40 years of aquaculture – Marine Harvest
Inside Inchmore
Fish Farmer gets a tour of state of the art hatchery as it nears completion
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ARINE Harvest’s recirculation hatchery at Inchmore, in Glenmoriston, is weeks away from completion, with the first eggs due to arrive before Christmas. In just over a year, the old plant, built in 1978, has been torn down and a new, steel framed structure has been erected to house 30 fry tanks and 18 smolt tanks, egg incubators, water intake and treatment systems that will recirculate 18,000m3 of water, 4km of underground pipework, lab facilities, offices, an engineering and maintenance area, feed hoppers – and a visitor’s gallery. The £26.5 million hatchery covers 14,000 square metres, and will produce around 4.5 million smolts for the company’s expanding network of sea sites and 6.5 million parr for on-growing in freshwater lochs. Inchmore will complement Marine Harvest’s new Lochailort hatchery, opened four years ago, and has the capacity to produce 880 tonnes of fish, a marked advance on the 40 tonnes the old, flow through plant could manage. Overseeing this monument to salmon farming sophistication is Stephen McCaig, appointed Marine Harvest’s construction manager last year and now fully conversant in the finer points of fish husbandry. McCaig has several big projects to his name and has worked all over Scotland. But he was also involved in the Lochailort hatchery, freelancing for contractor Robertsons, and when Marine Harvest advertised for a construction manager he jumped at the opportunity. ‘I thought with their growth and development plans, why not. There is the feed mill at Kyleakin and plans to open a new farm on Rum, and a number of
Left: Stephen McCaig, left, with Marine Harvest’s John Richmond, Steve Bracken and group engineer Mick Watts, and Highland Council leader Margaret Davidson at the turf cutting ceremony last year . Above: Inchmore takes shape
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other new farming locations are being looked at.’ The company’s current investment alone justifies the employment of a full-time construction manager, and there are further plans on the horizon, including the possibility of a post-smolt plant on Skye, still at the design stage, and the rebuilding of the cleaner fish recirculation hatchery on Anglesey, acquired by Marine Harvest last year. At Inchmore, McCaig meets regularly with the contractors, Morrison Construction, and with John Richmond, Marine Harvest’s freshwater manager and the technical expert behind both the Lochailort and Inchmore RAS systems. Richmond has described before how technical advances have made the Inchmore hatchery even
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04/10/2017 17:12:40