Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
337 John Holmyard – Lowest carbon protein aka mussels: it’s food, not a high tech unicorn
A conversation with John Holmyard, founder and managing director of Offshore Shellfish, 21st century mussel farming: guilt-free food that helps regenerate marine biodiversity and captures carbon. We talk about protein. With a growing population, we need more and more of it. So, what is the lowest impact and positive impact protein source we can grow? A deep dive into the largest offshore mussel farm in Europe, where they grow large amounts of mussels by grazing large number of plankton that naturally flows by. And, in case you are wondering, there is so much plankton around because we depleted most of the fish stocks that used to eat a lot of it.
We learn all about how to build the largest mussel farm in the UK and how to deal with regulators who have no idea what shellfish farming even means (they think you hunt mussels in the wild). We explore why mussels are such a potential crop to grow, and they can even restore natural mussel reefs, which used to be present all around the North Sea until we started bottom-trawling. And why are politics fundamental to the business when all of your crop goes fresh to mainland Europe?
---------------------------------------------------
Join our Gumroad community, discover the tiers and benefits on www.gumroad.com/investinginregenag.
Support our work:
- Share it
- Give a 5-star rating
- Buy us a coffee… or a meal! www.Ko-fi.com/regenerativeagriculture
----------------------------------------------------
More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/john-holmyard.
Find our video course on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/course.
----------------------------------------------------
The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Feedback, ideas, suggestions?
- Twitter @KoenvanSeijen
- Get in touch www.investinginregenerativeagriculture.com
Join our newsletter on www.eepurl.com/cxU33P!
Support the show
Thanks for listening and sharing!
Protein, protein, protein. With a growing population, we need more and more of it. So what's the lowest impact, actual, positive protein source we can grow? Of course we cover ruminants grazing on healthy pasture all the time, but let's change scenery for a moment. All the way down from factory farm beef to pork, to chicken, to some fishes, soy meal, even below that, there are bivalves and specifically mussels. Today we take a deep dive into the largest offshore mussel farm in Europe, where they grow a large amount of mussels by grazing plankton which naturally flows by and, in case you're wondering, there's so much plankton around because we depleted most of the fish stocks which used to eat a lot of this. We learn all about how it is to build the largest mussel farm of the UK, how to deal with regulators who have no idea what shellfish farming even means they think you hunt mussels in the wild why mussels are such a positive crop to grow and why they can even restore natural mussel reefs which used to be present all around the North Sea until we started bottom trawling. And finally, why politics are fundamental to a business when all of your crop grows fresh to mainland Europe. So don't mention the word Brexit, but we still talk about it, as the UK doesn't eat a lot of fresh mussels, so you have to export.
Speaker 1:Take a deep breath and another one. Every second breath we take comes from the oceans and over half of the fish we eat is farmed. That's why we dedicate a series to explore the potential of regeneration. Underwater Oceans and other water bodies cover most of our planet and have stored most of the excess heat so far and, at the same time, have some of the best opportunities to produce healthy food, mostly protein, store carbon, create materials, fuel, biostimulants and much, much more. Plus, create a lot of jobs in coastal communities.
Speaker 1:We have largely ignored the water-based farming aquaculture industry in this podcast until now. In these conversations we explore why aquaculture is so important for the future of our planet. If we get this wrong, we have a serious problem. What are the risks and challenges with feed, the reliance on soy pests yes, there are pests underwater antibiotics, microplastics, etc. What does it mean when you apply regenerative principles to aquaculture? What can soil-based agriculture learn from aquaculture and vice versa? What should investors really know about water-based farming and what the potential is of regenerative aquaculture and visa versa? And what should investors really know about water-based farming and what the potential is of regenerative aquaculture A series of interviews with the people putting money to work entrepreneurs and investors in this crucial and often overlooked sector.
Speaker 1:We're grateful for the support of the Nest family office in order to make this series. The Nest is a family office dedicated to building a more resilient food system through supporting natural solutions and innovative technologies that change the way we produce food. You can find out more on TheNestFOcom or in the links below. Welcome to another episode Today with the founder and managing director of Offshore Shellfish 21st century muscle farming guilt-free food that helps regenerate marine biodiversity and captures carbon. Welcome, john. Hello. How are you? I'm amazed how you put the guilt-free piece there, which we're definitely going to go into, because I think people are looking for that and longing for that. But to start with a personal question we always like to ask at the beginning how come you spend most of your awake hours, and maybe also your sleeping hours, thinking about shellfish and thinking about and doing muscle growing Like? What path led you to this occupation?
Speaker 2:Probably a fairly long story. I trained as a marine biologist at Bangor University back in the early 80s, but before that I'd spent many years doing all sorts of jobs and I suppose historically I come from a farming background. And I suppose historically I come from a farming background. My mother's family were farmers. I've always had an interest in muscle firing since probably before there was any really in this country. I can remember when I was probably a teenager and got hold of a paper that was looking at the potential for doing muscle farming in the UK. So that was back in the mid 60s, late 60s.
Speaker 1:How come Did you love eating them or did you love how they look? How does that come on your plate literally?
Speaker 2:I think, partly accidental, I just happened to pick up the paper in the school library. But also I've always been interested in rooting around the rock pools when I was a kid and fascinated by what you find, eventually went to university in my sort of mid-late 20s. That was the beginning of the takeoff of a lot of aquaculture. Salmon aquaculture was just really sort of starting to kick off. Detroit aquaculture had been around for a long time. Freshwater aquaculture, carp and so on had obviously been going for thousands of years in the Far East and to some extent in Europe. I wasn't particularly interested in the freshwater side of it, but I was definitely interested in what was happening in the marine area. One of the jobs I had when I was in my early 20s was working up in the northwest of Scotland on an oil rig construction site and I can remember at the time sitting out in the wilds there on this construction site looking at the lock in front of me and thinking it'd be a really good idea if somebody started muscle farming up here. And it wasn't until quite a few later years later I just graduated in marine biology and done a dissertation on muscles and how they were affected by things like biotoxins and so on. And then, well, mid-s, getting a job was not as easy as it sometimes can be, and I took the first job that was offered me, which was working in Imperial College in London. It was actually going back to what I used to do, which was mending concrete and testing concrete and so on, which meant I'd live in London, which wasn't a great fowl.
Speaker 2:And then one day I picked up an article in a magazine that was talking about what a couple up in Loch Etif on the northwest of Scotland, just about 20 miles up from Oban, what they were doing. And they were just starting to produce a few mussels on ropes. And I knew that the Spanish were doing it in a relatively big way then and I knew it had been done before the Spanish on ropes by Venezuelan farmers not long after the last war, I think so in the 50s or something like that. But nobody was really doing it in any great numbers. So after I found the article, I gave the characters involved a call, so can I come and have a look? They sounded slightly suspicious of me but they said yes, and it was a couple called Janet Church and Norrie Atherson, the sort of founders of the scottish showfish industry. Uh, I went up to go and see what they were doing and uh, I thought, yep, I could do this, and um, basically, what was so different about the rope?
Speaker 1:like what, just for people to, for the audience to, to understand muscle farming, the different types of of that? You mentioned rope a few times as as being something not done in, let's say, the uk, but other places. Why, why, how do we imagine, should we imagine, muscles being farmed on a rope?
Speaker 2:well, there's, there's three main methods of farming muscles. One is just to lay them on the seabed. You either collect seed and put them in a better place, or you just pick up what's there, naturally. One is the way they do it in France, where you collect seed on ropes and then you wrap the ropes around a vertical pole called a Boucher pole. That happens a lot on the west coast of France. And the third way is to collect seed on ropes and then just keep on growing them on the ropes seed on ropes and then just keep on growing them on the ropes. And now the big advantage of growing them on the ropes is that they're, um, they're in the water all the time, so they grow 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and they're also not picking up silt or grit or um whatever on the bottom, and they're, they're away from. The predators of starfish and crabs are the main seabed predators.
Speaker 2:I was aware that there was a rope farming industry in New Zealand which was starting around about the same time as we started in Scotland I'm sorry, just to scroll back when I'd been to visit the people in Scotland I'm sorry, just to scroll back. When I'd been to visit the people in Scotland. I came home, put the house on the market, sold the house and started a farm next door. That was the end of London and it was real pioneer times. There was quite a few people trying to have a go. We all had pretty much the same idea, but there was no readily available equipment. You had to basically build all your own stuff. There was no real markets in the UK. So we were all learning from each other and making all the mistakes and hopefully learning from everybody else's mistakes as well. So that's how we got going in Scotland. But go back to the rope farming side of things, as opposed to the seabed farming. If you're going to be farming on the seabed, you need a big treasure, a big boat, and you need the right place, and the right place is relatively rare. It's got to be the right depth and the right sort of seabed and so on. Plus, you've got to have a source of seed. Growing them on ropes gives you a lot more potential places to do them and in those days, because the gear wasn't particularly well developed, we were just literally building everything by hand out of bits of scrap and old five-gallon drums for floats and all that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Gradually the industry developed. We all got slightly better. A few of us took a trip to New Zealand to go and see how they were doing it. New Zealand was pretty professional by that point, probably because they could grow a lot, but there's not many trip to New Zealand to go and see how they were doing it. New Zealand was pretty professional by that point, probably because they could grow a lot, but there's not many people in New Zealand, so they've got to export them, so they've got to be efficient and there's not that many people to farm them are there.
Speaker 2:They developed sort of more mechanised, more efficient ways of doing it than we had. So we copied the bits that were relevant to us and that's how the industry developed in scotland. It was developing, at the same time doing very similar stuff in ireland and um and also in um in chile, the um, the farms in chile for if you go back to the late 80s when we started, the farms in Chile were probably doing about the same as we were in Scotland a few thousand tons by the time we got to. Well, if you look at what they're doing now, we're still only doing a few thousand tons in the UK, but Chile is doing about 500,000 tons. Wow, it's big, big.
Speaker 1:And so the market side of things was that easy. A few thousand tons, because that would be absorbed in the UK, or was it a thing? How difficult was it to sell? Let's say the growing side I can imagine tricky because you have to build everything yourself, yourself.
Speaker 2:But the selling side, to begin with in scotland. Um, yeah, you could sell them down the local pub and then we pretty much saturated all the local pubs. Then you started shipping them down to glasgow or edinburgh and we fairly quickly between us, um sort of saturated the Scottish market and then quite a few of us got together and realized that we really needed a much bigger market and we pretty much most of the growers in Scotland joined together in a cooperative so that we had enough as a communal bunch, as it were, to tackle the supermarkets. The supermarkets didn't stop fresh mussels at the time, but they were interested, and once we got a contract from a supermarket, then the industry in Scotland grew pretty rapidly and the producers in Scotland are now mostly based in the Shetland Isles and they supply most of the UK market. But the UK market, all said and done, is only about 8,000, 10,000 tons. We're not big eaters of bivalves. We're not big eaters of any seafood in this country, to be honest. Which?
Speaker 1:is hard being on an island.
Speaker 2:I know. I know it's one of those anomalies. Most of the seafood I'm talking about all fish and shellfish that are landed in the UK don't stay in the UK. They end up in Europe or further afield. It's the same in the.
Speaker 1:Netherlands, we eat salmon important, that's sort of it in terms of fish. I'm generalizing here obviously Don't email me but we are definitely not eating most of what gets landed, which is a shame because there's so much.
Speaker 2:Most of what we actually eat aren't caught in the UK are there. I mean, we import white fish from Norway and Iceland and Alaska. We import tilapia and catfish from the Far East the good stuff that always ends up in the pictures on the press releases and so on.
Speaker 2:It mostly ends up in France or Spain or Italy. It's the same for our shellfish, except where we are now. We're separated off from Scotland. We're no longer part of that cooperative. They carry on supplying most of the supermarkets in the UK. But this brings us to the point where I decided to leave Scotland, 2006,. I think we sold our farm in Scotland because I recognised we needed to get a lot bigger if we were to tackle the main market, and the main market is Northern Europe. And around about 2004, 5, 6, the production in the Netherlands had crashed. I mean, I think at one point it was up to well over 100,000 tons were coming out of the Eustacheld and the Wadden Sea and that crashed for a number of reasons, partly because the growers were restricted to the amount of seed they could collect, mostly from the Wadden Sea, because they were competing with the birds for the seed.
Speaker 1:Because you're collecting wild seeds, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's how they were doing it at that time. So the seeds collected in the Wadden Sea and then grown on, mostly in the Easter Shelf and some of it in the Wadden Sea. That production crashed and so prices went up to a point at which I thought, well, it was really worth a while to see what we could do about accessing that market, and I spent a fair bit of time in the netherlands speaking to the various processors and buyers. Um, and yeah, they were.
Speaker 1:Your idea was that price would stay up, because if it's a crash, it might rebounce at some point. But your hunch?
Speaker 2:was, or your research. Yeah, maybe we got there.
Speaker 1:I don't know, I haven't kept up on the latest prices of muscles, but you saw a market there, a potential market, a longer-term market, not just a nice one or two years because something happened in the Osterschelle, the Breschschelle.
Speaker 2:It was partly about price. But, to be honest, the base price is not a lot different from what it is in the UK. It was partly about price but partly about demand, and the thing that gets me up in the morning and really switches me on about this whole business is I'm producing food, I'm a farmer, I'm not hunting it, I'm growing it, and you can't get more basic than growing mussels. I mean, it's right at the bottom of the food chain. So I wanted to grow a lot more than we were growing in Scotland. I knew there was a limit to how much we could ever sell in the UK and there was definitely a limit to how much I could grow in the location that we had.
Speaker 2:So I wanted to get a lot bigger, and so the uh, the thought that was always going through my head is where do we go? Where do we go? And you know you think Scotland is, uh, it's a big place, it is. It's a lot of sheltered water, but there's a lot of other uses as well. You've got a lot of salmon farms, you've got military, you've got scenic issues and a lot of the space is actually not terribly suitable because it just doesn't grow terribly good muscles, so I knew we had to Because of the cold to rough.
Speaker 1:What makes a good spot for good muscles?
Speaker 2:It. It's like any animal it's got to feed, uh, so there's got to be enough food in the water, um, and the rate at which they feed is partly dependent on how much food is in the water, but also the temperature, um, the um. The other considerations are also the practical considerations.
Speaker 2:Although Scotland the west coast of Scotland, which is where most of the firing went on is a big place, it's made out of lots and lots of small spaces. So if you want to use a boat in one lock, it means you can't then go and use it in the next lock or the next lock because you might be restricted by weather to get there and so on. So we couldn't really grow that much bigger where we were in Scotland and I recognised that we needed a much bigger space and obviously going offshore was a possible way of solving that. Having said that, nobody else is doing it offshore, so we didn't quite know how to solve it, but I think it was bright enough to understand that if you're going offshore, then probably the West of Scotland is not the first place you'd choose. It's pretty wild.
Speaker 1:It's very rough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1:If you're ready to lose most of your muscles and minds regularly, then yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, it's less about losing them and more about just access to the farm.
Speaker 1:Getting to them, you mean with the boats? Yeah, with the boats. The further offshore you go, the more tricky regularly to visit and harvest and check.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, we spent a long time looking at other areas and I was quite interested in Does that mean you're driving basically down the coast around the UK trying to find places or how does?
Speaker 2:it work. I think Google Earth came into play here, getting out the charts and having a look at each area and so on, and we I mean I come from the West Country in the south of England originally and I quite fancied the idea of moving back down south and we looked at a lot of areas, but one of the areas we looked at was where we are now. It was Lyme Bay, and there is no such thing as a perfect place. There are places that have less negatives than others, or fewer negatives.
Speaker 1:This was good enough in terms of feed food. In the water temperature pollution, I'm imagining roughness it ticked those boxes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that and access. You've got to have a harbour. You're going to be using a boat. It's going to be a fairly big boat, so you need a reasonable harbour to deal with. And sort of one of the main outstanding things going through my head all the time is you need to find an area where the water is not just clean, um, but is recognized as clean um, that's a very important point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because, if people, because we'll get to that in terms of of feeding and filtering, which is one of the amazing things bioalps do, but then there's always that little voice in, I think, consumers, and my head as well. Okay, what does it mean? Where does the filtering thing go? So it needs to be a sea or a bay that people at least don't connect with any pollution. Exactly, yeah.
Speaker 2:The whole image of shellfish, particularly bivalves shellfish, oysters, mussels, clams and so on, is closely sort of related to the water they come from. And I guess I had a choice of, I don't know, sticking the farm up the Humber Estuary, which is very fertile, or putting it in South Devon, and if you don't think about the English coast, the South Devon sounds nicer. That's one consideration. But also, Lime Bay was pretty much the best area we could come up with in terms of the configuration of the seabed, the way the currents moved, the way the currents moved in comparison to the way the wind moved, the distance from harbour, the access to the road network. There was a lot of things that came into play and, um, we eventually settled on uh line bay and then we went through the process of uh applying for permission to do it. That's where we had a reason about that yeah, how does that work?
Speaker 1:because if if nobody does offshore muscles, I mean it's not visually very intense, because it's not that there's a huge wind farm or massive boats etc. You don't see them from far. But still, we all know policymakers are not the biggest fan of new things necessarily. So you knock on the door in South Devon and say, ok, we would like to start an offshore muscle farm business, and quite big, because we want to feed a lot of people. What was the reaction?
Speaker 2:Mixed. The seabed in the UK is owned by the Crane Estate, of course, so you need to rent an area. So my first stop was to go to the Crown Estate and said look, this is what I want to do. I think the basic reaction was well, we don't have any reason why you shouldn't do it, but you're going to have to tell us more about what you're going to do before we say yes. The other people we had to speak to at the time were um, uh, part of uh. Well, it was an organization called the mfa, which doesn't exist anymore. It's now been replaced by the mmo, which is the marine management organization, which is a government body that comes under defra. So essentially, we had to get a lease from the crown Estate and we had to get a permit from the MFA.
Speaker 2:The process for both of those was just not clear because nobody had done it before. So we had to do a lot of consultation and then we had to do a lot of sort of public engagement and allow people to say why they didn't want us there or why they thought it was a great idea or whatever else. Ultimately, the Crown Estate they charge us rent, so they make money out of it. So they were pro what we did. We've known them a long time because of our engagement in Scotland for 20 years, so we knew the characters and we knew the things that would be asked.
Speaker 2:To be honest, we didn't have a great deal of objection. I think possibly because nobody had done it before. People didn't have a great deal of objection, I think, possibly because nobody had done it before. People didn't really know. People had definitely clued up enough to know they didn't want a salmon farm or a sea bream farm or something like that. Not entirely sure why, but that's not my subject. The main reaction was from fishermen who would not be able to tow trawls or dredges through the area. So we sat down with the Seafisher's Committee, as it was then, and said OK, you know, these are the areas we want to go, because it's the right seabed and it's the right flow of water and it's in the right sort of little bit of shelter you get from the north, you know from the north and we identified areas that were not fished particularly heavily and the main reason they are not fished particularly heavily is because they have been fished particularly heavily and there was nothing left.
Speaker 1:yeah, um, just for background, like dredging is is basically pulling a heavy beam over the sea floor, like there are videos online which are interesting, sure, um, and it's. It's disturbing is a is an understatement there the the sea bed floor, and yeah, you can do that for a while, but then there not, and everything that comes up in terms of fish is being caught. It doesn't. It's not really regenerative, let's say it's definitely on a downward spiral. So you identified places where there was just not too much life left to fish, meaning not so interesting for fishermen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my approach to fishermen is yeah, I understand you're going to lose that bit of grain, but you're not going to lose the fish and the fish won't stay in the farm forever. You know they swim out and so on. And that was our position 12 years ago, 14 years ago.
Speaker 1:Is there any research suggesting that mussel?
Speaker 2:farms help with fish stock like, well, our long experience in scotland. Uh, just from looking over the side of the boat and putting a hook over and down again, you knew there was a lot of fish around your lines. The fish congregate around the lines. There's other things that grow on the lines as well, as mussels, um, and the fish come in to come and take them. Plus, they get a bit of shelter, um and um. You know, it's like it's almost like a fad that they use for attracting tune or something like that.
Speaker 2:But we went through all this with the Crown Estate and the MFA and they asked us to go and speak to Natural England, or English Nature as it was then to see what they thought. Now they were pretty suspicious that we then to see what they thought. Now they were pretty suspicious that we were going to damage the natural environment. I had to point out repeatedly it's not a natural environment. It's a bit of seabed which has been trawled for 100 years. It's not particularly natural. But we agreed in the end that what we'd do was survey all of the farming area before we put anything there at all, and that's what we did. It was a pretty intensive survey and we've continued that survey every year since and that's where the team from Plymouth University. It's entirely independent of us, other than the fact we pay for it. We don't influence what goes on there. I mean, the actual sampling plan is determined or was originally determined by Plymouth University and Natural England and we've followed pretty much the same sampling plan ever since. We sample the seabed for what's living in the sediment, the sediment size. We sample what goes on above the sediment. So they put down a lot of video, baited video traps so they can see what's swimming by. They sample with video what happens in the midwater, they sample the chemistry and they do that in multiple places within the farm but also in multiple places at sort of a near control and also again at a far control. So we have a huge amount of data. This is carried on Twelve years Wow, yeah, it's been going on for 12 years now. I'll maybe get on to that in a minute.
Speaker 2:There's quite a lot of publications coming out. What we saw when we put the cameras down that very first year was well, we could see basically a lot of hermit, crabs and virtually nothing else. I think I watched about 20 hours of video and scarcely saw a single fish. If you put a camera down there now, depending on the time of year you put it down, sometimes you can't see anything because of the fish. You know they're just crowded with them, and if anybody goes on our website, you can see plenty of video there. The recovery of the farm has been. I mean, I kind of predicted it. I was hoping to see all this, but it's been very gratifying to see that things have gone from being a fairly unproductive bit of seabed. Now, though, some of the fishermen originally were quite anti what we were doing, not necessarily because they wanted that bit of ground, but they just saw it as a sort of foot in the door, and before they knew it, the whole bay would be covered in mussel farms.
Speaker 1:It's not the case at all, but some of those fishermen now think we're the best thing since sliced bread, because of that regeneration, because of the life that came back.
Speaker 2:There are fishermen there that are very happy to fish around the edge of the farm and catch whatever's sort of escaping from the farm and leaking out, and there are some who still try fishing in the farm, although that's now illegal. That's a bit of a sore point. Sometimes they damage our gear. It's not something we welcome but it's something you've sort of got to put up with. But the regeneration when I was studying various possible areas, uh and I wish the heck I kept it at the time but I came across a dive record from about the 70s, uh, and I seem to remember it was a dive club for the midlands in england that had been diving on the area and there was the reported that there was big shellfish beds down there.
Speaker 2:Now, when we put our first video down, the one thing we never saw was a mussel. You know there was no mussels but you couldn't see any. There was nothing of that. It was just soft mud pretty disturbed, and you could even see the trawl marks sort of going across the farm. So we thought that there had probably been you know shellfish there before. When you pick up sediment grab, you could often find the old shells of you know animals long dead. And then there's a paper come out this year. I'm trying to remember the name of the journal, but I can give you all this later if you'd like. Yes, please, we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, sure, but it's showing how the seabed has recovered. We're now on our third PhD study going on on the farm and it's the same team all the time, all the same supervisors, and they're bringing in different PhD groups each year, because it's such a fascinating case, of course, for them as well.
Speaker 2:It is. It was pretty unique. I don't know of anywhere else in the world that has, well, I don't know of anywhere else in the world that's done what we've done on the scale that we've done. There are other offshore farms, particularly New Zealand and China, but I don't know that anyone's studied it in the intensity that we have. So the evidence we've got now is that, yes, things are recovering.
Speaker 2:We look at the biodiversity amongst a range of other things. We see how the biodiversity has changed each year and to begin with it was gradually changing. It was a gradual increase, which is good. But we also look at the biodiversity traits. So it's not just the individual species, it's the feeding traits, whether whether the scavengers or filter feeders or whatever else. And seeing how that's changed over the years, um, it does change because there's a constant rain of food down to the seabed. Um, but the general opinion is that it's all a very good thing. Um, that was something that people at Natural England and even the Marine Biology Association were suspicious of or really concerned to say. Well, it's not natural, and I never try and pretend what we're doing is natural, but a lot of the things we create alternative to natural, the one thing that we've shown over the last few years, because there's a new project called Ropes to Reefs, which is partly sponsored by us, with all our background information, but also is sponsored by the government through a defer grant or an MMO grant. Rather, it's looking how the farm is creating or recreating a reef underneath the the muscle ropes.
Speaker 2:Some of the muscles fall off the ropes. I'd love it if they didn't, because I'm trying to sell them, you know, but some of them will always fall off. That's, that's a natural thing. And it's not just mussels. There's a whole load of other things that fall off with them. There's there's crabs and, um, scallops and queen scallops and a huge number of other organisms settle on the ropes. Some of those will just fall off. Uh, the vast majority of them will get washed off when we harvest the mussels and they go back in the sea and they'll settle onto the bottom. So what they've seen over the past year with some very high definition sonar, is there's actually a rebuilding of a reef underneath each of the ropes. So each of the ropes when I say ropes, I mean headlight ropes, which each of those are 150 to 200 meters long, and so there's basically, and how deep underneath is like, what's the depth of the seabed at that point?
Speaker 2:The depth of the farm is about 30 meters, 25 to 30 meters over most of the farm. The ropes go down to about 12, 15 meters. So you know there's a gap underneath the ropes and then you've got the seabed. The thing they've shown is that those reefs are rebuilding. Now rebuilding a mussel reef is not an easy thing. You know. There's plenty of mussel farming where, essentially, you're rebuilding a temporary reef, and that's what you do in the netherlands and in north wales and various other places in the uk. You collect seed, put on the bottom. When it's grown to full size you take it up again. But what we're regenerating is a permanent reef and because there's a constant rain of young mussels, you've got a range of ages down there as well. So it's much more like a natural reef than just putting down a whole, and it's not happening outside your mussel farm.
Speaker 1:No, it's not. It's happening underneath.
Speaker 2:It's just under the headlines.
Speaker 1:And in terms of scale, have you reached? You set out to supply that demand, a much bigger one than you could grow in Scotland? Yeah, have you succeeded in that sense? And is there space to grow or not? Like what's happened on the scale side of things? Because you're a farmer, as you said, I'm growing food and I want to grow as much nutrient-dense, healthy and regenerative food as possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, this is where politics comes in. Our market is the Netherlands. We sell 95% of everything we grow into the Netherlands and from there it goes to some of the states in the Netherlands. Some will go to Belgium, some will go to France, germany, poland and elsewhere in Europe, and we'll go to France, germany, poland, elsewhere in Europe. So the EU is our market.
Speaker 2:We never really considered that we were going to be selling much in the UK and we don't, so we've always. You know, we've built the farm to supply the EU and we do it very well. The size of the farm air that we're permitted for should grow somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 tonnes. Well, a few years ago the UK had a collective brainstorm and decided to leave the EU, decided Brexit. Yeah, I couldn't believe it was going to happen. I don't think anyone believed it was going to happen. I don't think anyone believed it was going to happen, but it happened.
Speaker 2:We know what the regulations are for exporting or importing mussels from outside of the EU into the EU, because we used to be in the EU. So we know what the regulations are, and the regulations are that you can only import stuff into the eu if it comes from a class a water. Now we're six miles offshore, um, and we're I don't know 15 miles from the nearest sort of fresh water input. But we do occasionally have, um, an odd blip in the readings, maybe just once a year or something like that, but that potentially could reduce us from a grade A to a grade B water, and if we're grade B, we can't access the EU market. So, although we haven't well, apart from the first few months of Brexit, when we were shut out for about six, seven months because we were grade B at the time We've been grade A ever since, but the potential is there for us to revert to grade B the scare, yeah, the fear.
Speaker 2:And that has basically meant the investment has dried up, Although, because we've now managed to keep going for this long, I think we're a bit more confident that we can carry on exporting and we're preparing to expand the farm up towards its top limit At the moment. This year we should do about 3,000 tons, which I think as an individual farm that probably makes it one of the bigger ones.
Speaker 1:Certainly it is significant growth. Let's say you're confident to do that. How easy is that? Is that? Mostly, I mean it's a lot of ropes. Do you have like infrastructure wise, seat wise? Like, how do you, how would you do that? Is that a thing over multiple years? Is that different than in farming? Like, how would you go about if, if you say okay, I have a guarantee will be, will be a for at least a year or two, um, would you? How would you then go about growing or scaling?
Speaker 2:the? Um. Well, the size of the farm just depends on how many ropes we put in the water. Um, the seed that we collect comes from the farm itself. Uh, so we collect our own seed. We don't rely on anybody else for our seed supply. Some years it's better than others, but it's always been sort of okay. The next thing that controls it is your floating infrastructure, the boat. We've got two big vessels. One is the main harvesting vessels will take about 40 or 50 tons, and the other one is a surface vessel for moving floats about and doing reseeding things like that. For us to get any bigger, we basically need another boat. It's a boat that's going to be operated offshore. It's going to be a big boat. Big boats offshore are quite expensive.
Speaker 1:So if you're going to get another boat In the range just to, first of all, what's a big boat in terms of size and, second, what's the cost? I mean, we know that the tractor costs have gone through the roof over the last decades, mostly because of size and computers and all of that.
Speaker 2:But when you say an expensive boat, computers and all of that, but when you say an expensive boat, what should we imagine To do what we do? It's got to be a very specific sort of boat. It's a specifically designed catamaran and it can put up with a lot of the lousy weather but still remain fairly stable on the ropes and so on. We're just going out to tender for another one. The ballpark is somewhere between two and three on.
Speaker 2:We're just going out to tender for another one, and the ballpark is somewhere between two and three million, definitely an expensive boat, yeah, but if you're going to have that big boat then you've got to make sure there's enough work in front of it, which means you've got to put a load more ropes in. So we're probably talking about one to two million quid to the ropes. Shoreside infrastructure we don't have any at all because the mussels literally come straight off the boat into the back of a lorry. They genuinely don't even touch UK soil, they go straight into a lorry and straight off to Holland. So we don't have any infrastructure, apart from the pier that we use in Brixham, which in an ideal world would be twice the size it is. But we can manage for now. We would love to be able to sell some more in the UK but, as I said, the UK market is not very big and it's fairly price sensitive. And the big thing about the UK there's virtually nowhere to go and buy your fish.
Speaker 2:Although you have all the fish, and chips and stuff, sure if you want to buy fresh shellfish you've got to go to a fishmonger.
Speaker 1:Virtually all the fishmongers are in supermarkets and since Covid, virtually all the fresh fish counters in supermarkets have been shut wow, ok, so there's not a lot of like, unless the uk wakes up one day and the side shellfish are are on the menu and and hip etc. But the chances that happening is are small. Yeah, let's still hope for it, but still are small.
Speaker 2:You need to go abroad, yeah yeah, it gives us a target to aim for, in that there's expansion room there. Should we start targeting the UK? But I'm old enough and wise enough to know that building a market can take just as long as building a farm, and that's been the case in Europe. Rope-grown mussels in Holland, well, doesn't sound like it's particularly different, but they are different because the main market is Belgium. Belgians generally are very keen on bottom grip cultured mussels, and ours are slightly different. They have a thinner shell, they have more meat, the meat tends to be a slightly different color from the ones you get from the seabed in the Netherlands, and all this doesn't sound like particularly important, but it does take a while to get the market to accept things. We've got the added issue that because we're offshore, we're affected by weather and we could be blown off the farm for four or five days at a stretch, because the main market is for live, fresh mussels if you need to be able to ship.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, and you know most big buyers they want a consistent supply.
Speaker 1:Is that something you're thinking like how to preserve? Of course, there's a long tradition of canned mussels, especially in Spain. I think northern Spain has a lot. How do you get away from that, or that's just not your core business?
Speaker 2:No, it's something we're working on. We market everything. We've got partners in the Netherlands. A company called Crane for Vice it's one of the big muscle companies in Jersica and we've got a joint venture with them called Premier Offshore. So through that we supply them with fresh muscles and they do the marketing for us. But also through that joint venture we've built a small factory for producing ready cooked mussels in a sort of vacuum pack with various sauces. We spent a lot of time developing this product to be as good as or as close to a good fresh one as you can get. I mean there's plenty of pre-cooked mussels on the market.
Speaker 1:I've tasted a few. Yeah, that's a mixed result.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, some are better than others, but the process we've developed is actually pretty good and we've got a product which can quite frequently pass for good fresh mussels. They're not a huge seller in Europe because you've already got a good supply. I mean, most of Europe you want fresh mussels. You go to Fishmonger, you get fresh mussels. It's not like the UK where you know, does it mean it's more interesting?
Speaker 1:to bring them back to the UK.
Speaker 2:Well, we haven't done it yet, but we're planning to, it will be a double Brexit, wemi.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you know, there's all sorts of, you know, documentation, implications and so on, and it's a big enough hassle as it is trying to get the live ones into Europe, without wanting to try to get the cooked ones back. But it is something we're working on and we expect to be doing it this winter. The cook ones, our partners at Crime for Vice, sort of every other year there's a shellfish conference, nelty Arms, and we go to it each time and there's a lunch for everybody. You know, and, um, I think it was, yeah, three, four years ago um, our partners crime device were the ones who were sort of supplying the muscles for the for Well, they supplied our cooked ones. So not only were they not Dutch mussels, they were pre-cooked and everybody said well, these are really nice. Nobody twigged that they were pre-cooked. So they are this audience of mussel farmers. They passed the ultimate test.
Speaker 2:They got a good pass there, yeah, so, yeah, they're an item that we've been developing in Europe and hopefully it will grow a fair bit. I mean, even if you're sort of dead set on always having fresh cooked mussels, now and again you want to sling something in the shopping bag and you don't want it to leak, and you don't necessarily want to cook it that night, you want to have it a couple of nights later, and so you know, these things have got a shelf life of two, three weeks and they can sit in the fridge and be there as a ready meal whenever you want it. You know, so it's, uh, it's the main way that muscles are sold in the uk now. Um, you know, it's now, it's pre-cooked ones and they've been developed by the company that we, the co-op that we used to be part of in Scotland. So I guess if I bring stuff back from Holland I'll be competing with my old company.
Speaker 1:Let's see how that goes in terms of guilt free, which is something you put in your slogan, is that in the uk or in general, do you see an interest? Because, let's say, bifalves is is as good as it gets and we'll get to the, the filtering piece, but they're, they don't need any feed. I mean, they will eat feed but you don't have to give them any feed. Um, they're, they don't need to move a lot, they don't use a lot of energy, they don't use any water. Obviously, um, they are extremely nutritious and if grown in the, in the right places, do you see an interest or growing interest in that? I mean, of course, in in big parts of europe, uh, fresh mussels, it's muscle season, which now has changed a lot, but it's. It's a thing, but it's. There's been a historic one, let's say. Do you see growing interest into this potentially superfood, that that is extremely lightweight or actually regenerative, in this case, to to the seabed? Has that at all reached the, the shellfish business, um, or is it mostly in your slogan until now?
Speaker 2:It's definitely a point. We stress how much effect these things have on the buyer. I'm sometimes slightly doubtful as to how the message gets through to people. I read a recent report from the ASC what do we call it? Recent report from the ASC. And we're certified ASC. We're also certified as organic. But the recent report from ASC was very much that people still select what they buy in the supermarket on price and whether they like it or not, which is fine with me.
Speaker 2:You know we want people to like the things. If the, if the sustainability side of things is the hook that gets people to try them, then they will continue buying them because they like them. No, no one's going to eat something, however sustainable it is, if they don't actually like them or if they're too expensive. So you know we're in the right price bracket and I like them. Most people like them. It's maybe getting stuff in front of people, so there's that side of things.
Speaker 2:But also in the UK in particular, people are just getting more and more divorced from where the food comes from. It's not just seafood, you know. I've seen any number of TV programs asking kids where a carrot comes from. And it's where it comes from Tesco or milk. Yeah, they really don't understand, understand. So we're um, we sponsor um a program each year with uh an organization called food heroes which is uh partly organized by the um, uh, the fishmongers company, which is like one of the livery companies in uh, this in uh in london, the worshipful company of fishmongers, and they're putting uh seafood into schools and I think this is really important. And there's something my wife used to work on up in Scotland for years, the project called Seafood in Schools. You know really well-named, and the one thing you notice is kids think these things are fantastic but they've never seen them before. Kids love mussels, I mussels, they're like perfect size.
Speaker 1:If you eat them fresh or in the shop, it's amazing, because it's a thing. If you eat them through anything else, somehow they just fit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the resistance comes not from the generation who've never tried them, it's just they never get to try them because the generation above them doesn't go and buy them. Whereas you go to France or you go to Belgium, kids are sitting down in a restaurant with their parents. They're eating them, so they're used to them from an early age. We don't have that in the UK, and I don't think you really have that in the Netherlands either or Germany, but I think there's a huge potential market out there. If we can get stuff in front of people, and if the hook to get it in front of people is to tell everybody how wonderfully sustainable they are, then yeah, great.
Speaker 1:Who cares? And the flavor wise like I'm definitely not a muscle expert like flavor profile wise, like a rope grown offshore compared to um on on the bottom, like how would you characterize your flavor profile compared to to other ways of growing other places?
Speaker 2:the flavor is partly dependent on where they're coming from. So you know, like anything they'll reflect the environment they've been grown in, but also things like the speed of growth. Now, because of where ours are and we've been very careful to cite them in an era where they're always going to be well fed, the temperature is nearly always in the right range for them to feed and there's enough current going past to make sure they've always got food going past them so they grow pretty quickly. So I can get them to market in about 15 months from seed settlement, whereas up in Scotland it's about two, two and a half years. So it's quite a bit difference there. That speed of growth um means that the, the shells, tend to be relatively thin, um, but also means that the uh, the meat percentage is very high. It's big. Yeah, in a good year we can get meat percentage up to nearly 50, whereas you know the standard for a seabed growing muscle is probably 20, 25, something like that, yeah, I always notice the kilo of muscle disappears into 250 grams.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're lucky yeah, I've done a test the other day in fact, and ours get tested several times a week. Um, I think the percentage at the moment is up around 38 and that'll that'll get a bit uh higher as we go into the towards the winter, as they fatten up to get through the winter. Um, and the flavor well, one of the things that um, you'll notice, the flavor changes uh, throughout the year, that's if you eat often, um, probably several times a week. So I notice it.
Speaker 2:The um, the life cycle of a muscle means, as it's going into the winter, uh, it puts on, it puts on weight as food storage. And this and the food storage that you have in muscles is not fat and it's not carbohydrate, it's glycogen, which is kind of in between the two. Glycogen has a slightly sweet taste. So the fatter the muscle is, the sweeter they are. So even those are grown in full salinity, you don't really get that sort of really sharp salty taste. It's displaced by the sweetness of the meat. And so ours are definitely, as you're coming at this time the meats are definitely sweeter flavour than they would be, let's say, the back end of the year, you know, and then in the spring, when they're fattening up, getting ready to breed. Then they change again, and they'll again, and they'll taste slightly eggy, for the simple reason they're full of eggs.
Speaker 1:What's your favorite moment of the year? Tasting them.
Speaker 2:Probably October, november, that's, I think, their peak. And how do you prepare them? Do you eat them raw? I do. Sometimes I always find they've got a slightly peppery taste at the back of your throat when you eat them raw. But I prefer them cooked when I'm happy to eat them raw, I do. Sometimes I always find they've got a slightly peppery taste at the back of your throat when you eat them raw, but I prefer them cooked when I'm happy to eat them raw. Yeah, my favorite way of cooking them.
Speaker 2:I guess we're privileged and I've got fresh mussels every day and there's nothing better, I don't think, than this one ingredient. There's mussels. You just put mussels in a pan, put the lid on, turn the gas on two or three minutes and they cook in their own steam and I think that's as good as you can get. I'm a fan of virtually every other recipe as well. I mean I think they go really well with wine. They go really well with cream. They go really well with cream. They go really well with garlic. They go really well with sort of Thai spices. I have to say, my least favorite is the way the Belgians do that with the celery and white onions. I mean I could eat them. They're fine, but they're not my favorite, yeah it must be same here.
Speaker 1:And then getting to the um, let's say the filter aspects that people are that you mentioned before, like it has to come from a bay which is known to be clean. How important is the um? Or how I'm saying dangerous muscles are, but they are filter feeders so they get in a lot of the um. What is in the sea? Has that changed? Changed over the years? Now we have, of course, the microplastic focus. There's a lot of toxins in certain parts of the sea. How do you even test this? What do you tell people when they come to you and say, yeah, but what about the filter? And do I want to eat the filter of the sea?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, that's part of the reason why we are where we are offshore, we're well away from the influence of the coast or as far as you can be. They're tested. Every load that we send into Holland is tested for E coli another bacteria and in five years we've never failed a test. They're tested over here by the statutory authorities once a month for the same thing and mostly we pass. We've got a slightly different way of testing them in this country compared to the rest of Europe, particularly compared to Holland, so the results we get will differ slightly, but so far you know, they've always been clean.
Speaker 2:There is another aspect to food safety. With mussels or any shellfish, at certain times of the year in certain areas, you get naturally occurring algal toxins. For us that period runs from about May till about now. So we test every week for those, and if we get any sort of positive results, then we'll test much more often. We'll test every batch. Positive results, then we'll test much more often. We'll test every batch. We haven't had any problems with alcohol toxins for three years, I think, but once you get a poor test you just take them off the market.
Speaker 1:You've got to wait until it clears. So you basically leave the muscles in and you wait until the tide changes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they'll flush themselves out within a few days or a few weeks, depending on whether the toxins are still about, but it's a fairly rare occurrence for us, is that an issue for the sector in general, like the toxins, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it depends where you are. The further north you go, the more problem it seems to be. So they get quite a lot of problems up in Scotland, um, particularly Shetland, which is where most of them grow. So they're very rigorous with their testing there. Um west of Ireland you get a fair bit of toxin problems. I mean there's a number of different toxins. It will depend on where you are, which algae there is in the water, as to which one you've got.
Speaker 2:Um, and I think up in Norway they've always been plagued by algal toxins. So that's why the indices not really ever taken off in Norway. But I was just going through figures the other day and since we've been running this farm, we've sold nearly 1 billion mussels. It's quite a lot of mussels. Any one of those could have hurt you if it was contaminated and we've never, ever had a food safety problem. So we've I think it's a pretty conclusive test 1 billion tests and all passed. So as far as people are concerned, um, so I think we're pretty. We're pretty safe where we are, but you know, we still got to comply with all the regulations.
Speaker 1:So that's, that's where the issues go in and switching gears a bit to to the financial side or the financial world. Let's say we have quite a few listeners that that work in there either managing their own wealth or other people's money. And let's say we do this in few listeners that work in there either managing their own wealth or other people's money. And let's say we do this in London. I mean, you don't want to be alone, but let's say we do this in the city, in a theater, there, and of course, people learned a lot. Maybe we've made them taste as well. We do it live in front of an audience and they are enthusiastic. But you want them to remember one thing the next day potentially also do something about the shellfish, about mussels. What is the seed you want to plant? What is the one thing you want them to remember from an evening learning a lot about the business of mussels in the UK? It's food.
Speaker 2:I know there's a big sort of increase in the number of potential blue investors out there over the last few years, particularly following the various SDE goals, and yeah, I can see they're sort of focused on the kind of thing we do and they're focused on maybe seaweed and all the other non-fed bits of aquaculture. But at the end of the day, it is food. It's not a high-tech unicorn. So food's never going to go out of fashion. You're always going to be able to find someone to buy it because it's food. Are we going to increase in value by a million times over five years? No, it's food. The demand for food is always going to be there. Is it suddenly going to get far, far bigger? Well, yeah, certain things like you know, you've got a thing like coke or whatever. It's no different from a million other things like it. It's just got bigger marketing budget, you know um, but also didn't happen overnight.
Speaker 1:So yeah, there are chances of a food.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and an awful lot of what's out there in the food market to Billms is not even food, you know it's food like substances.
Speaker 2:This is food. It's real food. It's produced naturally. People are always going to want to buy food. Yes, people are always going to want to buy food. Yes, what we do is relatively high risk because there's not been that many people doing it. We sort of a lot less risk than we were 10 years ago. You know we had one or two disasters in the early days, mostly technical side of things. But we've ironed out most of those and I can be pretty sure we're going to carry on sort of making it more and more efficient and more and more reliable way of doing things.
Speaker 1:So what's then the biggest obstacle? If somebody would say it sounds amazing, is that the political side? What's the biggest obstacle for you to scale?
Speaker 2:At the moment, it is politics and finance, yeah, and the two are closely tied together. You know, people are going to keep their wallets shut when they think there's a possibility you might be shut out of your market, and I understand that. But we're sort of getting past that now. As I said, we've had five years post-Brexit and we're still of getting past that now, um, as I said, we've, you know, we've now had what is it five years post brexit and we're still going and, um, still increasing. So, um, there's that sort of things, but also the um, the, the technicalities of what we do, um, so so why don't we expand? Well, we can, um, but it's good. You know, I'm not, uh, daft enough to think you can do it overnight. It does. So why don't we expand? Well, we can. I'm not daft enough to think you can do it overnight. It does take a while.
Speaker 2:People are another issue. You've got to get the right people. It's not everybody's cup of tea to stand on a wet boat for 12 hours a day shoveling mussels around the place. I'm getting a bit long on the tooth for it, but I love it. You know, it's the whole idea of what we do. We can produce food literally from nothing. Um it's. It really switches me on and I know it's what drives several other people are. You know, my son is, uh, the main operations guy out on the farm right now, my daughter is the marketing person, my wife deals with all the administration and the PR and keeping the rest of us in line. So it's a family business and I guess we need to be able to start thinking beyond family and stepping beyond that, and that's a process we're going through at the moment. I guess it's difficult for any investor to come into what has been a family company for a long time and find their place and get a deal which satisfies both ends.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, of course. But it's also been done many, many times before. This is not a process like. Many industries or many family businesses have, for good reasons or not good reasons, at some point gotten outside investors on board and used that to grow and scale. And what if we flip the position at the table, let's say, and you wake up magically tomorrow morning with quite a large fund to an investment fund to put to work, let's say it's a billion pound, it doesn't have to be all in aquaculture, obviously it could be. I'm asking this question because I'm curious what people focus on. What are big buckets that people would would deploy? I'm not asking for exact this is obviously not investment advice but I'm not asking for exact amounts. But I'm asking would you invest in in machinery or would it be the seed side of things? Would it be market? What would it be brands like? What would you focus on if you had to put a lot of money to work?
Speaker 2:I think I'll probably spend a fair bit of it on lobbying and trying to get the legislation a bit more usable. The shellfish industry generally is complete sort of mystery to you, whether it be investors or regulators. We're not a huge industry and I've struggled over the years to get you know even people in government who do have an interest in us to get it through their heads. We are not fishermen, we are farmers. It's a very, very important distinction. You know somebody who rears cattle. You would never sort of liken them to somebody who went out with a rifle shooting buffalo or something you know. It's an entirely different thing.
Speaker 1:It's interesting how that transition hasn't landed in many places yet, like going from a hunter-gatherer society. Agriculture we've done in a long time ago and and with mixed results, to be very frank. But at the same time that's in our head and we we on the land side we know how to manage it. The policy side, for all, it's like it's there and at least it's developed and it needs to be changed because a lot of things we would like to do on land are not allowed. Um, but in the sea it seems completely lacking because it's just we've not made that, because the aquaculture or the aquaculture space, especially the global north, is relatively new, except for salmon, but only that's very young as well, which we discussed in another interview, but it seems to be completely maybe you don't see it, it's like far you don't. Really. Very few politicians probably run an aquaculture farm on the side. Many have a farm, at least a hobby farm, and sort of understand roughly what it entails something somewhere.
Speaker 2:So the distance is just enormous. I think to say it's sorry, I think you're making too much of a generalization in that. I mean, one of the things we hear pretty relentlessly is you know, more than half our seafood comes from aquaculture. You look at those figures. Very little of it is being produced in the West. The vast majority of aquaculture has been done for hundreds, if not thousands of years in ponds in China and Indonesia and the Philippines and India. They're very used to aquaculture. It's not. You know, the new aquaculture is stuff that you can go and make money out of it, whether it be shrimps or bass, bream and salmon and so on. They're very much new kids on the block and so on. Muscle farming has actually been around an awful long time, a lot longer than salmon farming, but in the form that we're doing it now, yes, it's new.
Speaker 1:Do you see potential in the bay then as well, or different bays along the coast? Seeing this could be replicated by you or others. This could be or not. What's your potential vision for, let's say, the south coast?
Speaker 2:one of um designed to build this farm. It was based on the assumption that I would have to be a standalone business um, because the marketing and the transport and all that sort of distribution is half the business, you know. So we had to be big enough to be able to do all that, and the route we've taken is to join forces with the company in the Netherlands. But for subsequent farms, whether it's ones that we build ourselves, they can feed into that model. Now they don't need to be as big as this, and so there's a lot more small areas around the coast that are suitable than there are big areas. So I think there's a lot of capacity to have farms, for it still needs to be big enough to be able to afford a workforce and a boat, and you know the boats are going to be always going to be expensive because they're working offshore.
Speaker 2:There's relatively little inshore water in the English coast where you'd want to farm mussels. The geography of it is just not quite right for growing them on ropes. There used to be a big, big production up in the Menai Straits in North Wales. Up in the Menai Straits in North Wales. That was I don't know probably getting 8,000, 10,000 tons. I mean it was a big production. All of it went to Europe, mostly to Holland, some of it to France. They have now completely gone out of business since Brexit because it's grade B water. It's a cry in shame. You know, we can grow really good mussels in this country, but we just don't particularly want to eat them and the industry has always been based on export, and now that export has been taken away for some of those companies, I mean it doesn't affect us directly, other than the fact that we're a bit or some of those companies. I mean it doesn't affect us directly other than the fact that we're a bit of a lone voice. These days. There's not that many other producers left in the country.
Speaker 2:So if I want to grab hold of an MP or a minister or whatever, I'm just me it's really difficult to get any attention. So there's that side of things. Um, so, yeah. So going back to your, what would I do with a billion pounds or whatever? Yeah, I would spend some money on lobbying. I would definitely spend some money on marketing.
Speaker 2:Um, and I mean, even in europe, the consumption has dropped quite considerably over the years. I think possibly because when production dropped 15, 20 years ago the price went up and it's never really come back down again. I think restaurants have got used to the fact that they can shift them at half as many but at twice the price and less work, so money. There's a job to be done there to promote that. Uh, if I had unlimited funds, I'd buy all the local water companies and make them deal with their um sewage a lot better than they do now. Not necessarily because it affects us, but it just. It just affects the whole concept of eating shellfish and people are nervous about it because they've got a relentless diet of bad news stories about sewers overflowing and things like that, and so it really doesn't help To go to the source of pollution, potential pollution and the image.
Speaker 2:But as far as the rest of the world is concerned, I mean what we do because of the, the fact we're in in the uk, wages are high, things cost a lot of money. Um, there's a limit to how uh lower price we can accept and still make a profit. Um, but the actual technicalities of what we do could be reproduced elsewhere. Um, and there are more productive bits of water around the world than this, whether it be in the Far East, and you know it is coming and we can see rope cultured mussels in Thailand and Vietnam growing quite rapidly over the last 10, 15 years. But what you've got there is a very cheap way of producing a base protein. Now, I think the best thing to do with a mussel is to eat it fresh. If you really want to take it out of its shell and dry it and turn it into a meal, well, you've got a very good substitute for fish meal for finfish farming. If you want to do what they do a lot of it with in New Zealand, which is to reduce it to nutraceuticals and taking out the omega-3 and things like that, it's a really good source of that. So there are an amazing number of things you can do with the meats and so on. And that's barely even looking at what you would do with the shell. I mean, obviously you've got a shell which absorbs carbon. I shan't get into the chemistry argument about whether it's actually reducing the carbon in the atmosphere. It is, but it might take longer than just tomorrow, sort of thing.
Speaker 2:The production, even the way we do it, which is relatively intensive, the production of mussels, has the lowest carbon footprint of any protein food. There's been some work done over the last few years by all sorts of organizations, one of which is the Seafish Industry Authority over here. And if you look at the standard graph of, you know all your various protein sources at the top of the graph you've got beef. You know feedlot beef, and halfway down there you've got pigs. A little bit lower than that you've got chickens. A lot lower than that you've got soy meal, and below soy meal you've got mussels. And I can assure you there are, there are, better food for you than soya. Ever will be nothing against soya, but it's not. It's not an all-round, you know it's. Uh, it hasn't got all the nutrients that, um, muscle meal has got you know. So, um, there's a lot that can be done in the future.
Speaker 2:Whether we can do it at the the price point we've got at the moment is debatable. Um, I certainly have plenty of discussions with feed manufacturers that produce feed for aquaculture, whether it be salmon or for specialist diets for early stage Juveniles, part of salmon. They're very interested but they say, yeah, okay, if you can get us 10,000 tons of meal then we'll start from there, because they do need large formulations. But you know they're very careful with these things. We can't do that at this moment, you know. That's not to say it couldn't be done. It could be. I'd far rather see the muscle meal go straight into people. But you know there's a lot of potential there for that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:And as a final question sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Sorry, the last bit of my billion quid is education. Get the stuff into schools. It's not the kids that are the problem, it's the people who buy the stuff for the kids, whether it's the caterers for the schools who are all on some stupid budget and they have to feed them with, um, you know, chicken nuggets or whatever it might be, or chips. Um, yeah, get them into schools. The the reaction we've had from the school kids are you know, we, we thought about um, I think. We sent out about 2,000 portions or 4,000 portions last year to various schools primary schools and secondary schools and those kids have written back. You know, they've made books for us and all that sort of stuff and they're thrilled with it. It's absolutely fantastic. You know where can we get these? Well, you can go and ask your supermarket for a start.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating and, as a final, I want to be conscious of your time. As a final question, if you had a magic wand and I'm guessing it might be in the education space it might be something completely different. We've had answers to this question at all grades and all levels, and from no more subsidies to global consciousness, etc. But if you had a magic wand and you could change one thing overnight, what would that be?
Speaker 2:It would be to get our regulators and decision makers in government to pay some attention and see what it is we're doing. It's really difficult gaining their attention.
Speaker 1:I know they're busy people Do, they come over. Has that worked in the past? Sorry, let's reframe.
Speaker 2:With our local MP up until the last election. We formed an all-party parliamentary group of which he was the chair, and he did get us a debate in parliament which was reasonably well attended, given the subject. How much of that influence dribbles down to the people actually put decisions into place did nothing really happened Since then. We've had an election and now we've got a new MP. The new MP's not in the party that's in power, but we're hoping to get the same sort of attention at some point. Really, what we want to do is get the fisheries minister out on the farm. I mean, we've had umpteen people out on the farm over the years writing policy documents and strategies and things like that, and when you persuade them to come out on the farm, their first reaction is wow, I see what you mean, you know you really was.
Speaker 1:I was asking, like, when people come on the boat and see the scale and taste and the impact obviously on the, the reef or the regenerated reef down, that's something you need to see and not you're going to read in the paper.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the um the thing about the farm. It is big, uh, it takes up quite a lot of area. Uh, in terms of farms anyway, it takes up less than one percent of the bay here, but um, uh, it's still 15 square kilometers, so it's quite, quite a big chunk. They're split into two pieces at the moment. So when people ask where is it, we say, well, yeah, it's a bit like asking where a town is. A town stretches over quite a big area, and so does this farm, so the best way to see it is to be on the boat and travel through it. Either that or look on our website. You'll see some aerial photographs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it's not easy to get people I mean, it's the same on farms as well Like, how do you get people to come and see and spend some quality time, ask the questions and understand or grasp the scale and the potential of some of these things?
Speaker 2:Yeah, all the aspects. You're talking about the fact that we work at the bottom of the food chain, and so, yes, people accept all that, but whether it actually strikes home before they actually see it. You know, you get out there, you pull up a rope and there'll be 100 kilos or whatever on the one rope, and there's thousands upon thousands of ropes out there. Um, and it's all food and it's all been produced from nothing. Basically, you know, uh, we're grazing plankton and there's an awful lot of plankton out there that's not eaten anymore because there's hardly any fish out there grazing plankton.
Speaker 1:I think that's a perfect um way to to wrap up this conversation. Thank you so much, john, for coming on here, first of all for the pioneering work you do and you have done with your family, and for coming on here to give us a deep dive pun intended on, or not so deep about 30 meters into the world of muscles and muscle growing, which only go to 12 meters people. I did pay attention, um, but the reef underneath is just as as interesting. So thank you so much for for that, and thank you for coming on here to share. You're welcome. Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. For the show notes and links we discussed in this episode, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculturecom. Forward slash posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend or give us a rating on Apple Podcasts? That really helps. Thanks again and see you next time.
