Suppliers’ view
Farmers have been trying to comply since STS was published say suppliers
JOHN Howard, chairman and managing director of Fleetwood based Boris Nets, said as far as the net manufacturers are concerned, the Scottish Technical Standard requires ‘a bit of tweaking’, and mostly in the way it is worded.
For example, the document refers to ‘continuous rope’ but, as Howard said, does that mean it hasn’t got a break in it or does it mean it goes from the top to the middle?
Boris Nets, which mainly supplies the smaller farmers and the freshwater side, was brought into the Containment Working Group after the first draft of the standard.
Howard said the few minor compliance issues, for nets, were mainly to do with the smaller companies being asked to do things that were ‘way out of spec’.
The specifications suited cages of 80m plus rather than the smaller farmers, but the three main net companies (Boris Nets, Morenot and W&J Knox) managed, ‘by a simple discussion’, to match the standard to all pen sizes.
‘The standard was written by the bigger companies so what they want is lots of strength of netting but not very many ropes,’ said Howard.
‘Whereas the smaller companies like the netting to be a little bit lighter for ease of handling, but then they have a lot more ropes to compensate for it. But there is no system in the standard to do that.’
He is concerned that in some aspects, the Scottish standard is asking for things that are ‘nearly impossible’.
He sits on other standard committees to do with nets and said: ‘The one thing you’ve got to be careful to do is you don’t write the standard to be so strict that innovation stops.
‘There are lots of new materials being used and they actually cannot comply because they can’t be tested.
‘Knotted netting, for instance, you can’t test the same way you test normal netting because the knots slip.’
But the standard does make provision for the use of other materials, so there is some leeway with nets.
Boris Nets is doing a lot of work on anti-predation nets at the moment, said Howard, experimenting with different materials and trying to keep cages ‘fish friendly’.
They do double netting, and seal bases, where the bottom of the net has an extra layer, with a separation between the cage net and the predator base.
And they are also making some nets with the knotted polyethylene sides, but using a softer base.
‘Seals don’t like knotted polyethylene netting. But the problem with it is it’s not overly kind on the fish, so we’re trying to go the other way round where we’re using different material but keeping the cage nets fish friendly.
‘It is farm led, farmers come to us with a problem and we try something. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.’
It is the farmers who will have to comply with the Scottish Technical Standard and Howard believes if it is implemented the way it is now there will be problems in the industry.
‘Some of the larger companies are going along with what their parent companies are doing in Norway.
‘It was written by people who wanted the aspiration of making things the best of the best, but the problem is you can never get to that. It gets to the point where it’s either not cost effective or doesn’t actually work.’
Howard said it was important for the industry to get it right and end up with a standard that fits the purpose.
‘The more complex things are, the more things can go wrong. So the simpler systems that people are using are probably better than the complex systems they’re supposed to use.’
And he questioned the suggestion that the standard could be incorporated into licence agreements.
‘That’s where the problem would come in,’ he said. ‘It’s always difficult when you’ve got a standard and you want to reduce it, but it was written much too strong in the first place.’
However, farmers, ‘from the smallest to the largest’, have been trying to comply with the standard since it was published and trying to upgrade equipment when they can, he said.
‘I would say, as far as nets are concerned, we have not made a net that doesn’t comply since the standard came out.’.
The simpler systems that people are using are probably better than the complex systems they’re supposed to use”