Summary
The snow-capped hills of Ardnamurchan and Morvern rear around the waters of Loch Sunart, on this occasion glassy-surfaced, bar the ripples of a cormorant. It isn't always this way: witness the men repairing some of the upper mesh on the salmon cages belonging to Marine Harvest, which operates four such salmon farms along the length of the 17-mile sea loch.
"You wouldn't have thought there were 25,000 fish in that pen," says John Muckart, Marine Harvest's manager at Sunart, nodding towards the dark water of one of the 16 steel-collared cages, each 20 metres square by ten deep. It is hard to see anything, except for the silvery flanks of the odd leaping salmon. "People seem to have the impression that the fish are crammed in there like battery hens, but there's 4,000 cubic meters of water in there."See the full content of this document
Extract
On the Line
If he sounds defensive it is because the farmed salmon industry, pioneered 30 years ago at the old Unilever research station at Lochailort, 20-odd miles to the north, has come a long way since then. "When I started, 60,000 fish was a big farm. Now it's half a million," says Muckart. But these days fish farming is under attack from the environmental lobby and from diminishing returns.
In Celtic legend, young hero Fionn Mac Cumhal, picking the salmon of wisdom from a fire on which it was being roasted, burns his fingers, licks them, and thus absorbs all human knowledge. These days, we are assured, to eat salmon is to absorb not worldly wisdom but essential Omega-3 oils. However, it is the salmon farmer who seems to be getting his fingers burned, while fears are expressed that the king of fish, whose elegant outline adorns ancient Pictish stones, is vanishing from o...See the full content of this document
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