Feed

Ben Hadfield reflects on achievements in both Scotland and Norway as he switches his focus to farming challenges

Ben Hadfield

THE new management structure at Mowi, announced in December, will be a very good thing for Scotland, said Scottish boss Ben Hadfield. He has been appointed chief operating officer of farming in Scotland and Ireland, handing over his previous duties in the group as COO Feed to Atle Kvist, formerly managing director of Mowi Feed.

Per-Roar Gjerde will be the COO of Farming in the Americas (Canada and Chile) and the Faroes, and will also lead Farming Norway until a permanent candidate has been found for the position.

Hadfield told Fish Farmer he was ‘very happy’ with the new arrangements: ‘We have the opportunity to re-focus our management experience at the main challenges in farming.

‘For me it’s very nice to be able to devote more time to Scotland and also bring that experience to work with the team in Ireland.’

He said overseeing the group’s feed division for the past seven years had been a ‘fantastic journey’, with plants in Bjugn in Norway and Kyleakin on Skye established ‘with a lot of support from the whole company’.

‘We’ve built it up into an organisation doing more than 500,000 tonnes - two factories with great efficiency in Norway and increasing efficiency daily in Kyleakin. I’ve been in it since the beginning so it’s nice to be able to hand it over when you’ve got two really efficient state of the art factories, and a great team.’

He said while he was ‘obviously disappointed with the delays and the cost overrun’ at Kyleakin, given the circumstances ‘we made the best of it’.

‘And the products now are the best they’ve ever been. Time and again we see our products benchmarking above all competitor products.’

He said the big feed manufacturers had been producing salmon diets for 30 years and Mowi had gone from nothing to competing well against these companies in feed performance within a seven-year period.

The Kyleakin plant could produce 240,000 tonnes in 2020 if there is demand. As well as supplying feed to Mowi’s operations in Scotland, Ireland, the Faroes and Norway, third party sales are also now increasing.

‘We’re doing trout diets, we’re doing specific diets for other salmon companies – not in Scotland in significant volumes but in Norway,’ said Hadfield.

‘We’ve had good success with the freshwater diets, we’ve done the organic diets for Ireland, and the next step is to do cleaner fish diets, and whatever else we can do.

‘On the cleaner fish diets we’ve got increasing demand as we step up our activity in Anglesey, with the two combined recirculation units there, one for ballan wrasse and one for lumpsucker.’

He said the wrasse hatchery, which Mowi bought from former sea bass farm Anglesey Aquaculture in 2017 and has rebuilt as a recirculation unit, would become operational this month. It will complement the company’s lumpsucker production unit at Ocean Matters, which was set up in 2015 on the site of an old turbot farm and acquired by Mowi last year.

Asked about the inclusion of novel ingredients in its feed, Hadfield said Mowi was one of the first companies other companies came to when they have alternative feed products.

‘What we look for is that they are economically sustainable…and of course effective as an ingredient.

‘We’re quite selective, we don’t jump into something because there’s a bandwagon mentality. Some of these products are not yet at a scale where you’d want to use them, but there’s a lot of noise and hype about them.

‘They will come, we’re optimistic about that, but until they are economically viable and genuinely improving the sustainability footprint of our fish products, then we don’t move into them in major volumes.’

He said it was a good time to hand feed over to Kvist – ‘a great guy, very experienced’ – who would take it to new heights.

And he said he was looking forward to spending more time on the farms – where he is happiest – in his new role, and would be travelling

less to Norway.

Priorities in the New Year will be to continue addressing sea lice challenges, particularly in the face of warming sea temperatures.

‘We need to use the cooler temperatures to take sea lice levels down to a very low position and we need to continue to improve the harvest weight and the production volumes.

‘It’s a great product from both Scotland and Ireland but the biology has been very difficult, so we need to use the time to get ahead of the biological demands of the operation.

‘In the latter part of the year the [sea lice] levels were higher than I’d find acceptable but in the last three years there has been a major increase in sea lice control.

‘There is nothing we can do as farmers about warmer sea water temperatures, we’ve just got to lean into it and innovate and be better farmers as the conditions get tougher.’

Becoming better farmers is not just about investing in new pest control strategies, although Mowi, like most salmon farmers, spends millions on fish health.

‘No one should think we’re not strengthening management and training and development all of the time, we’re absolutely doing those things.

But as it becomes warmer in the sea you have to do even more.

‘We’re talking about more innovation with sea lice barriers, more capacity in treatments, and higher welfare during treatment events.

‘And we may be talking about increasing the size of smolts, and there are some farming locations we have to question and ask if we are in the right place.’

Mowi Scotland has two RAS hatcheries, in Lochailort and Inchmore, but it also rears smolts in freshwater lochs.

‘What would help Scotland going forward would be to take advantage of the warmer temperatures and stock a larger smolt and reduce the growing phase in seawater,’ said Hadfield.

He said there were several ways of doing this, but wouldn’t specify whether Mowi would be doing post smolts in the land based facilities or in the lochs.

‘There’s an option to have post smolt rearing facilities, which we may look at. I can’t say at the moment.

‘But raising the size of the smolts and taking advantage of the warmer temperatures, rather than finding them problematic, is one reasonable course.’

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We’ve just got to lean into warmer temperatures and innovate and be better farmers as the tougher” conditions get