Scottish Shellfish Farm Production Survey 2015

// Sites and Businesses

The numbers of authorised, active businesses and sites in operation are presented in Tables 3 and 4. Many sites held stock not yet ready for market, others were fallow, and22 some were positioned in remote areas where cost-effective production and marketing of shellfish proved difficult.

Historically, production data have been collected by business. However, since 2002, data have been collected for both business and site, enabling the provision of more accurate site information. In 2015, 171 sites produced shellfish for sale, an increase of 4% since 2014.

Table 3: Authorised and active businesses 2006-2015.

Table 4: Active and producing farm sites by region 2015.

Active = Farms in a production growing cycle which may contain stock or be fallow.

Producing = placing on the market for the table OR on-growing.

NB: A business may produce more than one species and in more than one REGION.

Figure 2: Regional distribution of active shellfish sites in 2015 (number producing given in brackets) and numb er of producing businesses by REGION/species.

There were five Several Orders in place for scallop fisheries in 2015 ( see Fig. 2). Three of these Orders are in the Highland region and two in Strathclyde.

Table 5 depicts the number of businesses by region and by species: A) in table production, B) in on-growing production and C) showing no production. Many businesses cultivate more than one species on site, a practice made possible by similar cultivation techniques. For example, scallop can be grown together with queen, Pacific oyster with native oyster, and mussel with Pacific oyster.

Table 5: Number of businesses by region and by species 2015.

A) Production for the table

B) Production for on-growing to other producers

C) No production, actively on-growing or fallow

Table 6: Business production levels by species 2015.

Business production levels by species are shown in Table 6. There were 19 businesses producing more than 100 tonnes of mussels, an increase of two businesses since 2014. Out of these 19 companies, ten produced more than 200 tonnes. These ten companies produced 71% of the total mussel production in Scotland. There were four businesses that produced more than 200,000 Pacific oysters. The production from these businesses accounted for 62% of the Scottish total.