MARINE HARVEST
30 years of Scottish Aquaculture
Original and best
HOW THE ROOTS OF THE WORLD’S BIGGEST AQUACULTURE COMPANY WERE LAID DOWN IN 1960S SCOTLAND
By Steve Bracken, Business Support Manager, Marine Harvest Scotland
arine Harvest Scotland has ten freshwater farms (five hatcheries and five freshwater loch sites), 25 seawater farms and a head office in Edinburgh. The company currently employs 425 staff, mainly on the west coast, and was founded back in the 1960s by Unilever. Unilever’s interest in marine fish farming first arose in 1958, when a strategy group within the company predicted that, thanks to rising human populations and a decline in wild fish stocks, there would be a ‘fish gap’ before too long. Two parts of Unilever, Macfish and Animal Feeds, were involved in the study as to how to take this forward, as were Unilever Research Limited (URL).
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At around the same time URL set up the aquaculture resource within their Aberdeen fish laboratory and built a facility at Findon, south of Aberdeen, to carry out trials on prospective species for aquaculture, including flat fish and lobster. Meanwhile, the commercial arm identified the Vik brother’s process for rearing rainbow trout in seawater, from Norway as having huge commercial potential. At this time there was virtually no collaboration or co-operation between Norway and Scotland and any innovations in the fledgling industry were closely guarded secrets, so the company had to buy and import the process. A site survey was carried out to identify where this secret process could be tested and, in 1965, Loch Ailort, a sea loch between Fort William and Mallaig, was selected as a
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suitable operational site because of its sheltered location and excellent supplies of both freshwater and seawater, on which the acclimatisation process of the salmonids, it was thought, depended.
Local support
It was here that British Commandos had been trained for covert operations in the Second World War and, crucially for the company, the local landowner, Mrs Cameron-Head, was in support of the project as she was keen to see jobs created in remote rural areas. However, the rainbow trout project was a failure and URL then had the project stopped and converted to salmon. This typified the hit-and-miss, trial-and-error nature of the early stages of the industry, in which regular disappoint- ments were occasionally offset by quantum leaps of progress. In 1967 joint Marine Harvest and Unilever Research pro- grammes were set up and visiting scientists and technicians lit- erally camped in a caravan at Lochailort over a two-year period as the research continued.
This extensive research began to bear fruit and, by 1968, salmon had been given top priority at Loch Ailort. This was helped by the discovery by URL scientists, who were able to identify a developmental process that allowed them to transfer smolts directly from freshwater to seawater, and so were able to effect relatively mortality-free transfers without acclimatisation.
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