Paul Macintyre
Marine Harvest: 1975-1990
After being made redundant from his position as trainee game farm manager in Angus, in 1975 Macintyre’s father alerted him to an advert in the Oban Times for a trainee fish farm technician at Lochailort. ‘I remember the advert specifying that the applicant “must be used to inclement weather”, he laughs. ‘I have fond memories of my time learning to be a fish farmer at Lochailort’, he continues. ‘In the early days it was interesting to see all of the new technologies that were developed by Unilever, who had thrown a lot of money at the project and were coming up with systems for pen design, feed development and so forth. I remember a lot of scientists coming up from Colworth; they meant well but we ended up with a large compound around the back of the farm at Lochailort, which was a graveyard for all of the experiments and trial equipment that hadn’t quite worked. Over the years this compound became quite large.’ In the early days the priorities were very much about fish survival and growth, efficiencies were not high on the agenda, Macintyre explains. ‘However, Unilever Research did come up with a number of things in an attempt to make our lives easier. For example, we used to feed fish by hand until one day someone came along and gave us a scoop.
‘Another more complex device was a system designed for cleaning the panels of the early pens, which were rigid and in the form of a hexagon’, he continues. ‘Each side of the hexagon had four panels, each six feet tall with wooden frames and a perforated zinc filling, which were slotted into rails. There was also a large 12-foot high panel that was slotted in behind the smaller panels to prevent the fish escaping. When the panels got fouled, we had to take them out, scrape them with a hoe, stack them to air dry and put them back into place.
‘Unilever decided to invent a system for cleaning these panels, so this contraption came up from Colworth, a bit like a spider with a carwash system of rollers, into which the panels would be fed, brushed clean and deposited out the other end. We offloaded the machine and, as usual, everyone gathered around in curiosity as we eventually started the engine and gingerly offered up a panel to the machine, at which point the panel shot through it at a rate of knots. It was another example of a piece of kit that was expertly designed, beautifully painted, with a brand new diesel engine that ended up in the compound after about an hour.’
Macintyre spent about eight months at Lochailort before he and Ron Stevenson were sent to establish Marine Harvest’s second site, at Loch Leven, near Glencoe. ‘At that point we had moved on to net pens – wooden frames with polystyrene, with the nets suspended from them’, he says. ‘There were a number of challenges at Loch Leven, some of which were shared with other sites such as the impact of storms, and seals – there was a large colony quite near the farm. There were other challenges specific to Leven, not least the pretty horrendous tidal flow.’
Like at Lochailort, a number of ‘innovations’ were trialled at Loch Leven to try and make life easier for everyone. ‘One of these was a system for counting fish’, says Macintyre. ‘We weren’t happy with the accuracy of the hand-held clickers, so we tried videoing the fish as they were going down the grading table, and paying Stirling University undergraduates to watch the footage and count the fish for us. This was around 1977/78 – the project lasted about a year before being wound up.
‘The guy responsible for the project was a chap called Dave McKean’, he recalls. ‘We used to put the equipment inside a Mini estate and put the car on a raft, which had polystyrene floats. On an ice-cold day we’d feel jealous when Dave sat inside the car. One day, we heard a shout, and saw that the car was falling back into the sea. We hadn’t realised that it had a hole in the petrol tank, and petrol dissolves polystyrene very rapidly – I’ve never seen a person move so fast as Dave did getting out of that car.’
Macintyre was at Loch Leven until 1984, when he was moved back to Lochailort to run the processing factory there. ‘The following year we introduced the first gutting machine, the Trio, which came from Norway’, he says. ‘The fish were drawn into the machine over two parallel belts into a series of knives – there was no suction for extracting the guts. It did a reasonable job but it couldn’t cope with very small or very large fish.
‘In 1986 we decided that rather than weigh fish individually on a weigh band and grade by eye into weight bands that we would install a chickweigh system from the poultry industry’, he continues. ‘It was basically an overhead track system that carried individual trays on which salmon were placed. The trays were calibrated and passed over a weigh cell, and the in- dividual weights of fish triggered, further down the line, the point at which these fish dropped off, in one of six slots depending on their grade.
‘This thing used to clank its way around the ceiling of the factory, making a fair bit of noise’, he continues. ‘Quite often a large fish would swing and catch on one of the calibrating sensors, causing the 1-2s to be dumped in the 5-6 bays, and vice versa. When we heard the cry “the sensor’s been hit”, we’d all run around and try to catch the fish before they ended up in the wrong bay.’
In 1987 processing and packing was transferred to Blar Mhor, in Fort William. ‘A second version of the chickweigh system was put in, but it wasn’t much better’, Macintyre recalls. ‘It was eventually replaced with a newer system in around 2003 and, by the mid-‘90s, the gutting machines had been replaced with early Baaders, but even they needed an engineer on hand 24/7, although eventually their design and reliability improved.’
These were the early days of the SSGA quality scheme, explains Macintyre, the first that were being developed across any food sector. ‘As part of this we were being audited, and the current auditor explained that he was retiring and was looking for someone to take over. It was an opportunity I couldn’t ignore so, in 1990, I left Marine Harvest and have been involved in certification activities ever since.’ He is currently Aquaculture Services Director at Acoura.
Macintyre has seen a number of changes since joining Marine Harvest. ‘Specific innovations that have made an important impact include: the exponential growth of the company; the introduction of net pens; the mechanisation of harvesting – airlifts, for example; and improvements in the equipment used on fish farms. When I started we used wooden boats, but these got chewed to pieces when we introduced metal pens. I remember driving down to Dorset to pick up our first aluminium boat in 1982 and, in the mid-‘90s, we got plastic boats, around the same time as we got plastic pens. We also had so many problems with outboard motors that we became an agent for Yamaha who, with us as partners, developed an engine that could withstand the fish farming environment.’
However, for Macintyre, the biggest change over the last 30 or so years has been the control and regulation of the industry, and the improvements regarding certification. ‘The salmon industry was at the forefront of certification, and we should be very proud of that.’