Algae is at the centre of everything
We cultivate and grow fish in entirely closed natural pond systems. For the fish to grow and thrive they need to have excellent water quality and plenty of food. However, you cannot put excess fish food into a pond willynilly without it upsetting the delicate natural balance. To resolve this, we actively manage the pond’s environment to generate very high levels of algae. The cultured algae in the ponds generate large volumes of oxygen each day for the fish to grow and to support a healthy micro bacterial cycle that will break down all metabolic waste in the pond itself.
As a very general rule of thumb, if you add 1 kg of food into a pond you need to have 1 kg of Oxygen available for the fish to metabolise the food and for the pond’s healthy bacteria to break down the waste generated. So algae is the most natural and efficient way to do this via photosynthesis.
Carbon Capture and Offset
When a pond is actively managed to produce phytoplankton, it will produce a typical average value of 20grams of algae per m2 each day (10gr Winter - 40gr Summer)
20 grams of algae photosynthesing will fix 40grams of carbon per m2 each day. So our 40 ponds of 39,000m2 have the potential to capture 570 tonnes of carbon each year. Even allowing for some over Winter/Spring fallow ponds and lower than average bloom values the actual carbon capture of our algae rich ponds is huge.
If we stopped rearing our fish, the majority would be replaced by imported fish mainly from the States, Israel and the far East. (90% of cold water ornamental fish are currently imported by airfreight to the UK)
The current carbon cost of air freighting 300,000 (a conservative 60% of our production) 20 gram fish with water and packaging would be a further 110 tonnes of carbon.
