"We've got nothing to hide' insists Huon Aquaculture

Tasmania’s second-largest salmon company says it has nothing to hide and is not scared of regulation as the aquaculture industry gears up for an independent review amid sustained public scrutiny.

In August, Premier Jeremy Rockliff announced the Liberals would appoint an interstate specialist to examine Tasmania’s salmon industry to shore up support from the crossbench.

The Liberals eventually formed government and a pause on marine expansion for the state’s salmon industry has been put in place until the review is completed.

Huon Aquaculture was bought by Brazilian meat processing company JBS in 2021.

The multinational has been operating a meat processing facility at Longford since 2007, but Huon is its first foray into the aquaculture industry.

JBS Australia CEO Brent Eastwood said he was not concerned about the salmon review.

“Buying into Huon, we’ve learned so much about the regulated and controlled it is – and it’s great,” Mr Eastwood said.

“It’s a wonderful way to better prove to the consumer and to the public just how sustainable and how our wonderful product is generated in a sustainable way.

“Regulation is good, we’re not scared of it at all.

“We just need to make sure that we continue to be the best performer on the planet.”

Mr Eastwood said he believed the Tasmanian salmon industry was not too highly regulated.

“If anyone’s got something to hide, they might complain about that - but at Huon, our team has nothing to hide.

“We’re very transparent and any question can be asked.

“The regulation is what it is.

“We have to comply, we do comply and are happy to comply.”

But he did say it was frustrating to have marine expansion currently halted.

“We support our team here in Tasmania, and they 100 per cent live and live this farming every day – it's their life,” Mr Eastwood said.

“Anything negative like that, which casts a shadow on what they do every single day, is unfair.

“I just think it’s an unfortunate, unnecessary process, but we’ll comply and be part of it.

“We’re very confident and comfortable that the outcome will be as it is today, which is that it’s the most sustainable and healthy protein you can get.”

Earlier this year, the state’s aquaculture industry was grappling with a mass mortality event that eventually killed more than 16,000 tonnes of salmon.

The bacteria P.Salmonis and warmer waters in Southern Tasmania were considered to be the contributing factors behind the fish deaths.

Mr Eastwood said the mass mortality event was a very disappointing thing for the company to experience.

“We’re doing everything we can to be as prepared as we can to not be in the same situation next year.

“But nature is a very difficult thing to predict.

“We’ll do as much as we can and be ready for as much as we can.”

JBS is the largest meat processor in the world and Mr Eastwood said aquaculture would be a future focus for the company.

“To feed the world’s population in the next 20 years, we are going to need aquaculture.

“It’s a fact of life - otherwise, we’ll continue to put way more pressure on the land, which is not sustainable.

“Being the largest company, it’s important that we stay in every protein and learn.

“We’re learning a lot here in Tasmania and we’ll use those learnings for other growth in aquaculture around the world.”

Huon has no plans to shift its operations to be entirely land-based.

Its current salmon program has fish spending the first year of their life living at purpose-built hatcheries and nurseries before being transferred to sea.

Mr Eastwood said experts at Huon determined that having salmon in the sea was crucial for its development.
“Around the world, there are a number of companies that are trying to be fully land-based.

“It uses huge amounts of energy, so you’ve really got to look at the trade-off in energy versus the natural habitat for an animal.”

Huon’s general manager of corporate governance, Hannah Gray, said the company were disappointed with the recent politicisation of the aquaculture industry.

“If the salmon review is looking at the social, economic and robustness of the regulatory industry that we operate in, then we’re really confident that it will show that this is an industry that is critically important to Tasmania, that we absolutely are a major economic driver for the state, that we create opportunities for young Tasmanians and that we send a premium product all over the world.”

Ms Gray said that a shutdown of Tasmania’s salmon sector would have an adverse flow-on effect on the state’s other industries.

“One of the things that’s really important to remember about our industry is that it’s not just us, Tassal and Petuna, and it’s not just the people that we directly employ.

“It’s all the small businesses that we work with, it’s all the electricians, boat builders, caterers and accountants – it’s so many people that we work with as an industry that benefit.”

Huon is investing $140 million to build recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) at its Whale Point nursery and Lonnavale hatchery.

The system continuously filters and reuses water and is already in operation at Huon’s Forest Home Hatchery at Judbury.

Southern Recirc Hatchery manager Nathan Rowe said the Forest Home facility, which currently has around 6 million fish, recycles 99 per cent of its water.

“In the hatchery stage from eyed-egg to first feed, we would expect to lose about six per cent of the population,” Mr Rowe said.

“We hope it wouldn’t be that high, but that’s what I would allow for in my planning scenario.”

Mr Rowe said once the salmon are old enough to be put into the flowing water at the Forest Home facility, another roughly 5 per cent would die.

“Those would be fish that haven’t developed properly internally.

“So as their stomachs and mouths open, they are unable to feed compared to the rest of the very robust animals.

“I would only expect to lose probably another 2 per cent through the whole process to smolt, which is when they are around two years old, from there.”

The survival rate for salmon in the wild from egg to adult is between one and two per cent.

“Because we're providing the right oxygen levels and monitoring continuously, almost all fish survive here,” Mr Rowe said.

Huon had previously been part of the CSIRO salmon industry breeding program for around two decades.

But at the start of this year the company decided to go out on its own, with Huon breeding program manager Lewis Rands saying they did it to have more autonomy and control over the salmon they produced.

“The interesting thing about the Tasmania salmon program is that there are thousands of different families,” Mr Rands said.

“People don’t think of salmon as being different families, but our population is.

“My job is to track those different families and see which ones have the best disease resistance and growth potential.

“We’re constantly updating our rankings of these families and we use the right fish for the job.”

Mr Rands said P.Salmonis had posed a new challenge for him.

“But we’ve been able to use data to find families that actually have more resistance to the current bacterial challenge and we want to use those to breed from – which we are doing already.

“We had a really quick turnaround between getting data from the mortalities at sea and us being able to use the families that were more resistant to breed naturally from the hatcheries.”

Huon’s salmon supply is a roughly even split between the Australian and international markets.

“Demands have been consistent but also consistently growing,” Huon’s general manager of sales and marketing, Phillip Grey, said.

“Consumers are looking for healthier and more convenient snacking options, such as sushi and sashimi, along with the staple of cooked salmon.

“Asia is on our doorstep and we can get salmon there very quickly, which is an advantage for us.

“But the market growth in Asia has been twofold over the last decade.”