Tassal boss to host farm tours
TASMANIAN salmon producer Tassal is offering tours of its new fish farm sites, hosted by the company CEO Mark Ryan, the Australian broadcaster ABC reported.
The two-and-a-half-hour trips would ‘include an overview of our operations and vision’, a visit to existing salmon farms and travel to Storm Bay, south of Hobart, to view the location of proposed sites, the company said.
Tassal said ‘sustainable business is responsible business’ and pledged it was ‘committed to continuing to serve better’.
The tours, which the company said had been more than six years in the planning, were announced on the same day that news emerged of 30,000 mortalities at Tassal’s Okehampton Bay farm in December 2016.
The deaths of juvenile salmon were due to human error during freshwater bathing to prevent disease, the company said in a statement, describing the event as a ‘minor, one-off mortality issue’.
‘We are always very sad if something like this happens, but to put it into context, there are 800,000 fish in the water at Okehampton so we lost three per cent of our juvenile stock,’ Tassal said on its Facebook page.
The salmon farmer said it operated on a survival rate of 83 fish per 100 and, despite the Okehampton Bay incident, was still ‘tracking better’ than the forecast mortality rate.
‘All fish farmers deal with mortalities — it is built into risk management planning. No farmer achieves 100 per cent survival.’