30 years of Scottish Aquaculture
Hatching a plan A
By Rob Fletcher
n overgrown and crumbling shed, set amidst trees on the eastern flanks of the Ochils, is a location many people would hurry past without taking note. However, were
passers-by to roll back the clock by 38 years, they would have found the now derelict building a hive of pioneering activity and history being made by hand.
For it was here, in 1972, that Richard Haldane decided to open the UK’s first rainbow trout fingerling rearing facility. Almost four decades later, while this original shed may be long abandoned, the project it spawned has gone on to become by far the largest of its kind in the UK. With a degree in electrical engineering, but bored with his job with Reyrolle Parons in Edinburgh, a meeting with Johnny Roberts (later to become another fish farming pioneer at Carse of Ae) gave him food for thought. For, as a keen fisherman who was interested in trout, Richard liked the idea of trout farming and so arranged to visit the country’s first commercial trout farm – Gateway West – beside Loch Awe, where Roberts was working. There he met Kris Dalsgaard, a second generation ‘fishmeister’ from Denmark, and the two began to form a plan to create some form of fish farming facility beside Cloan Castle, Richard’s family home. ‘It was clear to Kris that we didn’t have access to enough water to produce fish big enough for the table,’ Richard explains, ‘for the nearby stream, the Cloan Burn, could only provide about a quarter of a million gallons per day. How- ever,’ he continues, ‘Kris saw that the site had the potential to provide enough water to grow fingerlings and, after we’d made a few calculations on the back of an envelope, we decided to form a partnership to become the UK’s first fingerling producers.’
Handmade
And, although Richard had only met Kris for the first time in May, their combined enthusiasm for the project ensured that work to make the facility – largely by hand – was underway in August of the same year. The hatchery building, which was essentially a wood and asbestos shed, housed 20, 12-foot diameter tanks, designed and built by Kris using corrugated iron, instead of the expensive moulded fibreglass which was favoured by other farms at the time, meaning that the whole project was underway for a comparatively meagre £10,000. The first eggs were delivered in January of the following year, and the first batch of fingerlings – some 658,000 – was sold the year after. ‘Our rough calculations meant that we decided to sell our first batch for £20 per 1000 fish, while in reality we later found out that the then market price was closer to £40 per 1000 – due to the scarcity of juvenile trout, the only ones available being those excess to requirements on the few table farms which had sprung up, mainly in England. But, despite the rather naïve calculation of sales price, the business recovered the entire £10,000 set-up cost in its first year’s profit!’
* Continued on page 42
www.fishfarmer-magazine.com 41
TROUT
THE UK’S LARGEST TROUT FINGERLING HATCHERY WAS FOUNDED AS MUCH ON ENTHUSIASM, INNOVATION AND GOOD FORTUNE AS TECHNICAL EXPERTISE
Constructing the original hatchery at Cloan in 1972: Richard Haldane, centre; Kris Dalsgaard, above.
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