A happy food chain: can mussel farming restore the UK’s damaged coastline?
The water beneath our boat is teeming with life. It is a fine Sunday morning on Loch Slapin on the Isle of Skye and Dr Judith Brown and Andrew Airnes are pointing below the surface to where they are hoping to grow more than 100 tonnes of high-quality animal protein suspended from four ropes.
“You probably wouldn’t be able to grow one sheep on that land-wise,” says Airnes. Due in part to its tremendous efficiency, mussel farming is seen by a new generation of food producers as having exciting potential for feeding a growing population while restoring native biodiversity, which has been damaged or destroyed by pollution and harmful fishing practices.
“Mussel farming with suspended ropes creates a marine habitat, an ecosystem which is permanent. All you do is rotate the ropes so there is always the habitat there. It ups biomass by 3.6 times and biodiversity by 1.6 times,” says Airnes.
Mussels attach to whatever substances they can find in the water, in this case four 220 metre-long doubleheader ropes, explains Brown. “When they are very small, they release spat [juvenile mussels] that stick to things hanging in the water. Effectively, mussel farming is providing the substrate that they would naturally stick to.”
Aside from maintaining the ropes and redistributing the mussels to spread them out when they are young, there are no further inputs – unlike almost all other methods of farming. The mussels simply grow at their natural density without the need for additional food, water or treatments.
John Holmyard at Offshore Shellfish, the UK’s first fully offshore rope-cultured mussel farm off the Devon coast, describes it as “like going from a ploughed field and into a forest”.
“The mussels on the lines are providing a habitat for
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