TURKEY
Liman sees a bright future in trout farming and processing
Investments in cage farms to produce large trout While Turkey is now well known for its seabass and seabream farming operations, production from which exceeds even that of Greece, the country also has a huge trout industry. Annual volumes of trout dwarf those of seabass and seabream and amount to almost three ďŹ fths of total EU trout production.
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ainbow trout was among the first species to be cultivated in Turkey back in the 60s together with carp. It was only two decades later that marine cage farming of seabass and seabream, now well established species, became widespread. While some big corporations are involved in trout farming many of the operators are in fact relatively small, family-run operations.
Feed based on Black Sea anchovies The farming is typically using raceways, long cement basins, to which water is supplied from a river, stream, or spring. Some companies are also farming trout in cages moored in reservoirs or dam lakes. Among the companies that have been involved in trout farming for at least two generations is Liman, a company that started farming trout at the beginning of the 70s. Founded by Hasan Papila, one of the pioneers of Turkish trout farming, Liman started cultivating trout in ponds. Despite setbacks which caused many of his contemporaries to give up, Hasan Papila persevered. The first farming site was in BozĂźyĂźk some 300 km south east of Istanbul and close to the city Eskisehir. In 1974 Mr Papila decided to set up a fish feed factory in order to supply his fish with good quality feed. This led to further backward www.eurofishmagazine.com
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integration. To supply the feed factory with fish meal, he invested in a vessel, the first factory vessel in Turkey, to produce good quality fishmeal and fish oil. The vessel operated in the Black Sea, where at the time, anchovy was plentiful for six months of the year between November and April, and was used to produce fishmeal and oil. In the 1990s the situation changed. The catching season for anchovies became shorter and shorter, falling first to four months and then to three and catches of anchovy were declining. First a fishing vessel and then the factory vessel were sold off and the family decided to wind down its interest in fishing and concentrate instead on fish farming. New farming sites were constructed, one in Konya and another in Kßtahya, and a processing plant was established in Bozßyßk, which conveniently, was equally close to both the country’s main fish markets, Istanbul and Ankara. Before the processing plant was constructed the fish was only being sold on the domestic market. With the onset of processing operations fish also started to be exported.
New acquisition increases capacity by a third As the farming and processing operations increased, the family
Hßseyin Yavuz Papila, the managing director of the Bagci trout farm, one of Liman’s newest acquisitions.
diversified into other activities, but aquaculture and processing continued to play an important role. In 2013 the family bought an existing trout farming site, this time in KĂśycegiz near Mugla. The farm was bought from a company called Bagci, a well-known name in the Turkish trout farming industry. It comprised a hatchery, a nursery, on growing basins, and a processing unit. Bagci was one of the first companies to produce hot-smoked trout fillets in Turkey. The new owners have continued with this production, which is being exported to Europe as within Turkey there is no tradition for eating smoked products and demand is virtually non-existent. Yavvuz Papila, a son of Hasan Papila, who is responsible for the new trout farm, says that the smoked fillets are exported frozen to Europe except to Bulgaria,
where they are sent freshly smoked. Prior to the acquisition of the Bagci farm, capacity at the other sites amounted to about 3,000 tonnes and production was about half that volume. The Bagci site adds another 1,000 tonnes to the capacity and production today is about 60 percent of the total capacity. There are different reasons for not producing at capacity, sometimes the water conditions impose constraints, at other times the markets may be down. Liman’s expansion plans have not reached their limit. Earlier this year it acquired another company that also farms trout, but in cages in a dam reservoir in the north-west part of the country. This is the first exposure Liman has to cage farms and will allow the company to build up its experience in this kind of production preparatory to establishing Eurofish Magazine 5/ 2015
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