Sustainable Seafood - Farming a superfood the natural way

the true meaning of sustainable is you can keep doing it and you can keep doing it more and more and more and you're still having no harm on everything you know that's sustainable feeding the world's ever-increasing population is a growing challenge pushing the limits of what the planet can sustain by 2050 the demand for food will be 70 to 100 higher and new sustainable ways are needed to supply the world's population i'm in devon to meet a family of mussel farmers who believe they have part of the answer [Applause] brixton is one of the uk's largest fishing ports and home to innovative family company offshore shellfish is harbour's very busy places yes there's kind of every activity imaginable happening around us at the moment company founders john and nikki homeyard have been growing mussels for over 30 years nikki tell me what is offshore shellfish offshore shellfish is uh john's dream basically he had a dream when he was 17 and was interested in muscles went to university studied muscles and then really wanted to do something with them so this boat is the holly may that's coming in good morning back in 1988 i think it was a son article in a magazine some people were trying to do it in scotland and went up to see what they were doing thought well i could do this [Music] culture muscle farms cultivate mussels on long lines of rope suspended underwater he got involved in that project he became one of the pioneers of the industry and he worked with other muscle farmers and equipment manufacturers to develop the scottish industry using no land fresh water or pesticides this process is recommended as a super green option in the marine conservation society's uk good fish guide but then as he grew we became the largest company in scotland it wasn't enough for john thank you he wanted to get bigger to get better to feed more people and to really look more into the environmental side of things this is adam this is we live and breathe it 24 hours a day but two of our children are involved they all three grew up working on the scottish muscle farm and now two of them still work for us which is lovely to have it as a family business and sarah was two i think when we started it five sorry you're older than i thought yeah and what was it about this particular area off the coast of devon that made this ideal it's got the right temperature range the temperature of the water governs how fast the mussels grow where we are in lime bay here we're around about the boundary of where the water coming down the english channel meets the water coming up from the atlantic and where you get that zone of mixing you often get very good growth of plankton there the plankton is actually vital for us because that's what the mussels feed on the single cell algae that the whole marine food chain is based on and the muscles are only just just up from the bottom if you see what i mean so they're the grazers of the sea as we arrive at the six square kilometer farm john is keen to check on the progress of last year's lines now becoming ready to harvest they'll throw a hook out catch over the head rope and then winch it up to the surface and then it gets put on these wheels so these are full-grown muscles they've got a covering of this year's spat on them as well which is a bit of a news that's impressive i'm going to go down and take some of these these guys are putting floats on as well so make sure you don't get crushed keep keep it up i want to get a sample [Music] [Applause] [Music] adult muscles spawn by releasing sperm and eggs into the water column which are then externally fertilized a common occurrence in marine species there are three larval stages trochophore veliger and plantagrade which begins shell secretion and the growth of what becomes the bissell thread that attaches it to any suitable surface [Music] john's specially designed float suspend the ropes near to the surface of the water this helps the mussels to hold on reacting to the movement of the waves to create more bisous these are the muscles as it comes straight off the lines you can see some clumps of hairy stuff here but this is the bisous or the business which are the threads that they attach themselves to the ropes well you've seen it on the shore and if you've got big muscles off of rocky shore where the waves are pounding you can already pull them off yes that's a reaction to the they just click on tighter when there's movement muscles like this are produced using an almost entirely natural process what's in store for us today john we're collecting seed from the um the spat collectors and then we're going to put the seed back onto the ropes at a lower density during the spring john and his team put out custom-made rope to collect the muscle larvae this makes it easier for the muscles to attach to and there's lots of surface areas so you can get more muscles on there they've got things to cling to the microscopic larvae floating in the water attached themselves to the rope using their biceps threads the species of muscles we farm is the native mitralis edgeless or the blue muscle and i knew there was beds of wild mussels around here so if there's wild mussels around you almost certainly to be able to collect enough spat it's not absolutely certain the first year we put ropes down it was a big blue fingers crossed exercise to see that we would actually get spread and we did they're really beautiful aren't they the same i mean they come up with all sorts of patterns this one's oh that one's like got round bits on it oh yeah wow others are all very stripy and almost look like they've got tartan on them these are what you call these are spats well yeah so this the spot is tiny and these are young muscles i guess and even when they're tiny they are actually perfectly formed in shape but absolutely recognizable as a muscle look at that yeah they're absolutely perfect yeah muscles are filter feeders so we don't add anything to them whatsoever we put the lines in the water and all their food they take from the ocean so from the algae and from the the microplankton and because the lines are so spread out there's a lot of flow through of nutrients here [Music] mussels are a part of the bivalve mollusk family which feed by filtering water removing organic matter and thereby cleaning coastal waters if i'll open one up now so you can see the two parts of the mantle join together to form two lips that just meet in the middle so they suck in one and blow out the other along with other shellfish like oysters clams and scallops they're described as the intestines of coastal ecosystems they grow in huge numbers if you give them the right environment too as you can see today whereas oysters and scallops they have to have a lot more care taken of them so there'd be more manual labor involved yeah and a lot of these would really just end up sort of amounting to nothing if it was their natural life cycle they'd float through or they wouldn't attach or they'd get eaten yeah exactly so there's a lot more muscles that are able to grow as a result of having the ropes in the water yeah absolutely they're fulfilling there they're fulfilling their destiny it's not only muscles that have been finding a home on the ropes so yeah these are some of the species which the farm is giving a home to so we've got the queen scallops here the baby edible brown crabs so they'll grow up to be like the big sized ones that you see on a plate and by the time you harvest the ribs you've got often getting that's actually a king scallop that's an important fishery in these parts i'm gonna put these back in the water so john could you tell us what stage we're at now in the process of today's outing well we finished collecting seed that's what you can see in the big one-ton bags here that's enough for us to get through for this afternoon we're now going to go on and put this seed back on the ropes what we call re-socking or re-tubing so this is our chart plotter so we've just finished harvesting the spat and now we need to move down this column to go and put the spat back out okay which you can probably see just out in a far distance right there's a load of little floats yep yep and amongst that law so you don't put it back in the same place that you just took it out no so these are designated areas for the spat but the rest of the farm's full of lines ready for the spat to go back out onto and then they'll be harvested in about a year's time the line goes through the tube there and the with the muscles and a big cotton stocking sock and so that will hold them on it's very fine and it will just hold them on long enough for them to create their biceps again and clean themselves back on and do you get to retrieve these socks off no this is such fine cotton it's biodegradable so it just disintegrates this has been going for a short while stop we take off a section yeah and count it counting the muscles in it during restocking measured sections are counted to make sure the spat density is in line with the water conditions getting these numbers right is crucial for healthy growth 275 we need to go up a bit yeah it's the sort of science that just comes from having done it a lot a lot of times you know having them at the right density means that there'll be less fouling there'll be better growth rates and they'll be better yield because um you know they'll have higher meat contents because they've got access to nutrients and things it's clever it's very close it's simple but yeah it looks it looks things look easy but there's a lot of planning behind it and applying these to make it simple down to how many muscles per square foot exactly yeah i mean these should be fine now until this time next year and all we got to do is keep adding floats as they get heavier and heavier and lower in the water so sarah why are you such a fan of muscles what's so good about them well in terms of eating they you can't really eat anything much healthier and then the shells are made of carbon so that carbon comes from the atmosphere and is absorbed yeah and then that's never released again so they act as a carbon sink which is i think is a little known fact about mussels yeah not many people realize that they're a superfood in terms of eating and also in terms of environment mussels capture and trap carbon as their shells grow through a process known as biomineralization not only is this great for marine ecosystems but when compared to other sources of protein their carbon footprint doesn't get any better you know you can grow trees or seaweed or whatever else you want that takes carbon out of the atmosphere but it releases it pretty quickly with mussel shells or any other bivalve shell it's millions of years so we're taking it out of circulation you can see the the lines we're working on here at the moment are basically grouped into a column going from north to south and there's 61 of those yeah and there's five columns going across the firearms the firm currently has 240 lines in the water and permission to expand to 800 lines covering 15 square kilometers which will then produce 10 000 tons of high quality protein every year i mean i'm proud of what we've achieved here and it's taking some doing and people thought it wouldn't be possible he developed our own system but took the best bits from around the world so we're the only ones in the world that use these ropes for this system of this method of farming offshore today we're going out to do the first harvest of this end of the season we're going to be lifting up one of our lines of muscles that are just over a year old well we're going to order for 15 tons to be sent to holland and the maximum we'll do on this boat is 40 tons [Music] with a finite harvest window and limited weather reliant work days the pressure is on to make sure this first day's harvest is a success restriction for what we do is the number of days at sea okay because you can't go out here when it's really rough no you just turn everything apart so we've got to get as much work done in any decent day of weather as we possibly can [Music] john gets his first look to see how these muscles have grown over the past year they go through a machine which takes them off the rope and through another machine which declumps them because they're all stuck together when they come off the ropes another machine which washes them sorts them into size and delivers them down into these bags there are many variables to john's ever-evolving practice to produce the perfect healthy and attractive muscles [Applause] that is a whopper that is beautiful but big muscle gorgeous colors as well yeah that's the scar it had when we put it back in the water around about this time last year that was probably a scar it got from being bashed against another one during a winter storm or something but since then it's grown pretty much straight through it's just like a tree yeah yeah when they're growing fast the rings are further apart you want to cook them up now if you want to wait until we get insurer so i'll get them out in a second i'm quite hungry actually you can't get fresher than this it's literally just come out of the ocean mussels are now considered one of the ultimate superfoods being high in protein low in calories and rich in vitamins and minerals right that liquid is virtually all straight out of the muscles fantastic stock yet if this is to have a significant impact on how we produce and consume protein more people need to be eating them and cooking them at home so good it's something that they might eat when they're on holiday or if they're in a restaurant because they don't have to cook it and it's ready for them and really we've just cooked with you you've seen how quick and simple it really is there is nothing quicker and simpler in my opinion to cook it's certainly from the sea in the theme of sustainability and growing world population and needing to kind of have sustainable solutions to how we feed a growing population do you think rope cultured muscle farming could be one of those answers well if you look at the productivity here we can produce an awful lot of high quality protein this is high quality seafood with no inputs ultimately when we've got all the gear in the water we should be able to produce more than 10 000 tons a year the total landings in brixton fish and other shellfish is somewhere between 10 and 20 000 tons each year so if we can land 10 000 tonnes it's making a big big difference as far as the biology is concerned i mean i think we're benefiting the fishing indirectly because of all the the food that gets released from the farm whether it be little shrimps or worms or things like that fish that come into the farm eventually they'll leave a little bit fatter than when they come in researchers from plymouth university are monitoring the impacts of the farm on the marine ecosystem the last survey showed 56 different species living on and around the ropes it's also acting as its own nature reserve before we arrived the seabed was basically fished out and scoured we have that from studies that we took before we started the seabeds become more populated they're lobsters there are crabs there are many many different creatures that live there so it has become its own little marine protected area so it would be incorrect i think to use the word monoculture yeah anything but yes i mean it's an enormously diverse ecosystem here i'm not pretending it's natural it's not but then there's very few ecosystems anywhere in the country that you can call natural we've been using this country for an awful long time [Music] on our way home john and sarah mentioned the exciting news that they've been nominated for best aquaculture company at the uk aquaculture awards and the ceremony is taking place online today it's the whole world that's fantastic to be a finalist [Music] a satisfying end to the day satisfying seeing the bags go up more than that satisfying looking at what's in them yeah we've grown some good stock this year i think we've got the basics of what we do pretty well sorted out so we're confident enough to go and build the next stage soon just as today's harvest is leaving the boat john receives an exciting call all right yeah all right i'll go and tell yeah adam greg come here and lee thank you today was the uk aquaculture awards this company was nominated for the best aquaculture company in the country and it won that oh fantastic that's sponsored by the crown estate on monday it's only taken 32 years [Music] it smells like lucky after 32 years one of the most satisfying things about what we do is seeing when a truckload of muscles goes off that is 30 or 40 000 meals in one truck and i can do that sort of every day when we're harvesting it's an awful lot of stuff called sustainable merely because they've passed a certificate of something you can write sustainable on your stuff the true meaning of sustainable is you can keep doing it and you keep doing it more and more and more and you're still having no harm on anything you know that's sustainable ah it's finished but don't worry we've got a lot more razor stories for you all you need to do is like comment and subscribe and hit the bell button below for notifications we'll see you next time

Channel: RAZOR Science Show

Views: 42,768

Keywords: Sustainable seafood, sustainable farming, sustainable food, food, seafood, mussels, mussels farming, green farming, climate change, climate crisis, climate solution, superfood, food crisis, growing population, feed the world, hunger, Devon, Devon mussel farmers, protein, biomineralisation, biomineralization, marine ecosystems, marine life, carbon footprint, Razor, RAZOR, Razor CGTN, CGTN, science show, science film, sustainability documentary, greta thunberg, trump, china

Id: FQa3NAuOI28

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020