MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Aquaculture specialist urges ?foundations first' approach

AFTER three months in the Falklands, aquaculture adviser Dr Brendan Gara is confident that international opportunities in fish farming are open to the Islands,
however he is advocating a slow build up into the industry.

Based at the Falkland Islands Development Corporation with a background in hatchery management, Brendan openly admits he has no specific marketing training, "...other than selling products from my hatchery for the last fourteen years," but he is confident that the secret lies in, "believing in your product and knowing you have to sell it against a lot of other competitors."

In the Falklands, he says, people are keen to get involved in the industry - and some already are - but it is important to focus on "foundations" first. He explained, "Rather than jumping straight in to high tech options, for which you don't have the staff, infrastructure or supply chain, if you slowly build up, those things will fall into place and people will have increased experience." An example of a foundation, Brendan said, is sea trout farming, something he describes as, "a really interesting option" for the Falklands.

He explained, "Around the world, everybody knows what sea trout is, it's a really nice fish and easy to farm, it's differentiated from salmon and rainbow trout so it's occupying a niche position already.

"The technology is fairly lowtech. You could ranch it to start off, so all you're doing is releasing eggs into the rivers and seeing what returns... "There are risks with that, of course, and that's one of the things I'll be investigating over the next eight weeks or so." Once these foundations are developed, growth can happen in other areas, he said, citing zebra trout as a "really interesting" fish. "It's an indigenous fish and has got to be something worth looking at. "But it's only once you've got those ways in to the markets, you should start to look at such more ambitious products."

Brendan says he has been surprised by the level of concern people seem to have about conservation: "Whenever aquaculture development is discussed it seems conservation is the bookends of that discussion."

He said one example is sea trout: "It is on the conservation list and I don't know why, essentially it's an introduced pest so why not exploit it instead?

"It's a frame of mind that I think we have to be careful about. The bookends should be opportunity and development, not just conservation, because they are not mutually exclusive."

Mussel industry

Mussel farming is already in its infancy in the Falklands; Simon Hardcastle's company Falklands Fresh has been harvesting mussels for a number of years. Brendan says the time still isn't quite right for exporting mussels though.

"Give it two or three years time and the legislation will be in place; we'll probably have made major changes to the way biotoxin and algal monitoring is done in the sea, so those compliance issues will be much easier for shellfish. "Also, within two or three years' time, enough product will have built up that can be marketedonto a world stage."

So, are our products good enough to market abroad? Brendan says the test is in the way the products are received at home: "Do people in the Falklands actually eat it and rate it enough? If you don't like it, other people aren't going to like it. "That's the same for whatever we do, whether it's sea trout or zebra trout, toothfish... you've got to have an appreciation here first."

On one of his first days in Stanley, Brendan walked around the shops looking for Falklands seafood and it was hard to find. "It needs to be there in people's faces when they come off the cruise ships and it's got to be a really good product so they'll take it away with them..."

He describes the ideal product as, "...an aspirational product rather than bulk production. We're looking at low volume, high price products."

UK visit

Brendan has recently returned from a three week trip to the UK during which he worked on a number of areas: "I was talking to people about working with sea trout and about getting research and development work done on the back of other projects, and trying to encourage students to come over from places like Sparsholt College, an agricultural college in Hampshire) next year to do practical work here.

"I was also looking at the compliance issues with shellfish farming and how that legislation is going to change in the EU. Hopefully current testing regimes are going to improve to a point where it is much easier to do sampling in the Falklands without having to send samples overseas to be processed."

He also met with a rag worm farmer and producer of shrimp diets in the UK who is keen to receive as many rag worms as possible.

While this may sound like an unappealing industry, Brendan says it has lucrative prospects. Rag worms are farmed by a couple of companies around the world and sent to angling shops in the UK and Europe who, Brendan says, pay well for the product.

There is also a huge market for worms in shrimp farming, he says: "They need a supply of rag worm, a high quality product from a place where there's no industrialisation, very little PCBs and fluorines and things like that. They are really good marketing points..." He added, "The good thing with rag worm farming is its very lowtech: they live in big ponds in low lying ground next to the sea, you feed them every day and you harvest them once a year. "Farmers could have 50-100 ponds each and you could have a centralised harvesting contract once a year, they then get block frozen and containerised out of the Islands." In addition to providing advice to established companies when they want it, Brendan is trying to draw up options to present to the general public which can be developed into business plans, "...that people can then take forward."

Over the next couple of months Brendan will be drawing together a number of options for presentation to interested people and he also plans to identify where further project work needs to be done, such as possible pilot rag worm and sea trout farms. He will make a presentation during Farmers Week. (PN)