Join Fish Farmer and see the world!
Reporter recalls pre-internet era of extensive tours
T WAS a bit like that when working with Stuart and Rosemary Banks during the early days of their ownership of Fish Farmer. Okay, it wasn’t exactly the world; more Europe and Scandinavia, but it was good to be part of the emergence of modern aquaculture and to meet some of the early believers in the potential of fish farming.
Stuart and Rosemary had somehow acquired Fish Farmer from whoever owned Farmers Weekly (FW) at the time, ending up with a publication which had bags of potential but not much in terms of a commercial base.
At an earlier point in the story, I worked with Denis Chamberlain and Bob Davies, both part of FW’s editorial team, to help produce a fish farming supplement to be distributed alongside the big-selling farming publication.
Having observed a rising interest in fish farming, FW’s management obviously thought they should see if there was a commercial base for a stand-alone publication.
I worked on the supplement purely because I was FW’s Scottish editor at the time and Scotland was already playing a major role in the new industry’s UK development.
Industry leaders then included Graeme Gordon, Iain McCrone, Robin Bradley, Ted Needham and Ron Roberts, a pioneering group of landowners, farmers and scientists who definitely believed in the future of Scottish aquaculture and were determined to get the industry going.
Based on salmon and trout, and not much else, the sector’s output was pretty modest, with the industry’s annual get-together being held in McTavish’s Kitchen in Oban. The number of support and service businesses was also limited although you would not have known that when a McTavish event was in full swing.
As for actually seeing Europe and Scandinavia, not just Oban harbour, that was the result of agreeing with Stuart and Rosemary to undertake a series of pre-conference/exhibition tours.
It seems something of a luxury now, but to gather preview material from researchers, farmers and commercial companies, I routinely visited Norway two to three months before each Aqua Nor, interviewing anyone who had something to say ahead of the event. We spoke to industry leaders, researchers, individual inventors, farmers and CEOs of a whole range of commercial businesses.