innovative Norwegian start-up which has produced just 10 tonnes of fish feed this year but whose backers believe has the potential to become a major global player. The company concerned is Planktonic AS, whose progress


towards the production and manufacture of a new type of live feed for use in marine fish farming has already secured more than €5 million of funding support from Invest in Norway, the EU’s Horizon programme and 20 private investors. Before dealing with how barnacles fit into all of this, it’s probably


worth explaining why so many people are getting excited about the discovery, with due apologies to those who know this already. The product which Planktonic is working on is designed to be fed


as an alternative to rotifers and artemia during the hatchery growth stage of marine species such as bass and bream. The current process works fine, of course, but only for farmers


who are successful in obtaining sufficient supplies of artemia, which is the only commercially available live feed for marine fish currently on the market. With the world’s supply of artemia already fully exploited, at approx.


3,000 tonnes a year, and with rotifers and artemia being prone to inconsistent production cycles, the commercial door is definitely open for anyone who can develop a good feed alternative. Planktonic believe they’ve done exactly that with the production


of their cryopreserved nauplii, derived from the ‘humble’ barnacle, and already run successfully through feeding trials in Europe. ‘We were looking for a marine zooplankton which could be


successfully cryopreserved, giving producers a new feed source which they could bring back to full life for use within a hatchery environment,’ Rune Husby, CEO of Planktonic, told a major aquaculture event in London in September. ‘The challenge was to find a species which could survive extremes


of temperatures and the barnacle has proved to be perfect, even though it has previously been viewed as essentially a problem species, to be got rid of. ‘Actually, its great quality is that it survives temperatures as low as


minus 30 degrees Centigrade in the winter in Norway while also being able to cope with up to plus 30 degrees in the summer. They are clearly very tough creatures with their own natural anti-freeze properties and are just right for commercial cryopreservation.’ Prior to the London event, Planktonic had been extremely secretive concerning the organism on which their new feed was based.


Ramping up production In now naming barnacles as the company’s great discovery, Mr Husby said the business was ready to ‘ramp up’ production, building significant output capacity around the world. ‘We already have patents covering the use of cryopreservation


techniques in relation to barnacles in 16 European countries, with many others pending,’ he said. Development plans involve setting up growing and harvesting


units in many different countries, along similar lines to those already used by mussel farmers. This will allow barnacle spat to be collected, grown and harvested, with cryopreservation then being used to create a ‘frozen’ live feed for delivery to hatcheries.


After that, according to Planktonic, the farmer will merely need to


allow the cryopreserved feed to thaw until the nauplii resumes normal swimming activity, making it ideal for live feeding. Whatever you may think of basing your future on making feed from


harvested barnacles, the €5m of investment capital already on the table adds up to a pretty impressive opening statement of intent.


BREXIT DOWNSIZE DANGER Finally a few words on Brexit, which is probably all any of us can stand at this point in the negotiating process. Given that anything might have happened by the time these words


actually appear in public, I’m restricting my focus to how Brexit is forcing one of the UK’s top specialist turkey producers to plan for a massive downsizing of the British end of his highly successful business. Essex-based Paul Kelly invited journalists to call him recently to


hear why the £15.3 million sales base he’s built in the UK could easily be reduced to little more than £4.5m as a result of post-Brexit border controls and a loss of access to his highly reliable EU workforce. Having also built a 30% share in a £25m German poultry business


over the last 20 years, and launched a US production and sales operation which is now worth £230,000, Paul warned that if we end up with a hard Brexit he could envisage his UK operations being cut to 30% of their present size. He then gave two key reasons for expressing such pessimism. ‘First, we employ 95 EU workers, mainly from Poland, who


join us in November every year to help prepare our turkeys for the Christmas market,’ said Paul. ‘More or less the same group of people come to us each time and have done for several years. As a result, they understand exactly what we need them to do and are extremely skilled at their job.’ I promptly countered with a question based on the UK


Government’s confidence that his future labour needs would be filled by British nationals, sourced partly from existing unemployed people and partly through youth employment schemes. ‘That is absolute nonsense,’ he said. ‘Talk to anyone who is


practically involved in this industry and they will tell you the government plan is a joke. In addition, even if we could find suitable people who wanted to do this work, we’d need to spend at least a month training them for the job, with all the extra costs this would impose.’ Reason number two was equally bluntly stated. ‘Second, a major part of our business in Germany involves the


supply of Kellybronze genetics to Freiland Puten Fahrenzhausen, the organic poultry business in which I hold a 30% stake,’ he said. ‘Looking forward, we simply cannot afford to risk any post-Brexit border controls disrupting our operations, as our eggs and chicks could not cope with a five-hour delay at a check point while all the paperwork gets sorted.’ He then revealed that plans are already underway to close some


of his UK farms and replace their output by eggs and chicks produced on new units in the Netherlands and Germany. Just a few Brexit words, therefore, but enough, especially when


you remember that poultry feed is the leading segment for the European compound feed industry with the poultry feed market in Europe being worth £1.64 billion in 2017 and forecast to reach more than £2bn by 2023. Those figures are all pre-downsizing, of course.


FEED COMPOUNDER NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 PAGE 15


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