By Nick Joy

IT IS now nearly 30 years since I started down a different path in aquaculture and I feel it’s about time I explained why and maybe a bit about how. Firstly, I would love to claim that deciding to farm salmon differently was all my idea but it wasn’t. Jonathan Stansfeld, who died earlier this year, was formative in getting me to think differently. He was a deep thinker and cared about how we farmed.The other side of him was his knowledge of wild salmon, and in our many discussions he would challenge the thinking about farming in the 1990s based on what he knew.

After three years of working with him, I asked how he imagined the farm would be; in other words, what was our culture strategy. He replied,‘what would you do if it were your farm?’

That question caused me hours of work and torment, trying to decide what the most important things were and what mattered most to me.

In the end I came up with: farming needs to be a process that can last for

100 years in the same place, and the qualities of the animal we are farming should remain essentially the same too.

affect the animals we grow and the area we farm will be changed inevitably.

them, but also least impactful on the local environment.

This, in time, became our fallow system, which exceeded the requirements minimise impact on the site.

People have often questioned the need for this length of fallow but usually from a health perspective.

The most important thing is to ensure that nothing from the previous crop (or very little) exists at the site when the next crop goes in. It’s not as though this is particularly brilliant or clever, as it is the same as the sort of rotations used in agriculture.

In those days, we were so busy trying to farm, that we often forgot about the poor creatures that we were farming. I don’t mean that we didn’t care! Of course we did, but the equipment we were using was in development all the time.

We were encountering things that people had never faced before; even now, with all of the sophisticated equipment, we can’t stay on top of it.

We knew little, worked hard and tried our best, so the philosophy of rearing animals was often put on to the back boiler.

It was a tough time and we didn’t always perform as we might have liked. My

farm and the systems to rear them.Too often in farming we see equipment designed for the humans who work there, rather than the animals grown there.

Here are some examples of the things to think about, which I thought about then. I would argue that they are as relevant now as they were then.

Salmon are piscivores and do not eat all the time in the wild.They are used to long periods of fasting and their systems are designed for that.

Most feeding systems in use now try to keep the gut full as much as possible. Yet we know these animals are not designed for that. How should we approach this or should we at all?

The modern development of circular pens has come about because of exposed sites and the cost try to leave the swim pattern to rest and recover.

something, they try to get out of the way of the rest of the population for a moment to recover.

In square pens, the corners are where you see

suggest mostly to the centre or the surface, neither being a particularly good place. I am not suggesting that we should get rid of circular pens,

there are many differing solutions and who is to say which is right. face as an industry and maybe it is awkward to bring up things like this. But if we are to last as long as agriculture, we

will need to!.

From how to feed to how we contain our right