Going native

Traditionally, salmon has been bred to grow fast and big. Francesca Ryan visits a pioneering initiative in the Outer Hebrides breeding slow-growing native salmon – traceable back to their relatives in the wild. Photographs by Mhairi Law

A Hebridean salmon farm that’s helping fish to flourish

A DRAMATIC UNTAMED landscape dominated by water, the Uist islands in the Outer Hebrides are an otherworldly place. Surrounding the main causeway that connects Protestant north Uist to the Catholic south is a patchwork of peat bogs and fresh- and saltwater lochs. This unique habitat – including its famous machair grazing land – makes it a haven for wildlife from otters to the rarest bumblebees, and a breeding ground for a new ‘native strain’ of salmon.

The Scottish Salmon Company (SSC) has spent almost 10 years developing its award-winning slow-growing Native Hebridean Salmon. In an industry dominated by just a couple of Scandinavian salmon-egg producers, it’s a pioneering step. Bred from wild salmon that began life in the Skealter freshwater loch in north Uist, the Native Hebridean has a lineage that can be traced back thousands of years.

‘If you were to catch a wild salmon and put it up against one of our fish, you would struggle to tell the difference,’ says Henry Dalgety, head of broodstock (responsible for the breeding fish) at the SSC. ‘No one in Scotland has done this – in fact, I don’t think anywhere in the world has. It’s unique.’

A relatively young industry, salmon farming has historically focused on quick growth and volume yield. ‘If you go back 30 or 40 years,’ Dalgety says, ‘people wanted fish that were going to grow fast and big, because you make more money. But you lose a certain amount of the qualities we have identified.’ Instead, the isolated loch system, its pure, clean cold water and jagged coastline, produce a lean, robust and firm fish. ‘It’s so rugged and wild here that they are extremely good fighting fish, very fit because they lay down so

much muscle fibre,’ Dalgety explains. ‘Whereas their counterparts from Norway would have far less. Ours want to be powerhouses.’

Down the road from Skealter, Dalgety oversees the Langass hatchery (one of SSC’S seven freshwater sites) and its salmon family breeding unit. ‘We have 88 families at the moment, but the magic figure is anything between 120 and 150.’ Each family has around 130 individuals, and one female will produce 10,000 to 12,000 eggs.

The hatchery employs a nutritionist to oversee their diet (which changes as they mature) but wherever possible the aim is to replicate the salmon’s experience in the wild. So their feed, unlike at some salmon farms, is steroid-free and contains organic selenium, an ingredient that the fish would consume in the natural environment. Even the overhead lights mirror the daylight the salmon would experience at the loch from which they were bred.

Inside the laboratory-like hatchery are salmon at many different life stages – from 70,000 eggs kept in huge incubation buckets (with lids on for darkness), to tanks in which up to 2,000 salmon enjoy what is called ‘first feed’, many of them labelled with electronic PIT tags

The hatchery employs a nutritionist, but the aim is to replicate the salmon’s experience in the wild

(tiny barcodes) to identify an individual along with its mother and father.

Around the age of one, when salmon prepare to leave the river and migrate to the sea, their appearance changes from the dark colour of the fry to the silvery form of an adult. ‘They go through an amazing transformation and become a smolt,’ Dalgety says. ‘Not many animals or fish in the wild do this, but salmon live in both marine and freshwater environments.’ At this stage, tanks of oneyear-old smolts are loaded on to boats and delivered to marine pens four miles away in Locheport. Here, seven pens each hold up to 16,000 salmon. ‘It’s very low [capacity] compared to other farms,’ says David Taylor, the SSC’S head of production in the Hebrides, who also oversees Native Hebridean across 26 other seawater farms off Lewis, Harris, Benbecula and Skye.

Out at sea, with the wind whipping up a storm beneath a vast, dark sky, it’s an extraordinary sight to watch hundreds of salmon leaping high under the nets. They are grown on for two years until they reach five kilos, when they’re sent to Stornoway for processing. The broodstock grow for a further year before being returned to the hatchery.

A significant challenge of rearing salmon is parasitic sea lice, a problem for farms across the world and one that can prove devastating. Sea site manager Archie Maccorquodale hands me a Disney-like turquoise fish as he explains how the SSC is winning the battle by breeding lumpfish, so-called ‘cleaner fish’ that consume the sea lice. This avoids the traditional chemical intervention.

Once they reach the sea, the Native Hebridean Salmon are given food with a higher marine-oil content, ‘which means there is more omega-3 in these fish compared to other traditional fish’, Taylor says. ‘And since the fish grow slower than normal salmon, they have a much better flesh quality.’ Stocked exclusively in Waitrose, where buyer Andy Boulton aims for all farmed salmon on the counter eventually to be Hebridean, the Native fish has a clean, sweet, non-oily taste, and its firmness lends itself to everything from barbecues to pan-frying to sushi – and, unlike traditional salmon, the flesh doesn’t fall apart when grilled.

Importantly, in a region classed as ‘economically fragile’, salmon farms are providing jobs where there isn’t much else. Half of the farm workers I meet are Gaelic speakers, who in the past worked in very different industries; they were car mechanics or lorry drivers. ‘We’re currently the biggest private employer on the Western Isles,’ says Taylor.

And although the SSC’S methods are more of a challenge, with the salmon in the sea for longer, its employees take pride in their work. ‘It’s about getting away from fast growth and focusing on quality,’ Taylor continues. ‘Hebridean guys growing a Hebridean fish in Hebridean waters: you cannae get more natural than that’.

Native Hebridean Salmon is available on all fish counters at Waitrose; waitrose.com

‘Hebridean guys growing a Hebridean fish in Hebridean waters: you cannae get more natural than that’