Page 70 - Food & Drink Business Nov-Dec 2019

BLUE SKY
Ocean Grown Abalone worth tens of millions in exports
One simple farming idea – think grass-fed meat – is transforming a family-run abalone business in Augusta into a highly sustainable and profitable sea ranching corporation. Stuart Ridley reports.
BRAD Adams’ family has dived in the cool waters off Augusta at the very-south-west tip of WA for half a century, searching for lobsters, tuna and abalone.
Back in the 1960s when his father pioneered the wild catch fishing industry in the area, finding a cluster of rocks covered in shellfish was like striking gold. But, like many ocean-catch industries, high demand led to dwindling abalone populations in the wild.
These days Adams doesn’t have to search for his next catch: he knows it’s just a few minutes’ boat ride to the world’s first wild-fed green lip abalone sea ranch.
Ocean Grown Abalone (OGA) is leading the world with a new kind of farming that shares some of the principles of the grass-fed beef movement. Like their bovine counterparts, the abalone farmed by OGA are raised on a naturally-occurring diet.
“We found an area in the Ngari Cape Marine Park where abalone happily grow free-range at a very fast rate, without adding any food,” Adams explains, commenting that in other parts of the world abalone are grown in sea cages or in tanks on land, with the added cost of farmed seaweed or feed pellets.
Though tank farms allow scalability and fairly constant supply, according to Adams this ‘factory-type’ method produces a very uniform product that can’t match the fuller flavour profile and texture of wild abalone.
“Wild abalone has a broad diet, just like a nice grass range-fed cow. You have to let nature do its work,” he says. “What we’ve created here is exactly what’s happening in the wild – all we’ve really done is create a living reef in an area
OGA now has 10,000 Abitats forming 20 kilometres of artificial reefs, which have attracted huge numbers of other sea creatures, including snapper, rock lobster and sea cucumbers.
IMAGE: RUSSELL ORD