Northern Light
Building Barcaldine
SARAH Riddle, an aquaculture veteran of some 16 years, thought that when she joined her husband Greg’s consultancy business, Northern Light, they would see more of each other. It hasn’t gone quite according to plan, but that’s because they have been so busy, which both Riddles agree is a good thing.
Fish Farmer managed to find them together in their Fort William offices one day last month, alongside the rest of the team, project manager Shona MacLeay and business co-ordinator Mairi Sandison, all taking a rare break from a hectic schedule.
Greg, whose background is in civil engineering, set up on his own in 2013, while Sarah, with a BSc in science and management, was commercial director on the board of Aquascot.
Over the last six years, Northern Light has worked on the design and construction of various aquaculture projects, including upgrades to, and expansion of, land based freshwater and seawater facilities, including hatcheries, research units, and processing plants.
The main focus, until recently, though has been the building of the new RAS hatchery for Scottish Sea Farms at Barcaldine.
Constructing a large RAS facility required a completely different skill set for the farming company and Northern Light was engaged to manage the project from the start, which has helped establish the young company quickly in the aquaculture market.
Greg was involved from the start, visiting state of the art RAS plants in Norway, at Leroy and SalMar, which co-own Scottish Sea Farms. Choosing the right location in Scotland came next.
‘With the head of freshwater [Pal Tangvik] we travelled the west coast from Ardyne Point right up to almost Durness, looking at every single scrap of land next to the sea with a river or a loch near it,’ said Greg.
‘You can narrow it down quite quickly; you find out that half of them aren’t suitable at all, a quarter of them planning wouldn’t support, about five of the rest haven’t got a power supply anywhere near big enough, and very quickly you only have about four sites on your shortlist.’
Northern Light was also involved in the tendering for the aquaculture process contractor, which went to Billund in Denmark; the lead consultant on the building design, which went to Pick Everard; and for the main contractor, which was Robertson Construction; as well as the demolition and the enabling works contracts.
‘That was five different tender processes and five different contracts to administer, and supervise the work on site, deal with all the contractual administration, cost, programme, change management,
and physically be there most days just to keep an eye on what’s happening,’ said Greg.
Sarah eventually joined her husband at Northern Light in 2015. She had previously been at SSF for many years, responsible for sales to key clients in the UK, including M&S.
She had also worked at Mowi (then Marine Harvest) when Graeme Dear was boss, starting on the same day as one Ben Hadfield (there was an article at the time saying they would be the future of aquaculture, she recalls), and brought excellent industry contacts to Northern Light.
She could see, with farmers’ recent big infrastructure investments, that there was a role for a team with Northern Light’s combined expertise in engineering and in the industry.
‘Greg is not just an engineer but has a really good knowledge of aquaculture (because that’s what I’ve been in for so many years) and can embed himself on behalf of the client to help them through the process,’ she said.
The Barcaldine hatchery absorbed Greg between January 2017 and summer of this year, 80 to 90 per cent of the time, he said. Sarah corrects that to 100 per cent.
Greg said: ‘Nobody appreciated at the outset of this project how large and complex it was going to be by the end, not the project team, not the designers, not the contractors, nobody, and it got bigger and bigger.
‘The number on site at the peak of construction might have been 120 to 130 turning up every day. I would try to get around the whole site in its entirety at least once a day so if anyone had something they wanted to raise or had an issue, I was there and they could catch me.
‘It’s been a learning curve for everybody. Fish farmers are not typical construction clients. Someone like Transport Scotland are building roads and motorways every week. But aquaculture companies, by and large, apart from these recent big hatcheries, haven’t done much big work on the land.’
Also on a fast aquaculture learning curve is civil engineer Shona, a fellow Highlander like Greg, who came on board the Northern Light team a year ago but had spent ten years in Orkney so is not completely new to aquaculture.
She has worked on roads, bridges, flood schemes, and in marine environments, but said now ‘every day is a learning day’.
She agrees with Greg that as engineers they can apply to aquaculture developments the disciplines and processes they are used to in construction work.
‘It is a very young industry and the regulations are changing, so what we have in civil engineering is not only the building side but also an appreciation of regulations,’ she said.
Barcaldine is not up to full capacity yet, but it has been becoming operational stage by stage, with the official opening planned for spring 2020. Everybody worked so collaboratively, the Northern Light team agreed, and they achieved the eggs-in date a year ago on time, ‘a major achievement’.
It is undoubtedly an impressive calling card for the Riddles’ business.
“Nobody appreciated at the outset how large and complex it was going to be”
NORTHERN LIGHT is now developing other ideas, beyond the scope of ‘business and project consultancy’, which is what is says on Sarah Riddle’s card. How would they describe what they are? For the first time during the discussion, there is a moment’s silence. Sarah concedes that ‘consultant’ doesn’t capture the Northern Light remit.
‘We want to be agile, we don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves, we want to be flexible, light and adaptable and good value. But if there’s an opportunity, let’s go for it.’
Greg said: ‘We do innovation and we create things. We create projects and products, but that forgets all the business strategy stuff that Sarah does for various UK and international clients. We are hard to define.’
Sarah again: ‘Construction, engineering, project management, innovation and commercialisation, business strategy and procurement, sales and marketing, grant funding (£3.5 million in the last three years, mostly aquaculture).’
Greg said they try to work with the client’s team ‘as if we were part of that organisation’.
‘We don’t have a fixed agenda, we do what needs to be done. The big projects are few and far between though. Our bread and butter is the smaller stuff because there are a lot more of them.
‘From a business point of view, I’d rather be doing six smaller projects than one massive one to the exclusion of everything else.’
About 80 per cent of their work is aquaculture related, much of it innovative, or even ‘transformational’, as Sarah put it.
They are advisers to a young Glasgow based connectivity company, R3 loT (see Fish Farmer, October 2019), and are also involved in the commercialisation of a lice capture product.
Called the Lice-O-Lator, it is the brainwave of a joiner and an electrician, both from Argyll, who were challenged by a local farm manager to devise a sea lice solution.
‘But it works!’ said Sarah. ‘They had built it but didn’t know how to take it forward. Now the prototype is in the water and it’s proven, tested by a farmer, with further trials currently in place.
‘The principle of the technology is very simple, basically attracting and capturing the lice. It’s patented. It looks like a large cone, 2m by 1.8m, that floats on the surface of the water.’
She said the farmers in Scotland who have trialled the Lice-O-Lator have been impressed and she believes the impact of this might be equally as important on gill health because it is taking out plankton and algae as well.
Northern Light is also working with a ‘fantastic designer’ called Rodger Taylor, the man behind C-Cap, the first concrete feed barge in Scotland which, in 1997, won the John Logie Baird Award for Innovation.
He is, it seems, a fount of extraordinary inventions. Based near Inverness, and in the industry for many years, his new venture, of which both Riddles are directors, is called Aqua Innovation.
‘He came up with all these ideas, everything from a waste capture system to a closed containment pen, from aeration curtains to custom built pontoons,’ said Sarah.
‘Currently, we are focusing on two products and have made applications to the Seafood Innovation Fund, and we’re working on Disruptive Farming as well.’
These are two new UK wide funds, the latter historically targeted more at agriculture, although seafood companies are eligible too.
‘It’s about how we will farm in the future, what is completely game changing,’ said Sarah.
The first of Taylor’s projects is a waste capture system that neatly fits underneath the existing cage to capture the waste before it hits the seabed. A tarpaulin –although Greg prefers ‘technical fabric’is separate to the net but synched to it.
At last year’s Scottish parliamentary inquiry into salmon farming, some MSPs asked why waste could not be collected from below the pens, and this sounds like their answer.
Marine Scotland, Crown Estate Scotland, the SSPO, SAIC, and SEPA have all been supportive, and there has been interest from the industry, said Sarah.
In collaboration with Rodger, Shona is involved in developing the design, for both freshwater and seawater suitability, and the plan is to have a prototype within the month to deploy in January.
‘The SEPA regulations have evolved and there are biomass consents being challenged and cut that this could save completely,’ said Sarah.
‘Biomass consents are set on what the environment can cope with, but if we’re capturing, the farm can grow on its existing footprint.
‘Shona’s experience here is so crucial because it can’t just be a design, it’s down to parameters of sites, the seabed and how we anchor it, the flow dynamics, the logistics of how you get it out to the site and install it.’
The second of Taylor’s concepts is contained aquaculture, a floating concrete tank that is ‘basically a simple RAS system in the water’.
It is made of pre-cast blocks that are stacked together, and then floated out with a draught of 4-5m, said Sarah. It would be used as a nursery initially, for fish when they leave a freshwater hatchery, until they grow to around one kilo.
‘There was a big SARF [Scottish Aquaculture Research Forum] report looking at contained aquaculture so our key focus here is 6,000 cubic metres, 30m diameter and 15m depth.
‘We know we can grow fish in contained aquaculture but let’s do it in a staged fashion. A lot of people are looking at big smolt, post smolt, whatever you want to call it – which would be our first priority, with the fish moving to normal grow out at 1 kilo.
‘It’s another option of using leases we’re not farming; there are 111 inactive sites currently not in operation. In the next phase, we’ll build a bigger one so you would have a 24,000 cubic metre [concrete tank] and you’ve almost got a farm with 2,500 tonne consent.
‘But it would be perfect with a small footprint, potentially close to land, catch the waste, no predation, no jellyfish, no lice, as we’re drawing water in from down deep.’
Greg said: ‘People are impressed by large scale freshwater RAS facilities like Barcaldine but post smolt is very different and trying to do something as complex as that would be prohibitively expensive. Post smolt needs to be simpler and built in a more cost-effective way.
‘If you’re spending £10 million on water treatment equipment and pumps and a clever control system, you shouldn’t then be spending double that on putting a shed round it…an alternative is to build in the water.’
The SEA-CAP 6000 (Sea Contained Aquaculture Production), just a concept at this stage, is circular with only a couple of metres above the water level so it would not adversely impact the landscape.
‘The accommodation ‘wheelhouse’ would be visible at the top, it would look like a boat,’ said Sarah. ‘And there is a working central column, the core of the structure, with windows, so you could go right the way down to the bottom and see your fish. It has never been done before.’
They have applied for Seafood Innovation Fund finance for this too, and hope to be in the running for Disruptive Farming as well.
The combination of Taylor’s imagination and Northern Light’s skill set is a ‘match made in heaven’, Sarah suggests.
As for the Riddles’ own match, it may have started inauspiciously, when they were both students doing summer placements at Highland Council Department of Water and Sewage. One of their first dates was a visit to a newly commissioned sewage works.
Their children have their own yellow vests and hard hats and they are all active in their community – Sarah has a broken thumb to show for playing in the Lochaber women’s shinty team – and they are managing the construction of the local Corpach marina community project, at the bottom of the Caledonian Canal.
The future is in aquaculture though and they have several other projects in the pipeline, including possible post smolt plants.
Sarah was in the Faroe Islands recently, and was excited by the scale of the operations and forward investments of Bakkafrost, the country’s biggest salmon farmer and new owner of the Scottish Salmon Company.
‘The post smolt they are doing is phenomenal. In a 30-mile drive, I saw lots of hatcheries they were upgrading. They are so progressive,’ she said.
Big smolt is the ‘logical way for the industry to grow’, she said.
‘Make the bit that is harder to control less. It was 22 months at sea when I started, now we’re down to 15 to 18 months. We could be down to 10 months if they go in at a kilo.’
Both she and Greg want to see the industry they love grow and Northern Light will do what it can to make that happen.
‘The innovation is so clearly there but it is breaking down the ideas, making them workable,’ said Sarah.
But she let Greg have the last word: ‘Compared to traditional industries like civil engineering, aquaculture seems like the wild west, the last frontier.
‘It is a really exciting place to work. It is growing fast and there is a lot of investment in new facilities.
‘We’re trying to use our skill set to bring some order to how the industry is procuring and delivering projects, but without going to the nth degree and killing off that frontier spirit.’