussing the what-ifs.

‘One of the things that came up was what happens if we have a health problem in seawater. We hadn’t got a clue.

‘Then a chap came along to one of the meetings - this was the early to mid-70s - and said he’d seen some sea lice. That’s interesting we

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40 years of aquaculture – Cages

Clockwise from above: Pen developments; square pens at Marine Harvest sites

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said! Then the sea lice got hold and we had to do something about it.

‘It was one of those occasions where Unilever’s research might came in handy and within three weeks we were treating for sea lice routinely.

‘We found a chemical that did the job and we had a long fibreglass pole and at the end of the pole was a polythene bag full of this chemical, along with some red dye.

‘In the middle of these wooden frame pens with steel sides you would have an oxygen supply so you’d get good water churning over inside the pens.

‘We’d introduced the polythene bag into the stream of water coming from this oxygen supply, pull the string and release the dye and the treatment into the water.

‘The cage previously had been wrapped in a big lorry canvas to isolate it from the water. That was quite an operation itself but we got good at it and could do one cage an hour – we could do it all from the surface.

‘We completely surrounded the cage and then had an oxygen supply to keep the fish alive, which was okay for an hour.

‘I had about 10 fellas working at Lochailort and all we did was treat for sea lice for about 10 days. It worked, it was effective. They never disappeared altogether, as we now know, but they were controllable.’

Crook said that towards the end of the 70s they realised there was a limit to how many fish they could keep in a place like Lochailort. He set up Marine Harvest’s second farm in Loch Leven, and then did a tour of Skye to identify other potential sites, with shelter and decent access off the shore.

‘One didn’t worry too much about water turnover then because the farms were going to be small, you were operating on a completely different scale.

‘By then we’d got around to the idea of a square frame that would take a net of 7.2m square and 4.5m deep - that was the standard unit. I think by about 1982 there were 800 of those wooden framed cages at Marine Harvest.’ Predator nets came in at the end of the 70s.

Crook said just before he left Marine Harvest, in 1982, it was his view that they were ‘pushing it too far’ with some of the wooden pens.

‘We had a farm in Loch Torridon where there was serious risk of wave action. This was on the north shore of Loch Torridon, it wasn’t sheltered enough and the structure of the

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Scotch myths

pens wouldn’t take the hammering.

‘I had a clear idea in my head around the time I was leaving Marine Harvest that the pens were far too small. In the long term they needed to be a lot bigger.

‘I tried to put forward a novel design of pen which would have been the typical volume of a big Polarcirkel now.

‘I called it my inkwell. It was a square floating collar and then from the side and the corners it had outriggers with a buoy. There were four buoys, which were much further out than the collar, and then the net was slung underneath.

‘It would have worked and it also had the advantage that you got good access to what was going on because you could walk about on the collar.

‘The plastic pens didn’t have walkways to begin with so you had to perch on the tubes, a bit tricky. And then the walkways appeared, but a fundamental question about the collar is does it need to be as big as the net. It could just cover a part of it because once these pens get very big, to some extent you’ve lost contact with the fish anyway.

‘You can’t see what they’re doing, you need the television cameras and all the fancy stuff.’

When Crook left Marine Harvest he carried on building timber and then later steel pens, until he began representing the insurance companies. He said he was last on a farm about five years ago, by which time 90m plastic circles, with barge feeder systems, were the norm. FF

Hatchery aims for 200,000 a year WHEN Marine Harvest opened its hatchery at Inchmore, Glenmoriston, in 1979, the production target was 200,000 smolts a year by 1980.

As Fish Farmer reported at the time: Earth moving machines moved into the site in April of this year and the first fish went into permanent Inchmore tanks in July. By November the site’s hatchery will be ready to take the first flush of eggs.

‘It sounds like an instant fish farm – but in fact we first began to look at the Inchmore site way back in 1971,’ explained Marine Harvest’s chief engineer, Peter Crook. ‘Up to 1974 it was still one of several sites under consideration.’

Crook designed and built the hatchery at Inchmore after an extensive site selection process. The company had also considered locating the hatchery on the Beauly River or the outfall from the aluminium works in Fort William.

The first ‘serious’ hatchery had been built at Invergarry and there was also Lochailort. For a while Inchmore and Invergarry ran together and Lochailort was used more for research stuff.

Crook said they didn’t have recirculation systems at Inchmore, it was water pumped through into a header tank.

‘The tank had Marine Harvest’s name on the top of it and we used to get Hawker Hunter jet aircraft using it as a bombing target to practise.

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‘So I phoned and said, look if you’re going to come and try and pretend to bomb us, at least bring a camera. So they had a special sortie with a Hawker Hunter that took pictures – I used one as the front cover for the handbook I wrote about the hatchery.’

The first Inchmore hatchery was built so production could be doubled, and Crook said they were aiming for a quarter of a million smolts.

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40 years of aquaculture

from the

ARCHIVE

40 Years of Breakthroughs

Above: The impact of the mobile phone on modern communication technology (above right) was an obvious feature of AquaVision, reported Fish Farmer in 1998. ‘At each break in the conference programme, opportunities were seized to re-connect to base.’

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From the Archive - Breakthrough.indd 44

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From the Archive

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40 years of aquaculture – Fish vets

BY PROFESSOR RON ROBERTS

How it all began A pathologist’s tale, from examining Tweed salmon carcasses to setting up the Institute of Aquaculture in Stirling

Professor Ronald J Roberts FRCVS FRSE.

U

NTIL the 18th century, only parasites were reported from fish. The first definitive tumour - a fibromyosarcoma from the stomach of a cod - was described by the Glasgow medical pathologist, John Hunter, in 1782. It is still pickled in a jar in the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

The first bacterium to be isolated was Vibrio anguillarum from the Venice lagoon in 1883 and the first virus disease, Lymphocystis, in 1914.

The first involvement of the veterinary profession was by a remarkable Bavarian lady, Marianne Plehn DVM (1863-1946). She had been appointed the first female Royal Professor by King Ludwig of Bavaria, and to this day there is a dedicated fish pathology group in

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the Munich Veterinary School. Such was her fame that the Marianne Plehn Strasse and the Munich railway station are named after her. She was the person who carried out the first detailed study of furunculosis after the pathogen arrived in Europe with imports of rainbow trout eggs from US hatcheries.

Once furunculosis spread to the UK after WW1 it caused major losses in the salmon rivers. Many members of the House of Lords owned salmon rivers on their estates and took the matter very personally.

Action was called for!

The veterinary profession, sadly, was more interested in horse lamenesses, but Professor T J Mackie, professor of Medical Bacteriology in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, was persuaded to set up a multi-disciplinary team to investigate the problem.

What the good citizens of Edinburgh thought of the smelly fish that started arriving at their hospital is not known, but Mackie and his team produced three ‘furunculosis reports’ for the House of Lords. These reports marked a milestone in fish pathology and that team was the model for my own ideas much later.

Thereafter, apart from the work of isolated carp veterinarians in the pond fishery areas of Eastern Europe, and occasional excursions by lone practitioners, on occasion, in France, Sweden and Denmark, this was the situation in Europe when I came on to the scene in 1964.

I was a very junior pathologist in the University of Glasgow Veterinary School, struggling to keep a family and do a PhD on a salary of £850 a year. The junior pathologist, as well as teaching

Left: The old Veterinary School in Buccleuch Street, Glasgow, where the first salmon disease work was done. Now demolished, the modern University Veterinary School is on a purpose built campus in Bearsden. Opposite - top: Tore Haastein (right), Stirling’s first veterinary PhD, chats to a young smolt farmer. Below: Fresh run wild salmon with clean UDN ulcer.

This was the disease that brought vets into the salmon world

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How it all began

and research, had to carry out routine post-mortems on dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, pigs, and anything else that could find its way into our post-mortem room in the middle of Glasgow. My colleagues did their share but somehow I always seemed to get the ones they did not want.

One day in early 1965 a Colonel Ryan from the famous River Tweed appeared with a collection of salmon carcases of varying antiquity, and I was told that I was the ideal choice for the task.

Soon, the knowledge that there was someone available in Glasgow who appeared to know something about fish diseases (albeit very little) meant that fish would come in from the Tay, the North Esk, the Dee, the Don and even from some of the English rivers.

The problem was common to all these rivers-- a very high mortality in wild fish fresh from the sea with large, often symmetrical ulcers on the head. This had been called ‘Columnaris’ by a particularly unqualified English bacteriologist who even got her ‘discovery’ published in Nature, despite the fact that Columnaris is a disease of high temperatures and low oxygen levels, neither of which apply in Scottish rivers in winter.

My veterinary colleagues in Dublin, where it also occurred, and I decided it should be called Ulcerative Dermal Necrosis, a descriptive name which did not indicate any specific aetiology, as we did not know what the cause was.

I was very fortunate to be working in Glasgow. Not only was the veterinary school of the highest calibre, but also the dean was a connoisseur of salmon cuisine, and the professors of human dermatology and human pathology were both very keen anglers, so I had access and encouragement from powerful mentors.

Also at that time, I had met up with Dr Alan Munro of the Marine Laboratory in Aberdeen, a bacterial chemist who had been given the remit of looking after this problem from the government service point of view.

Alan had little in the way of expertise or facilities at his disposal at the time and we worked together on the problem, and indeed have worked together and remained friends now for over 50 years, despite the competitive pressures our two laboratories have been under at times.

As soon as it was known that I could carry out detailed pathology of wild salmon, Scotland’s newly established trout farmers, Graeme Gordon and David Brien, started presenting me with tasks, and then the White Fish Authority wanted support for their rather outlandish flatfish rearing trials in Hunterston Nuclear Power Station and the artificial lagoon they had in Ardnamurchan.

Clearly, I was getting overrun as I only had one pair of hands. Alan and I took on a PhD student, Tony Ellis, who was made to do the immunology and pathology parts of the Glasgow veterinary course as part of his PhD, and he greatly helped the research. But something else was also

starti ng toH happen - salmon To re aast einfarming.

Stirlin Atlantic salmon farming was very experi- g’s first Veterinary mental in the 1960s. Indeed, only Unilever in collaboration with two Norwegians, the Vik brothers, were taking it seriously. As luck would have it, however, two separate happenings dictated my fate.

Firstly, a delightful, elderly veterinary politician, Mary Brancker, famous for her work with the chimpanzees in the PG Tips tea advertisements, started to take an interest in fish and, furthermore, in me because she somehow discovered that her reverend uncle had christened my father (such is life’s serendipity).

Mary was a formidable lobbyist and her contacts brought her into the ambit of the Nuffield Foundation, a wealthy charitable trust.

At the same time, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Glasgow, Professor Graham Wilson, who had a holiday cottage in Lochaber, asked some fish workers there what they did if their fish were sick. They muttered about having to send them to Aberdeen, or sometimes to Glasgow Vet School but the chap there was very busy. How fortunate for me, because Graham Wilson was also a trustee of the Nuffield Foundation.

The foundation had, with great vision, realised that aquaculture was going to become big business, both for Scotland and internationally. Equally, they realised that to grow as an intensive livestock industry it would need the

“toItbewasa

veterinary Tore Haastein Stirling’s first Veterinary PhD. chats to a young smolt farmer. research based centre but I was determined that its science base would also have inputs from pure scientists

”

Fresh run wild salmon with clea n UDN u This was the disease that brou ght vets in

Fresh run wild salmon with clean UDN ulcer. www.fishfarmer-magazine.com This was the disease that brought vets into the salmon world.

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40 years of aquaculture – Fish vets

same kinds of veterinary inputs as poultry and pig production required, but which were not catered for in the fish spectrum.

These included not merely skills in the comparative pathology and microbiology of farmed fishes but also knowledge of pharmacology, biosecurity, epidemiology, fish welfare and clinical medicine, as well as legal certification, insurance, medicines legislation and legal ability to prescribe.

The upshot was that I was summoned, totally unawares, to a meeting with the deputy director of the Nuffield Foundation who offered me a very significant sum to establish a dedicated veterinary centre for fish disease work.

He suggested setting it up in Glasgow or Cambridge veterinary schools. I had no intention of leaving Scotland, nor did I see the sense of working in Cambridge, a lesser veterinary school in a much younger university than Glasgow, and so far from the evolving fish farming industry.

Unfortunately, when I discussed things with the Dean at Glasgow, Sir William Weipers, who was always most supportive, he felt it might be very frustrating to try to set up an ambitious operation such as I envisaged at Glasgow at that time.

Space was limited and very large development grants were being pressed on the veterinary school by bodies such as the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council because of its internationally significant medical and veterinary research.

Weipers was due to retire and his view regarding the succession was, and I quote, ‘apres moi le deluge’.

His solution was to establish a unit within an appropriate nearby institution, with a link to the Glasgow school and a strong advisory board to ensure the veterinary involvement was maintained. This board he also offered to chair.

As it happened, I knew Fred Holliday the professor of biology at the new Stirling University, which was seeking to make a name for itself in biological sciences, and he introduced me to Tom Cottrell, the principal at Stirling, a very impressive scientist and a man of great vision.

A scheme was devised to establish a Unit of Aquatic Pathobiology at Stirling, independently managed by myself as director with the advice of a management board reporting to the university principal and court. It was to be a veterinary research based centre but I was determined that its science base would also have inputs from pure scientists, skilled in those aspects such as fish biology and fish parasitology where there was already good expertise from non-veterinary scientists.

We started on January 1, 1972, in a wooden shed on the fringes of the Stirling campus. We only had one water supply to the building, so the post mortem room, which was so essential to our work, was located

Princess Diana admires a side of smoked Landcatch salmon during her visit to the Institute of Aquaculture following the award of the Queens Award for Industry.

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“

We did not really have time to appreciate what we were achieving

”

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How it all began

in the gents’ toilet area and our female colleagues were expected to knock twice and shout if they wished to enter.

Our first veterinary training course started almost immediately, an MSc in Aquatic Veterinary Studies. This was a unique course and even in its first year, with no advertising, attracted veterinary graduates from the US, Norway, Turkey and New Zealand, as well as the UK. Our first PhD students included Tore Haastein, Hugh Ferguson, Christina Sommerville, Randolph Richards and Hamish Rodger, who have all gone on to international positions of great distinction.

Initially, we had two academic staff, one technician and one secretary, the ever unflappable Elsie. By the time I retired in 1996 there were 10 veterinary surgeons on the staff, 30 PhDs and more than 100 postgraduate students.

We enjoyed the benefit of an endowment fund, supporting academic staff on short term contracts, worth over £1 million from our advisory and commercial earnings. The other academic at the beginning was Jonathan Shepherd, a Liverpool veterinary graduate who was absolutely unemployable in veterinary practice as he was very allergic to animal hairs and feathers.

Jonathan had already done an MSc and PhD at Stirling in technological economics and so placed our operation on a sound commercial basis from the start, as well as using his charm to attract numbers of guest specialist lecturers to enhance my otherwise solo teaching efforts.

South African editorial colleague, who had He went on to become a major player in salmon farming and in fish feed production, latterly as CEO of the Fish Oil and Fish Meal Producers just been given the task of producing a new journal, Fish Farming International. Heighway Association, and not many people associate him with the early days of looked at our book and agreed to publish it, the Stirling Veterinary Unit.

Our short courses for fish farmers also started at that time and, as far but with the caveat that I also had to produce monthly articles for the new FFI. Opposite: The Princess of as I am aware, they run to this day. We had great help on the courses This young South African soon became Wales presented with from Ted Needham of Marine Harvest, an Edinburgh veterinary student smoked Landcatch known throughout the aquaculture induswho changed horses for sea horses, and ended up as a distinguished salmon during her try, for it was Peter Hjul, fi shery journalist, fish parasitologist. visit to the Institute anti-apartheid campaigner, liberal politician, Jonathan and I produced a text for fish farmers based on these short of Aquaculture for historian and bon viveur—and also the father courses. We had to seek a publisher for this and turned to the famous Roberts’ Queen’s Award Chairman Institute of Aquaculture this journal’sWeipers, editor.

Arthur J Heighway of Fishing News Books, who published FAO manuals SirofWilliam for Industry.

A year or so later, a farming journalist called among other fishery books.

Above: Sir William Denis Chamberlain, who edited Farmers Week- Weipers, chairman He welcomed the opportunity to look at our book and so I travelled ly, tried to recruit me for his new fish farming of the Institute of to London, to his office in Fleet Street, where he introduced me to his journal, Fish Farmer. Peter Hjul, surprisingly, Aquaculture Advisory encouraged me to get involved, so for a couple Board.

Left: Prof Ron of years I was writing two monthly columns Roberts opening the of veterinary and other advice. Both seemed Vetrepharm conference popular but eventually I called it a day when Denis left. My FFI column continued for anoth- in Inverness in 1996, watched by Clare Evans, er 20 years, but now the wheel has come full Tesco’s seafood buyer, circle—how strange.

Dr Knut Moknes The Unit of Aquatic Pathobiology eventually became the Institute of Aquaculture. I directed it for 25 years in total and it produced a phalanx of aquatic veterinarians who long dominated the fish health scene.

During that time we did not really have time to appreciate what we were achieving.

Although the medals, awards and decorations, including the famous visit from Diana, the Princess of Wales, when she expressed amazement that fish got jet-lag, were great, it all now seems so long ago.

But we made our contribution and we enjoyed the ride. The results are in the scientific literature and in the commercial industry itself, where no one now queries the need for a strong veterinary presence. The Nuffield Foundation was right and it can be proud of its investment. FF

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Adv

40 years of aquaculture – Fish vets

BY RONNIE SOUTAR

A close shoal Profession realised early on the importance of sharing information

H

AVING recently written some veterinary articles for Fish Farmer, it is a real honour to be able to contribute to this anniversary issue. That’s particularly so because it allows me to pick up the story of veterinary involvement from where Ron Roberts’ history of the early years leaves off and give you my personal take on what has happened since.

Ron rightly focused on the development of the academic side of fish health. Without the critical research into the diseases which affect farmed fish, and the means to combat those diseases, life for those of us in the production frontline would have been even more of a struggle than it often seemed.

Veterinary general practitioners in other disciplines rely heavily on a network of referral centres, specialist laboratories and academic colleagues to ensure they can deliver the best possible results for their patients and clients.

It is no less important that the same support is available to the humble fish vet.

However, having worked on the clinical side of a vet school, I can tell you that the provision of first-opinion veterinary services is something with which universities struggle.

Detailed, accurate research and quick, practical solutions don’t always go hand in hand, and university infrastructures and career pathways don’t necessarily meet the requirements of veterinary practitioners. I believe this is just as true for us as it is for those in more traditional veterinary fields.

During the growth of Scottish salmon farming in the 1980s, the Institute of Aquaculture was able to deliver veterinary services direct to farmers through its diagnostic unit. The unit was staffed by a number of excellent veterinarians and, eventually, me!

I joined in 1989, just after completing an MSc into which I’d been led by Jimmy Turnbull, an early entrant into aquaculture academia with

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whom I’d been at vet school. Under the direction of Randolph Richards, diagnostic services at that time were carried out by Edward Branson and Pete Southgate, who had also been vet students together – fish vets have always been a close shoal.

Although two of the best diagnosticians around, Pete and Edward realised they were having difficulty delivering timely and pertinent answers to the health questions which the growing industry was asking.

My arrival didn’t significantly alter things; if that seems like no surprise, then neither was the fact that within a very short period at the start of the 90s, each of the three big salmon farming companies had employed their own vet – Andrew Grant in Marine Harvest, Mark Jones in McConnell Salmon and me in Hydro Seafood.

As I’ve written in Fish Farmer before, fish are not mentioned in the Veterinary Surgeons Act and this has been interpreted as meaning that anyone may diagnose and treat fish diseases. However, fish are covered by medicines legislation so only vets with the stock under their care may prescribe medicines (in the appropriate categories) for farmed fish.

The cynic might assume, therefore, that the companies only employed vets to get an MRCVS signature on a prescription.

That was certainly not my experience. The opportunity to bring veterinary general principles, and the specific fish knowledge I’d gained, to bear on practical problems appeared to be really appreciated, and combined well with the practical skills of company management and staff. The armoury was frustratingly small but we were able to make a difference, optimising the use of available antibiotics and the one lice medicine we had!

Of course, not all companies could afford to invest in a vet of their own. It was to address their needs that Tony Wall, a practitioner in Rogart, established the Fish Vet Group. Tony’s experience in running a vet Above: Pioneering practice was complemented by Pete Southgate’s diagnostic skills and Mark Jones’ practical experience to create a winning formula which has diagnostic services gone from strength to strength.

Indeed, the Fish Vet Group was the only dedicated fish practice in Scotland until Europharma established its production focused Fishguard company here in 2012. Some solo vets have provided vital services, notably David Sutherland up in Shetland, while Peter Scott and Chris Walster, south of the border, separately covered the veterinary needs of trout producers there.

Over the last 25 years or so, therefore, the provision of veterinary services to Scottish salmon farming, the major UK aquaculture activity, has become a network which parallels the structure in comparable livestock sectors.

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A close shoal

“

We have always known that we work best when we work with others

”

Frontline vets are principally employed by farming companies or by dedicated practices.

They are supported by colleagues in private laboratories and academic institutions, carrying out detailed diagnostic tests which link to cutting edge research. There still aren’t a lot of us but we realised early on the critical importance of sharing information as a way of developing best practice.

That was the main reason for the formation of the Fish Veterinary Society in 1990. The society is now recognised as a specialist division of the British Veterinary Association and

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boasts a triple-figure membership. We meet at an annual conference to exchange ideas, while maintaining client confidentiality of course.

Not all members are vets: in recognition both of the legal status of fish and the excellent fish health work they do, non-vets involved in fish health have been admitted as associate members since 1999.

The concept of multi-disciplinary teams working together to promote animal health and welfare is currently popular across livestock sectors, and rightly so. It is increasingly recognised that the value of the knowledge and skills of the frontline vet is multiplied when combined with the complementary abilities of colleagues from other disciplines. I like to think that, as in so many other ways, aquaculture has led in this – fish vets have always known that we work best when we work with others.

Looking back at my own career, I’m genuinely grateful for the camaraderie and support, not to mention the banter and jokes, that I have had from those around me. I can only apologise to those not mentioned in this short reminiscence – too many characters, too little space.

I reckon the current state of fish vetting is pretty healthy and hope that the young colleagues just starting out in aquaculture find it as fulfilling, and as much fun, as I do.

Ronnie Soutar, Aqualife Services Ltd. FF

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40 years of aquaculture – Research

Testing times

From flatfish to furunculosis - Dick Alderson looks back on some early challenges

A

S ONE of the pioneers of flatfish cultivation in the UK Dick Alderson was the right man in 1975 to consult about the future feasibility of the turbot industry.

He had been working at the MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food) research unit at Port Erin on the Isle of Man since 1968, initially growing plaice and Dover sole, and later turbot, when he was commissioned to report on the economics of the project.

He duly told the director of Fisheries Research in Lowestoft that while the fish grew too slowly in the cold UK waters it would be possible to rear the species commercially in recirculation systems or in the effluents of power stations.

‘I was very honest,’ said Alderson. ‘I said temperatures in the Iberian Peninsula would be quite good, however, and that was where turbot farming was most likely to develop, which is exactly what happened.

‘But they looked at the report and said, why

are we spending money on a UK industry that is unlikely to develop?’

The unit was shut down and Alderson found he had talked himself out of a job. It was 1977 and MAFF offered him a role in marine pollution, but after nine years, his heart was in the nascent aquaculture sector.

When he first arrived at the MAFF unit in Port Erin as a young zoologist he knew ‘absolutely nothing’ about fish farming, and there were very few reference books at the time. But he worked alongside Jim Shelbourne, who had raised several thousand small plaice by 1968.

Shelbourne had been inspired by the work of an Austrian refugee, Fabius Gross, who wanted to increase the productivity of the inshore lochs during the war when the fishing fleet couldn’t get out and there was a shortage of fish.

Gross had conducted sea loch fertilisation experiments in Loch Craiglin from 1942-43, but after the war there was no further need for his research.

‘Shelbourne was well aware of this work,’ said Alderson. ‘But he wasn’t interested in farming…he wanted to have young fish to release into the sea and increase the fishery.’

When Shelbourne left, to work with oysters in Brazil, Alderson took over the running of the unit in Port Erin. He knew by then that plaice were not an economically viable species and Dover sole was very difficult to farm.

“

Because the research group supported the farming we had every aspect of the process

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Testing times

‘It was very easy to get through the larval stages but you couldn’t get the things to eat anything but live food. It was a huge impasse, a lot of work went into that but it never really got anywhere.’

Turbot, however, grew fast and Alderson was dispatched to the North Sea, where, along with Alan Jones, he collected ‘loads of turbot eggs from a spawning female’.

‘We played around with the standard rearing method in clean water, feeding them with tiny rotifers. They ate those fine but then they just trickled away and died.’

They had a limited amount of algae for growing the rotifers but he noticed that some ponds at the university station had an algal bloom in them.

The breakthrough came when Alderson tried introducing some spare larvae into tanks containing rotifers along with water from the pond.

From that they got 50 juvenile turbot. His success, he believed, was down to the presence of the algae with the rotifers.

‘That was the key because the technique for plaice and Dover sole had always been clean water through the tanks. This was a different approach. The next year we set up some big tanks and fed algae into them with powerful lights over the top so the algae would reproduce.’

They produced 1,000 juvenile turbot that year, 1973, and by experimenting with different algae eventually began consistent production of juvenile fish.

Alderson said he had a lot of freedom to follow his own lines of enquiry and being stuck out on an island helped, though he was in touch with others doing the same thing.

‘There was a network of people all involved in the development of fish cultivation and mostly they were talking to each other. We had visits of

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scientists from France, Portugal and the Soviet Union who were all interested in trying to raise turbot, as well as commercial companies who were hoping to develop a profitable process.

‘People like British Oxygen were looking at feeding oxygen into recirculation systems so you could economise on the water and heat.

‘Golden Sea Produce were doing the work at the power station. And the Unilever people from Aberdeen were interested in what we were doing and would come from time to time to Port Erin. They had identified what they called ‘the fish gap’ and were looking at a number of marine species.’

Alderson was delighted for the team at Port Erin when they were able to try Marine Harvest’s smoked salmon, sent over in return for some plaice he supplied for a Unilever exhibition. And when MAFF pulled the plug on the Port Erin turbot operation in 1977, it was Unilever that gave Alderson his next job.

But instead of going to Unilever Research in Aberdeen, he was sent to Lochailort to run the research unit there and, while continuing with flatfish work, was also introduced to what they were doing with salmon.

‘It was still the early days and facilities at Lochailort were pretty basic. But because the

Above: Dick Alderson, sixth left, at Loch Duich with Marine Harvest colleagues.

Opposite page: Hexagonal cage. Pictures courtesy Dick Alderson

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40 years of aquaculture – Research

Clockwise from above: From waterproof paper to waterproof computer; Mrs Cameron Head; farming in Chile; taking stock; Alderson in Chile in 1988 - he made several trips there; working for Marine Harvest in 1981

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research group was set up to support the farming we had every aspect of the process.

We had broodstock, eggs, egg incubation, first feeding fry, smolts that were transferred to cages in the sea. We had the whole cycle.’

One of the other delights of Lochailort were the regular meetings with Mrs Cameron Head, the landowner, who had had the foresight to recognise that fish farming would bring employment to the young people of the area.

‘And we were doing a lot of feed testing.

Aberdeen was developing the formulations for feed and we were testing fry and freshwater feeds and also feeds for salmon at sea, how to incorporate different raw materials while ensuring that the feed was cost effective.

‘I got more involved in the health side of things too. In the early years, the idea was still that you could put every year class in one farm because you had separate cages for each of them, not fully appreciating that the water goes from cage to cage and if you’ve got a disease that also goes from cage to cage.’

The Lochailort team had two ‘frights’ said

operators wanted a piece “ofIndependent the action and set up farms too close to our sites ”

Alderson. The first one was sea lice in 1976, the year before he arrived.

‘Unilever’s research headquarters at Colworth was huge, like a university campus, and so we had that pool of expertise and together with key management at Lochailort like Gordon Rae and Bruce Hillcoat, they got a solution to sea lice, dichlorvos, and used that with a special licence in Lochailort.’

Then in 1977 they discovered they had transferred the bacterial disease furunculosis from the hatchery at Invergarry to the sea and that went through all the fish, with significant losses.

One of Alderson’s jobs was supposed to be developing Unilever’s marine flatfish programme but furunculosis quickly became the focus and soon after that they abandoned the flatfish research altogether.

‘Furunculosis was a long term battle. We had to have some means of controlling the disease so used antibiotics, but the idea of a vaccine was there at an early stage and we had people like Alan Munro from DAFS in

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Testing times

Aberdeen working with us because we had the facilities to do testing and they had the scientists with knowledge of immunology.

‘Furunculosis is a very sophisticated pathogen. One of its strategies is to produce little blebs of lipopolysaccharide which it sheds when it’s circulating around in the bloodstream.

‘It’s a bit like the aluminium streamers the aircraft used during the war so the missiles would attack these and not the planes. The immune system would grab on to these lipopolysaccharides and produce some really strong immunity and it would do absolutely nothing to the bacterium because it was part of the surface coating and it was being shed all the time anyway. Very clever.’

Better husbandry helped bring the disease under control while the search for a vaccine continued. In 1977 they had decided they needed separate stocking and separate harvesting, with fallowing periods. That was the beginning of the single year classes.

‘That’s why they started expanding to lots of other sites and it worked really well. By 1981 we had nine seawater sites though three older ones still had furunculosis. By 1983 we had 11 seawater sites but we had farmed out the furunculosis.

‘You come to the end of a cycle, you empty the site completely, then you restock it with clean fish. We were doing a lot of checking of the fish that went into the sites. It was brilliant. By 1984 we had no furunculosis on 12 farm sites. Survival was about 95 per cent.

‘But then things started to go into reverse, as independent operators also wanted a piece of the action and they were able to set up farms too close to our existing sites, destroying our fallowing strategies. We appealed to DAFS but though they thought we were right they couldn’t prove it and couldn’t refuse the permission for these sites.’

All of this coincided with Unilever’s decision to greatly expand Marine Harvest production in their existing sites.

‘We thought this is probably not a good idea and it turned out to be an absolute disaster. By 1985 we had 14 sites but furunculosis was already back in five of them.

‘It was very depressing because we would watch people developing a site and not doing the checking of the smolts going into the sea that we were doing, so they were putting carriers of this disease among us.

‘Furunculosis is asymptotic so you wouldn’t know they were carriers, they weren’t dying, but then they would go in the sea and get stressed and then the bacteria would come out and there was nothing we could do.

‘With furunculosis back in the farming system, trying to expand at the same time – with the vast majority of lads on the farms having little experience – created mass problems.’

A Canadian vaccine worked partially, one from Aberdeen worked but it wasn’t consistent, and eventually the Norwegians cracked it.

‘Suddenly, we knew we had a vaccine and that turned the corner. The Lochailort unit was where that testing was done. There was no jubilation but rather a quiet ‘we’ve got it’.’

Soon after that Unilever sold Marine Harvest and when eventually it was taken over by Booker McConnell, in the 90s, the research side was wound up and Alderson went on to work as an independent consultant with BioMar as one of his clients. Eventually he joined the company full time and stayed with them until his retirement in 2007.

But in 2009 he was talking to Ian Armstrong, a former Marine Harvest colleague, who asked him to help with sea lice. Alderson went to a meeting in Norway and was horrified listening to the scientists and industry people – ‘we were still talking about the same problems we had in the 70s’.

‘They had these enormous circular cages with many thousands of fish in a cage, making it very difficult to treat them.

‘We tried peroxide back in the 80s and we knew it worked but we couldn’t control the volume accurately enough. But what Ian had was a treatment in a ship, because they had ships for transporting salmon.

You have a defined volume and they developed a dosing system that was a very specific amount of hydrogen peroxide that would kill the lice

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and not kill the fish. And there is no residue so there is no clearance period for the fish because all you’ve got is water and oxygen, no discharge of nasty chemicals.’

Despite the challenges, Alderson is optimistic about the industry he helped develop, and if he is proud of anything it is the employment salmon farming created in the west Highlands of Scotland.

‘Altogether I am glad that my career has been in this industry, even though I often get a negative response from some I meet. Apart from the work being fascinating, it enabled me to visit some of the most beautiful parts of the world and meet and work with many very good people.’ FF

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40 years of aquaculture – Vaccines

BY PROFESSOR PATRICK SMITH

A short but

remarkable

story

Fish vaccine development has led to techniques that are cutting edge in many other veterinary - and even human - fields

O

OVER the past 40 years aquaculture has seen much progress and growth, fuelled by an increasing global demand for fish, a diminishing wild catch and the introduction of a number of new technologies and innovations.

One field which has seen remarkable advances and dramatic out-

Left: Large-scale vaccination in the United States, using a conveyor belt and automatic repeating syringe. Opposite page: Dr Patrick Smith receives the Peter Jones Memorial Award presented at the 1999 British Trout Farming Conference at Sparsholt from Mark Davies, British Trout Association chairman (from the March-April issue of Fish Farmer).

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comes is in the field of aquatic animal health and, in particular, vaccines for fish.

In this relatively short period we have travelled from the early stirrings of vaccine development, through to widespread acceptance of vaccines as important tools in the control and management of disease in aquaculture, to arrive at a position where some fish vaccines in commercial use are embracing technologies novel even to the development of human vaccines - truly a short but remarkable story!

The first report of fish vaccination to appear in a scientific publication was as far back as 1942, when Duff reported successful vaccination against furunculosis. However, Duff ’s pioneering work did not result in an immediate landslide of the development and uptake of fish vaccines.

Possibly, the aquaculture industry was too small to warrant the commercialisation of fish vaccines but, more probably, the preoccupation was with disease control using the newly discovered antibiotics – a move that eventually nearly brought aquaculture to its knees.

In fish culture, where disease was one of the most important limiting factors, the ensuing 30 to 40 years since Duff ’s first publication might accurately be termed as the ‘era of chemotherapy’ because large numbers of antibiotics, sulfa drugs, and even mercury based antimicrobial agents were routinely used.

It was only in the mid- to late 1970s, with an increased interest in fish farming, particularly marine farming and the development of two new diseases – vibriosis in fish farmed in saltwater and Enteric Redmouth Disease (ERM)

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A short but remarkable story

becoming the scourge of the rainbow trout farming industry in the US, that attention once again turned to the possibility of preventing/ controlling fish diseases by means of vaccination and to the development of commercially available fish vaccines.

The reasons for this were varied: the high cost of chemotherapy, the short-term nature of the protection obtained with antibiotics, the increasing appearance of antibiotic resistant fish pathogens and, to some extent, early concerns about the environmental impacts of antibiotic use.

Thus, in 1977, while commercial vaccines were being used in the US and companies had been established to manufacture and market these vaccines, the European aquaculture industry was still without vaccines as a tool for controlling diseases in fish.

Tipping point The main tipping point as far as the UK and Europe were concerned was the introduction and spread of Enteric Redmouth Disease (ERM) in UK trout farms and the almost simultaneous spread in trout farms in the majority of European countries.

Once again, as in the US decades previously, antibiotic therapy was the only method available for control, and antibiotic resistance to these antimicrobials was rapidly appearing, together with the potential environmental issues associated with the widespread use of antibiotics in the aquatic environment.

A decision was made to initially import the ERM vaccine, rapidly followed by the manufacture and licensing of the vaccine in the UK. Such a move was not without its problems,

not necessarily concerning manufacture as the vaccine was a simple bacterin (based on the bulk production of the pathogen in fermenters followed by chemical inactivation), but with the licensing of the vaccine in Europe that dictated that a simple fish vaccine could be treated no differently than any other fish vaccine.

Thus the vaccine had to be produced in manufacturing premises approved for the production of veterinary vaccines. In addition, batches of vaccine had to be safety and efficacy tested in facilities that could accommodate challenge with live pathogens.

While a number of such facilities exist today at universities and research institutes, it was not the case 40 years ago and the whole process was a steep learning curve.

The first vaccine against ERM in the UK and Europe was released to a rather sceptical fish farming industry in the early 1980s. It was an instant success, conferring high levels of protection of long duration, and the administration method of immersion/dip was simple and farm-friendly. These factors helped to establish vaccines as an important tool in the management of ERM. A similar situation occurred with the vaccine against vibriosis where excellent and long-lasting protection was obtained, albeit that the farming of trout and salmon in saltwater was a much smaller industry at the time.

An increasing food safety lobby was “questi oning the amount of antibiotic residues that could potentially be present in farmed salmon

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40 years of aquaculture – Vaccines

and many attempts to add other vaccines administered by immersion to the list met with failure. However, the first two vaccines had established the credibility of fish vaccine and encouraged an explosion of research into the development of other fish vaccines.

The next major landmark in commercial fish vaccines was the development of an effective vaccine against furunculosis, caused by the bacterium Aeromonas salmonicida. Furunculosis had become, in the 1980s, the most important disease of farmed Atlantic salmon and, at its height, was causing unsustainable losses to the growing salmon farming industry in Scotland and Norway.

Furthermore, large-scale use of antibiotics was causing resistance problems and, in some farms at the height of the furunculossis crisis, resistance to the four commonly used antibiotics used in fish farming was being reported, making furunculosis virtually untreatable in those farms. In addition, at the time, an increasing food safety lobby was questioning the amount of antibiotic residues that could potentially be present in farmed salmon for human consumption.

However, the development of an effective vaccine against furuncuThe time spent ensuring that the vaccine losis was a hard nut to crack and many researchers were engaged in was safe for both the target species and the a detailed study of the causative bacterium and in trying to develop consumer was vindicated when we received effective vaccines. an urgent fax from a Scandinavian country (no Results from such studies showed that the way forward was to use emails or mobile telephones at that time) to vaccines administered by injection. Until that date, the mass injection say that one of their farm staff had drunk a of farmed fish was not considered as a practical proposition but the litre bottle of Vibrio vaccine and would it do adoption of multi-dose repeating syringes, already employed for the him any harm (it didn’t). Needless to say, it did delivery of vaccines in the poultry farming industry, and an extensive not topple Guinness from its market position. training programme for fish farming personnel in injection techniques The great success of both the ERM and Vibrio led to the acceptance and widespread use of injection administration of vaccines in the market led people to believe fish vaccines. that simple bacterins delivered by immersion could be developed against any fish disease Vaccination machines but, unfortunately, this was far from the case A more recent trend has been the development of sophisticated automatic or semi-automatic vaccination machines, allowing the rapid vaccination of even quite small fish by injection and the consequent opening up of injection vaccination to species of farmed fish other than salmon - sea bass and turbot, for example.

While there is still some way to go in this area and the perfect vaccination machine has yet to be developed, I see progress speeding up and automatic injection vaccination becoming commonplace in the fish farming industry.

We received an urgent fax from a “ Scandinavian country to say that one of their farm staff had drunk a litre bottle of Vibrio vaccine

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A short but remarkable story

Another advance in the past 40 years that has had a significant impact on vaccine efficacy has been the introduction of adjuvants to injectable vaccines. Adjuvants work in two ways: firstly, by providing a depot effect and allowing a slow release from oil droplets contained in an emulsion of the adjuvant and the vaccine component to stimulate the immune system over a long period of time and, secondly, in an inherent stimulatory effect in the adjuvant alone. It appears that the only way forward in the development of vaccines against some diseases, as it was with furunculosis, is the inclusion of adjuvants.

Unfortunately, while the first furunculosis vaccines launched approximately 30 years ago were effective, the mineral oil based adjuvant contained within them caused major side effects such as adhesions and growth penalties.

But they did help to reduce the losses due to furunculosis and they did help to reduce the use of antibiotics.

Research over the past 20 years has helped develop second generation adjuvants which have the same stimulatory effects but without the side effects, and much work is now being directed in the development of new adjuvants which can be added to immersion applied vaccines to improve their range and efficacy.

Of the beneficial effects of vaccination, the most dramatic has been the reduction in the use of antibiotics in the salmon farming industry. Some studies have shown that while antibiotic use has not been entirely eliminated, the reduction has been over a thousand-fold and the industry has gone from one entirely reliant on chemotherapy to one that seldom uses chemotherapy - a truly dramatic turnaround almost entirely due to the adoption of vaccination and to the benefit of the salmon farming industry, the consumer of farmed fish and the environment alike.

A trend over the past 40 years has been the emergence of a number of new diseases often occurring in conjunction with one another.

The original fish vaccines were mono-valent (against only a single disease) and, indeed, it was thought that multi-valent vaccines would compete with each other as far as the development of immunity was concerned, resulting in reduced protection.

Subsequent practical research showed that this was not the case and high efficacy multi-valent vaccines were developed and brought to the market. It is now common for vaccines protecting against five or more diseases being in widespread use in the salmon industry.

the salmon farming industry, but for emerging species. However, most attention was now directed to the development of vaccines against the major viral diseases of farmed fish which, until now, had no vaccines available for them.

Once again, the early viral vaccines centred upon the growth of the virus in cell lines developed from fish tissues. This was more technically difficult than the simple bulk growth of bacteria in a broth culture in a fermenter and necessitated the growth of the fish virus in fish cell lines as a mono-layer in culture bottles and the harvesting and inactivation of the virus once it had reached a certain density.

Several of the experimental viral fish vaccines produced in this way were highly effective but the bulk production of live virus in fish cell lines was time consuming and expensive and had problems with scaleup. While there are licensed viral vaccines produced by this conventional production method and these are effective, it is obvious that it is not feasible to produce all viral fish vaccines in this way.

One method that was being promoted 40 years ago was the use of live viral vaccines where the viral component had been attenuated Viral vaccines and made non-virulent. These vaccines could ‘infect’ and replicate The success of the furunculosis vaccine in the 1980s led to a massive increase in research in the target species which would then develop a protective immune into developing new vaccines for the aquacul- response. While this was an attractive way of vaccinating fish against a viral pathogen, there was a fear that the viral component would revert ture industry and a number of new vaccines to a virulent form, thus infecting the fish and spreading the very disease were registered in this period, not only for

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Top: In 1990, automatic vaccinations were a comparatively new invention.

Above: Immersion systems have been around since the 1970s.

Opposite page: Chris Pedigrew of Lianfairfechan, Gwyned, gained the Clive Memorial Trophy as best student on his three-year BTEC Higher National Diploma Course in Fish Management at Sparsholt College, Hampshire, and the Aquaculture Trophy for best thesis. Here he receives the trophy from Patrick Smith

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40 years of aquaculture – Vaccines

that one was vaccinating against. This reversion to virulence would be a particular problem in an aquatic system and could exacerbate the spread of the disease and, because of this, live vaccines did not gain acceptance. However, 40 years on, new techniques and tests have almost entirely eliminated the chances of reversion to a virulent form and there are now one or two effective live viral vaccines being used in some aquaculture systems worldwide and there will probably be more to follow.

Similarly, not all bacterial pathogens lend themselves to simple fermentation production – for example, slow growing bacteria where the time taken (and cost) for the bacteria to reach the required density would make any vaccine prohibitively expensive and not economically viable. Likewise, fish parasites are an obvious target for vaccination but it is not possible to bulk culture parasites on a large scale.

Vaccine development in most of the cases cited above requires the introduction of new technologies and this has been one of the most significant developments over the past 40 years and has led to the adoption of techniques which are still cutting edge even in the fields of other veterinary, and human, vaccine development.

Such technologies include recombinant DNA vaccines where the DNA coding for the production of protective antigens that stimulate an immune response is inserted into another non-pathogenic organism – for instance, another bacterium, yeast, virus, algae or insect cells.

These ‘transformed’ cells then act as an antigen factory, secreting the protective antigen which can be purified and used in a vaccine. In some cases, the transformed yeast, algae or insect larvae expressing the protective antigen can be fed directly to the fish and used as an oral vaccine.

GMO vaccines In the case of recombinant DNA technology the transformed organisms are classed as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the vaccines produced from them are classed as GMO vaccines. They are more complicated and expensive to license and have to go through what is termed the Centralised Licensing Procedure.

This more complex and expensive procedure has deterred the taking

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forward of some vaccines through the licensing procedure, but this difficulty is perceived rather than real and represents a glass ceiling; there is no permanent barrier to achieving a full Marketing Authorisation for such vaccines.

Indeed, there are already a few commercial fish vaccines that employ recombinant DNA technology in their manufacture and in the case of potential vaccines against fish parasites, the technology represents the only way forward in vaccine development.

So, after 40 years, we enter a new phase of vaccine development for fish which, given a fair wind in terms of regulatory requirements, could lead to the effective vaccination against a number of fish pathogens which it was hitherto impossible to contemplate.

Recently, a DNA vaccine against the viral disease PD (pancreas disease) was given regulatory approval by the European Medicines Agency (EMEA). DNA vaccines differ from recombinant DNA vaccines in that the technique involves injecting genetically engineered DNA directly into the muscle cells of the host (in this case fish) so that the host cells start to produce protective antigens so that the host’s immune cells respond to it, thus inducing a protective immune response.

This vaccine technology is relatively new even in humans and several research projects on fish have indicated the effectiveness of DNA vaccines against a number of fish diseases. The recent approval by the EMEA of the first DNA vaccine against PD (one against IHN has been in use in Canada for a few years) will potentially open the floodgates for the development,

Above: Controlling fish diseases: Marine Harvest’s Gordon Rae examining pre-smolts in the late 80s.

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A short but remarkable story opment projects over the past 40 years has been our increasing knowledge of the immune response of fish. Forty years Oral vaccines ago it was often said that it was While we mentioned vaccine administration pointless attempting to develop in terms of semi-automatic and automatic effective commercial fish vacinjection equipment earlier in this article, we cines as the adaptive immune cannot ignore the Holy Grail of the fish vacciresponse was too primitive. nologist - that is orally administered vaccines.

However, pioneering work at Orally administered vaccines would provide the perfect solution for the fish farmer, allow- a number of universities has proved this wrong and, while ing vaccination without the stressful handling there are some differences, the associated with injection or even immersion, components of the immune and allowing regular booster vaccination to system of fish are essentially strengthen the fish’s immune response to similar to those found in higher vaccines. animals. Further work on eluciTo be able to vaccinate or booster vaccinate dating the structure and function fish in situ is an extremely attractive proposiof the fish’s immune system can tion and, while Duff in 1942 reported suconly allow us to better target and improve the cessful oral vaccination against furunculosis, efficacy of fish vaccines. the development of oral vaccines has been A significant change in the landscape of relatively slow. fish vaccines and the establishment of their It became obvious that for any oral vaccine to be truly effective in fish the vaccine antigens credibility can be measured by the entry of the major pharmaceutical companies into the had to be somehow protected from degradafield. tion in the stomach of the fish, allowing it to The aquaculture business sector and fish react with the immune tissues in the lower vaccines were almost completely ignored 40 gut. In the past 20 years various mechanisms years ago by the major pharmaceutical comhave been applied to the protection of the antigens and, progress is being made. One can panies, leaving it to the realm of the smaller foresee effective oral vaccines being developed research based companies. Now we see most of the major pharmaceutical companies active and achieving widespread commercial use in in the aquatic animal health field and, in parthe, not too, distant future. ticular, in the development and marketing of Finally, underpinning all the vaccine develregistration and commercialisation of fish vaccines using this technology.

fish vaccines, mainly through the acquisition and incorporation of the smaller, pioneering companies.

If the major pharmaceutical companies continue to do justice to and support the aquaculture industry, then the future of fish vaccines and fish vaccination, and the effective control of economically important fish diseases over the next 40 years looks bright.

To sum up in a few words, I take the title of a presentation I made last year: ‘Fish vaccines - a short, but remarkable journey.’

Professor Patrick Smith, Tethys Aquaculture Ltd, is a member of Fish Farmer’s editorial board. FF

Congratulations to Fish Farmer Magazine on their 40th Anniversary

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40 years of aquaculture

from the

ARCHIVE

40 Years of Breakthroughs

Above: Fish Farmer records developments from the Isle of Man to Thailand, as well as Scotland

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from the Where are they now?

ARCHIVE

40 years of aquaculture

Above: Aquaculture is an industry that tends to lure people for life, as some of these early images of prominent ďŹ gures show. In no particular order, can you spot Alex Adrian, Gideon Pringle, Walter Spiers, Gilpin Bradley, David Sandison, Alf-Helge Aarskog - and Fish Farmer’s own William Dowds?

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40 years of aquaculture - Stirling

Between the covers Institute’s research and its impact recorded over four decades

T

HE University of Stirling’s Institute of Aquaculture has been with Fish Farmer for every turn of the page since its first publication in 1977.

The university, celebrating its own milestone 50th anniversary this year, founded its Institute of Aquaculture in 1971. Over the years, its academics have enjoyed both reading Fish Farmer’s take on the industry and seeing their research and its impact feature between its covers.

Since its foundation, the Institute of Aquaculture has grown to become the leading international centre in its field, and one of the largest of its kind in the world. Bringing together world-class researchers from a variety of disciplines, it is helping the world to meet the wide range of challenges which face aquaculture.

Boasting a community of 180 highly skilled staff and students and links with organisations in more than 50 countries, the Institute attracts support from a wide range of sponsors.

These include the Scottish Funding Council, UK research councils, UK government, European Union, international research organisations, industry, and a number of foundations and trusts.

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At any one time, the Institute has an impressive portfolio of collaborative research and training projects on the go with industry partners and other leading academic institutions from across the globe.

An ambitious vision for the future of the Institute has been launched recently, supported by nine scientific research teams providing a broad range of skills and expertise to address local and global aquaculture challenges. These include breeding, genomics and selection, nutrition, microbiology and diagnostic, immunology and vaccinology, parasitology, welfare and behaviour, spatial modelling and carrying capacity, and lifecycle assessment.

In addition, the Institute continues to provide world leading services in nutritional analyses, environmental assessment and consultancies.

Many of its research projects have had a major impact on fish farming and played a pivotal role in the development of the industry.

Furthermore, the Institute’s network of staff and student alumni have gone on to work in many key positions in the industry across the world. With more than 1,000 alumni from the Institute’s globally renowned Masters programmes in sustainable aquaculture, aquatic veterinary studies and pathobiology graduating since the 1970s, the Institute keeps very well-informed about current challenges and priorities.

Innovative projects include the work led by the Institute’s current director, Professor Herve Migaud, into securing a sustainable supply of cleaner fish for sea lice control in the Scottish salmon industry.

This work is co-funded by the Scottish Aquaculture Innovation Centre and leading aquaculture companies in Scotland.

The research is looking at the domestication of cleaner fish, to shift from reliance on using wild caught wrasse to the captive production of cleaner fish. Such biological control of a parasite is unique among livestock.

The work involves teams of scientists and students based at the Institute with a focus on two cleaner fish species, ballan wrasse (Labus bergylta) and lumpsucker (Cyclopterus lumpus). Ballan wrasse

Above: The IoA works closely with the industry. Left: IoA director Herve Migaud.

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Between the covers research, development and production was initiated at the Institute in 2010.

It continues to focus on tackling key challenges associated with scaling up production, developing knowledge on the biology and behaviour of the species, and developing tools and vaccines. The research is also looking at shortening the time required to reach deployment and optimising the delousing efficiency of the cleaner fish in salmon cages.

The benefits of this work have been numerous and far reaching.

There has been increased productivity at farms using such a new biological pest management strategy, which in turn has allowed reduced use of chemicals for sea lice control.

Cleaner fish production has created new jobs in rural communities due to the need for new hatcheries and nurseries, management on site at farms, and the subsequent creation of new salmon farms.

The project is contributing significantly to the competitiveness of the Scottish salmon industry.

Professor Migaud said: ‘Fish Farmer magazine provides an important platform for all involved in the aquaculture sector to share news, views and information.

‘Over the years, it has been instrumental in making the fish farming community aware of the relevant issues and provides an overview of the range of innovative solutions becoming available.’ FF

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40 years of aquaculture – Landcatch

BY NEIL MANCHESTER

Good breeding Visionary company that pioneered genetic selection in salmon

T

HE lands of the Ormsary estate in Argyll have changed hands just twice in history. Firstly, in the fourteenth century when Robert the Bruce gifted the estate to the Campbells of Argyll and, secondly, in the nineteenth century when the estate was bought by the Lithgow family as their Clyde shipbuilding empire started to develop.

The Lithgow shipyards produced many of the ocean going ships that Glasgow was famous for during the heyday of the twentieth century, and it was no surprise that after the decline of this great industry in the second half of the century, that pioneering and entrepreneurial spirit should be

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diverted to other emerging industries.

In 1980, leading industrialist and west coast farmer Sir William Lithgow applied the extensive engineering expertise drawn from over a century of independent ship building on the Clyde to develop ground-breaking land based seawater and freshwater operations in Argyll, under the name Landcatch.

Combined with extensive hydro schemes and innovative energy recovery systems, Ormsary fish farm was carbon neutral long before the phrase was ever invented, and the facilities remain as efficient and competitive even today.

The combination of freshwater operations drawing water by gravity from a protected loch system, through hydro turbines which, in turn, generate power for the pump ashore sea water facilities, and then heat exchange systems to harness winter energy from the sea, was clearly a concept ahead of its time but accepted as the norm.

The vision for design and efficiency went beyond structure and systems, and in the nearly 1990s, Lithgows recognised that the future of salmon farming lay in the application of selective breeding programmes, as had been successfully embraced in a number of agriculture species for many years.

Through its sister company, Landcatch Natural Selection, one of the world’s first genetic programmes in Atlantic salmon was established in the mid1990s and quickly gained a strong global reputation through close collaboration with the universities of Stirling and Edinburgh (Roslin Institute).

Landcatch Natural Selection was the first company to identify a QTL for IPN resistance in Atlantic salmon- a technology that is now adopted throughout the industry today.

Landcatch was also one of the first foreign supporters of the emerging

Above: Ormsary fish farm. Opposite page: The hatchery has supplied over 150 million smolts and nearly one billion eggs over the years

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Good breeding

salmon industry in Chile, quickly establishing breeding and smolt production operations in the country, and also developing trade in salmon eggs from Scotland to the point that in the 1990s, Landcatch was responsible for more than one per cent of Chile’s entire import market. Indeed, the Landcatch strain is still present in Chile with a growing recognition for quality, performance, and low maturation.

Over the intervening years, the company has supplied over 150 million smolts and nearly one billion eggs into the global industry, and been internationally recognised as one of the founders of modern salmon breeding programmes at the forefront of genetic and genomic technology development.

Today, Landcatch still stands for quality, reliability and innovation.

The development of Landcatch took a positive turn in 2011 when the Dutch based global multi-species breeding giant, Hendrix Genetics, bought the company as a first entry into the world of aquaculture breeding.

Through a combination of a significant capital programme to upgrade facilities, and the close collaboration between the Landcatch genetics team and Hendrix Genetics Research and Technology Centre, Landcatch has secured its future in the industry.

The company is still going strong as part of a growing aquaculture business unit in Hendrix Genetics, transferring breeding and production skills into sister salmon operations in Chile, rainbow trout breeding in the US and UK, and new moves into warm water species which now take the Landcatch technology into all aquaculture regions of the world.

As a pioneer in quality and efficient production, breeding technology de-

fish farm was carbon neutral “Ormsary long before the phrase was ever invented ”

velopment, and years of support for the Scottish and Chilean industries, Landcatch has long been an academy for budding fish farmers- scratch the surface of many aqua companies and it’s likely that you’ll find a Landcatch alumnus at high level.

After 37 years of history Landcatch is still going strong, a reminder of the legacy of a shipbuilding industry that led the world for over a century, and still flying the flag for Scotland on the world stage.

Neil Manchester is managing director of Hendrix Genetics Aquaculture. FF

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04/10/2017 16:38:11

40 years of aquaculture

BY MALCOLM DICKSON

Global reach

Magazine has played its part in aquaculture development, says former editor

S

O Fish Farmer is 40 years old and, like the industry it reports on, it is thriving. My main association was in the noughties when I was taken on as editor of the magazine after the Oban Times acquired it from Stuart Banks in 2003.

My interest in aquaculture started when I spent some time on an Israeli Kibbutz in 1978. I was amazed how easy it seemed to be to grow carp and tilapia in ponds. Coming from a dairy farming background I could immediately see that this was an industry for the future with huge opportunities.

I then took an interest in the start-up of cage based fish farming in Ireland where Fanad Fisheries in Donegal was founded by a neighbour in Co. Fermanagh, John Spence.

I was studying for a degree in zoology at Edinburgh at the time and tried, unsuccessfully, to switch to the department that dealt with fisheries. However, I had my chance in 1980 when I started an MSc in Aquaculture and Fisheries Management at Stirling’s Institute of Aquaculture, which immediately led to work in Zambia, then back in Ireland, then Malawi, then Bangladesh and a career in both commercial and development related aquaculture that has taken me around the world.

Throughout this time, Fish Farmer has played an important part in the development of the aquaculture industry. Its articles have inspired and informed new entrants to the industry, while advertisements help to create important linkages between producers, service providers and equipment suppliers.

It’s easy to forget in this age of Google but finding relevant informa-

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tion was difficult and Fish Farmer has always helped to bridge the gap between researchers, commercial companies and producers.

In 2011, I accepted a job with the international research organisation, WorldFish, in Egypt, where I have been for the last five and a half years. I recently moved to the WorldFish research programme in Bangladesh, familiar territory as I have had several short-term consultancies there over the last 25 years.

Reflecting on the past 40 years of aquaculture development, on a global basis, it’s been a huge success. You just need to look at the FAO statistics to see that aquaculture has fulfilled its promise.

Global aquaculture production has risen from only four million tonnes a year in 1977 to 76 million tonnes a year in 2015 and continues to expand.

Of course there have been hurdles to overcome and new challenges arise all the time but is aquaculture produced fish an important sector contributing towards nutrition, economy and employment in several countries? Yes. Is there potential for expansion? Yes. And has Fish Farmer played a part in this success? Yes, it certainly has.

However, I think there is a massive opportunity ahead for fish farming that many of us haven’t really considered. That is the opportunity for aquaculture to address malnutrition and food security for vulnerable populations.

As commercially minded fish farmers we normally look towards high-end markets so we can make reasonable profits. But what if we could produce farmed fish at a price that was truly affordable by the poor?

I have seen for myself that this is possible. In Egypt, small tilapia is by far the most affordable Pictures: Aquaculture around the world. locally produced animal protein source, while Pictures WorldFish in Bangladesh, farmed silver carp, pangasius and a small indigenous fish called mola are

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Global reach

I think there is a massive opportunity “ahead that many of us haven’t really considered…to address malnutrition and food security

”

The reward for the consumer is high quality nutrition and dietary diversity that can help to stave off health problems associated with poverty such as childhood stunting, rickets, heart disease and strokes.

So although we have made huge strides over the last 40 years, major challenges remain. And Fish Farmer will continue to inform and entertain new generations of fish farmers in the years to come. FF

widely eaten by poor consumers.

This demands a different approach; minimising input costs, having low cost farming systems and efficient distribution and marketing systems.

The reward for the producer is an unlimited market, in some cases substituting for declining supplies of low cost wild caught fish.

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04/10/2017 16:37:05

40 years of aquaculture

BY COLIN LEY

Join Fish Farmer and see the world!

Reporter recalls pre-internet era of extensive tours

I

T WAS a bit like that when working with Stuart and Rosemary Banks during the early days of their ownership of Fish Farmer.

Okay, it wasn’t exactly the world; more Europe and Scandinavia, but it was good to be part of the emergence of modern aquaculture and to meet some of the early believers in the potential of fish farming.

Stuart and Rosemary had somehow acquired Fish Farmer from whoever owned Farmers Weekly (FW) at the time, ending up with a publication which had bags of potential but not much in terms of a commercial base.

At an earlier point in the story, I worked with Denis Chamberlain and Bob Davies, both part of FW’s editorial team, to help produce a fish farming supplement to be distributed alongside the big-selling farming publication.

Having observed a rising interest in fish farming, FW’s management obviously thought they should see if there was a commercial

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base for a stand-alone publication.

I worked on the supplement purely because I was FW’s Scottish editor at the time and Scotland was already playing a major role in the new industry’s UK development.

Industry leaders then included Graeme Gordon, Iain McCrone, Robin Bradley, Ted Needham and Ron Roberts, a pioneering group of landowners, farmers and scientists who definitely believed in the future of Scottish aquaculture and were determined to get the industry going.

Based on salmon and trout, and not much else, the sector’s output was pretty modest, with the industry’s annual get-together being held in McTavish’s Kitchen in Oban. The number of support and service businesses was also limited although you would not have known that when a McTavish event was in full swing.

As for actually seeing Europe and Scandinavia, not just Oban harbour, that was the result of agreeing with Stuart and Rosemary to undertake a series of pre-conference/exhibition tours.

It seems something of a luxury now, but to gather preview material from researchers, farmers and commercial companies, I routinely visited Norway two to three months before each Aqua Nor, interviewing anyone who had something to say ahead of the event. We spoke to industry leaders, researchers, individual inventors, farmers and CEOs of a whole range of commercial businesses.

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Join Fish Farmer and see the world!

There’s no “substi tute

I also did a similar preview tour ahead of other major industry events in Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Ireland, Spain and Italy.

Run on the basis of one major trip per year, each tour inevitably included a feed plant feature, to the extent that I must have been in every manufacturing facility from the Faroes to Spain and back again.

Alongside such visits, of course, we always sought a customer perspective on whatever the latest feed development might be, an approach which gave us a steady flow of on-farm reports.

At probably three or four farm features a year, the recall list is far too long to repeat now. There were a few quirky highlights, however.

In northern Italy, for example, I remember visiting an eel farming operation which was part and parcel of a horticultural complex devoted to the production of poinsettia. The two ventures combined perfectly.

They also gave us a different set of photographs to what was usual for FF. Ireland was always enjoyable, starting with Ritchie Flynn in Dublin and then heading wherever Stuart and Rosemary had arranged. I especially remember an oyster farming operation in the south east corner of the country which managed to blend tradition with a modern approach to management. The end product was also superb.

Norway trips, meanwhile, tended to split between a couple of days in Bergen and Stavanger focusing on farm visits and business developments, a day in Oslo to see company leaders, and then on to Trondheim

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to talk to the scientists.

Always at the sharp end of the industry, Norwegian tours also included the opportunity to enjoy the country itself, such as heading out of Bergen harbour early one Saturday morning to see a new camera system in action on a farm located at the other end of the fjord.

It was one of those perfect still days when the boat glides through the water without even a hint of movement. My host had also packed food and a little something to drink, a combination which made the weekend task easy to accept.

While my research these days involves a lot less travelling, due largely to the influence of the internet, there is still nothing quite like visiting a new farm and seeing a fresh idea or development for yourself.

There’s also no substitute for talking, faceto-face, to those with a vision for the future of this industry and a passion for what aquaculture will be capable of delivering to the world’s consumers in another 40 years from now. FF

for talking face-toface to those with a vision for the future of this industry

”

Above: Fish Farmer pictured Prince Charles visiting a Booker McConnell farm in South Uist during a tour of the Highlands and islands in 1979. Colin Ley’s report of South Uist appeared in the same issue

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40 years of aquaculture

BY JIM TREASURER

Hold the

front page!

Bringing research to a wider audience – and other reflections

I

N my first days with Marine Harvest in 1989 sea lice were being tackled with a limited range of medicines available, only one in fact, and there were no effective vaccines for furunculosis.

Despite that, there was a lot of ‘craic’, optimism and endeavour in the industry. I recall that our health office at Lochailort was a small,

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wind-swept and rained upon portacabin.

One computer was shared by the departmental assistant Cath, two vets and five health managers, and so our time using it was severely rationed.

But life was good and I shared our on-site domestic accommodation with numerous cleaned skulls of deceased sheep, deer, hares, mice and birds that my house mate collected in ramblings up An Stac; it was that kind of place.

Nowadays, information is so easily conveyed by the internet, but back then the hard copies of Fish Farmer, to be found in all the canteens of fish farms, were the main source of information on aquaculture techniques, state of the industry, of advances, and news on how individuals and companies were doing, and we managed to keep in touch with the outside world and the community. Today, I still think farm and company staff like to see a hard copy of Fish Farmer.

In 1989, information, as now, was in the grey literature with little of the very latest found in books, so hearing up-to-date news about the industry in Fish Farmer was eagerly awaited.

My first contacts with Fish Farmer were with Stuart Banks and his wife Rosemary, owners I believe at that time of the publication.

They attended fish farming events and exhibitions regularly and were interested in hearing about developments in aquaculture and were always willing to phone to ask questions. That was not always easy in those pre-mobile days when staff were rarely near a phone and largely peripatetic.

Stuart gave me my only printed compliment

Hearing “up-to-

date news about the industry in Fish Farmer was eagerly awaited

”

Left: Jim Treasurer in the early 90s baiting a wrasse trap developed in Loch Sunart by Rodney George and known locally as the Sunart trap. Opposite: Chalimus stage IV of a salmon louse, illustration for one of Jim’s many articles that appeared in Fish Farmer

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Hold the front page! from the press in an editorial in an early 1990s edition describing me as ever enquiring, but I am sure there were many more questions I should have asked at the time. For example, were lumpfish cleaner fish!

The early 1990s was a period of great and necessary innovation, sometimes weekly, so it was very easy to find topical subjects to report on, whether it was improving sea lice treatments, fallowing, single year classes, sea lice count systems, novel treatments, cleaner fish, algal blooms, jellyfish, vaccines, and a range of fish health issues - the list was endless.

This was backed by Marine Harvest, whose staff - Ralph Baillie, Andrew Grant, Dick Alderson, Gordon Rae and others - were very keen to disseminate information and so we tried to get something new and useful into each issue of Fish Farmer.

From this beginning I was able to persuade

contacts, colleagues and students to send in various articles that might prove novel. Interesting features included cartoons and letters, sent by farm staff to the magazine.

My own view was, and still is, that researchers were producing papers, but technical knowledge should be made more widely available, and in an interesting and fluid style, to staff who could implement it.

Rather than allowing reports to languish on a library shelf, I think that Fish Farmer is a good place for discussing such things as oxygen requirements, water quality, transport methods, and cultivation routines by experts.

I also think the magazine is both a forum and opportunity for young researchers to make their mark and to pass on their work to industry, often in a preliminary way before the final results are published later. It’s also good for researchers to get feedback from industry before their studies go further.

The fish farming press in Europe can get dominated by salmonids, yet I think farm staff are always interested to hear about developments with other species and shellfish, and also about other countries; fish people like to know more about fish of any description.

Since 1989 I have encountered five editors of

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40 years of aquaculture

Clockwise from top left: Cuckoo wrasse; a digenean parasite found in the gut of wrasse; anaesthetised goldsinny wrasse - all pictures ilustrated an article by Jim Treasurer in Fish Farmer’s September/ October 1991 issue

Fish Farmer and they have all brought their personal slant, always trying to make the content as relevant as possible. But, in a way, it is up to the readership to give feedback at exhibitions and other events, and to say what would be good to cover.

Personal profiles of staff and farm visits have been among my favourites, such as the recent coverage of Otter Ferry’s 50th anniversary.

It was good to see the photos of the visit by the Princess Royal with Alastair and David.

The first thing that came to mind was that the boys are in fact some of our own fish farming royalty! And I hope they hid their special 2016 calendar from the Princess!

The opinion page at the back is also a great innovation as it’s good to hear personal views and to throw new ideas out there, no matter how

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Hold the front page!

controversial they may be. It would be great to see people sending in letters with their questions and comments.

In a way, the history and content of Fish Farmer over the last 40 years reflects the advances, setbacks, culture and technology in the industry itself and catalogues and follows that whirlwind and rollercoaster progress.

So, here’s to another 40 years of Fish Farmer keep engaging us and sharing our mainly highs and sometimes lows.

Happy anniversary, slàinte, and very best wishes to Jenny, William and all the production team.

Jim Treasurer was recruited as a Marine Harvest health manager in 1989. He is now research director at FAI Ardtoe Marine Research Facility, and a member of Fish Farmer’s editorial board. FF

Personal profiles of “staff and farm visits

have been among my favourites

”

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40 years of aquaculture

from the

ARCHIVE

40 Years of Commentary

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From the Archive - Commentary.indd 76

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04/10/2017 16:30:35

From the Archive

Above: There has never been a shortage of opinion formers in the industry, from the days of Ted Needham and Alex Behrendt, to Fish Farmer’s current commentators Nick Joy, Martin Jaa and Phil Thomas

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From the Archive - Commentary.indd 77

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40 years of aquaculture

BY NICK JOY

A wonderful career Early farmers did things differently but knew the industry would change

A

water “The started

lapping over both sides of the bow and I gave the international signal for ‘in distress’

”

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SK a 60-year-old man to reminisce and you may deeply regret it! My career has been a long and lucky one and experience and interesting people have abounded.

It seems like yesterday that I avidly read my first copy of Fish Farmer, left behind on some staff room table. It was a magical magazine then and it still hooks me now.

I came to fish farming through a circuitous route. I had no career plan, like most of the world, and drove my mother to exasperation.

In a final fit of desperation she wrote a list of all of the careers she could think of and with a wail in her voice said, ‘Just cross out the ones you don’t want to do!’

I shall not tell you how badly I fared on that one but after passing out from Cirencester studying agriculture (and passing out was not just an educational term there), I heard there was a course in aquaculture in Inverness and suddenly smelt hope on the wind.

In 1979 I started the course that changed my life completely. I was fascinated, enthralled and addicted. The aquaculture you see now was so utterly different then.

I worked on a mussel and oyster farm in Mull, a Dover sole farm (the White Fish Authority’s) in Largs, a rainbow trout farm at Moniack, and a plaice or anything farm at Ardtoe. Imagine that range being available now?

The equipment was basic to say the least.

The mussel farmer’s boat was a single skin assault craft which sank at its mooring in every significant blow. The first task of the day was

to wade out up to your chest and bale it out. Then we would go back to our digs and change.

Once dry and semi-warm we would go back and sit on a metal seat, on a metal boat and sort inch-long mussels onto a strip to re-hang them. That winter was the famous one when the temperature bottomed out in Oban at -32. So I fast learned the meaning of cold. Yet nothing dampened my enthusiasm.

There was so much to learn and to develop. There was so little written at that time that we had to use our gut instincts about fish all the time. Sometimes we got it catastrophically wrong and sometimes spectacularly right. To give you some of the differences from then to now: Feed hopper sizes: 50kg hung on poles over pens, filled every day by hand.

Feed in 25kg bags loaded onto barges and then hand balled onto pens.

Pen sizes: 8m with 5m deep nets.

Fish numbers in hundreds or low thousands.

Boat sizes: 12ft if you’e lucky with a crock outboard on the back.

Number of feed types available: Salmon feed. Digestibility (what?) who knows.

Smolt: If you haven’t got a hatchery you take what you can get. (40g was big!)

Vaccination: Sorry? Never heard of it, against what?

Harvest weight: 2-3kg. 4kg is huge.

Harvest and packing on farm. When you finish harvest you start packing.

Hand strapped boxes.

The only thing that was so much better in those days was that when we sold what little fish we had, the market would pay anything and were desperate to get it.

These are just some of the differences but I hope you get the picture. We innovated every day, simply because we had to. We knew then that the industry we were in could not stay as it was.

The people too were very, very different. Whether it be Murdo, the guy who taught me reluctantly to mend nets, an ex-fisherman, who had been on the whaling fleet and had albums of pictures.

Or Charlie, a Glaswegian raconteur who could tell a story for an hour at lunch break (and often more), weaving jokes in and out, and leaving us with sore stomachs as we headed out for the afternoon’s work.

So many amazing, interesting people who had careers before they came to fish farming. I have never forgotten them and never will.

There were some less salubrious characters who came and went but this was the way of an industry that could not find specialists as almost none existed.

I will not say that it was the safest environment because it wasn’t. I

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A wonderful career

remember being in a very small assault craft heading out to the pens with one tonne of feed aboard when a strong breeze got up.

The water started lapping over both sides of the bow and I gave the international signal for ‘in distress’ – which, I am sure you all know, is to raise and lower one’s arms towards the nearest vessel or people. In this case it was a group of pens. I was not encouraged by seeing three members of staff turn and wave back at me, assuming that for some idiotic reason I was waving to say hello.

The boat was awash by the time I got to the pens and there were a few choice words said.

I cannot talk of the son of an owner who fired a rifle from shore at a seal, forgetting the ricochet possibilities, only for the bullet to pass through the steel staff hut at sea, luckily missing everyone inside!

Nor would I ever mention the member of staff who tied the boat on badly and was so afraid of what his manager (me) might say that he rowed himself ashore in a harvest bin and recovered the boat.

I can talk with pride of someone I still call friend, who worked for me for many years (poor chap). He is the only person to directly disobey an order at sea and survive. No one would ever do what he did now.

A towboat had gone adrift from its mooring in a force seven south westerly. I told him that under no circumstances was anyone to try to get from the rocks to the boat. I informed the insurers and drove to the site, only to find the boat on the mooring.

I discovered that a certain person had jumped from the rocks to the boat and put it back onto its mooring. It is not a pleasant task telling someone off but it is even harder when you know that he has done something that foolhardy and that brave. I managed it but could hardly discipline him, though I am sure there are those who will tell me I should have done.

I must also note how I learned to say sorry. We had a young lad start when I worked in Argyll and as the team were prone to practical jokes, I gave them all a lecture about safety at sea and particularly with youngsters.

That evening as everyone came ashore, the first figure was bedrag-

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gled and soaked to the skin. I pulled in the supervisor and gave him a roasting over what I had said before. He stated that the boy had jumped off the boat, thinking it was in shallow water and went in over his head. A likely story! Only upon checking with all of the staff and the young man himself, it turned out that this was exactly what he had done. So many staff then knew nothing of the sea either. I had to apologise long and hard for judging too quickly.

In the 38 years of my career I have worked with the best of people, learned from so many and enjoyed every minute. So it is my turn to make a confession.

On one farm where I worked, the weekend shift was not paid as it was supposedly included in your weekly wage. As a special treat on a Sunday you were given a cup of coffee after you had done the morning feed, made by the kind wife of the managing director.

One Sunday I tasted my coffee and to my utter astonishment it tasted of brandy! One of the guys in the staffroom said, ‘that must be Opposite: Ardtoe. Above: the boss’s, drink it before he figures it out!’

Oysters Scalding my throat, I gulped it down in about 30 seconds, giggling terribly as I did so. Duly the boss thrust his head through the door saying, ‘Has one of you got my coffee?’

Not one laugh was heard as we all replied we had no idea what he was talking about.

Okay, I admit it. Robin, it was me who drank your coffee and can I just say it tasted so much better for it being yours! FF

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40 years of aquaculture

BY DR MARTIN JAFFA

Striking a

blow

How Arthur Scargill ruined carp rearing venture at power station

T

HIS year is not only the 40th anniversary of Fish Farmer but it is also the year of the pink salmon. This Pacific species has found its way into Scottish rivers in relatively large number after straying from the seas around the Kola Peninsula in Russia.

However, pinks are not the first Pacific salmon species to find their way to Scottish shores. Forty years ago, in the summer of 1977, Unilever Research imported 20,000 coho salmon eggs with the intention of evaluating the species for rearing in the UK. Strict quarantine conditions were imposed on these eggs and any fish that subsequently hatched from them. All the effluent had to be sterilised and the fish had to be confined for life.

The relevance of these imported coho salmon to the 40th anniversary of Fish Farmer is that it was because of these fish that I first came across the magazine. I never got to see the first copy but I did see the second and then all the subsequent issues.

I was working for Unilever Research during the summer of 1978, having applied on spec and being offered a temporary job. I later asked why I was chosen from quite a number of applicants and was told that I was the first student who had already worked with fish – trout, carp and sea bass in my case.

After arriving at Unilever Research in Aberdeen, I was taken eight miles south of the town to a remote research unit located on the top

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of the cliffs at Findon. I was shown a separate self-contained building and asked to change into boots, which then had to be disinfected.

Inside the building were a couple of large tanks stocked with salmon - not native fish but the very same coho salmon that had been imported as eggs. It was stressed to me that these were extremely valuable fish and they were now my responsibility.

After being shown how to change the iodine filters on the outflow, as well as the food store and the feeding and weighing regimes, my guide said, ‘goodbye - I’m off on holiday – don’t kill the fish’.

I should point out that there were a couple of other people still working at the unit, undertaking feed trials for what would later become Fulmar feeds, and my other job was to help them.

My main memory of that time was avidly reading this new magazine that was dedicated to fish farming. This might not seem anything now to students but for me, at that time, it was a revelation as there was so little information in print about the fledgling industry.

Above: Salmon. Opposite page: Martin was a regular contributor - and letter writer - to Fish Farmer.

Below: Miners’ leader Arthur Scargill

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Striking a blow

The other memory of Findon was the wind. At times it was almost impossible to stand upright. Fortunately, I managed to avoid being blown over the cliff top and I also managed to keep the cohos alive, even though their eventual fate was sealed due to strict conditions imposed on their sojourn in Scotland.

In the early years of Fish Farmer, the pages often contained details of novel approaches to fish farming that were once seen as revolutionary. Sadly, many of these new ideas and ventures failed to live up to expectation.

Most were probably well ahead of their time.

One such venture involved growing table carp, to be supplied live to the Chinese community living in the UK. This was the brainchild of Waburton’s the bakers, who had initially become involved in rearing fish due to the possibility of recycling their waste bread as fish feed.

I ended up building a tank based unit for rearing carp at Eggborough, next to the cooling towers of one of the main Yorkshire power stations. Unfortunately, this rearing unit did not last for long, but the reason that this warm-water growing facility did not survive was for reasons probably never encountered by any other fish farm in the UK – the miner’s strike of 1984 to 1985.

The unit performed well with hot water taken from the main supply pipe to the cooling tower and cooler water taken from the base of the tower. These were mixed for the optimum growing temperature and the fish grew quickly.

Regular shipments were taken down to a Chinese wholesale company in London’s now fashionable Islington. Demand was strong

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of Fish Farmer “oftTheen pages contained details of novel approaches to fish farming that were once seen as revolutionary

”

and the unit could never supply enough fish, but as production started to increase, Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, called the men out on strike.

The carp unit was located in the heart of the Yorkshire coalfield and among the first places the miners picketed were the local power stations. Feeding the fish meant crossing the picket line but once the union officials realised that the farm had nothing to do with the CEGB (Central Electricity Generating Board), they were happy to allow free passage through the line of striking miners.

The strike went on for weeks on end and eventually the CEGB management decided that it offered an opportunity to close the station down for an overhaul. This spelt disaster for the carp as the generators were turned off and the flow of warm water ceased.

Warburtons decided that such farming was too dependent on outside forces and opted to abandon the site.

By the time I drove out of the power station for the last time, all there was to be seen of where the carp had been was some of the ash taken from the coal powered furnac-

es, which we had used to cover the original grass surface for the truck to drive on.

The fish unit at Eggborough wasn’t the only power station to host fish farming ventures.

Fish Farmer also reported from the eel farm at Drax and the tilapia unit at Ratcliffe on Soar. None survived to become truly viable aquaculture operations but only the fate of the Warburtons carp farm was decided by Scargill’s striking miners.

Over the years, Fish Farmer has covered many exciting developments within the industry but none have really managed to match the endurance of Scottish salmon farming, despite having the potential to do so. Looking through the back issues of the magazine now leaves me to wonder where all those years have gone! FF

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Trade Associations – SSPO

40 years of aquaculture

BY

BY PROFESSOR PROFESSOR PHIL PHIL THOMAS THOMAS

So, how was it for you?

Underpinning provenance

Celebration is tinged with regret about what might have been if government had been more visionary

T I

HIS 40th anniversary issue of Fish Farmer is guaranteed to elicit some fond memories of the past, when fish farming was in its buccaneering infancy. So, let me start with a small confession: as a young man, I might have followed a career in aquaculture if my head had not been turned by the lure of filthy lucre!

I had just finished a PhD in animal nutrition and was looking for a job.

Two positions were under consideration, one in the agricultural faculty t may not be politically correct to say so at at the University of Leeds and the other in fish nutrition at Southamppresent but farmed Atlantic salmon would ton. not have become Scotland’s leading food In the end, the agricultural job got my vote because the starting salary export without the Crown Estate’s positive was 10 per cent higher. In cash, the difference was about £100 but that engagement with aquaculture development seemed a small fortune back in 1966. back in the 1980s.

Now, aquaculture is a significant part of the agency’s marine leasing portfolio and is regularly celebrated by the Crown Estate’s Scottish Marine Aquaculture Awards event. This year’s event in Edinburgh on the 11 June was the usual highly successful showcase for Scottish aquaculture and a rare opportunity for industry to join together to mark its success.

The Crown Estate is presently at the centre of further devolution discussions between the UK government and Scottish government. The long-term future of key Scottish functions remains unclear and professional expertise could be squandered in the process of organisational change.

Both the Crown Estate’s core expertise and the Marine Aquaculture Awards are important in maintaining the distinctive coherence of Scotland’s aquaculture and it would be a tragedy if they became casualties of political change.

This year’s Awards event was hosted by actress, writer and comedian Jo Caulfield, an inspired choice by whoever made the booking.

She was very funny and entertaining and kept the proceedings going with a swing. Only once did she stray, when she wondered what ‘provenance actually meant’.

In a room full of folk whose livelihoods

Do we think enough about what gives the industry its edge in key markets?

should “beWeorganising our training and education provisions much better

”

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Thereafter, it was some 35 years before my fish interests were re-engaged. I had moved out of academia and into consultancy work, and events resulted in my working on several fish farming projects, and ultimately being appointed as chairman of the Scottish Salmon Producers’ Organisation. depend on the provenance of their products she quickly sensed an auThis period brought me a new awakening dience response and moved to safer comedic material: there are some about the biology of fish and the efficiency of things you just don’t joke about! their metabolism. Having previously worked However, her remark left me asking myself whether we think enough on ruminant farm animals, I could not get over about the underpinning of the provenance of Scottish farmed fish – and the growth performance of Atlantic salmon, for me that’s farmed salmon.

There is no doubt that Scottish provenance is important to our industry – it gives us the edge in all our key markets.

Provenance can be defined in various ways but most people will agree that it goes beyond the appearance and sensory qualities of the final product: flavour, texture, visual presentation and product consistency are always key factors in consumer appeal but provenance is about much more.

It reflects a wider concept of consumer quality assurance, including: the place where the fish is grown and processed; the professional integrity of the production and processing methods; and the quality, commitment and care of the people involved – the professional skills, expertise, passion and dedication of the producers themselves.

In Scotland our ‘place of production’ gives us a huge natural advantage because we grow fish in the pristine coastal waters of some of the most beautiful and wild scenic areas of the world, and our brand is protected by its PGI status.

Likewise, adoption of the Scottish Finfish Code of Good Practice allied with the industry’s deep commitment to a range of independent farm quality assurance programmes, including the RSPCA fish welfare scheme, builds on the underlying strength of our statutory regulatory systems to assure our production systems.

Finally, the skills, expertise, passion and dedication of our farmers can be demonstrated in abundance day in and day out – and they were showcased by the recent awards event.

However, being wholly objective and forward looking, it is this third area of provenance where the Scottish industry has greatest scope for systematic development. That is not to say that our industry’s skills and professional expertise are not of the highest calibre, but it is to recognise that our vocational educational and training structures, and

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So, how was it for you? and how metabolically different fish were.

Luckily, I learned quickly through the patience and generosity of my colleagues, and by starting almost every sentence with ‘I don’t know much about this but ----‘.

My increased understanding of fish farming brought constant revelations. I am still amazed that the huge efficiency and environmental benefits of food production from farming fish have taken so long to become more widely recognised. Even now, I am not convinced they are as well recognised as they should be.

The history of the development of salmon farming in Scotland is well-known, often told, and a quite remarkable story. The pioneering R&D work done by Unilever and BP at Lochailort in the mid-1970s resulted in a production of 658 tonnes of farmed salmon in 1980.

The intellectual property rights of the technology were transferred to the Highlands and Islands Development Board for £1, and fish farming was widely promoted as a new enterprise for the Highlands and islands region.

The industry developed rapidly along the north-west coast and in the western and northern islands, where the quality of the water for salmon farming is second to none.

That development has resulted in Scottish farmed salmon becoming a major Scottish food sector. Economically, farmed Atlantic salmon has become the largest single food export, not only from Scotland but from the UK. Judged in any terms, this is a massive success

Left: Loch Ailort in the late 60s

story, and there are future chapters yet to be written.

However, underlying that success is another slightly different story, worthy of consideration and offering lessons to all those interested in Scottish economic development.

From the figure of 658 tonnes in 1980, farmed salmon production in Scotland rose year on year throughout the 1980s and 1990s to reach 170,000 tonnes in 2003. Then, catastrophe struck. Market prices

Scotland cannot afford to let “ opportunities slip through its fingers ”

Happy 40th birthday to Fish Farmer Magazine Thank you for your contribution

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26.09.2017 10.53.33

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40 years of aquaculture Thus, in tonnage terms, the industry is only now regaining the level of production it was achieving in 2003, despite massive continued investment in farm development and in new technology.

The hidden success story – in reality, little short of an economic miracle - is that over the past 10 years, Scottish salmon farming has successfully grown its economic value, while at the same time addressing the heavy burden of structural challenges that resulted from its earlier history.

dropped, Scotland became uneconomic and production fell sharply to around 128,000 tonnes by 2007/2008.

The reasons for the price collapse, and the role of the rapid expansion in Norwegian production in creating a market over-supply, are still hotly debated in some quarters – but they are not germane to the points that are important here.

Irrespective of how the market situation had arisen, the consequent need was for a huge consolidation of the Scottish company structures and a major restructuring of the farming estate to provide larger, more cost-efficient and more strategically positioned farming infrastructure.

Unless this was achieved the future of the industry looked rather bleak.

This underlying restructuring has been ongoing progressively for the past decade, and production volumes have risen as a result. But the statistics from the recent Scottish Fish Farm Production Survey show production at 163,000 tonnes in 2016, with a projected 177,00 tonnes in 2017.

Lessons to be learned The slow increase in Atlantic salmon tonnage might, of course, be reasoned to reflect an industry policy not to oversupply the market, since Scotland produces an internationally recognised product with a significant market premium.

However, in both premium and commodity markets, international demand for farmed Atlantic salmon continues to increase bullishly ahead of market supply. In fact, there is a strong and unfulfilled market demand.

Likewise, one might ask whether companies have been sufficiently willing to invest in farm development. However, a lack of investment has demonstrably not been the case: investment in farm development has been characteristically high throughout the period.

Rather, analysis of the underlying causes of slow tonnage growth always come down

“Investment in farm

development has been high throughout the period

”

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So, how was it for you?

Right: Farmed salmon - incredible growth performance. Picture Marine Harvest

to one main reason. Expanding or improving existing farms, or replacing them with new farms, is a tortuously demanding and frustratingly slow process because of the planning and regulatory systems that apply. It simply takes enormous amounts of effort and unbelievably long periods of time.

This point is particularly relevant now, as UK political parties and governments are beginning to talk about the need for what used to be termed ‘industrial strategies’.

In a widely reported speech at the end of August, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, was very strong on the need for Scotland to be a nation that produces and exports things.

Additionally, a similar theme emerges in ‘A Nation with Ambition: The Government’s Programme for Scotland 2017-18’, which specifically acknowledges the food and drink sector as a major contributor to Scotland’s economy.

Yet after the nadir of Scottish salmon farming in 2007/2008, the only things the farming industry has ever sought from the Scottish government have been a more streamlined planning and statutory approval system for farm development and a robust statutory reporting system for the game fisheries sector (to facilitate planning).

In both cases the politicians have bottled out, leaving the industry just to ‘get on with it’. In parallel, the last decade has seen an unprecedented volume of aquaculture legislation approved by the Scottish parliament.

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However, it would be a very brave man who offered to identify any legislation that has facilitated fish farming development, although the economic and environmental benefits of such development at the national strategic level are obvious.

So, collectively let us celebrate the enormous success of Scottish salmon farming. But for me at least that celebration is tinged with regret about the opportunities lost and by what might have been if the Scottish government had been more strategic and visionary in its approach to fish farming development.

As a small but ambitious nation, Scotland cannot afford to let such opportunities slip through its fingers, either now or in the future. FF

steen-hansen.com

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40 years of aquaculture

from the 40 Years of Advertising

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ARCHIVE

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From the Archive

Above: Advertising rates may have changed since 1977, but some of the familiar names remain and appear in Fish Farmer on a regular basis

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40 years of aquaculture – Marketing

Scotland

the brand Company realised its interests were best served if there was a strong industry

I

N the late 80s and early 90s, when Angus Morgan was chair of the Scottish Salmon Board, the industry had yet to consolidate and about 70 business leaders could turn up to meetings.

Developing a marketing strategy that suited everyone was a challenge but, as Morgan says now, the principles of promoting Scottish salmon today remain the same as they were back then.

Chief among these was differentiating the Scottish product from its competitors. Morgan, who from 1974 to 1996 worked for Marine Harvest where he was the marketing director, realised at the start that the company’s interests were best served if there was a strong industry.

‘Right from the early years we participated fully in industry matters and I represented the company in those industry matters from the onset,’ said Morgan.

‘It was important that the Scottish industry flourished. So we put more effort into marketing Scottish salmon than we did into marketing Marine Harvest salmon. People recognised Scottish salmon but they didn’t recognise Marine Harvest.’

When he arrived at the company, though, production problems were the main concern.

The task Morgan was given by Unilever was to establish, for the benefit of the business, whether salmon farming could be viable.

Until then it had been very technically led,

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driven and managed by scientists. Unilever had identified a market for aquaculture but was looking for someone with commercial experience for the salmon operation. Morgan, who had joined the group as a management trainee in 1964 and worked at John West Foods, fitted the bill.

‘I was instructed to look at it from a different perspective. At the time the farming process was not performing as anticipated and it was a question of whether there was a commercial future.’

He worked with colleagues in research to build up a stronger pilot production operation which, he said, ‘thankfully worked’. Then, when Iain Anderson was made managing director, Morgan was able to concentrate on marketing.

‘My task was to try and extend distribution and the customer list in advance of the production coming on stream.

‘We had to choose which retailers we went to and we chose the obvious ones, M&S and Makro, and similar businesses in France, the US and Japan, and designed products that would suit their market place.

‘Until Marine Harvest started production, Atlantic salmon had just been wild capture, which only amounted to around 1,000 to 1,500 tonnes a year, very, very small. Distribution was patchy, it was a niche product and expensive.

‘What we had to do was try and persuade retailers and then consumers that this was a healthy and nutritious product that, as production was developing, could be reliably supplied 12 months a year, that could provide the basis for a wide range of downstream products, fresh, and smoked, in simple presentations and a potentially wide range of ready meals.’

To begin with, the industry joined with trout farmers as a committee of the National Farmers’ Union of Scotland but, said Morgan, over time ‘we realised we had to stand on our own two feet’.

With other producers they formed the Scottish Salmon Growers’ Association and determined that the marketing of their product should be separate from trade issues.

‘So we formed two organisations, the SSGA and the Scottish Salm-

Above: Marketing salmon - Angus Morgan, left, with the Earl of Strathmore in the 1980s

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Scotland the brand

on Board, the latter being responsible for the marketing of Scottish salmon, and the former being the equivalent of the NFUS, representing the industry.

‘Individual industry members could have quite strongly held different views and we didn’t want the trade and policy issues to spread across to the marketing initiatives. We didn’t want people to fall out in the committee over how to deal with the Crown Estate commissioners, for example, and then withdraw support for the Scottish Salmon Board.’

That was in 1988 and it worked extremely well, said Morgan. But problems lay ahead, not least the dumping of Norwegian salmon, after over-production led to an influx of cheap imports, threatening Scottish sales.

‘That’s when things began to fall apart as far as the industry was concerned because of course significant parts of it at that time were Norwegian controlled. So they weren’t too chuffed about what the Scottish salmon industry was doing in Brussels ‘However, thankfully some of their more progressive Scottish managers persuaded them to stay with the game for quite a long time.’

The special position of Scottish salmon in the market place became even more important, said Morgan.

‘We realised from early on that it was alright to say Scottish salmon is wonderful and we’ll all join together and spend money and hopefully get support from government to promote salmon and make the public aware of it. But you had to be damn sure you had a quality standard for the product you were promoting.’

That necessitated setting up a quality scheme, called Scottish Quality Salmon, which Morgan said took a while to get bedded down.

‘Having established a secure quality scheme in the UK we then decided to apply for Label Rouge accreditation, which took many years.

We made it and Scottish salmon was the first non-French product to be accredited.

‘The Label Rouge authorities required one to have a fully independent accreditation organisation – a board reviewing the inspection reports and taking the necessary action of removing accreditation where appropriate if standards were not being adhered to.

‘So we set up Food Certification Scotland and I chaired that too. FCS initially was only concerned with salmon but soon widened its interests.’

Getting salmon farmers to allocate part of their budget to promotion ‘took a lot of persuasion’, said Morgan. Spending money in the market place, on advertising or on retail promotions for the Scottish Quality Salmon product started to be ‘quite beefy money’.

‘That worked well until prices went through the floor, profitability slumped and it was a very easy thing for businesses to say, ‘I’m not spending £40 or £50 a tonne (or whatever it was) on a promotional project when I’m losing money’.’

Companies, including Marine Harvest, became reluctant to invest in promotions.

‘I remember a meeting at the Station Hotel in Inverness, around the

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early 90s, when things were particularly awful with production performance and prices for the industry as a whole,’ said Morgan. ‘Everybody was very, very gloomy.

‘I was chairman of the Scottish Salmon Board and I’d produced a grand marketing plan for the forthcoming year, with expenditure for this and expenditure for that.

‘My boss at the time, David McCarthy, was going to come up and express the Marine Harvest view. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it to the meeting, ‘But all the leaders of the industry were assembled in Inverness, not very happy men and ladies. And there were a lot more businesses

put more effort into marketing “We Scottish salmon than we did into marketing Marine Harvest salmon ” 89

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40 years of aquaculture – Marketing

then, about 70 people in the room – now, an SSPO meeting would be just a handful.

‘So the brave me stood up and gave the big sales pitch on the marketing programme for Scottish salmon for the year that had been agreed by the board. However, there was a lot of sucking of teeth in the audience.

‘When I sat down a discussion took place.

Then I was invited to express the view of Marine Harvest as to where the priorities for expenditure lay, production or marketing, and I had to say that we were not going to support expenditure on marketing – a bit of a volte-

I think for the Scottish industry it’s “ important that product differentiation is maintained ”

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face that didn’t go unnoticed!’

But when the production problems eased and the market recovered, the industry mostly agreed that the best way to promote their product was indeed generically, said Morgan.

‘Some tried to do other branding but it always failed. Consumers recognised Scottish salmon and no brands have ever succeeded. Now the promotion of Scottish salmon is much, much less and you have conflicting interests in the industry currently, with it being owned by the Norwegians. That makes it much more difficult.’

He is not sure if he would like to promote the sector these days – ‘I don’t know at first hand the views of the major participants’.

‘In the 80s and 90s and at the beginning of this century the production processes here were very different [from Norway], so we had a recognisably different product in the market place. Whether that’s the case now I don’t know.

‘I think for the Scottish industry it’s important that product differentiation is maintained and that differentiated product is promoted, and that all comes down to the quality standards that are set.’

If quality standards were to diminish, with cheaper production, it would be a risk to the industry because Scottish salmon would become an undifferentiated product – ‘that’s the view I’ve always held,’ said

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Scotland the brand

Morgan, who continued to chair the Scottish Salmon Board after he left Marine Harvest in the 90s, subsequently becoming managing director of Ardvar Salmon in north-west Sutherland.

He has talked before about the well financed wild salmon lobby and its specious propaganda that undermined the salmon industry’s efforts, creating unease among customers and affecting site availability.

In his day, these attacks were dealt with by the Scottish Salmon Growers’ Association as they were focused on production standards, not the product.

‘It was important for us not to indulge ourselves in that fight… I was promoting a perfectly healthy and safe product because the quality scheme assured that to be the case.’

Although the propaganda continues, he believes ‘at the end of the day it will die away, because there are so many factors contributing

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to wild salmon survival and I am sure they will understand that they will be much more successful when they concentrate on these other factors’.

He praised recent articles from those involved in restocking programmes, such as Bob Kindness and Jon Gibb, which ‘called a lie to accusations that had been made very vociferously’.

As for the Scottish industry’s target of doubling growth from around 170,000 to 350,000 tonnes by 2030, Morgan reckons this is ‘pretty tame’ compared to the targets they set themselves many years ago.

‘In the 1990s, we were envisaging an annual production of around 250,000 tonnes of Scottish salmon. However, for production reasons, combined with the massive impact of the dumping, increases in production flattened out quite considerably for a number of years.

‘The increases envisaged amount to around five per cent per annum.

At the margins, such changes are less because the bulk is so large. It’s hard to think of a 20 per cent increase in production in one year, but in days gone by that happened because it was quite a small industry and it didn’t require many new farms to come on stream to have a massive impact on production.

‘It doesn’t take much additional production, though, to have a hellish effect on the price. Sentiment could turn in an instant from under supply to over supply and then things really can go off the deep end.

‘But there are bound to be fluctuations and that’s why it is very important for the Scottish industry to have a strong market position internationally for its brand, which is Scottish salmon.’ FF

Above: Angus Morgan (third right) in the 90s with fellow Marine Harvest directors Graeme Dear, John Lister and David Windmill.

Right: Taking farmed salmon to the Royal Highland Show - ‘we’re extremely pleased with the number of people who visited the exhibit,’ said Angus Morgan at the time

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40 years of aquaculture – Chile

Great

adventure With container loads of farm gear, a new industry was launched

W

HEN Marine Harvest was setting up its first salmon farms in Chile it had a number of young but already experienced farm managers apparently eager to travel across the world.

Among these was Ralph Baillie, who had run his first fish farm in Scotland aged 22, and regarded the prospect of starting again in South America as ‘a great adventure’.

‘We had done some research and Dr Bruce Hillcoat [Marine Harvest’s then technical director] had been to Chile a couple of times.

‘They knew salmon farming existed in Chile, it had been running for nearly 10 years, but hadn’t really got going. It was mostly run by local people, although there were a couple of Norwegian companies, tentatively dipping a toe in the water.’

Baillie, sent to Chile as technical manager, said there were a lot of highly educated college people ready to take on aquaculture – ‘they must have seen the potential’. This talent and the huge organisation of Unilever made the Marine Harvest operation viable.

‘There were only one or two other companies doing Atlantic salmon, the rest were doing coho and Pacific, which were harder to manage. They didn’t really know what they were doing but they learnt quickly.

‘We had the money and the logistics and the wherewithal to do it so we were able to send out a freshwater guy, Willie Fortune, who went to Chile to help with the building of a hatchery… so when we sent him eggs, which came from our hatcheries in Scotland, it would be ready.

‘The hatchery was about 100 miles north of Puerto Montt, near the Argentinian border, at Pichi Chanlelfu. It was a relatively poor rural area in the middle of nowhere, chosen because there was what we thought was a good freshwater supply, and also a very sympathetic alcaldessa [local mayor].’

Baillie arrived in Chile with two 40ft containers loaded with ‘everything we thought we might need’, including two wooden cages, boats, diving compressors, more hatchery equipment, and fibreglass tanks.

He had a Chilean engineer from Santiago allocated to him, who was about the only English speaker working there at the time.

‘My Spanish was non-existent despite being sent on a language course in London for a month by Unilever ‘It wasn’t in the slightest bit worrying, perhaps because I didn’t know any better,’ said Baillie, who took his wife and two very young children along with him.

‘Although it was pioneering for me, the support I had from Unilever was better than working for the Foreign Office. I met other people, not working for Unilever, who’d been flung out there with no support and their job was a lot tougher.

‘Unilever were second to none. They absolutely knew how to treat people, they were extremely good. They listened to you as an individual and as a family and did what they could. If you had a beloved pet, for instance, they would do what was necessary for you to take that pet with you.’

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The eggs had hatched by the time Baillie arrived with his containers so he had to hurry up and build the cages. They were about 10m by 10m, and made of wood and polystyrene with galvanised metal corners and stanchions.

‘We had to lay moorings in the lake, Lake Llanquihue. In Scotland we had a contractor who made huge one tonne concrete blocks for us and got them delivered off a tipper lorry on to the beach. Then you could bring a raft across at high tide, tie a rope to the blocks, and the tide would lift the block.

‘But in a freshwater lake in Chile we didn’t have that option. We got 45 gallon barrels and filled them with rubble and concrete and this engineer from Santiago got hold of a team and within a couple of hours there was a pick-up, three or four labourers from the hatchery piled into the pick-up with four 45 gallon barrels, a whole load of gravel, bags of cement, and off we went.

‘There was no road but we got down on to the beach, built a raft, put the barrels on the raft, shovelled concrete into the barrels and floated them out to where we wanted them and just pushed them off the raft, with ropes attached, and moored these two pens.

‘At the same time we gave the design of the pens to a local fabricator and he copied it. By the time we’d got these two moored for the fry (in 2mm mesh nets) – they went out into the pens at less than a gram, tiny – the local workshops had made another ten pens. It was amazing fun.’

Within just three years, Baillie and his team had established a significant salmon farming operation in Chile, with 12 seawater farms, four of them with full shore bases, and production was 4,500 tonnes.

‘You could do things a lot faster in Chile though you still had to get concessions from the government. But when you decided to do something it was so much quicker out there because they just threw people at it. The Chilean government was very welcoming.’

He even had the dubious honour of meeting General Pinochet who, said Baillie, ‘didn’t know about salmon farming but did know about economic progress’.

‘The major issue when we took eggs out in January or February was that

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Great adventure

we didn’t know if they were going to go through a winter in Chile and might take another year before they became smolts. But of course they didn’t.’

It was a different temperature regime, with the freshwater lake not getting below 10 degrees or rising much above 14.

‘These little fish grew like fury because the water was so much warmer and they smolted in the first spring. We were suddenly six months ahead and I had to phone up David McCarthy, who was then in charge of Unilever in Santiago, and say these fish have gone nuts and I need help from Scotland.

‘I said I needed a JCB forklift and sea pens within a month. He just picked up the phone immediately and called the man who was running Marine Harvest. They just sent it all out.’

By then, 1987, Baillie had quite a big team in Chile, mainly local people, but also Kenny Gordon who he’d worked with in Scotland. While Baillie looked after the logistics of getting new farms built, Gordon was getting on with the practical side.

Baillie bought the first forklift truck in Chile, at a cost $56,000, ‘a huge chunk of the budget’. The Chileans wanted to do everything by hand but he told them they couldn’t lift steel pens by hand.

‘The JCB arrived the same day Kenny arrived and he got off the flight, jumped into the forklift and started moving cages about on the pier. He knew Marine Harvest in Scotland was already using steel pens so we got the plans and ours were made in Chile.’

By the time Baillie left Chile, there were several ancillary industries, such as companies that had been making plastic toys manufacturing plastic floats for cages.

He had encountered few disease problems there and didn’t treat fish at all, but he arrived home in 1990, as farms manager for Scotland, to find ‘horrendous problems’.

‘They had pushed things too far and my first job when I came back to Scotland was to find a hole big enough to put all the dead fish in. In Lochailort we had triple resistant furunculosis ‘Marine Harvest was told by a particular Unilever director it had to get bigger so while we had been putting 110,000 smolts to sea at any one time we were suddenly told to put a million to sea.

‘Furunculosis got rife as did sea lice, and they became resistant to dichlorvos. It was a disaster. In June or July, that hot summer, we lost 500 tonnes of the 1,000 tonnes we had in Lochailort within about

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two weeks to sea lice. We thought that was it, the end of the industry.

‘That’s when we sat round the table and decided to go back to basics. We stress tested every fish in freshwater for furunculosis and if any of them were carriers they got destroyed.

‘We were budgeted to put eight million smolts to sea, nothing nowadays, but after stress testing them we destroyed more than half.

‘We cut everything back and started from first principles. The outcome was dramatic. With half the amount of smolts put to sea we doubled the tonnage that we had been producing previously.

‘When everything was going wrong in 1990 the mortality for a year class was between 38-48 per cent. You were getting about 1.1 kilos of fish harvested for every smolt you put to sea.

‘But because of changing the husbandry (this was before vaccination) we turned that into 3.2 kilos for every smolt put to sea. And within one year class, mortality dropped down to five per cent.’

In November 1991, Baillie signed a management agreement for Loch Sunart with McConnell Salmon. That was the first area management agreement and it formed the basis of what became the code of good practice.

Baillie chaired this, getting a team together and organising meetings up and down the west coast, in the Western Isles, and on Orkney and Shetland. After he left Marine Harvest in 1998 to set up the Salmon Management Company he continued working on the Code of Good practice.

‘It was a fraught and difficult thing – people were still putting two or three different year classes in one farm at that time.’

Baillie deployed the people skills he had acquired as a young farm manager and when farmers said they couldn’t afford to implement the code, his mantra became they couldn’t afford not to.

‘It definitely did its job but whether people adhere to it I don’t know. I hear of people now still moving half grown fish around the countryside in wellboats and I completely disagree with that and think it’s too risky.’

Baillie left salmon farming in 2004 and joined the pharmaceutical world. He said he thinks ‘poor old Chile is going to go through another desperate period’.

‘There is regulation but they are their own worst enemies. They are the most free market you could imagine but it’s too free. They have a lot more civil servants to manage regulations but the companies don’t fully trust each other.

It’s a cultural thing.’

He believes there are only three things that matter to a salmon farmer: survival, feed conversion ratio and the price.

‘The price is extremely good at the moment. I don’t think survival is as good as it should be because of gill disease and sea lice mainly. It’s not cracked yet and will probably be a continual problem.’ FF

Above: Ralph Baillie was sent to Chile as Marine Harvest’s technical manager.

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40 years of aquaculture – Scottish Sea Farms

Investing in Scotland Jim Gallagher, managing director of Scottish Sea Farms and co-chair of the Industry Leadership Group, discusses past achievements and future plans with Fish Farmer structure, treatments and management practices to mitigate or overcome these challenges.

The marine environment will continue to change but I am very confident in our ability as a company and wider industry to find solutions that work in harmony with the biology of salmon and the environment where we farm.

FF: Will these challenges be best solved by future innovations or old fashioned good husbandry?

JG: Without question, both – technological innovations may bring new ways of doing things but if these do not take into consideration the welfare of salmon they will inevitably fail.

FF: How is SSF’s cleaner fish operation going?

JG: We are seven years into the learning journey of cleaner fish and it is unquestionably successful, with multiple sites going through a full crop without

“Thashe aILG

fantastic opportunity to address the barriers to growth in the industry

”

Fish Farmer: What is the most significant change you have seen in the industry since joining?

Jim Gallagher: This would be how technology and the use of data has become increasingly important to support and underpin excellent animal husbandry skills. Historically, the industry involved a significant amount of manual labour, now we are focused on skilled and motivated people having the right information and tools to deliver the best results, quality and welfare.

FF: What would you say is your own greatest achievement?

JG: There are many areas where I have been proud to have been involved: seeing young people come into the industry and progress through a rewarding career to site or even regional manager; to see Scottish salmon become the UK’s biggest food export; the way the industry reacts to environmental challenges and finds solutions to those challenges.

If I was forced to pick one single achievement it would be the creation of the Scottish Sea Farms Heart of the Community programme, which says a great deal about who we are as a business, as people and of the role we believe we play in the areas where we work.

FF: What do you think are the biggest technical challenges for the industry?

JG: Inevitably, it will be adapting to the changing environmental conditions in the marine environment. The industry has been faced with a number of challenges over the years and has shown an incredible ability to develop infra-

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Investing in Scotland

Left: Scottish Sea Farms managing director Jim Gallagher; the team at Lismore North. Above: Gallagher inspects a ballan wrasse with Darin Bryars at Lismore North

the need for sea lice targeted medicinal bath treatments.

We have seen our health and vet spend swing from being predominantly medicinal treatments to being dominated by non-medicinal treatments – which is great for our fish and great for the environment.

I call this a learning journey because we still have a lot to learn, but we have come a long way in a short period already and are seeing the benefits.

To be clear, there is no one single answer to the sea lice challenge but we believe cleaner fish are a very important, possibly the most important, tool in that battle.

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FF: Are you more confident the industry will meet its growth targets now the Industry Leadership Group (ILG) is up and running?

JG: I believe strongly that the ILG has a fantastic opportunity to address the barriers to growth in the industry. The ILG is made up of leaders of industry, industry value chain, and regulators, and sponsored by senior government ministers so we have senior representation from all key stakeholders, working towards a shared set of strategic priorities.

FF: Have you seen any reason for optimism yet (such as in changing regulator attitudes)?

JG: Some optimism, but really we are at the beginning of this journey. Hopefully, all stakeholders see the importance and the opportunity we have to make a significant contribution to the social, economic and environmental development in Scotland that will bring mutual benefits for all.

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40 years of aquaculture – Scottish Sea Farms

“

As the pace of change increases we have to ensure our workforce is equipped to deal with that

”

Above: Jim Gallagher - the business is focused on continuous improvement

FF: Would you put any limits on the Scottish industry’s size?

JG: I think working together towards a specific vision in a specific time frame is a much more appropriate way of working than speculating. Ultimately, the size of the Scottish industry should only be constrained by the limits of economic, social and environmental sustainability.

FF: Are you confident that the industry here is now being given a higher priority?

JG: Yes, and the ministerial lead coming from Fergus Ewing in the ILG, commitment from all stakeholders, and the industry ambition to invest further in Scotland is testament to the importance of Scottish salmon in the economic development of Scotland.

FF: Is there more government could be doing?

JG: There is always more that we could all be doing. We need a clear signal from government that they want to have the investment and development in Scotland that the industry has the ambition to deliver.

We should have robust regulation with balanced and proportionate regulation of the industry that allows the planning system to deliver in an appropriate timescale the opportunity for development.

We should have enabling regulation as opposed to always trying to find a reason not to do something. We have a truly fantastic product with insatiable demand from customers worldwide, so let’s be in a position to service this demand and create wealth and value for Scotland Plc. FF: Is there more the industry could be doing?

JG: As an industry, we need to do more to promote the overwhelmingly positive story of salmon aquaculture in Scotland, and there are plans to address this through the various industry bodies.

We face criticism from professional and well-funded campaign groups which is at best subjective and at worst simply incorrect. At times we are guilty of spending too much time and energy reacting to this rather than helping the millions of consumers who enjoy our products every day to understand why Scottish salmon is a good choice.

FF: Are your export markets still expanding and have you opened up any new markets recently?

JG: Absolutely; we are very fortunate to see increasing demand from all markets in all regions. We have added new countries in the Middle and Far East in recent months but there is huge potential in markets where we have long standing trading relationships.

FF: Scottish Sea Farms is investing in the future – how are the current expansion plans going?

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JG: We have a £70 million investment programme over three years to develop and grow our business, with a number of new sites and increased consents which are now in production, and have further increases in the pipeline.

The investment to support the future marine growth has been secured, the hatchery is of course a significant part of these plans and is on schedule to support the increased marine capacity as it comes on-line.

FF: And what will be next on the agenda?

JG: Our focus in the business is always on continuous improvement, be in to the details of what makes our business perform at the highest level and to develop our people. We will continue to have these as key objectives and remain flexible to be able to react to situations as and when they occur.

FF: Are you succeeding in attracting high calibre youngsters to the company?

JG: SSF are very proud to have 47 of the 70 Modern Apprentices currently employed in the industry and were the first company within Scotland to win Investor in Young People Gold.

So I think you can see the importance we place on not only attracting but developing young people.

The industry is changing and as the pace of change increases, we have to ensure that our workforce is equipped to deal with that, not only by bringing young people into the business but by developing and sharing the experience of our existing staff.

FF: Is SSF making a difference to the industry overall through your involvement as co-chair of the ILG? JG: I certainly hope and believe so, but ultimately the ILG will need to be judged by the performance against its vision of Scottish aquaculture contributing £3.6 billion or more to the Scottish economy by 2030. FF

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04/10/2017 16:18:30

B I O L O G Y

Congratulations to Fish Farmer on joining the select over forties club

T E C H N O L O G Y By developing technology focused on solving the biological challenges we contribute to the continued development of a sustainable industry

with fish welfare as the most important success criteria. Good fish health is paramount in achieving good results and investing in our technology will help deliver both.

www.akvagroup.com

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04/10/2017 16:16:39

40 years of aquaculture – The Scottish Salmon Company

Passion for provenance Why maintaining close links with heritage is so important

S

COTLAND is famous for its rolling hills and historic castles, its warm hospitality, sense of humour and, of course, the weather.

But it is also renowned for its quality produce and thriving food and drink sector. Scottish provenance has achieved such status where it is now considered the best of the best, with a reputation known and revered all over the world for taste and quality.

Scotland’s food and drink industry has successfully combined its outstanding heritage and deep-rooted traditions with a forward thinking and innovative approach. With a commitment to exceptional standards, quality and provenance, Scotland has positioned itself as a world leader.

Scottish salmon is an international success story, hot on the heels of Scotch whisky. It is Scotland’s and the UK’s biggest food export and a major contributor to the Scottish economy with exports surpassing £346 million in the first half of 2017 alone, a 70 per cent increase year on year.

Directly supporting more than 2,200 jobs - almost eight per cent of the food and drink workforce in Scotland- its significance is unequivocal.

As the leading 100 per cent Scotland based producer of Scottish salmon, the Scottish Salmon Company (SSC) is a crucial part of the industry’s beating heart and has been driving the renewed vision for the country’s aquaculture sector and its commitment to provenance.

Headquartered in Edinburgh, SSC has more than 60 sites along the west coast of Scotland and Hebrides, employing 500 people in remote and rural communities.

Still a relatively young company, having been listed in 2011, the Scottish Salmon Company has built a globally recognised brand. Its international

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“

This strain is descended from fish which have lived in the Hebrides for thousands of years

”

Above: Native Hebridean Salmon

customer base stretches around the world, with over half of its production volumes exported to 26 countries, from North America to the Far East.

SSC’s commitment to provenance underpins everything it does and it is building on this success through an ambitious long-term strategy for sustainable growth based on its values of pride, passion and, crucially, provenance.

With customers around the globe becoming much more aware of where their food comes from, provenance and traceability now go hand in hand with quality. Scotland as a country of origin is considered by many as the sign of a superior, premium product.

Scotland’s heritage and history is the subject of a year of celebration in 2017. However, the Year of Heritage also extends to our food and drink, and for SSC it’s a subject very close to its heart.

Imagine a chain of islands off Scotland’s west coast, standing strong against the Atlantic’s elements with stunning natural beaches of pure white sand and turquoise water. It’s here in the Hebrides that SSC has been focusing its passion and commitment to traceability and provenance.

In 2016, following years of hard work, development

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FLOURISHING IN SCOTLAND ...AND THRIVING OVERSEAS Proud to be Scotland’s standard bearer and Passionate about Scottish aquaculture.

SCOTLAND’S FINEST Sea Loch Fresh Salmon

www.scottishsalmon.com

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40 years of aquaculture – The Scottish Salmon Company

and research, the company introduced its Native Hebridean Salmon to the international market.

Truly unique, as a result of its genetic lineage descending from the fresh cold rivers of North Uist, this strain is descended from fish which have lived in the Hebrides for thousands of years. The company has created a unique broodstock programme resulting in a flagship export product which is born and reared exclusively in its ancestral home.

The appeal of fresh, quality, premium salmon from the pristine waters of the Hebrides is obvious but SSC is now championing the concept of ‘micro-provenance’, where the unique heritage of this strain of salmon is celebrated.

For a young company like SSC, maintaining close links with its heritage is just as important to growing for the future as looking to the new.

The wider food and drink industry has been hugely successful in capitalising on ‘place’ as a vital ingredient in the produce it is selling and SSC is leading this charge in the aquaculture industry.

Native Hebridean Salmon has been received very well since its introduction to the international market last year. It has been shortlisted for a number of high profile industry awards, including the Seafood Global Excellence Awards, Scotland Food and Drink Excellence Awards and the Highlands and Islands Food and Drink Awards.

Not only that, the Federation of Chefs Scotland has given Native Hebridean their stamp of approval, representing a true validation of the quality and origin of this product. Through a significant long-term investment programme, SSC is now growing annual production and expanding its Native Hebridean product range.

Growing international exports is a key strategic priority for SSC and the company attends a number of high profile international trade shows to build on its already strong global relationships.

In August, a delegation, led by chief executive Craig Anderson, attended the prestigious annual Japan Seafood Expo in Tokyo, and was able to engage personally with existing and prospective customers, and showcase the quality of its produce.

A country where SSC has enjoyed a long-term export relationship for more

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than 15 years, Japan has an affinity with Scotland, and its people are incredibly passionate about Scottish produce, with Native Hebridean proving to be ideal for sashimi.

SSC is Label Rouge accredited, a world renowned food quality assurance scheme administered by the French government, which this year celebrated its 25th anniversary. The Label Rouge range is core to SSC’s export offering and the company has recently introduced innovative vacuum packed fillets for key European markets.

To have such a ringing endorsement is a fantastic opportunity for Scotland to showcase its produce; indeed, the company even hosted a delegation from Master Chefs of France to allow them to see the for themselves where Label Rouge salmon begins its journey to the best restaurants in the world.

The Scottish Salmon Company is committed to the local communities in which it operates and where many of its staff live and work. The company is passionate about promoting health and wellbeing, and in 2017 alone supported a number of local groups and events through its community engagement programme.

From grassroots sporting events, to Highland games and high quality theatre, SSC takes great pride in playing an active role in its local communities.

A significant employer throughout the west coast and Hebrides, SSC also provides valuable Modern Apprenticeships to young people across its freshwater and marine sites, with one of its apprentices winning Lantra’s Aquaculture Learner of the Year award in 2016.

Aquaculture in Scotland is becoming an increasingly popular career path, forging a new and engaged generation as the industry enters a new era.

Therein lies the true worth of provenance – not just a marketing tool or a label on a product but a way to drive economic growth, job creation and value in Scotland.

The Scottish Salmon Company is an example of a business that has harnessed the power of provenance to position itself on the global stage, create a thriving export business and deliver on its responsibility to the remote and rural communities in which it operates. FF

Left: Commitment to traceability. Below: Pristine waters

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04/10/2017 16:12:09

40 years of aquaculture – Nets

Squaring the circle Roger Dehany of W&J Knox on keeping pace with increasing pen sizes

W

&J KNOX is even older than Fish Farmer, established in Kilbirnie since 1778, nearly 200 years before the aquaculture industry took root in

Scotland.

But now some 90 per cent of the net maker’s market is in salmon farming and it has recently expanded into making equipment for cleaner fish and, in the past few months, lice skirts too.

Roger Dehany joined the firm from a spell at competitor Boris Nets, and before then was at Golden Sea Produce, later to become Scottish Sea Farms. But his path to fish farming was unusual.

Having worked as a fisherman, and then also nine years with a Dutch marine operation company as a tug master, he took on a role as a salvage master for a job in the Sound of Mull. He applied for an explosives licence but opposition came from the local fish farm at

Loch Aline.

‘I didn’t know what a fish farm was and went across on a small boat and had a look. The site manager for the farm, owned by Golden Sea Produce, ‘exchanged pleasantries’ regarding the opposition to my application for an explosives licence, and he explained they were growing fish in a cage.

‘I thought, all the years I’ve been chasing fish and they actually put the fish in the net instead of having to find them! This is going to be for me! I was totally taken by it.’

That was in 1983. Dehany eventually finished his sea going career in 1984 and applied to Golden Sea Produce for a job. They offered him employment at Loch Spelve on Mull as an ordinary farm employee, and he worked his way up to manager.

For five years he saw, from a farmer’s perspective, the evolution of cage culture, experience that undoubtedly proved invaluable later as a net specialist.

‘When I first went to Golden Sea Produce we grew six tonnes of fish in a hexagonal cage and it took us over two years to produce a crop of 2.5kg fish.

‘The cage was made of steel poles with six buoys to a cage and very

Left: A Knox cage net hanging on a Marine Harvest cage from 1985.

Opposite page: W & J Knox board, from left to right, Roger Dehany, Jim Traynor, Dave Hutchens and Finlay Oman

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Squaring the circle

It wasn’t “trial and

error, we knew what we were doing and it was quite a smooth transition actually small nets. In those days we were looking at fish of a minimum input size of 28g so the mesh size was only 12.7mm, very small. Now the average input size is anywhere between 15 and 18mm.

‘We got our first 12m steel square cages from Viking in Norway in about 1986/87 and we also had Wavemaster 15m cages from Ireland.’

He made the move to the supply industry in 1989, working first for Boris Nets at Fleetwood, when Boris Howard, father of the current managing director, John, was still around. Dehany used to buy his fishing gear from Boris Nets and so was familiar with the company.

‘I thought there was a better future for me in the supply industry.

It was back into nets, which was my old comfort zone because of my fishing experience.

‘John Howard is a very knowledgeable chap and I learnt a lot from him and he learnt a bit from me too!’

Dehany ended up at W&J Knox (then owned by Cosalt plc of Grimsby) in 1994, when the industry was seeing major changes in terms of scale.

‘The first jump was from the six tonne cages to 30 tonnes in a 12m cage over the period of a year; that was a huge leap forward. And then, within a couple of years of that, we were into 15m cages. That was the big transition.

‘The production was beginning to accelerate and the cages kept up with that and the nets consequently got bigger, with heavier twine sizes.

‘Most of the nets - made of knotless nylon - were either made by Boris or Knox, we shared the market between us.’

The introduction of high density polyethylene (HDPE) in the last few years has enabled the cage sizes to grow even further, said Dehany.

‘From the late 80s to about five years ago the cage sizes went up from 15m squares to plastic circles, that was another huge step forward because the sizes just grew from 60m, 70m, 80m, 90m, and now we’re into 120m circumference, in a period of 15 years.’

He said the transition from square to circle pens was relatively straightforward for the net makers.

‘It wasn’t trial and error, we knew what we were doing and it was quite a smooth transition actually. It’s more or less the same technique, except there aren’t any 90 degree corners and the bases of the nets are made in segments. We just went with it.

‘We were involved in the discussions from the beginning. The ideas were a combination of the farmers telling us what they would like to do and we would find the methods to produce the required strengths and weights, and types of netting.

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”

‘We produced what the customer wanted – it was all done on a personal basis and still is. But the internet and emails have made contact a lot quicker, of course.’

Some in the Knox team have been making nets for more than 40 years, including Jim

• Fish Cage Nets – Nylon & HDPE • Predator Solutions • Net Service Plant • Treatment Tarpaulins • Lice Skirts • Supplier of LIFT-UP • Wrasse Hides Congratulations to Fish Farmer Magazine on 40 Years of Aquaculture Service

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40 years of aquaculture – Nets

“

The best thing that’s happened to the industry in the last five years has been the formulation of the Scottish technical standard

”

Above: Steam rising from a batch of sterilised nets.

Right: W&J Knox has developed cleaner fish hides - artificial kelp for wrasse and plastic surfaces for lumpsuckers

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Traynor, the current chairman. In 2004 he and Dehany put together a successful management buyout of the company, and with this came another big shift in net making.

‘In order to keep pace with the demand, and with the latest innovations in materials, we formed an association with an Indian company, Garware Wall Ropes, of Pune.

‘We met the chairman and the managing director at a fishing exhibition in Glasgow in 2004 when we were progressing the management buyout. And as a consequence of that we moved our Raschel knitting machines to Pune, a hell of a big move.

‘They would run them 24 hours a day, seven days a week – because of the labour costs – and initially they sent the material back to us for putting together. We still make some cage nets in Kilbirnie, but we also buy nets manufactured by Garware in nylon and in HDPE. They are such a big outfit, the manpower is unbelievable.’

Outsourcing production is now commonplace, and many Norwegians go to Eastern Europe, said Dehany. But Knox employs the same number of people on the netting side of the business now as it did before the management buyout.

‘The volumes have increased so much – we wouldn’t have been able to keep up if we hadn’t gone with Garware.’

Dehany was a director and general manager of Knox until his retirement, aged 70, from the day to day business last year. But he has taken on a non-executive role in the company, goes in for board meetings once a month – ‘and I’m wheeled out to talk to people!’

‘The best thing that’s happened to the industry in the last five years has been the formulation of the industry technical standard. To me that’s the culmination of my life’s work, to see a technical standard that covers the industry.’

He was involved in helping to devise the standard, bringing his exper-

tise in netting, after receiving a call from Steve Bracken, Marine Harvest’s business support manager, who chaired the Scottish government’s Containment Working Group.

‘He was putting a team together to form a committee. The embryonic period was about three years before it got going. We met regularly with Marine Scotland and formulated it. It is very thorough and detailed.

‘We needed a Scottish standard, not a Norwegian one, because of the geography of our country. And that’s what we produced and it’s a working document. I’m not saying the whole of the industry went along with it in the first instance but I think they appreciated what we were trying to do.

‘The industry has been sniped at by so many groups and individuals who don’t like it or don’t understand what a benefit to Scotland fish farming is. To have employment in the Highlands and islands is essential. And also the downstream jobs, like W&J Knox in Kilbirnie, rely on this industry.’

Dehany has nothing but confidence in the sector’s future: ‘Once they get on top of the issues they have with lice…nothing will stop it. It will grow and it will grow successfully, I’m sure of that.’

He is equally optimistic about his own people: ‘The Knox team is a great team going forward…the business is in excellent hands.’ FF

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04/10/2017 16:11:16

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Mar ‘17

40 years of aquaculture – Suppliers

Peaks and

troughs

How one small business moulded equipment to meet young industry’s demands

T

HE highs and lows of the emerging aquaculture industry in Scotland are nowhere better reflected than in the fortunes of the smaller suppliers.

One of these was Bob Hyde, whose son Chris is commercial director of Otaq, one of today’s pioneers of acoustic deterrent systems.

Hyde snr was working in a shop fitting company, Heggie and Aitchison, in Edinburgh in the early 1970s, when he first heard about the new fish farming industry. His firm had just opened a glass fibre moulding division and one of its first customers was Sandy Shorthouse at Howietoun fishery, now part of Stirling University.

‘They had been to someone else in Edinburgh with a hatching trough made of wood and they wanted to make it out of plastic,’ said Hyde.

‘The other company passed them on to us and we designed a plastic hatching trough.

That was the beginning of my involvement in aquaculture – up to that time I vaguely knew that people farmed fish but not much more.

There was a trout hatchery out at Penicuik but that was about it.

‘Howietoun was the first serious fish farm, growing brown and rainbow trout in 1873. Sir James Maitland was the first pioneer, getting

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old horses, slaughtering them and then mincing them up to feed the fish.’

Hyde worked closely with Allan Crow who, he said, was ‘the practical end of it, although we all got involved, it was very much hands on in those days’.

The fish farming work was very small to begin with but Hyde and Crow had moved out to the old Scots Porridge Oats mill at Granton, and became a subsidiary called Hydec Plastics.

‘When Heggie and Aitchison got into financial trouble we were on the dole,’ said Hyde, ‘but fish farming was beginning to take off so we spoke to the Bank of Scotland and they gave us facilities to start up on our own.’

They opened a 2,000 sq ft unit at Loanhead – ‘hardly large but it gave us a start’ - and traded under the name C and H Plastics.

‘That was the real beginning. We spirited away a lot of the moulds from the wreckage of Hydec and started again. We made a lot of new moulds and designed new things.

‘From troughs to bigger troughs and then 6ft square tanks and 12ft tanks, we were more fish farming than anything else by then and eventually it became about 90 per cent of what we did.’

Left: C and H Plastics exhibiting at the Scottish aquaculture show. Opposite page: Howietoun farm, an early customer

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04/10/2017 16:06:57

Peaks and troughs They were very much hatchery orientated and also made insulated transport tanks and a grading table – ‘I’m not sure where that one came from,’ said Hyde, but what they made was what the industry needed and they would develop products in consultation.

‘It all started off that way, it was all in consultation with Howietoun and Sandy Shorthouse and people that he knew. That was how the first hatching trough evolved.

‘The other thing we did at that time was an egg grid that was in the hatching trough. It was a wooden frame with glass tubes or rods in it and of course they broke all the time, a real pain. So we made a plastic version of that to go into the hatching trough and you could buy the whole thing – and just add water and eggs!

‘It made life a lot easier for them. And then people would say, we like that but can you make one that’s longer, there was a lot of that kind of thing, people wanting minor variations on a theme.’

Hyde said they could make whatever was asked of them, given the versatility of the GRP moulding, and he spent a lot of time going to the fish farms to see customers.

‘We decided at an early stage that we would try as far as possible to deliver stuff ourselves to the fish farms. That way you almost got them to pay for you going to see them – that seemed like a jolly good idea.

‘We had a trailer to begin with and then we bought a lorry eventually and then bought a bigger lorry. It was my job to trundle around the fish farms, mainly to the hatcheries.’

Hyde saw the industry developing at first hand – ‘it was amazing times’.

‘The type of people who ran fish farms changed completely from when it was people who’d retired from the Army with their pension and were looking for something to do and thought they could grow a few fish.’

Hyde and Crow had just got the keys to a new building and had spent ‘a great deal of money we didn’t have’, when the fish farming industry started to go down.

“

We went from 90 per cent fish farming to nought per cent

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‘We had grown and grown in Loanhead, we had one, then two, then three units. We had customers all over the industry – we were certainly one of the main suppliers of tanks and so on to the farmers in Scotland.

‘Then, from about 1988, it started to swing the other way and we went from 90 per cent fish farming to nought per cent. That was when the price dropped and all hell broke loose and when that happened people didn’t go out and buy new things, they just tied another knot in the net and kept going as best they could.

‘We made one or two bad decisions about

At Tom Morrow Tarpaulins we supply the oil and gas sector with a wide high quality covers to help and protect Withrange over 30of years experience in the aquaculture industry we the takevarious pride items machinery and within the industry in ourof ability to supply theproducts highest quality products.

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40 years of aquaculture – Suppliers

Above: Supplying fish farms on the west coast of Scotland

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how to employ ourselves in other ways.

We tried to go into the fishing industry and became agents for a company that made a jig fishing machine (like a longline with lots of hooks on it).

‘That was about as stupid a thing as you could possibly do looking back on it, very much akin to not just shooting yourself in one foot but we actually took aim at the other one.

‘It was ecologically sound as you didn’t take out the young fish, as trawling does, and used a lot by Scandinavians, used by almost everyone in fact except the British.

‘We tried to introduce it here but didn’t realise that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks, particularly fishermen. They’re very good at what they do but don’t try and persuade them to do it in a different way.’

Hyde said the wolf was too big to keep from the door but Crow continued manufacturing fish farming equipment to a limited extent and from 1991 to 2002 they had a company called C and H Aquaculture in Musselburgh.

‘I was selling the stuff Allan was making in the fish farming industry - tanks and troughs.

And I started making feeders and things, diversifying a bit, until I decided enough was enough.’

Hyde had also had agencies, such as Dansk

Ørredfode, the company that became BioMar, selling fish farming equipment, and he went off on his own – ‘making a crumb here and there. I’ll have you in tears in a minute!’

He is impressed by what his son now does at Otaq and remembers the evolution of seal scarers, developed by the fisheries lab in Aberdeen.

‘They didn’t look like they do now but that’s where the idea came from - you would make a noise like the orca killer whale, which is no friend of a seal, and that’s how it evolved. It’s moved on but the principle is the same.

‘They weren’t nearly as sophisticated as they are now. Ours were electronics in a tin can, or stainless steel, but it didn’t keep the water out.

You used to open them and it was like a tin of soup, electronic soup, absolutely horrifying! The seals were just going around laughing.

‘We were beginning to sell all that and what happened then was the animal protection lobby latched on to the seal scarers, which make quite a loud noise, and didn’t approve of them, they said it was damaging the seals’ hearing and upsetting other marine mammals. Everybody stopped using them just as we were getting the hang of them.’

Hyde still keeps his hand in, trading under his own name and maintaining feeders for a hatchery on Loch Fyne.

He says it’s incredible how the industry has changed, but there is not much place for small companies now – ‘it’s much more difficult for them to deal with Marine Harvest and so on’.

‘It’s a young industry and the people are in touch with the real world, out there in the thick of it.

‘I just thoroughly enjoyed it, it was so much better than dealing with the big bad industrial world and shop fitting, not to say it didn’t have its downsides from time to time. I look back at my somewhat chequered history but I’m still here.’ FF

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Congratulations to Fish Farmer Magazine on their 40th Anniversary

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40 years of aquaculture – Gael Force Group

Blowing a Gael Gael Force Group, growing with aquaculture

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t would be fair to say that parallels can be drawn between the growth of Scottish aquaculture and the evolution of Gael Force Group in recent years. As the industry has grown, and the needs and challenges of fish farmers have advanced significantly, the team at Gael Force has had its collective ear continuously on the ground, developing its products and services in response to what farm operators are saying, and always with the focus of ensuring that farmers feel enabled to give as much of their attention to fish welfare and husbandry as possible.

Today, the company is the largest Scottish SME manufacturing and supplying equipment, technology and services to the Scottish aquaculture industry, with staff numbers edging increasingly close to 200 – over 50 of those joining Gael Force in 2017 alone. And while Gael Force’s burgeoning

success can be attributed to a highly accomplished and committed team led

by Stewart Graham, and the growing popularity of its dependable, trusted equipment and services, that success is also an indication of how far the Scottish aquaculture industry has progressed in recent years, with a keen desire across sectors to grow together, as documented in Vision 2030 and supported by the Industry Leadership Group, which Graham co-chairs.

Developing alongside fish farmers The range of equipment, technology and services that Gael Force Group has brought, and continues to bring, to fish farming is in response to feedback from farm operators on how Gael Force can support them in achieving improvements to their businesses.

Take the company’s most recent development, for example, SeaFeed Offshore Feeding System, which has been designed to ensure accuracy and reliability in feeding, but also has a unique safety feature, so when the selector cover is opened the rotation of the selector will cease, thus helping to prevent operator safety problems during access.

The bespoke SeaFeed software, which is developed in-house, allows each

Left: Gael Force carries out design work in-house. Opposite page top: The SeaQure Hold – a component of the SeaQure Moor System.

Inset: The SeaQure Link is submerged during deployment. Opposite page below: The vision for Scottish aquaculture as set out by industry leaders

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Blowing a Gael

farm to manage the way they feed and in a way that suits them, the fish and the environment they grow their fish in, rather than having to feed their fish within the constraints of a system.

The group’s range of Scottish manufactured in-pen technology, which includes cameras, lights and seal deterrents, supported by data logging software, is becoming increasingly visible across farms. The SeaSight 410 underwater camera with 360 degree pan and tilt function comes with a lens brush cleaner, ensuring superb picture clarity which means optimum pellet and fish condition identification – a key requirement for fish farmers.

The adoption of Gael Force SeaLight has been an illuminating experience for Scottish Sea Farms in Shetland.

SSF engineering manager Keith Fraser, said: ‘It delivers a fantastic reduction in power consumption… helps to reduce our environmental impact and delivers a large fuel saving, that along with 100 per cent product reliability.’

Gael Force’s consumables supply service, now approaching its tenth year in operation, has enabled Marine Harvest and, most recently the Scottish Salmon Company, to source all its dayto-day goods such as PPE, cleaning supplies, and

tools, from a one-stop shop via an online ordering system and dedicated supply chain team. The benefit of this is that fish farm operators are able to consolidate purchasing in a single contract which allows them to standardise product and make very significant direct cost savings, and perhaps even larger indirect savings by leaving managers and staff free to focus more time on the important job of fish husbandry and less time on time time-consuming product sourcing and purchasing.

Trusted partner A testament of the trust that Gael Force has earned in the industry was evident in August this year when Marine Harvest Scotland confirmed an order for Gael Force to build and supply a series of SeaMate 400T concrete feed barges, complete with the SeaFeed Feeding System. This was Gael Force’s biggest single order to date and one which will see a doubling of capacity at its Inverness based manufacturing facility; a move which will assist in accommodating an increased programme of barge builds over the coming

Gael Force is committed to “ growing with all its partners in the aquaculture industry in the years ahead

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40 years of aquaculture – Gael Force Group

two years that also includes barge build capacity for other Scottish salmon producers.

The company’s moorings capabilities and capacity continue to go from strength to strength - founded on a quality management system which helps clients to ensure best practice and minimise containment risk.

Gael Force’s commitment to the industry to deliver fish cage and feed barge moorings which are fully compliant with the Scottish Technical Standard is behind the continued success of SeaQure Moor – an end-to-end system with combines innovative components to protect farm investment.

Trust across the industry in the SeaQure Moor system is evident as demand continues to grow, with deployment to multiple sites now occurring on a monthly basis.

supporting social, economic and environmentally sustainable growth in and from aquaculture.

What does the future hold?

As the industry grows, Gael Force Group continues to head down a track which should eventually see it offer the widest complementary end-to-end range of equipment, technology and services to the aquaculture market. Its recent recruitment of an in-house software development team gives the company the added capability to develop existing and new software as technology advances and plays and ever increasing important part in day-to-day farm management.

Of course, it’s not just the home patch where aquaculture has been a great success. Overseas, other countries are opening their eyes to the sustainability of fish farming and the important role it plays in our global future. This undoubtedly offers Gael Force the opportunity to take its equipment and technology to international markets, a prospect that will soon become reality as the group plans for expansion into new targeted overseas markets.

One thing is certain about the future: Gael Force is committed to listening to and growing with all its partners in the aquaculture industry in the years Leading by example ahead, while proudly serving its many satisfied current and future customers.

As part of Gael Force’s commitment to the inYou can read more about the company at www.gaelforcegroup.co.uk FF dustry, the group’s founder and managing director, Stewart Graham, was a driving force behind the Scottish Aquaculture Growth Strategy to 2030 and is now co-chair of the Scottish Aquaculture Industry Leadership Group. His resolve to gain support for the industry from the Scottish government, as well as all stakeholder support for its strategy, has helped place Scottish aquaculture on a focused path towards growth by 2030.

That involvement in the ILG, cross-sector cooperation and open communication, allows Gael Force and others to support one another to innovate in areas affecting the industry, and maintain the focus on the end goal of doubling the value of aquaculture production in Scotland by 2030 – thus

Above: First class clarity is ensured with the SeaSight Underwater Camera. Below: Gael Force’s SeaMate 400T at Marine Harvest Muck.

Photo: Arthur Campbell

From everyone at Gael Force Group, a huge congratulations to Fish Farmer magazine, playing their part in keeping the Scottish aquaculture industry connected and informed for 40 years. Here’s to many more successful years ahead.

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40 years of aquaculture – Dyneema

Net gains

Dyneema offers a reliable netting choice

A

S Fish Farmer celebrates its 40th anniversary we take a look at a company that is about to achieve half of that milestone.

DSM Dyneema has been involved in the aquaculture industry for almost 20 years now and during that time has gained lots of experience in determining the needs and criteria that make a good net.

The company says that the answer is definitely not a ‘one size fits all’ solution and over the years it has been involved with its customers in jointly developing many engineered designs.

Due to the vast experience of its customers in this field and the build knowledge DSM Dyneema has gained, it has been able to develop its fibres to fit the need of the aquaculture industry. Its track record has proved that netting made with Dyneema is strong, bite resistant and light and therefore easy to handle and safer in use. First and foremost, though, is the product’s reliability.

Particularly in the Mediterranean, nets made with Dyneema are now in great use and have become the industry standard for reliable performance.

Over the years, nets with Dyneema have become the preferred choice of many of the large fish farmers in Turkey, Spain, North Africa and many other areas of the region due to the proven reliability. They are used in the region mainly for farming sea bream and sea bass and have, from a technical point of view, demonstrated their superior per-

Above Dyneema nets on location

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formance in use.

Fish Farmer over the years has caught up with some of DSM Dyneema’s large client base and they were more than happy to deliver positive feeback on the efficacy of the Dyneema product.

One of Dyneema’s clients, Sinan Toplu of Agromey in Turkey, summed up the advantages of using netting with Dyneema in his operations: • It offers excellent protection against the biting behaviour of sea bream; • It has superior breaking strength compared to other nets; • It has one to three times the weight advantage compared to other nets; • Especially for bigger cages, the lightweight and natural buoyancy leads to safer operation, particularly once subject to anti-fouling; • Thinner fibre makes it harder for anti-fouling organisms to hold on to the nets.

• Low water absorption and lower surface

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Net gains

area decreases anti-fouling material costs.

• It has operational ease (repairing and so on) at regular underwater checks; • Dyneema has longer service life.

These and more site specific advantages are confirmed by other industry leaders. Hakan Adamcil of Kilic said: ‘A decade ago Kilic decided to switch from nylon netting to netting with Dyneema and we have been working with these nets ever since.

‘Netting with Dyneema has proved its performance as a reliable netting solution in Kilic’s operations and has added to the operational performance and current market position that the company has gained.’

In Norway, developments in innovative offshore farming concepts and ‘green licences’ set high standards and require netting materials that can live up to these environmental challenges and performance requirements.

In early 2016, for example, netting and ropes with Dyneema became the material of choice for Salmar’s new ocean farming project, Ocean

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“

Products made with Dyneema actually deliver the lowest carbon footprint for the performance specified Farm 1. This required equipment that could withstand the harsh conditions off the Norwegian coast.

Dyneema’s partner, Morenot, was granted the contract and used the product to create the world’s strongest and most advanced net for this project. For the ropes, DSM Dyneema’s innovative extremely low creep fibre DM20 was used to guarantee ultimate performance and reliability.

Bente Lund Jacobsen, CEO of Morenot Aquaculture, said: ‘We use the world’s strongest fibre Dyneema from DSM to develop nets that can handle the conditions offshore and use the most robust rope and netting technology that

”

exists today in this project.’

Recently, also in Norway, the first Dyneema nets for the new ‘green licence’ sites have been sold. A requirement at these sites is for high quality and increased netting performance and this fits perfectly with the Dyneema standards. Current clients Morenot, Egersund Net and Hvalpsund Net are all fully dedicated to support these new developments.

Hvalpsund, which is based in Jutland, has signed an agreement with Cermaq Norway for the delivery of 15 x 160m floating collars and new combined nets this year. Altogether, Hvalpsund will deliver 15 plastic rings and 15

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40 years of aquaculture – Dyneema

Clockwise from top left: Ocean Farm 1; nets at Andromeda in Greece; Dyneema nets at Cooke Aquaculture

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nets made with Dyneema, according to sales manager Ryan Poulsen.

One of the interesting facets of the DSM Dyneema business model is that it is committed to a sustainable future.

This commitment is clearly demonstrated by the sheer number of fish farming projects in which the company is actively involved around the globe and the ongoing success of these projects.

There is no doubt that products made with Dyneema deliver the lowest carbon footprint for the performance specified, from ‘cradle-tograve’.

With Dyneema, clients are choosing the material with the greenest strength, delivering the lowest carbon footprint per unit of strength.

Three factors combine to make Dyneema ‘the greenest strength’: firstly, the continuous improvement in manufacturing; secondly, ongoing research and development to further improve the unique properties of the fibre; and thirdly, industry partnerships to explore a

contribution to a circular economy.

Dyneema said this means there is no need to compromise between high performance and sustainability either now, or in the future.

To support this ‘greenest strength’ approach, an eco footprint study has been performed comparing netting made with nylon to netting made with Dyneema. The main conclusions from the report were: • Dyneema outperforms nylon cages, both in salmon and sea bream cages (more than 65 per cent less netting related carbon emissions); • There is less anti-fouling usage for Dyneema, leading to reduced metal depletion of more than 50 per cent.

Working with net cages made from Dyneema offers advantages to both people and planet, with easier and safer handling of these lightweight nets and the lowest carbon footprint, with better escape prevention and lower anti-fouling use. This all adds up to better profits.

Dyneema is proud of what it has achieved so far. The company’s current successes are the result of many years’ involvement and understanding of the challenges facing the industry.

It is fully dedicated to the aquaculture industry and its innovations will provide further opportunities for future aquaculture developments, such as offshore farming.

Dyneema looks forward to featuring in its own 40th anniversary celebrations in Fish Farmer in 20 years’ time!

In the meantime, you can find out more about DSM Dyneema by visiting dsm.com/products/dyneema. FF

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A truly sustainable operation Aquaculture nets made with DyneemaÂŽ keep fish in - and predators out. Combined with easier and safer handling, and lower maintenance costs, nets made with DyneemaÂŽ support more sustainable fishing techniques that optimize production while being better for the environment.

For more information: www.dyneema.com

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40 years of aquaculture – Mørenot

Truly, madly,

deep-sea

Offshore farm combines best of Norwegian technology

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F the success of a project can be gauged by the amount of enquiries that it generates, then Mørenot Aquaculture can be sure that it is on to a winner as one of the main partners in Ocean Farm 1, which starts production this autumn. The leading Norwegian net provider was hand-picked to design the net system for the groundbreaking construction, which will be the world’s first large scale deep-sea fish farm.

Mørenot Aquaculture CEO Bent Lund Jacobsen said that the phone lines had ‘truly gone mad’ since they agreed to get involved in fish farmer Salmar’s concept.

‘The phone has really not stopped ringing since we got involved in this innovative offshore farming project.

‘Every week we receive phone calls from curious companies and government agencies from various countries.

‘To be part of creating the world’s largest sea farm is incredible. We are very, very excited.’

the Norwegian fish farming industry with the offshore oil and gas sector,’ said Lund Jacobsen.

‘The submerged facility is an anchored fixed structure, floating steady in the exposed ocean and is suitable for water depths of 100 to 300m.

Here, the aqua biological conditions are ideal for aquaculture on the fish’s own terms.’

Hardwearing nets The rope and net technology is based on Mørenot’s net concept, Stromnot. The company has used similar technology in traditional fish farms and in offshore and seismic contexts.

Mørenot uses durable Dyneema fibres in both the ropes and nets. A polymer based coating protects the fibres, which creates a hard, smooth surface that is easy to clean and also ensures good water flow.

Through extensive testing, the ropes and nets have been exposed to intensive brushing and flushing, without noticeable abrasion or damage.

A new era Ocean Farm 1 is a full-scale pilot facility for testing, learning, research and development. The construction was built by Wuchang Shipbuilding Industry Group, a subsidiary of the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation. It arrived at its location in Frohavet in the Norwegian county of Sor-Trondelag in September.

Mørenot was brought in especially to design and develop all the hull outfitting, nets and moveable bulkhead arrangements.

‘The design combines the best of existing technology and solutions from

Left and opposite page: Images from Ocean Farm 1

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Norway taking the lead The farm will be equipped for research and development activities, with a particular focus on biological conditions and fish welfare.

The aim is to reduce environmental footprints, improve fish welfare and answer acreage challenges.

The knowledge and new solutions obtained from the project could represent a new era in sustainable seafood production and are potentially adaptable worldwide.

Lund Jacobsen said Norway is now far ahead of other producing countries, thanks to the support of the Norwegian authorities and the aquaculture industry, which is implementing a number of new ideas, both within salmon farming and in other types of aquaculture.

‘Norway is taking the lead in fish farming, as we have also done in the oil, gas and maritime industries’, she concludes.

For more information, visit: www.morenot. com FF

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Truly, madly, deep-sea

The phone has not stopped “ ringing since we got involved in this innovative offshore farming project ”

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HAVNEVIK

A MØRENOT AQUACULTURE COMPANY

3D-ILLUSTRASJON: GLOBAL MARITIME

NET SERVICES SHETLAND LTD

«Supplier of groundbreaking net technology in OF1»

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Photo

GALLERY

40 years of aquaculture

40 years of Photography

Above: From farm sites to shows, Fish Farmer has recorded the development of the industry. The current team (top left) of Dave Edler, Jenny Hjul, William Dowds and Scott Binnie (not pictured) as seen at Aquaculture UK in Aviemore in 2016. Picture: Angus Blackburn

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40 years of aquaculture – Inverlussa

BY DAVE EDLER

Ocean’s

eleven

Two new ships take Inverlussa’s fleet into double figures

I

T has been a busy year for Mull based Inverlussa Marine Services, as the company has just taken delivery of its second new vessel in the space of five months. The Gina Mary arrived in May of this year and she has now been joined by new arrival the Kiera Fiona, from Norway’s Havyard.

With the addition of these two vessels, both designed by Macduff Ship Design in Aberdeenshire and built by Havyard Ship Technology in Norway, the number in the Inverlussa Marine Services fleet has risen to 11.

Following years of experience operating in the sector, each ship was uniquely designed for the aquaculture market with a view to meeting the ever changing technology within the market and anticipating future demand.

Both the new arrivals will be operating on contracts for Marine Harvest Scotland, supporting the 49 sites owned and worked by the world’s largest producer of farmed salmon. Their main duties will be to assist with fish treatments and general work site activities. Ben Wilson, Inverlussa’s manag-

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crew “loveTheworking on such a fabulous ship

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ing director, said: ‘When we made the significant investment in these ships, we had no contracts for them to fulfil.

‘However, it was an important time for us to invest in a growing sector and shows our confidence in fish farming in Scotland. We are delighted to be working with Marine Harvest.

‘Fish farming continues to be a success story in Scotland but there are a number of challenges in modern fish farming.

‘As providers of services in this sector, we need to keep pushing ahead, otherwise we will be left behind.

‘Being a family business, we have always been focused heavily in reinvesting, whether that be in our crew or the vessels. These two new ships will enable us to steer through any future changes and developments in this sector.’

This is the first time that Inverlussa has used ship builders from outside Scotland to build its vessels.

‘We would normally use Scottish ship designers and builders, but when we spoke to them last year they were so busy that they couldn’t meet our timescales,’ said Wilson.

‘This afforded us the opportunity to buy from the world renowned shipbuilders Havyard in Norway, using the designs by Macduff in Aberdeenshire, and we are delighted with the results.

‘The Gina Mary has already been active during the summer months and the crew love working on such a fabulous ship. We are now looking forward to getting the Kiera Fiona into operation.’

Inverlussa Marine Services has continued to grow and secure contracts, most recently in the aquaculture and renewables sectors. The company has vast experience within the marine industry and originally started from a fishing and shellfish

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Ocean’s Eleven

Clockwise from above: On sea trials at Havyard, Leirvik; lounge area; wheelhouse; bollard pull testing

farming background on the west coast of Scotland, before diversifying into marine services with the delivery of its first vessel in 2006.

Since then the company has carried out a number of contracts, including the provision of vessels for inter-island vehicle ferry contracts, survey work for Sound of Islay tidal array and Islay offshore windfarm, towage contracts from Norway and around the UK, and many other contracts where the company works closely with customers to provide a safe and cost-effective service.In the past four years Inverlussa has more than doubled its workforce and boasts almost 70 staff. The family firm now plans to further its growth within the aquaculture sector. FF

The technical specifications for the two new vessels delivered this year are as follows: GINA MARY 25m length x 9.7m beam Deadweight – 390 ton Deckload – 150 ton Total engine power – 1200 hp Crane – 1 x 100 t/m & 1 x 48 t/m

KIERA FIONA 25.5m length x 9.7 m beam Deadweight – 400 ton Deckload – 182 ton Total engine power – 1200 hp Crane – 1 x 100 t/m & 1 x 48 t/m For more information, visit www.inverlussa.com.

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40 years of aquaculture – Feed

BY SARAH COOK

Recipe for success Scotland specialised in becoming more customer focused

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ERHAPS one of the less considered factors contributing to the success of Scottish aquaculture is the feed industry.

Fish Farmer reported as far back as 1989, in a special feed feature: ‘As margins tighten, feed costs assume ever more importance. If you know what your fish are eating – and what they may be wasting – you are a long step closer to surviving in a tight market situation than the ‘chuck it and chance it’ farmer.’

From the very early days, when Marine Harvest launched its Fulmar trout feeds in 1978 – a year that saw just 8,000 tonnes of manufactured feed sold to the UK market – to the first ever ‘fish only’ feed mill (Ewos-Baker’s plant just off the M8, built in 1985), to the present day, dominated as it is by just a handful of players, the pace of change in the feed sector has grown in tandem with the salmon industry.

One of biggest names in the business is BioMar, which first established a UK subsidiary in 1991, initially supplied by BioMar Denmark with feed shipped by containers to Grangemouth and transhipped out to the farms by lorry. This culminated with the opening of BioMar’s own feed manufacturing plant in 1995.

Based on the docks in Grangemouth, this new facility sprung from the development of an innovative feed regime. Offering feed

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with a high oil content of 28 per cent, it persuaded Marine Harvest to offer the first contract to BioMar UK. The subsequent history of BioMar matches that of the salmon industry for growth and transformation.

One of the reasons the Scottish salmon sector succeeded, said BioMar UK managing director Paddy Campbell, was its ability to realise early on that it would be unable to compete with Norway on a pure production costs basis, so it needed to differentiate itself and become more customer focused.

The feed industry had to mirror this in its own development. There is nothing that illustrates this more than the creation of Loch Muir salmon for Marks and Spencer, a salmon reared on a unique diet offering an individual nutritional make up specifically for one supermarket.

The ability to develop and work with customers is key for all of the salmon feed companies and investment in research and development has been critical. At the start, BioMar provided basic feeds but, with improved R&D, has worked with the salmon farmers to deliver new feeds offering added value products that help stimulate not only better growth but help protect against disease and promote fish health.

This is one of the feed industry’s strengths - an ability to forge relationships with key companies, to help develop and improve them.

More recently, the development of more nutrient dense feeds and the resultant reduction in the amount of feed needed to produce a kilo of salmon, and the reduction in the production costs, has helped to lower the price of salmon for the end consumer.

As could be expected, there has been a transformation in the raw materials used from the early days, which consisted typically of high levels of marine ingredients with wheat as a binder.

Material being delivered in big bags and physically ripped and tipped may have been achievable in the days of lower production tonnage, but over the years, as tonnage has increased and more demands have been placed on diets, the raw material portfolio has been transformed.

The move towards sustainable feeds - away from a reliance on marine ingredients, and using more plant based raw materials – alongside the introduction of MSC certified raw materials, notably krill, has helped revolutionise the diets offered to customers.

The flexibility to change and adapt has remained a key focus for BioMar and over the years the company has offered organic and traditional feeds, increasing diversity in the market place.

The production environment within BioMar has also seen vast changes over the years and demonstrates the level of growth within the industry. Initially built to produce a capacity of 30,000 tonnes a year, this year the feed mill will reach a level of nearly 120,000 tonnes.

Remarkably, the factory footprint has remained the same, consistently improving machinery, with innovative production methods upping throughputs from five tonnes per hour to an average of 20 tonnes per hour. This has ensured that the increasing demands on production have

Marine “Harvest’s

new feed mill will no doubt change the picture in the Scottish market

”

Left: BioMar’s Scottish plant is well sited at Grangemouth with access by water as well as road. Picture from 1995. Opposite: BioMar, a big feature on the Scottish landscape

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Recipe for success

been maintained and met.

One of the key contributing factors to BioMar’s success is the retention of staff. Many employees have been with the group since day one and offer a unique insight into some of the changes BioMar has experienced over its 22-year-history in Scotland.

The customer portfolio has changed greatly over the years, from a diverse list, through a period of consolidation to a few key buyers. For the industry, this has offered many benefits through greater investment and innovation on site, and also for BioMar, which has been able to concentrate and strengthen partnerships.

The logistics of transporting feed have also changed over the last 22 years, from loading straight from the factory to ship. New complex customer focused logistic solutions are required to minimise storage costs and deliver to the farms when they require feed.

BioMar has managed to meet these logistical challenges and adapted the use of technology to ensure material arrives on site when needed.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the business BioMar has developed with Tasmania. While it is challenging enough getting material to Orkney and Shetland, the company has really pushed itself to the limits by creating an export business to Australia through containerisation.

So what of the future? BioMar’s success in Tasmania has resulted in the group’s commitment to build a plant there and further its exploration of the Australasian markets.

Closer to home, Marine Harvest’s new feed mill on the Isle of Skye will no doubt change the picture in the Scottish feed market.

One thing is for sure, through innovation, partnerships and continued flexibility, BioMar and the Scottish feed sector will continue to be the backbone of the salmon industry over the next 40 years, offering high quality feed to help grow high quality salmon so that more and more people can enjoy what was traditionally a premium product at an achievable price.

Sarah Cook is purchasing and inbound logistics manager at bioMar. Bio-

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Congratulations Fish Farmer to Fish Farmer Magazine on their 40th Anniversary

www.BioMar.com

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40 years of aquaculture – Feed

Forever

young Over 100 years of innovative solutions

W

HILE Skretting has been in the feed business for more than 100 years, its ever-expanding portfolio of innovative solutions and eagerness to sustainably progress production have never been more essential to the aquaculture economy than today.

The Skretting story began way back in 1899; a family business, established in Stavanger, Norway, selling feed and equipment to the agriculture industry. It would actually be a further 61 years before the company conducted its very first aquaculture trial – on rainbow trout raised in wooden cages. But it was that humble beginning in the middle of the 20th century, and the feed supply heritage that preceded it, that set the company off on its remarkable journey towards the development of scores of groundbreaking fish and shrimp farming products and innovations that followed.

The very first edition of Fish Farmer magazine in November 1977 contained an advert for Skretting’s TESS feeds, the name chosen by Skretting for the industry’s first pelleted feed when it was first launched in 1963. In 1977 a feed was considered to be ‘high energy’ when it contained more than 15 per cent fat and grow-out cycles were between 24 to 28 months.

While Skretting’s initial aquaculture undertakings were successful, it has been the last four decades – those years of industry progress documented by Fish Farmer magazine – that have seen such a remarkable development in all aspects of aquaculture feed and production technology, a period that has also defined Skretting globally. Indeed, it was the commencement of commercial extruded

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feeds production in 1983, together with the formation of the Skretting Aquaculture Research Centre (ARC) in 1989, followed by its first foray into the until-then unchartered area of health-enhancing feeds at the start of the 1990s, that provided the gateway for much of its accomplishments.

At the same time, of course, the group has been steadily growing its footprint into many new geographies and species – all with very explicit requirements and all offering further opportunities for growth and progress.

Raw material flexibility Skretting ARC, the engine that drives Skretting’s feed and production innovations, was set up as a separate operating company with a remit that remains the same today: to support all companies in the group by providing expertise and world class R&D in fish nutrition, health and feed production. Since it was established, Skretting ARC has built up an international team of scientists and delivered innovation after innovation to support aquaculture’s progression; solutions that range from GEMMA Micro, a specifically formulated diet that facilitates the early weaning of marine fish larvae, to the new Prime and Express diets that utilise the full growth potential of salmon to enable farmers to significantly reduce their production time or, alternatively, ramp up the harvest weight of their fish.

Probably the biggest jewel in the crown, though, is the groundbreaking MicroBalance concept that has been enabling fish farmers to use diets containing vastly reduced levels of fishmeal and fish oil without detracting from feed performance, fish welfare or end product quality.

The crucial breakthrough that lead to this particular technology came when Skretting ARC researchers identified alternative sources to the essential micronutrients found in fishmeal. The discovery introduced a new way of thinking and enabled Skretting to choose from a wider range of raw materials to ensure more economic and sustainable feeds for aquaculture.

Many innovations have resulted from MicroBalance. For example, in 2016, Skretting delivered MicroBalance FLX – the world’s first commercial salmon feeds to be completely free of fishmeal or other marine proteins. Aligned with Skretting’s very latest technological breakthrough – N3 – a salmonid diet that uses a new marine algae oil

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Forever young

capable of providing a viable and sustainable alternative to the finite supply of fish oil, the availability of traditional fish feed raw materials are no longer an obstacle to the expansion of the global aquaculture industry.

Now, both fishmeal and fish oil are just like any other raw material; they are interchangeable and can be formulated into feeds at varying levels depending on specific nutrient requirements, customer needs and fluctuating prices and availability.

very “firstTheedition

of Fish Farmer in November 1977 contained an advert for Skretting’s TESS feeds

�

Championing health Skretting became the first fish feed company in the world 25 years ago to provide the aquaculture industry with a diet focused on supporting fish health.

This advance followed its investigations into whether solutions that prevent challenges in salmonid farming systems could provide viable alternatives to traditional medicine based treatments. Crucially, it was at that time that Skretting first began to learn that the use of specific natural substances could result in stronger, more robust animals that were better equipped to deal with diseases.

Skretting had seen that salmon were being exposed to an increasing number of challenges during production, and the group felt that if it could modulate the immune defences before the main risk period, then much needed support could be provided to those fish. Early trials gave some good results; good enough that the decision was taken to introduce a new anti-stress product to the market and by 1996/97 this first health diet had been rolled out worldwide.

In 2004, due to the increasing impact disease and the reduction in the availability and efficacy of chemotherapeutant treatment options was having on the industry, the decision was taken within the Skretting ARC to establish a health department to see what could be achieved in terms of strengthening preventative health through feeding and diets.

This increased investment and capacity enabled a number of projects to get underway, and three years later, the industry leading health diet Protec was launched to help

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40 years of aquaculture – Feed

support against challenges in the four key areas: skin, gills, gut and immune system. In 2013, Protec was upgraded to deliver support for viral challenges, providing the building blocks for stronger skin and optimising the balance between fish, microbes and environment.

Thanks in part to the knowledge gained in developing new generation Protec, in 2016 Skretting launched Lorica – a shrimp health diet that supports the functioning of the immune system and helps protect the animals against hostile threats, including Vibrio bacteria, which are widely present in many aquaculture environments and have been directly responsible for a number of major mortality events.

Synergies and collaboration Today, Skretting’s portfolio of health diets across all species utilises more than 40 functional ingredients that work in synergy to enhance aquatic animals’ ability to cope with stressful situations, such as disease, handling, transport and vaccinations. Individually, these ingredients have some benefits but, crucially, what Skretting continues to evidence is that specific combinations provide synergistic benefits where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts - thereby providing greater holistic protection for the animals in complete feeds that are tried, tested and ready for use.

For example, the current generation Protec contains novel functional ingredients that directly target viruses that cause diseases such as infectious salmon anemia (ISA) and cardiomyopathy syndrome (CMS) at the same time as the diet strengthens the fish’s immune system to help it cope better with challenges. It also strengthens the skin’s natural defences and enhances its healing capacity.

Multiple innovative methodologies, including quantitative histology and plasma biotechnology, have also been developed and optimised

by Skretting ARC, and these have advanced its understanding of the way different ingredients interact; thereby providing the platform for current and future innovations.

The progression of Skretting’s health feeds has also greatly benefited from the expertise and R&D work undertaken by colleagues in parent company Nutreco’s animal nutrition business, Trouw Nutrition, which has five major research centres, as well as some important external collaborations with key universities and scientific partners. There are more than 50 active collaborations with external partners at present, providing a very valuable pipeline for Skretting and also enabling it to improve the value proposition it offers its customers. One of the most recent innovations to come out of this strategy is Protec Gill, which is a diet expressly developed to support salmonids’ gill health and recovery during disease, environmental and treatment challenges.

Future focuses While current challenges are being met head-on, the industry is con-

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stantly moving and encountering new obstacles, which will certainly lead to shifts in Skretting’s R&D focus. A growing cause for concern, for instance, is the amount of handling that farmed fish undergo – whether for vaccination or treatment for parasites. These are potential sources of stress that can negatively affect the number of available feeding days and, in turn, impact the production cycle length and even cause mortality. Ensuring that the fewest number of days are ‘lost’ in a production cycle is another key attribute of Skretting’s new Prime and Express diets.

At the same time, the scale and impact of shrimp diseases is a growing key focus for Skretting and an area in which its first shrimp health diet, Lorica, is already having a positive effect. Similarly, the Protec diet launched for tilapia last year has come from considerable ongoing R&D looking at the key diseases impacting the species’ production.

Skretting’s future health research work will continue to follow the preventative path, and if the health of fish and shrimp is compromised then how can the severity of the challenge be reduced. Aligned with this, will be increased focus on clinical nutrition and what fish and shrimp should be fed if they are suffering from stressful situations. Additionally, because timing is critical when it comes to health related issues, Skretting wants to explore the development of rapid diagnostic tools that can give immediate diagnoses relating to the health status at farm sites.

From its outset in aquaculture all those years ago, Skretting has held the same ambition: to help producers optimise the health and wellbeing of their stocks so that they can achieve fair profit and continue to supply growing consumer markets with essential protein. Its unwavering mission remains ‘Feeding the Future’, and continuing to be at the forefront of one of the greatest food production success stories of modern times.

You can read more about the Skretting success story at www.skretting.com FF

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The fine art of protection

Protec is Skretting’s prime functional feed for farmed fish.

New Protec helps to shield skin, gut and gills; it supports the immune system, provides building blocks for new cells and optimises the balance between fish, microbes and environment.

skretting.co.uk

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04/10/2017 15:43:46

40 years of aquaculture – Solvtrans

Port in a Storm World’s biggest wellboat will ensure efficient treatment at sea

S

OLVTRANS cemented its reputation as the world’s largest wellboat operator by ordering its biggest vessel to date earlier this year.

The £47 million, 116m long Ronja Storm, currently under construction at Havyard Ship Technology in Norway, will be delivered to Tasmanian salmon farmer Huon on a 10-year contract in the first half of 2019.

Solvtrans also has the Ronja Diamond under construction at Myklebust Mekaniske Verksted, to add to its fleet of 22 wellboats on longterm contracts in Scotland, Norway, Chile, Canada and Australia.

The Ronja Storm, which will have a fish tank capacity of 7,450m3, is to be fitted with a reverse osmosis system. This makes freshwater from seawater and will be able to produce around 17 million litres of freshwater a day, creating what has been described as a ‘salmon hospital’ on board.

In Tasmania there is a shortage of freshwater, which is needed to treat stocks for amoebic gill disease.

Solvtrans CEO Roger Halsebakk said his company’s wellboats play a significant role in combating health problems in farmed salmon, and

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reverse osmosis will ensure even more efficient treatment at sea.

‘There is a huge requirement for freshwater and it is hard to find, therefore we have developed the reverse osmosis equipment to make the water. We will install this on a few vessels.

‘We were the first to start doing this and we developed a special system where we can re-use the freshwater many times, a big cost and time saviour for our customers.

‘We have had good results and that is why the customers are signing new and long-term contracts.

‘In a wellboat we do have much better control since we know exactly what the volume of water and biomass is – and also there are good filters to catch sea lice and not let them go back in the sea.’

Fish will be transferred into freshwater tanks where they will be held for two to three hours before being returned to sea pens.

Halsebakk said they have a system to remove cleaner fish and return them to the sea before the salmon are transferred to the freshwater.

Solvtrans worked with shipbuilder Havyard and MMC First Process on this wellboat, with Havyard providing everything from design services,

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Port in a Storm

engineering, outfitting, electrics and propulsion, and First Process delivering the fish handling equipment.

When the contract was announced earlier this year, Halsebakk said: ‘We chose Havyard Group based on a full evaluation where both cost and quality were decisive.

‘Moreover, Havyard can prove their experience of already having constructed several live fish carriers. This helps Solvtrans in order to provide assurance that we will deliver a good service to our business partner Huon, with fish welfare having top priority.’

Asked what have been the biggest changes

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he has seen in customer demands over the past few years, Halsebakk said: ‘Direct harvest in the UK and there has been a large use of wellboats for treatment.

‘However, in future there will be a need for vessels to do post-smolt, both in the UK and Norway, and direct harvest in Norway as well.’

Having dominated this market for more than 20 years, he said there

We developed a special system “ where we can re-use the freshwater many times ”

Above: Ronja Challenger.

Left: Ronja Ocean

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40 years of aquaculture – Solvtrans

are ‘a few new operators, but not many’ entering the market, and only DESS, part owned by Marine Harvest, from the oil and gas industry.

Above: The luxurious ‘However, for them to grow there is a lot they need to learn about interior of Ronja Storm, building and equipping vessels and to optimise the operation to deliver complete with soft quality to customers.’ furnishings, blonde wood Solvtrans will maintain its edge as market leader, he said, through and even a jacuzzi ‘technology development and continuing to be the best operator and deliver quality at a low cost rate’.

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And what will he and Solvtrans be doing 40 years from now?

‘Solvtrans will still be a supplier to the aquaculture industry, with the best and newest technology. I will be past 90 years so maybe I will sit in an urn on the wall! But Robin [his son] and new strength will grow up.’ FF

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EXPERIENCED IN THE TRANSPORT OF LIVE FISH Sølvtrans long experienced in closed well boat transport in Norway and Scotland. 14 modern well boats, 12 for fully enclosed transport. Sølvtrans’ wellboats ensures the best possible protection of the environment and animal welfare, and the company enclosed vessels provide a safe and gentle transport environment without risk of discharge.

T: +47 70 12 80 20 F: +47 70 12 80 21 www.solvtrans.no

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40 years of aquaculture

from the 40 Years of Predictions

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ARCHIVE

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From the Archive

Above: Predictions that came true - and some that didn’t, with apologies to those who were prepared to stick out their necks for the sake of Fish Farmer’s readers

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40 years of aquaculture – HIDB

Life support

trip to Japan inspired us to write “aAstrategy for the development of aquaculture ”

How vital funding for fledgling industry was secured – and other tales

C

RUCIAL to the development of aquaculture in Scotland was the Highlands and Islands Development Board, which not only gave the emerging industry funds, but political clout.

Marine Harvest’s managing director in the late 70s, Iain Anderson, said the fact that the HIDB, an independent body with its own money, believed fish farming was worthwhile ‘gave us a lot of internal leverage within the higher rankings of a big corporation’.

‘They saw more than we did the employment potential in areas of the west Highlands that didn’t have any employment. And that’s turned out to be absolutely true in spades.’

Two of the people ‘in on the ground floor’ were Bill Mackenzie, formerly senior fish farming officer at the HIDB (and latterly part of the management team of Wester Ross Salmon), and Alan Scott, formerly head of press and PR at the HIDB. The two men, who still fish together, met up recently to recall for Fish Farmer their stories from the early days of the industry’s development.

ness, when the HIDB and fish farming interests entertained the Mayor of Berlin. The main course, provided by Marine Harvest, was the ‘first’ farmed Atlantic salmon!

Another event in the Kingsmills Hotel was a reception following the opening by Prince Charles of rock star Ian Anderson’s salmon processing plant in Inverness, when Mackenzie spent some time explaining the grilse component in sea cages, and how it was managed, to a very interested royal guest.

First for lunch Scott remembers ‘a most enjoyable lunch in the Kingsmills Hotel in Inver-

Left: In 1971 Marine Harvest produces its first harvest of 14 tonnes from Lochailort.

Above: Cheesebay, Uist; Opposite: Alan Scott and Bill Mackenzie; HIDB headquarters

Patent for £1 In the early 1970s, Marine Harvest submitted an application to patent various processes in farming salmon. If successful, such a monopoly would have been a serious threat to the future development of what the HIDB saw as an industry that could transform some of the most remote and fragile areas of the Highlands and islands, where job opportunities were mostly non-existent.

The board decided to oppose the Marine Harvest application and to this end recruited a newly graduated PhD student to undertake the research and prepare the case.

Bob Kindness, whose PhD was conducted on the sea trout population of the Ythan estuary, took on the daunting task of compiling the evidence.

Eventually, Marine Harvest was persuaded to sell the patent to the board for the princely sum of £1.

Kindness later became manager of the board’s Moniack rainbow trout hatchery near Inverness, which was also used as part of the initiative to train new entrants to the industry via an Inverness College course. This evolved into the establishment of the Fish Farming Training and Development Centre at Kishorn, Lochcarron, with Kindness a principal player in setting it up. This fulfilled a long-term aim of the HIDB to see the creation of such a facility.

Learning curve Aquaculture was a fast developing activity in the 1970s and early 80s, and the HIDB took every

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Life support

opportunity to promote the industry. Mackenzie remembers when they decided that the HIDB exhibition at the Royal Highland Show in Edinburgh should feature aquaculture.

It was an impressive display of finned fish and shellfish farming- tanks of oysters, scallops, mussels, salmon fry, salmon parr, smolts and mature salmon.

‘These were the early days when we still had much to learn,’ said Mackenzie.

‘Sadly, the mature salmon kept dying on us, but we were able to secure replacements to keep us going to the end of the show!’

How it started The first steps in fish farming were based on rainbow trout. Mackenzie remembers going to Norway with board member Prophet Smith to see the first sea cage production of rainbow trout, which they thought could be the best choice for finned fish aquaculture in the Highlands.

Robin Bradley, then a senior scientist on the production side of experimental fish farming with Unilever, and research colleagues suggested moving into salmon, rearing smolts at Lochailort for transfer to sea pens. And that’s how it all started.

Later, Bradley became the joint founder of Wester Ross Salmon with Alan Mann, of the Alan Mann group of companies, and co-director John Ackroyd-Hunt. A management buyout by the senior management team in 2004 set up the new company, Wester Ross Fisheries, which continues as one of the few independent operators in the industry.

Close call in funding Most of the early starters in fish farming were assisted by the HIDB. In several instances problems arose because all were at the bottom of a steep learning

curve and had to apply for rescue funding.

At this point, the board came close to pulling out of development assistance.

It took some very persuasive arguments from Fisheries Division to convince the board to stick with the fledgling industry. And many of those early farms operate successfully today, though under different ownership.

The HIDB was often accused of helping only big companies, such as Fisons, Blue Circle and others, into salmon farming. But these were the entrepreneurs who were prepared to provide the risk capital in order to get underway.

The board also assisted small operators. A scheme using Integrated Development Programme funding encouraged crofters in the Western Isles to set up small 10-tonne units in the sea lochs in their areas.

Some 40 applicants for the scheme emerged, with funding in the order of 80 to 90 per cent made available. Many gave up in a short space of time but some persisted, with their sites continuing and expanding production, often with established operators.

Inspiring tour In the early 70s, Mackenzie and colleague Andy Johnston went to possibly the first World Aquaculture Conference in Kyoto, Japan.

‘It was a real eye-opener as to the extent of aquaculture in Japan,’ says Mackenzie. ‘They were light years ahead of the rest of the world in the production of both finned fish and shellfish.

‘We were also given a whistle-stop tour of some of the major fish and shellfish companies throughout Japan. The trip inspired us to write a strategy for the development of aquaculture in the Highlands and islands.

‘This became the template for what is now a significant driver of the Highlands and islands economy, with major benefits for some of the most remote and fragile areas.’

Hannibal the halibut With HIDB assistance, the White Fish Authority pioneered the development of marine flatfish aquaculture at Ardtoe. Turbot was the chosen species but growth rates were poor in prevailing water temperatures, so work switched to halibut.

A programme was mounted to secure sea-caught halibut as broodstock, with the assistance of Peterhead boats and crews.

Mackenzie recalls that it was quite a tricky exercise keeping them alive, in tanks on the boats and then transporting them all the way to Ardtoe in Ardnamurchan.

One of these wild-caught halibut, named Hannibal, lived to a great age and size! Despite many setbacks relating to pigmentation and algal feeding at the larvel stages, a successful process emerged and halibut are now successfully farmed. FF

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40 years of aquaculture – Crown Estate Scotland

BY ALEX ADRIAN

Ebbs and

flows

Reflections on four decades of managing the Scottish seabed

B

EING tasked with managing the Crown’s ownership rights of the seabed and just under half of the foreshore around Scotland provides a unique overview of the variety of marine activities that present themselves, and their fate over time.

While Scottish aquaculture is a significant social and economic success story today, the last 40 years have seen both flourishing and floundering as the industry has experienced turbulence in its economic performance, reflecting and often associated with that of its unforgiving marine environment.

As might be expected, some have fared better than others. While output by both finfish and shellfish sectors has, by and large over the years, been on the rise, the associated industry resilience that has accompanied this has seen the number and variety of producers going the opposite way.

For an organisation such as Crown Estate Scotland (and the Crown Estate before it), where we deal as much with the ‘who’ as the ‘what’ in this and other business, it has meant bidding farewell to many more aquaculture tenants over the years than extending greetings to new ones.

While this is expected in a maturing industry, changes in the case of

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finfish production have been marked nevertheless.

Looking back to 2003/4 when production was at its first peak ahead of a period of mixed fortunes, and before it reached similar levels about 10 to 11 years later, records show 103 finfish tenants. The great majority produced salmon but there were trout, halibut and cod farmers present too.

Fast forward to 2017, when we still have 75 per cent of the species being cultivated but less than 10 per cent of active cultivators.

That first production peak really did represent a turn of the tide for farmed salmon, especially since the ensuing economic hard times precipitated a consolidation that continues to this day.

Even by 2010/11, the finfish tenant roll numbered only 37. It is perhaps an interesting exercise for those ‘old hands’ out there to see how many of the 37 they can remember, never mind the 103!

Shellfish farming has not been immune either, albeit the changes have been less stark. Production by 195 tenants back in 2003/4 is now sustained and more by about 108 although, now as then, many of these will not be fully active.

Here, however, flows have been more of a consolidation of production than producers, illustrated best by the increased dominance of Shetland for farmed mussels.

Alongside this consolidation has been a rate of innovative change that rivals the electronics industry (and probably involves a lot of it). Much as calling with a mobile phone still involves speaking

We “ have bid

farewell to many more aquaculture tenants over the years than greeted new ones

”

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Ebbs and flows

into one end and listening from the other, the practice of putting small fish into the sea and taking large ones out some time later remains the basic tenet of finfish production.

But the changes in equipment and processes in-between, as it were, are mind boggling.

With them has come a shift in what might be described as ‘the job’ – out goes the generalist and in comes the specialist.

Hosting the Scottish Marine Aquaculture Awards over the past 10 years provided opportunity for insights into the evolving nature of employment skills on fish and shellfish farms in Scotland that, as an ex-jack of all trades and master of none type fish farmer of the past, I found frankly intimidating.

Memorably, and scariest of all, was being shown by the proud manager of a large, sophisticated and very expensive recirculation hatchery how his fish could be monitored and their circumstances, to all intents and purposes, controlled by his tablet device from practically anywhere with a mobile signal.

This begs only one question from someone like me: how do you get to sleep at night? I have no doubt that much the same will be the case for many aspects of production at sea soon, if it hasn’t arrived already. Advances certainly worthy of admiration, but not without some sympathy too!

Looking back at changes to those who farm

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Scotland’s fish and shellfish must include their relationship with the Crown Estate and now Crown Estate Scotland. It is no secret that this too has seen its fair share of both flourishing and floundering, as regulatory role, rent reviews and changes to policy initiated by other regulatory processes have come and gone (and in the case of rent reviews, come around again).

Recent devolution of Crown assets and their management in Scotland means that we continue to live in interesting times for those with seabed interests. While it remains to be seen just what changes finally manifest themselves, the aim now as before for Crown asset managers in Scotland is the enabling and embedding of a sustainable aquaculture industry in Scotland’s marine and coastal economies.

Most noticeable in a relationship that essentially involves the requesting and granting of space in which to develop is how the use of space around Scotland’s coasts has evolved and, more importantly, needs to evolve if the aquaculture industry is to realise its ambitions for growth alongside those of everyone else.

The concept of space in the marine environment is one far less of tangible extents (although, heaven knows, it is not short of lines of all sizes and colours) since the critical interests and impacts of marine fin and shellfish farmers, among others, generally extend well beyond those lines that delineate rights and consents, to overlap significantly with those of neighbours, be they fish farmers or others in that shared public space.

We know because the regulatory history of the industry is in large part a cautionary tale of attempts to address this.

At Crown Estate Scotland, we increasingly recognise that if the industry is not to run out of space before its ambitions for growth are realised, it must continue to find improved ways of sharing it.

Alex Adrian is aquaculture operations manager of Crown Estate Scotland. FF

Pictures: Farming at Strome, Loch Carron.

Pictures courtesy of the Crown Estate

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40 years of aquaculture – Scottish Aquaculture Innovation Centre

Best in class SAIC’s mission to connect industry need with academic ability is succeeding says CEO

T

HE Scottish Aquaculture Innovation Centre has become such an integral part of the industry it’s hard to believe it is just three years old.

Established by the Scottish Funding Council in 2014 as one of eight innovation centres, its brief was to bridge the perceived gap between what industry and academia needed.

The test of whether SAIC has achieved its remit will come when it bids for its next phase of five-year funding, taking it up to 2024. This, said CEO Heather Jones, is now high on the agenda and her team is currently compiling a case for its future.

While she is not complacent, she believes SAIC is in a strong position, having more than met its goal of creating collaborative partnerships focused on solving some of the industry’s greatest problems.

The organisation’s guiding principle is the appliance of science – ‘the phrase we use is connect and collaborate, we connect industry need with academic ability,’ said Jones.

‘I think the most distinctive thing we’ve achieved is multi-partner collaborations of companies that in the market place would be in direct competition with each other.’

Above: Industry and academia meet at SAIC’s cleaner fish summit in Glasgow. Left: SAIC CEO Heather Jones visiting a fish farm.

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Jones said she inherited a very clear business plan when she joined SAIC in September 2014, which is based on identifying research needs, providing public funding and encouraging industry investment.

‘If the industry doesn’t see any value in what we’re doing and doesn’t co-invest with us, which is what is happening in other sectors, then how do we know that it’s public money being spent on the right things?’

So far, Scotland’s aquaculture companies have given SAIC a ringing financial endorsement, said Jones. By August 2016, there were 13 SAIC projects worth £10.3 million, of which the industry invested 67 per cent.

‘A year on we now have 20 projects announced worth £19.4 million, industry has put in 58 per cent, we put in a quarter but we have pulled in other money from UK or EU funding into the sector.’

Future projects will amount to £29.8 million, involving 48 different companies working on 23 projects with 10 different academic partners.

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Best in class

‘Does that tell us that industry are serious about the kind of research that’s been funded? Yes, it does.

‘We’ve taken £4.9 million from other sources (research councils or EU money) and the best part of £19 million from industry, so we’ve taken £5 million and made it £30 million. That’s best in class of the eight innovation centres in Scotland.

‘We’re not having difficulty persuading industry to work with us, the challenge is more to get enough money to do everything industry wants. And that’s conditioned by how much money government

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”

wants to channel through us.’

Projects that have already borne fruit include the initiative to scale up the production and deployment of cleaner fish, which involved Marine Harvest, Scottish Sea Farms, BioMar and the Institute of Aquaculture.

The aim of the project, based at Machrihanish, was to boost the number of farmed wrasse available to Scottish farmers. SAIC contributed 21 per cent to the £4 million cost, and Jones cited as proof of its success the fact that Marine Harvest is now constructing its own wrasse hatchery, also at Machrihanish.

‘That’s high quality scientific jobs in the Mull of Kintyre where they have seasonal tourism jobs but not year round employment. You can see that the industry’s confidence in investing in Scotland is in a good place right now.’

Another early project aimed to improve cleaner fish vaccination technology and involved Aqualife, Scottish Sea Farms and the IoA. Jones said that on

the back of this, Aqualife has expanded its sales into Norway and the Mediterranean.

While the biggest companies could afford to invest where they want, the SAIC co-investment with the private sector ‘de-risks areas of uncertainty’.

‘What you’re seeing in Norway with some of these [new farming] concepts is massive investment, but nobody has yet deployed fish or grown them successfully or got a return on that, so these are very high risk.’

Scotland may not be doing research on that scale but Jones compares SAIC to the Norwegian government’s national centres of excellence, such as Exposed.

She said SAIC could even branch out in that direction if any of the offshore concepts took off. But the Scottish industry’s view, as expressed in the Industry Leadership Group (on which Jones sits), is that exposed offshore locations are not the panacea.

‘Some parts of the Scottish government talk a lot about that being the answer, and maybe it’s a medi-

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40 years of aquaculture – Scottish Aquaculture Innovation Centre Asked how applied research could help unlock growth, Jones said a workshop will be arranged, probably in the first part of 2018, to ‘kick around all the ideas’.

‘The constraints on growth are to do with availability of sites and consented biomass on sites.

Consented biomass is to do with the regulators’ approach to risk.

‘They make those judgments using models and a model is an approximation of reality but it’s not reality. So with all the new technologies, are there ways we could help the regulator have a model that they have more confidence in - that is more risk tolerant of increased biomass?’

SAIC could also fund marketing research to try and understand where perception problems arise.

In fact, a recent project looking at the potential for um or long term answer. But the Norwegian government isn’t only doing that, avian protein in fish feed researched consumer it has a wide number of activities, with different kinds of licences it’s putting in perceptions. place to boost growth.

‘With that project, our board said let’s break it ‘They have green licences, R&D licences, the automatic five per cent growth into three chunks and decide after phase one how every two years so long as you stay within lice limits. There is organic growth in strong the market is in the UK. The market demand Norway as well as this exceptional experimental trial growth. wasn’t there so we didn’t do the next phase. That’s ‘The difference between Norway and Scotland is they’re producing 1.2 sensible because you’re only going at the pace the million tonnes of fish a year and the profits they can reinvest from that allow market wants you to go at. them to put millions into testing things.

‘A lot of what the producers do is dictated by what ‘The scale of production in Scotland doesn’t support that level of investment. the market wants and what the market wants is There’s a school of thought that might say, see what happens with the experpartly dictated by what the consumer perception imental stuff in Norway and if one or other of those concepts starts to come is,’ said Jones. good we’ll do them in Scotland.’

One of the things SAIC is trying to do is articulate To engage industry and academia, SAIC stages regular workshops, such as the to the UK government that aquaculture ‘is a signifcleaner fish seminar held in Glasgow earlier this year, which attracted 81 differicant UK industry and therefore the UK research ent companies, with the fish health managers from Marine Harvest, Scottish funding bodies should be investing in the pure Sea Farms and Scottish Salmon Company all talking to each other about what research as well as the kind of applied research that they do. we do’.

‘There was a lot of knowledge exchange and collective learning that I think ‘We had our first project announced in the past SAIC has helped to facilitate,’ said Jones. month on Saprolegnia, a water mould that affects Participants in SAIC workshops are invited to submit expressions of interest freshwater hatcheries. It’s a mould that spores in in getting projects up and running. The proposals then go to the SAIC board the air, is hard to control but causes quite a lot of which judges them against the funding criteria – ‘what’s the likely impact; losses.’ what’s the relevance to the problem; what’s the scale of investment you want The £1.1 million BBSRC Link project is a collabofrom us; what’s the investment you are going to put in yourselves’. ration between the universities of Aberdeen and ‘Once we’ve ‘sifted’ we then invite people to put in a detailed application. We Glasgow, eight commercial partners, the SSPO and do that in order to minimise the bureaucracy of people spending a lot of time RSPCA, with an input of £130,000 from SAIC. filling out a form that might not go anywhere.’

‘This pulls together the academic partner and all A workshop on gill health last December has resulted in three new projects, the industry voices that have freshwater hatcheries, to be announced shortly after being considered and approved by the SAIC which is more or less everybody, trout and salmon, board, which includes the bosses of Marine Harvest, Scottish Sea Farms and and then the UK research body puts in a significant BioMar, as well as academics. sum of money as well.

SAIC also conducts a ‘charm offensive’, with each of its regional innovation ‘Aquaculture is part of the agritech economy and managers visiting the universities on their patch. it’s an important sector for the UK. Salmon is the ‘They will present to the academics what the industry’s priorities are and number one food export. what the challenges are, and put the offer on the table that we have money to ‘The UK government wants to put money into support applied research but the money is only available if there is a commerfunds to support innovation in sectors they think cial partner who wants the work done. have got commercial growth potential and there’s a ‘We don’t allow academic ‘push’ to say this is what we want to research; huge potential for growing protein to feed a hungry we’re relying on industry ‘pull’ where industry say this is the problem, can you world. help us solve it.’

‘My role is to help Scottish funders and UK SAIC channels its funds to four priority innovation areas. These, said Jones, funders realise that innovation in aquaculture is a have ‘slightly morphed over time’. good thing for the UK economy.

The first priority is now broader, incorporating environmental and health ‘In which other sectors is one company investing challenges, particularly sea lice and gill disease; second is to develop feeds £70 million in the next two years in freshwater that optimise fish health and nutrition; third is to unlock additional capacity hatcheries? It’s not subsidy, or grant dependent, it’s for aquaculture development; and the fourth priority remains the same, to a thriving sector. establish a reliable supply of mussel spat. This is already being addressed, with ‘As the Norwegians say, aquaculture is there for the building of a mussel hatchery, partly SAIC funded, in Shetland. when oil runs out. I think Scotland should be saying Seventy per cent of SAIC’s money will be invested in priority one, reflecting that. We talk a lot about renewable energy, we industry concern over fish health. But, Jones said, ‘we could potentially put a should be talking about renewable fish.’ FF lot of money into the growth one’.

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Above: SAIC funds industry internships; research projects into cleaner fish have attracted industry investment

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23 & 24 MAY 2018, AVIEMORE, SCOTLAND No other UK event provides aquaculture professionals with such direct access to suppliers from all over the globe representing all aspects of the aquaculture industry.

Over two days Aquaculture UK offers a valuable opportunity to network, discover new products and meet decision makers. The atmosphere is dynamic and exciting with open and friendly interaction between exhibitors and visitors.

Visit www.aquacultureuk.com to register as a visitor or contact info@aquacultureuk.com to find out more about exhibiting.

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40 years of aquaculture

from the 40 Years of Events

ARCHIVE

Above: Exhibitions and conferences have been a staple of the industry from the start, and while some of the participants and products may have changed, many of the themes are similar today

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40 years of aquaculture – Aqua Nor

BY ERIK HEMPEL

Race for space

Norway’s aquaculture showcase adapts to changing times

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QUA Nor 2017 was the 20th exhibition showing aquaculture technology in Trondheim. Since the exhibition is held every other year, alternating with its sister exhibition Nor-Fishing, it was therefore a sort of a jubilee, although the first Aqua Nor was held 39 years ago.

The first Aqua Nor exhibition, in Trondheim in 1979, really was not an exhibition at all. It was mainly a seminar about smolt production. But the organisers had allowed a few suppliers to exhibit their goods in the hallway.

In fact, there were 18 stands and only 150 participants at the seminar. But it was still considered a success, and it was repeated two years later, thus alternating with Nor-Fishing, the fisheries technology exhibition which started way back in 1960.

But there have been a number of fisheries exhibitions in Norway before the event in 1960. The very first we know about was a show held in Aalesund on the west coast in 1864, obviously inspired by the first World Fair in Crystal Palace in London in 1851.

The city of Bergen followed suit in 1865 and held its own fisheries exhibition. However, although the interest was there, 22 years would pass until the next fisheries exhibition was held, in Trondheim in 1887. This was remarkable in the sense that it was the very first exhibition where there was also a focus on fish farming - or rather oyster farming, which was practised along the coast.

There were then several exhibitions held around Norway where fisheries was part of the feature. But the most important event in the early days was the Scandinavian Fisheries Exhibition, held in Trondheim in 1908.

The exhibition was the first staged in the newly independent Norway, and the new king, Haakon VII, and his wife, Queen Maud (daughter of Edward VII of England), and their five-year-old son, Crown Prince Olav, were present. The exhibition lasted for two whole

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months, and the royal family spent a full fortnight there!

The first Nor-Fishing exhibition in modern times was held in Bergen, and was very well attended indeed. A total of 130,000 visitors came, and King Olav V opened the show, in his admiral’s uniform, no less.

The exhibition was open to the public, which is why there were so many visitors, and there were numerous events to ‘teach’ people to prepare and eat fish. During the first years, it was not called Nor-Fishing but Norsk fiskerimesse (Norwegian Fisheries Exhibition). The name was changed to Nor-Fishing in 1972.

Although the first Nor-Fishing was a success, it took the organiser (the Ministry of Fisheries) five years until the next exhibition was held.

This time, the event was moved to Trondheim, closer to the major fishing communities in the north. And it took a further four years before the third exhibition. But from 1972 it became a biennial event, and apart from 1978, when the exhibition was held in Oslo, it has since then been in Trondheim.

In the beginning, the Ministry of Fisheries was the organiser, while the Norges Varemesse (Norway Trade Fairs) was hired as technical organiser.

For Aqua Nor, it was a different matter. From the start, the Norwegian Fish Farmers’ Association (NFF) and the Fish Farmers Sales Organisation (FOS) were behind the event. But when FOS went bankrupt in 1991, the organisers of both Aqua Nor and Nor-Fishing got together, and the Nor-Fishing Foundation was established with the sole purpose of staging these two exhibitions.

At the same time, the responsibility for the technical arrangement went to the owner of the exhibition halls, which at the time was Nidarøhallen. So from 1993 onwards, the organiser of both exhibitions has been the Nor-Fishing Foundation, while the technical organiser has been Nidarøhallen. The latter

Above: During the opening of Nor-Fishing 2008, Crown Prince Haakon was presented with a memento of his great-grandfather King Haakon VII’s visit to the Scandinavian Fisheries Exhibition in Trondheim in 1908.

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Race for space

changed its name in 2003 to Trondheim Spektrum.

Odd Berg, who was originally marketing director of the Fish Farmers’ Sales Organisation, was engaged as managing director of Nidarøhallen when FOS went bankrupt, and that became the start of a long and important development of the exhibitions. Under Berg’s leadership, the exhibitions grew steadily, and a number of key features were introduced, among them the Innovation Award.

During the second aquaculture exhibition, the editor of Fishing News International, Peter Hjul, attended and he was very enthusiastic about the show. He even suggested that his employer, Heighway in London, should buy the exhibition. But it was not for sale. He also suggested that the name should change from Fiskeoppdrett (Fish Farming) to the more international Aqua Nor. The name was adopted for

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The exhibition lasted for two whole “ months and the royal family spent a full fortnight there ”

the third exhibition in 1983, and has stayed the same since then.

The Innovation Award Innovation has always been a central part of the exhibition and in an effort to stimulate more innovation among the suppliers, the Nor-Fishing Foundation in 2003 decided to establish a special award to be given to the person or institution who during the past year had come up with the best idea for innovation in the industry.

The prize was modest: a work of art, a diplo-

ma and NOK 100,000. A highly qualified jury picks the finalists, and the board of directors of the Foundation makes the final decision about the winner. The award is presented to the winner on the opening day of the exhibition, and it has become a highly respected prize. Through the years, it has contributed to the development of a number of innovative products and services in the industry.

Student Day One of the challenges facing the industry is how to recruit bright young people. The foun-

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40 years of aquaculture – Aqua Nor

dation established a special Student Day in 2015, in cooperation with the Norwegian FHL (Seafood Federation) and student organisations.

After three years of operation, this has proven to be a very successful initiative, and this year attracted as many as 350 students.

All students are given free admittance to the exhibition on Student Day, and a special programme is put on for them. But perhaps the most popular event is the ‘speed dating’, in which students meet representatives from a number of commercial companies, as well as research institutions. Some of these brief meetings have already resulted in companies hiring young talent. No wonder the students are interested!

Growth: re-thinking the exhibition concept In recent years, the organisers found themselves faced with a dilemma: the number of fishermen as well as the number of fish farming companies in Norway were declining. Consequently, if the exhibitions catered only to Norwegians, there would be fewer and fewer visitors. It was therefore decided to focus on making the exhibition more international.

At the same time, the question was asked: ‘Do such exhibitions have a future, or are they going to be replaced by various internet based services?’ The answer to this question seemed to be a qualified, ‘Yes, there is still a future for exhibitions, but they have to be adapted to the changing times’. As a result, the Nor-Fishing Foundation re-defined the exhibition in terms of what it meant to the visitors and the exhibitors as

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Clokwise from above: In 1960, the first NorFishing exhibition was held in Bergen. The show was opened

by King Olav V, who donned his admiral’s uniform for the occasion; the two pioneers of the Aqua Nor exhibition, Odd Steinsbø (left) and Odd Berg, posing in front of the entrance to the 1981 exhibition; King

the following: • The exhibition is a display window for new technology and new services. This is served through the traditional stands by exhibitors.

• It is a meeting place for people in the industry. It is a great forum for meeting old friends and making new acquaintances, and to talk face-to-face with practically everybody in the industry.

• It is an opportunity to get professionally updated. This is done through a number of professional seminars, mini-conferences, lectures, presentations and demonstrations. By providing a forum for these mini

Olav V arrives for the 1988 opening; the directors of AKVA receive the innovation award from fisheries minister Svein Ludvigsen, and director of fisheries Petter Gullestad

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Race for space

would-be exhibitors on a waiting list, so more space is needed.

The work on demolishing three of the old halls and building one very large new hall has already started and should be completed in time for Aqua Nor 2019. Exhibition project manager Kari Steinsbø reports that a number of exhibitors have already booked stands.

So after 20 Aqua Nor exhibitions, it looks like the sky is the limit. For those who intend to attend, it might be smart to start thinking about hotel bookings soon.

Erik Hempel is director of communications for the Nor-Fishing Foundation. FF

events, the exhibition offers a grand audience to those who have something to present, and it offers a unique opportunity for the visitors to pick and choose topics on which to update themselves.

This new strategy seems to work, because more visitors are attracted to the exhibitions now, and they report that they find more of specific interest to them.

New facilities The city of Trondheim, which owns Trondheim Spektrum and consequently the exhibition halls, is planning to organise the European Hand Ball Championships in 2020. For this, they need larger facilities and so have decided to expand and modernise Trondheim Spektrum.

This also benefits the Aqua Nor and Nor-Fishing exhibitions, where demand for space is extremely high. In 2017, there were about 100

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40 years of aquaculture – Shellfish

BY NICKI HOLMYARD

Quantum leap

New strategies could help the UK develop its industry as successfully as Europe’s

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LOOK back at 40 years of shellfish farming reminds me that I have been involved in the industry for three-quarters of that time, which sounds a lot better to my ears than 30 years!

We arrived on the west coast of Scotland in the late 1980s to become part of a rag-tag bunch of pioneers setting up mussel, oyster, and scallop farms all over the country. It was often hand-to-mouth and it was hard work, with no specialist equipment available. It was also fun, and it was new, and we all agreed that quality of life was more important than riches.

Most of those early adopters have moved on to other things, but there is still a good handful of us left in the shellfish farming world. Our annual catchup at the Association of Scottish Shellfish Growers conference in Oban always involves a great deal of reminiscing and physical reminders that we are all now rather grizzled.

In the early days, for a mussel farm, all one needed was a lease from the Crown Estate, a boat, some patience waiting for a crop to grow, and a lot of finger crossing, because there was always plenty that could go wrong.

There were storms, eider ducks, starfish, too much freshwater affecting salinity, ice sheets in win-

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ter, and unreliable equipment. In addition, the market was yet to be developed and transport links were poor.

We started with some old fishing rope for longlines, old juice barrels for floats, pebbles in mesh bags for weights, hand-split greenheart wooden pegs to stop mussels slipping down the ropes, a wheelbarrow and a rowing boat – a far cry from the state of the art equipment we use today. Others built wooden rafts to support rope droppers hanging down into the water.

Oyster farmers were slightly better off as they were able to borrow ideas and purchase equipment from the well established French industry, but their seed was unreliable and growing techniques needed to be perfected.

A main issue in the early days was the presence in anti-fouling of Tri-Butyl-Tin (TBT) which caused shell damage and it took many years for the shellfish industry to persuade the powers that be to ban this substance. Court cases were also brought against salmon farms which used TBT on salmon nets at that time.

One factor affecting the number of people involved in the early industry was its promotion as a complementary activity or diversification for crofters. The Highlands and Islands Development Board, Islands Development Programme and local enterprise agencies all weighed in with grants and advice to facilitate this, along with a subsequent marketing programme to grow markets for a small but increasing volume of shellfish.

While crofting and shellfish farming seemed to many to be a good idea at the

Scotland is probably better associated “with shellfish production, thanks to the power of Scotland as a brand ”

Above: John Holmyard harvesting spat ropes at Offshore Shellfish; offshore manager George Holmyard working the anchor drill. Left: Nicki Holmyard has been a regular contributor to Fish Farmer. Opposite page: George checking spat ropes

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Quantum leap time, most crofters failed to appreciate the amount of time and attention to detail it takes to make it work. Very few continued farming the sea beyond the initial few years, but to his credit, Andy Abrahams from Colonsay was one of the few who did!

Seafish ran a specialist shellfish unit at its research facility at Ardtoe, and got involved in numerous trials to develop the industry, even looking at periwinkles and various species of clam.

The 1990s saw the industry start to become more professional, equipment manufacturers taking an interest, and bigger money and better ideas come into play. It also saw the start of a long period of amalgamation of smaller farms, which were bought up by the more dedicated players.

Scallop Kings imported Japanese ideas with the ear hanging machine, which seemed set to revolutionise the scallop industry. Unfortunately, they discovered that scallops are much better off growing on the seabed, where they can keep themselves free from the fouling that plagued those hung beneath rope headlines, and the venture ultimately failed.

Some scallop farmers tried to shorten the growout time for their queen scallops, selling the smaller ones as princesses, but with limited market interest, this idea also soon faded.

Xplora arrived on the scene with some innovative ideas to help mussel farmers, including purpose made floats, plastic pegs to replace the early wooden variety, and rope weights. The company also developed a rope ladder mussel growing system, together with a harvesting vessel.

French company Ets Cochon introduced mechanised cleaning, grading and packing equipment to the industry, which began to revolutionise the way in which both mussels and oysters were handled post-harvest and cut down on some back-breaking labour.

Spanish companies produced re-tubing machines along with plastic and cotton netting, which enabled small mussels to be put back into the water instead of being discarded following a harvest. This helped mussel farmers to increase the volume of harvestable mussels they could produce from each rope in a season.

Rope manufacturers recognised the need for the industry to have different types of rope for each application and their efforts soon rewarded the mussel farmers.

Kishorn Shellfish imported large mussel rafts from Galicia, which were heralded as the answer to farming in sea lochs, but the conditions proved to be wildly different in the north of Scotland, and the rafts and their production were sadly very short lived.

As the industry started to become more professional, so too did its representative body, the Association of Scottish Shellfish Growers, as it dealt with a growing volume of legislation and issues related to water quality, disease, algal blooms and biotoxins, compliance and numerous EU directives.

The organisation also developed a strong market development arm, which helped to raise the profile of the industry and introduce an ignorant public and the media to the delights of Scottish shellfish. This included the best way to handle farmed mussels, whose shells were more fragile than the bottom

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-grown variety that consumers were used to.

As production grew, so did the need to cooperate on marketing effort, to avoid competing for the same few customers and initiate a downward spiral in prices. Cooperation would also provide the ability to sell to supermarkets, and so was born the Scottish Shellfish Marketing Group.

From small beginnings in Benderloch, through an office at the back of Loch Fyne Oysters in Cairndow, to the large factory it operates from today, SSMG has been responsible for helping the industry to develop, by creating new products and opening markets for production to feed into.

It is currently instrumental in helping to set up an experimental shellfish hatchery, which is looking at the feasibility of producing commercial quantities of mussel spat, the natural availability of which is seen as one of the barriers to further industry growth.

The 2000s saw the introduction of semi-automated mussel farming technology from New Zealand, with its continuous rope systems and looped rope that removed the need for mussel pegs. And with bigger and better technology came the need for ever larger vessels.

Current mussel production in Scotland is around 7,700 tonnes, the majority of which is now grown in the Shetland Isles, where farming was late to start, but quick to catch up. Here, too, the development followed a pattern of increasing efficiency as many small-scale producers gradually amalgamated into just a handful of bigger players.

Scottish oyster farmers last year produced 3.5 million Pacific oysters (Crassostrea gigas) and 201,000 native oysters (Ostrea edulis). Again, the industry is in the hands of just a few companies.

French interest in Scottish oyster farming is also becoming more apparent, as they seek disease free production areas, following the devastation of their own industry over the past few years with diseases such as Bonamia and oyster herpes virus.

Recent years have heralded a flurry of interest in the idea of integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA), which combines shellfish, finfish and seaweed farming in proximity. Loch Fyne Oysters is the UK leader in this field but it is still waiting to be proven on a large scale.

South of the border, the mussel industry has

largely centred over the years around the Menai Straits, where mussel production takes place on the seabed. Rope grown farms have also sprung up over the past decade, notably in Swansea docks and in the estuaries of the south west of England.

Our own operation, Offshore Shellfish, is taking this a step further with a fully offshore mussel farm, the first of its kind in Europe, which uses adapted New Zealand technology combined with UK innovation and specialist flotation.

Oyster farms in England and Wales produced 12 million Pacific oysters and 120,000 native oysters last year. This is considerably more than their Scottish counterparts, yet Scotland is probably better associated with shellfish production, thanks to the power of Scotland as a brand.

Prices for oysters have seen a strong upward trend over recent years, with demand being driven by the shortfall in French production but also by greater domestic consumption as they start to break out from the gentlemen’s club menus to the ‘must have’ item in hipster bars.

Native oysters are the latest species to see a revival of interest. Long considered as difficult to farm, the development of new growing equipment, such as Tony Legg’s Ortac and Microreef systems, is helping to bring a new generation of shellfish farmers onto the scene.

My hope is that new developments and innovations will continue in production methods and marketing because, as yet, we have not broken through the glass ceiling. Other European countries have developed their shellfish farming industries far more successfully than our own and we have yet to create the European notion of shellfish as a normal part of the diet. However, new strategies from both the Scottish and English governments aim to overcome perceived barriers to success.

The significant health benefits of eating shellfish are becoming more widely understood and the genuine sustainability of shellfish farming is also gaining recognition through adoption of various accreditation schemes.

With a lot of hard work and some considerable investment, perhaps the next decade will see the quantum leap forward that we have all been working towards. FF

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40 years of aquaculture - Trout

BY DOUG MCLEOD

New dynamic Development of marine trout raises sector expectations

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HE cultivation of rainbow trout, like Fish Farmer, sometimes feels as if it has been around for always. Although 40 years for the magazine must seem like a long time, trout farming has been an activity for significantly longer.

However, the traditional trout farm (which can be traced back to medieval times, albeit for brown trout) of ponds discreetly located in a corner of the estate (private or monastic) has largely been replaced by professionally managed stand-alone operations of specialised equipment producing up to multiple hundreds of tonnes, with a trained and expert workforce.

Indeed, in recent decades the production of rainbow trout globally has grown exponentially, from 110,000 tonnes 40 years ago, to around 850,000 tonnes currently, doubtless facilitated by the knowledge transfer and availability of technical information from Fish Farmer!

And similarly, over the past decades feeds have evolved to carefully crafted nutritional parcels with a balance of marine and vegetable source proteins and vitamins, creating ever improving feed conversion and an equally declining fish in/fish out ratio.

Improving production efficiency since the late 70s has also been the result of research into disease treatment and prevention (including the development of vaccines), rearing densities, genetic improvement through selection and technological advances (particularly in hatcheries, feed delivery and recirculation).

However, the typical British trout farming business is firmly within

the SME category, with only a limited number of large corporations producing significant volumes and/or processing major tonnages.

Nevertheless, the UK sector produces a healthy 18,000 tonnes per year, divided between ‘portion’ at around 44 per cent, large/ marine trout at some 26 per cent, and restocking, representing an estimated 30 per cent, with the mariculture sub-sector representing the newest dimension of this traditional strand of aquaculture.

It must be admitted that trout farming in the UK has - until recently - been characterised by stable production levels. But the development of marine trout has injected a new dynamic into the industry and, looking forward, the sector is expecting positive developments across the board.

Clokwise from top: Trout; former Fish Farmer editor Stuart Banks’s report on the BTA; trout processing plant; Doug McLeod, a well known figure in the shellfish sector too.

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New dynamic

The large marine trout are competing with salmon products and generating higher values than traditional portion trout, while portion trout itself is experiencing higher demand, reflecting consumer appreciation of the taste and nutritional benefits of the product delivered at a value for money price.

In addition, consumption is being enhanced through the development of added value products – a move away from the whole fish on the wet fish counter.

At the EU level, trout is the largest single species of fish farmed, totalling around 143,000 tonnes of portion and 57,000 tonnes of large/ marine (2015).

While geographically European but outside the Union, Turkey and

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Norway produce a further 102,000 tonnes of portion and 86,000 tonnes of large trout, giving a European (EU plus) total of almost 400,000 tonnes of portion and 200,000 tonnes of large trout.

The future is widely seen as positive across the continent, particularly in France, where trout is perceived as the most dynamic sector of the fish industry, with rising demand being driven by the development of innovative added value products, a trend that is generally expected to be repeated in other countries.

Production also continues to expand in other continents, with little evidence of a slowdown, most notably in the major producers of Iran (despite constraints from sanctions) and Chile (despite issues with disease in salmon).

In summary, 40 years of growth for trout and Fish Farmer appear likely to be followed by more decades of expansion, which must call for some form of celebration! FF

The future is widely seen as “positi ve across the continent ” 153

04/10/2017 15:13:42

40 years of aquaculture – Processing

BY VINCE MCDONAGH

Salmon part of Grimsby’s future Port once regarded aquaculture as an upstart – now it accounts for a third of fish processed

W

HEN Andrew Coulbeck began selling salmon and trout back in the 1980s he needed a licence because it was wild game fish from Scotland.

Then one day, a box of farmed salmon was dropped off at the door of his premises and from that moment everything changed.

Today, Coulbeck is managing director of JCS Fish in Grimsby, a fast rising business which has evolved into one of the UK’s leading seafood companies specialising in salmon.

It is also helping to spearhead the changing face of seafood processing in Grimsby, with farmed fish now playing an increasingly significant role.

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Processing.indd 154

Thirty years ago, white fish such as cod and haddock dominated. It is fair to say that at the time the port was somewhat patronising about aquaculture, which it regarded as an upstart.

While precise figures are hard to come by, salmon is now thought to account for at least a third of all the fish processed in Grimsby.

Coulbeck, who founded JCS at the turn of the millennium with his wife Louise, says that ratio is certain to increase in the coming years.

JCS Fish now supplies both fresh and frozen products through its specialised BigFish Brand and has successfully broken into Ocado, the world’s largest online food retailer which, in turn, supplies some of the country’s largest supermarkets.

It also has an extensive network of listings with independent retailers and farm shops and a considerable food service business.

And last year JCS achieved another major step in its expansion plans when it won British Retail Consortium A grade for the first time, followed up with BRC AA grade status in August this year.

There was a time when the Coulbecks were among the four best known names in the Grimsby fish trade – a large extended family divided up into various independent businesses.

Andrew Coulbeck began his career with the family firm Richard Coulbeck, exporting dogfish for which it won a Queen’s Award. He then went to work with a fish merchant called Jack Carlisle Smith who was renowned at the time as an expert in sourcing wild salmon from Scotland and Ireland.

Coulbeck credits Jack Smith with passing to him more than 50 years of unsurpassed knowledge about salmon, knowledge which he still uses in his business today – which he named JCS Fish in honour of Jack Carlisle Smith.

JCS was probably the first sizeable business in

Left: Trout are prepared for smoking - from Fish Farmer, 1983. Opposotie page - (top): Louise, Jack and Andrew Coulbeck. (below): Head smoker Nick Keen checks sides of smoked salmon from Fish Farmer, 1983.

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04/10/2017 15:08:24

Salmon part of Grimsby’s future

“Farmed fish is

crucial too to the big companies such as Seachill and Young’s

”

Grimsby devoted entirely to farmed fish. It is still predominantly focused on salmon, although in the past 12 months Coulbeck has also introduced farmed trout, both as chilled smoked product and frozen in the BigFish Brand signature frozen fillet format.

He says the change over the past 30 years has been little short of incredible. ‘There was a time when salmon was considered a luxury – something you had out of a can for Sunday or as a treat on rare visits to restaurants.

‘Today salmon – either smoked or fresh – is a mainstay of quality restaurant menus.

The great thing about it is its versatility and its health attributes, being rich in omega 3.

These allow you to do so many things with it, and we have plans to do even more.

‘Convenience is also a big plus. These days people are short of time and most still don’t like to handle fish too much, so they are looking for products neatly packaged as fillets or in other convenient formats.

‘Our job is to make it easy for them and we have a host of ideas in the pipeline for different presentations and new products.’

Coulbeck’s wife and business partner Louise usually comes up with product ideas but now the couple are also looking to their son, Jack (who recently joined the business as commercial manager) as a source of even more inspiration and innovation.

‘Jack has a sound commercial brain and is also a fantastic cook. I’m sure he will come up with some really great new products,’ said Coulbeck.

He firmly believes that farmed fish has helped Grimsby retain its status as Britain’s premier seafood processing centre.

‘It is a big part of the town’s seafood future,’ he said. ‘And no doubt crucial too to the big producers such as Seachill and Young’s.

‘Although Grimsby’s roots are in fishing, it has evolved its seafood skills and there are plenty of people here with first class expertise in curing, smoking and processing salmon.’

Coulbeck is also relieved that salmon prices have dropped back from their extreme levels at the beginning of the year.

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Processing.indd 155

‘While the prices may have been great for Norwegian fish farmers, they no doubt led to a few casualties. Fortunately, we have been able to weather the storm and maintain our development programme.’

JCS Fish buys most of its raw material from Scotland and Norway and Coulbeck visits fish farms in Scotland regularly and is suitably impressed.

‘Particularly as a relatively small company, it’s important for us to keep strong relationships with our suppliers and generally I am very impressed with the quality we buy, particularly from Scottish producers.

‘It’s always good to speak to them first hand and keep an eye on how the industry is developing.’

Today JCS Fish employs 40 people; there were just two or three when it started out 17 years ago. The BigFish Brand is growing fast and sales have more than doubled over the past 12 months. Plans for further expansion continue apace both in terms of new products and additional retail outlets.

‘We are still full of ideas and enthusiasm and people continue to love salmon, so who knows where we might end up?’

Ivan Jaines-White, head of the Grimsby Seafood Village School, runs at least 17 courses a year and has noticed a change in emphasis from wild caught to farmed fish.

‘Many of our trainees come from processors and the big retailers, and want to know how to handle farmed fish such as salmon, sea bream and sea bass, as well as the more traditional cod and haddock. We have even trained people from Florida, Iceland, Spain and Australia.’

He estimated that the large Grimsby processors, such as Young’s, Seachill and Morrisons, now receive at least 600 tonnes of salmon a week, mostly from Scotland and Norway.

The medium sized processors take in an extra 100 to 150 tonnes a week.

‘It is big business in Grimsby and don’t forget that farmed salmon supports hundreds of processing jobs in this town. The volume of salmon curing has also increased.

‘Looking at a graph showing the projected growth of farmed fish, it is clear it is going to become even more important to Grimsby, although I do think white fish will be dominant for a while yet.’ FF

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04/10/2017 15:08:43

40 years of aquaculture – Sustainability

BY JIMMIE HEPBURN

Growing up Aquaculture is entering adolescence and its potential is being widely recognised

A

FTER 40 years, is UK aquaculture heading in a sustainable direction?

Perhaps for many, the obvious answer to this question is yes! Not only do we still have an aquaculture industry, but we have seen a massive development – though salmon culture has taken the lion’s share of this expansion in Scotland.

In the rest of the UK, expansion has been limited, and in some cases, we have witnessed a contraction. Globally, we are all aware that aquaculture has become the fastest growing food sector, where we are now farming more fish than we are catching from the wild.

What we have witnessed in these last four decades is a revolution of real significance for humanity. In essence, human beings are changing from being hunters of fish to farmers of fish.

Since my return to Scotland in 2015 (after a 20-year absence farming fish in England), I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to visit many finfish farms up and down Scotland, as well as further afield. Many changes have taken place over these two decades, but what has also been striking is what has not changed.

Aquaculture is still a relatively new industry, with no tradition. Without ‘baggage’ from the past, there was little to hold back its development, bar the challenges (by no means trivial) which included technical, regulatory, market development and public awareness and acceptance.

Despite such hurdles, we have witnessed rapid expansion and at the same time an astounding consolidation of the industry. I can recall at the beginning of my aquaculture career the diverse range in ownership structures. I took take great pleasure as a hatchery manager in supplying neighbouring crofters

with 5,000 smolts for the couple of pens they owned at the foot of their croft.

However, it was not long before the crofter fish farmer became extinct. Rapid takeover mania became rampant. I know of one site which, over a 30-year period, was reported to have had 16 companies as tenants – eight of which were taken over/ merged during the time they occupied the site!

Other changes included innovative approaches to fish welfare and husbandry which have solved some of the serious health issues, including the development of vaccines for diseases such as furunculosis.

The use of antibiotics within the industry has plummeted – it is rare indeed (perhaps with the exception of trout hatcheries) that I come across the use of antimicrobials in my work. However, within the realms of fish health there have been some unwelcome changes, such as the apparent increase in gill disease or heart problems.

Effective answers to such obstacles often appear to evade us, though pressures from aquaculture businesses to maximise profits can push the stocks beyond their physiological limits.

One other obvious change has been the escalation in the number of standards many aquaculture operations must now work under. I can sympathise with a farm manager who has to prepare for six or more audits per year, each with their particular ‘quirk’.

These standards have undoubtedly raised the bar, but the reality is that to sell your products on the open market on a global scale retailers demand stringent assurances. Though in my experience audits are an onerous task, most site and quality control managers appreciate their necessity to securing their company’s market share and therefore their own livelihoods.

“

Success has been built on an ability to consider the unthinkable and to handle uncertainty

”

So much for the changes, but what has not changed?

Well, for one thing the industry is continuing to

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Growing up grow. Yes, there have been ups and downs, but the trend is continued growth. At times, it seems to me that we experience two steps forward and one back.

Local environmental impacts have much improved over these past 40 years. However, where a site used to produce 500 tonnes, the same site may be producing 2,000 tonnes, as we are farming fish much ‘smarter’ today.

The small inshore sites are becoming less suitable, and therefore the incentive to move further offshore is gaining momentum. The knock-on effect is that substantial capital is needed to develop such sites which is within the reach of fewer and fewer companies.

Perhaps one significant aspect which has not changed is the challenge to successfully manage and control the fish farm’s environment within an open marine ecosystem. Health issues, such as sea lice or establishing sites in exposed locations, tax to the limit our abilities to manage effectively. We are continually challenging the physiology of the animal we are farming or pushing our engineering capacity to the edge.

The future success of aquaculture will be dependent on finding more successful ways of managing the industry within this somewhat chaotic environment where nature is ultimately in charge and not the fish farmer.

Clockwise from above: Aquaponics system; organic carp ponds; Jimmie Hepburn writing in Fish Farmer in 1997; carp farming; Jimmie on his farm in Devon

What about the future?

Where will the industry be in 40 years from now?

There are a number of factors which will likely dictate aquaculture’s sustainability. These include developing technical competence, driving up standards, encouraging the appropriate economic and marketing frameworks, raising public awareness and acceptance, securing a political will for aquaculture to succeed and considering whether it is more appropriate to farm fish within a more open (extensive) or more closed environment (intensive) is to name but a few.

Readers will no doubt be familiar with many of these factors, but I will only touch on one: to what intensity should we farm fish?

When we had our fish farm in Devon a few years ago, we had 13 ponds and a rather antiquated RAS on site. The carp we grew in our ponds were certified organic, being fed on the aquafeed in the ponds and locally grown organic wheat.

The inputs to this system were sourced within a 10km radius of the farm. With our RAS we developed a rudimentary aquaponic/aquafeed production system. Not only did the aquaponic filter clean the water but it also supported a diverse community of water louse and other species which supplied some of the feed to the fish in the tanks.

This experience taught me the principle that it is possible to develop more sustainable aquaculture systems, either going down the extensive or intensive routes.

Within farming freshwater salmon, the RAS approach has seen remarkable development, with some companies now growing 600g smolts. This is interesting because it implies an acceptance that we cannot effectively manage the open marine environment.

In this case, we have restricted the exposure of

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Jimmie Hepburn.indd 157

the fish to open sea in a hope that the stock can be harvested before things get out of hand. Already there is serious consideration being given to growing 3kg salmon and trout in RAS. Intensive farming methods such as vertical growing, aquaponics or even insect meal production are all now expanding rapidly.

Do we focus on trying to contain nature so that we can still farm in open environments without inflicting severe damage on the ecosystem which all life on our planet is dependent on?

Or do we take the bull by the horns and manage aquaculture intensively, where there is a far higher degree of management control both in terms of farming the species and managing the impact of this approach on the wider environment?

Whichever route is taken it will throw up challenges and questions. For example, going down the more intensive route has its unique risks, including public confidence and acceptance. Farming fish more intensively could be perceived as ‘factory farming’.

What would this do to the image of Scottish salmon? Could such an approach be justified if survival could be improved to more than 95 per cent at sea?

What we have witnessed in these past 40 years is rapid and extensive changes in aquaculture. This success has been built on an ability to innovate, adapt, be prepared to change course, consider the unthinkable and to handle uncertainty effectively. That is why aquaculture is still here and continues to grow.

But as it expands, so does its responsibility to meeting human needs and beyond. To continue to succeed and grow, aquaculture needs to take this responsibility seriously (from local to global). It must gain widespread public acceptance through genuinely demonstrating a responsible attitude to how the industry manages itself.

Aquaculture is perhaps entering its adolescent phase where the real potential of what it can offer humanity is now being widely recognised. But like any adolescent, unless it can demonstrate that it will act responsibly as it grows into adulthood, its future status will be less secure.

Jimmie Hepburn has spent more than 30 years farming salmon, trout and carp. Since 2000, he has run his own business, Aquavision, which is involved in a wide range of aquaculture related development. FF

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04/10/2017 15:05:57

40 years of aquaculture

from the 40 Years of Products

ARCHIVE

Above: Workwear and phones may have become more streamlined over the decades but the spirit of innovation in aquaculture lives on

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From the Archive - Products.indd 158

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MOHN AQUA AQUA GROUP GROUP The The Enterprise Enterprise Park, Park, Forres, Forres, IV36 IV36 2AB, 2AB, Scotland, Scotland, UK UK MOHN Tel +44 +44 (0) (0) 1309 1309 678270 678270 Fax Fax +44 +44 (0) (0) 1309 1309 673615 673615 info@mohnaqua.com info@mohnaqua.com Tel

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36, Foxdenton Lane, Middleton, MOHN36, AQUAFoxdenton GROUP The Enterprise Park,Middleton, Forres, IV36 2AB, Scotland, UK Lane, Tel +44 (0) 1309 678270 Fax +44 (0) 1309 673615 info@mohnaqua.com Manchester M24 1QG Manchester M24 1QG Tel: +44(0)161 6835869 MOHN GROUP Tel: +44(0)161 6835869 M Java Craignure MDive DiveLtd. Ltd.11 11AQUA JavaHouses, Houses, Craignure MOHN GROUP +44 AQUA (0)1772 322200 MOHN AQUA GROUP MOHN AQUA GROUP The Enterprise Park, Forres,PA65 IV36 2AB, Scotland, UK 07715 007964 Isle of Argyll 6BE Isle ofMull, Mull, Argyll PA65 6BE MOHN AQUA GROUP TheMobile: Enterprise Park, Forres, IV36 2AB, Scotland, UK 07715 007964 MOHN AQUA GROUP TheMobile: Enterprise Park, Forres, IV36 2AB, Scotland, UK Tel +44 (0) Tel +44 (0) 1309 678270 Fax +44 (0) 13091309 673615 678270 info@mohnaqua.com Tel +44 (0) export@evansvanodine.co.uk Tel +44 (0) 1309E: 678270 Fax +44 (0) 13091309 673615 678270 info@mohnaqua.com sales@aquacultureequipment.co.uk www.egersundnet.no Tel +44 (0) Tel +44 (0) 1309E: 678270 Fax +44 (0) 13091309 673615 678270 info@mohnaqua.com sales@aquacultureequipment.co.uk t: 01680 812 420 m: 07585 801 906 t: 01680 812 420 m: 07585 801 906 info@mohnaqua.com W: www.AquacultureEquipment.co.uk info@mohnaqua.com www. evansvanodine.co.uk e:e:mdiveltd@live.co.uk W: www.AquacultureEquipment.co.uk mdiveltd@live.co.uk info@mohnaqua.com

Nathan Moreland, Aquatic Hygiene Ph: +44 1463 718735 Mob: +44 7818 483043 e-mail: Nathan@aquatic.as

 

Specialise in the manufacture and supply of:

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Custom manufacture of  AQUACULTURE SOFTWARE, all types ofTO nets.  FROM HATCHERY HARVEST! Net sterilising, washing, repair, • Improve efficiency  renovation and antifoulant • Reduce costs  retreatment. 

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SAFE SUPPLIER OF NEW NET TECHNOLOGY AND  PROFESSIONAL SERVICE 

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Egersund Net AS Tel: +47 66Egersund 80 82 15 SvanavŒgen, N-4370 Tel.: +47 46 29 00 Fax:51+47 66 80 25 21 Fax: +47 51 46 29 01 post@netkem.no post@egersund-net.no

• +47 Longer Tel: 51 48 33Life-time 95 aquascan@aquascan.com

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Your partner in Aquaculture Technology AKVA group is a unique supplier with the Tel: +45 97181977 capability of offering both Sea and Land Fax: +45operations 9642 5278 Based Aquaculture with complete technical solutions and local support.

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pment Ltd

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Storvik LTD Lochgilphead, Scotland Tel: +44 (0) 1546603989 info@storvik.co.uk

Other equipment available on request.

Other Otherequipment equipmentavailable availableon onrequest. request.

Other equipment available on request.

Sea Cages | Mooring Systems | Nets Tel: 97181977 Tel: +45 97181977 Chandery |+45 All Farming Essentials

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Integrated Integrated Logisti Logisticc Soluti Solutions ons Tank Construction Integrated Logistic Solutions Integrated Logistic Solutions Integrated Logistic Logistic Solutions Solutions Integrated Road, Rail & Sea Road, Rail & Road, Rail & Sea Road, Rail & Sea Transport Tanks –Sea inSea stock Road, Rail & & Sea Road, Rail Your partner in Aquaculture Technology On-site Repair Service www.fergusontransport.co.uk www.fergusontransport.co.uk www.fergusontransport.co.uk www.fergusontransport.co.uk GRP Tank Manufacture www.fergusontransport.co.uk www.fergusontransport.co.uk www.fergusontransport.co.uk

·

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40 years of aquaculture

BY GILPIN BRADLEY

Last words Today’s salmon farmers owe an enormous debt to the early pioneers, says SSPO chairman

I

I CAN legitimately claim to be the same age as salmon farming in Scotland, so I’m pleased to offer a unique personal perspective on growing up in one of the country’s most successful industries.

While my father managed the many challenges of salmon farming during those pioneering days at the Unilever research site in Lochailort, my brother, two sisters and I had a lot of fun ‘helping out’- although I’m not convinced the young Angus McPhee will remember our activities the same way!

Chasing the smolts down the polythene pipe on the pontoons, or pottering about the loch in one of the clinker built (by Hendersons of Mallaig) wooden boats were great fun times.

We spent months trying to persuade our parents that we could keep a pet monkey in one of the many solid mesh hexagonal cages - of course, we grew up immune to the challenging Lochailort climate, and assumed all other livestock would thrive.

We were fascinated by the specimen finger that was well preserved in the farm office, a stark reminder of the dangers of producing those early wet diets.

When the Duke of Edinburgh visited Lochailort, we experienced security en masse for the first time, and were amazed at how quickly the seal deterrents were found in my father’s safest hiding places.

The late Mrs Cameron Head, who owned the land, could not have been more supportive to this exciting new business, and her renowned West Highland hospitality was frequently enjoyed by the growing team on the farm. And I’m sure all who can remember participating will not forget the very homely scent from the many cats which dominated life at the castle.

There was a wonderful collective sense of pride when some of the earliest harvests of salmon were loaded on the train at Lochailort station, destined for J.Bennett at Billingsgate market. Interestingly, the logistics in the early 70s ensured fresh salmon could be in the old Billingsgate market within 24 hours of harvest.

Salmon farming has fundamentally changed career opportunities in the Highlands and islands. A

162

Gilpin.indd 162

few years ago, I was pleased to be reacquainted with an old friend from Arisaig Church School, who was running the Ardnish trial site; a generation earlier, Rory would have inevitably had to leave the West Highlands to find work, like many previous generations. Salmon farming is now an integral part of many remote communities.

Today’s salmon farmers owe an enormous debt to the early pioneers; without Unilever’s very deep pockets, the industry would not have overcome some enormous challenges.

Enthusiasm, tenacity and vigilance remain key qualities for successful salmon farmers and while the scale is vastly different to the early days, the challenges and risks must still not be underestimated.

The early vision from HIDB (now HIE) was that fish farming would create a wonderful opportunity for traditional subsistence crofting in the West Highlands.

This opportunity was grasped by many, but was often short lived as the very high risk nature of salmon farming ventures became apparent.

A former chairman of HIDB, Robert Cowan, described salmon farming as generating ‘the greatest ever return on investment for the public sector’ and the board’s contribution in providing the essential risk capital for many small operators to get started must not be underestimated.

Sadly, consolidation was always inevitable, as challenging cycles repeated themselves far too often, very painfully for some pioneers.

These days, banks remain cautious in accepting the growing stock as collateral, and this is a major constraint for the new entrant.

The salmon industry landscape has been shaped by many significant milestones: • The Oslo stock exchange’s enthusiasm for salmon farming has created unprecedented access to affordable capital, and probably formed the foundation for sustainable expansion, which has only been corrected by the inevitable market cycles; • Excellent genetic selection has produced strains that are achieving growth rates which, 20 years ago, could only have been dreamed of; • Vaccines have been developed to overcome each of the new disease challenges; • New market development is creating very strong demand for Scottish salmon.

While not ignoring current challenges and the need for new solutions, Scottish salmon continues to be a highly sustainable industry, judged against social, economic and environmental measures.

I’m pleased to be playing a small part in shaping this exciting sector for the next generation. May the ‘blue revolution’ continue at a sustainable growth rate!

Gilpin Bradley is managing director of Wester Ross Salmon and chairman of the Scottish Salmon Producers’ Organisation. FF

I’m “ pleased to

be playing a small part in shaping this exciting sector for the next generation

”

www.fishfarmer-magazine.com

04/10/2017 14:57:08

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