Business

Mussel industry goes high-tech

New Zealand's mussel industry had been lacking in innovation, but a new breeding programme could change the flow

When Nelson scientist Rodney Roberts swallowed down a freshly cooked greenshell mussel on a boat in Pelorus Sound recently, it must have tasted very sweet.

Two years earlier, Roberts and his team at SPATnz had produced the beginnings of that mussel in their Nelson laboratory.

The selective breeding programme he has been developing will make New Zealand’s mussel growing industry much more profitable.

A report by the BERL consulting group estimated it could increase the value of Mussel farming by $200 million a year if technology was adopted by all the industry players.

“If you think about what selective breeding has done for our sheep and cattle industries, for decades now farmers have been breeding faster growing animals that yield better meat. Now we are going to be able to do the same with mussels,” says Roberts.

Until now, the mussel industry has been handicapped by having to collect spat (baby mussels) from the wild. Most of the spat is collected from seaweed washed up on Ninety Mile beach in Northland.

The industry is at the mercy of the weather gods and wild spat grow into mussels of all shapes and sizes, not ideal when demanding consumers want a consistent and uniform product.

Rodney Roberts and his team of scientists have taken the vagaries out the process.

In 2015, SPATnz produced its first batch of mussel larvae in six large tanks at its Nelson hatchery.

The tiny mussels were transported to 16 farms managed by Auckland seafood company, Sanford. That was enough to populate 70,000 metres of rope.

Those mussels are now being harvested.

“What we've done is prove that we can provide spat that will produce mussels which are strong, robust, grow quickly and have a good meat-to-shell yield.“

“We are now ramping up production and will soon be able to supply enough spat to produce 30,000 tonnes of mussels annually,” says Roberts.

The New Zealand greenshell mussel industry produces about 94,000 tonnes and earns about $300m a year.

It has a “light” touch on the environment compared to fish farming.

Mussels farms are efficient users of waters space and they are “sinks”, rather than sources of nutrients like nitrogen.

But, until now, the industry has not been particularly innovative.

Ted Culley, General Manager of Processing at Sanford, says selectively bred hatchery spat is the biggest thing to happen to the mussel growing industry since it started.

“We always believed this was the future. These mussels will grow 20 percent faster which will allow farmers to increase the turnover, meaning much better utilisation of the water.”

SPATnz and the science behind it is a joint venture between the Ministry of Primary Industry (MPI) and Sanford, through the Primary Growth Partnership(PGP).

Sanford and MPI are each investing $13m into the PGP programme. The Auckland-based fishing company and its contract growers will have exclusive access to the hatchery spat for the next two years. After that, the whole industry will be able to benefit from the technology.

Producing spat in the hatchery was never a sure thing and it has been a process of trial and error for Roberts and his team.

“We had to work pretty hard to figure out how to get the mussels to breed reliably in our hatchery. We experimented with lighting, different bath temperatures and we finally settled on a combination of light, temperature and small vibrations that seem to really get the mussels going, encouraging them to produce maximum quantities of sperm and eggs,” says Roberts.

Roberts predicts that selective breeding will allow them to make continual improvements in greenshell mussels for years to come.

“We could have sat back and played a conservative game but we took a big risk and now we have a scientific edge. We will be jealously protecting this technology for New Zealand.”

The new technology also opens up opportunities to selectively breed mussels, known for their anti-inflammatory properties, for Nutraceutical products.

But Roberts is quick to point out he won’t be breeding one line of “super mussels“, but instead will develop a wide range of lines to choose from.

“We want all our mussels to have a great mum and great dad, but we will be breeding from 200 different families so growers will have lots of options.”