Scottish Shellfish Farm Production Survey 2019

Sites and Businesses

The numbers of authorised, active businesses and sites in operation are presented in Tables 3 and 4. There are many sites that held stock not yet ready for market, others were fallow, and some were located in remote areas where cost-effective production and marketing of shellfish proved difficult. In 2019, 165 sites produced shellfish for sale, an increase of 3% since 2018, and 56% of these sites were located in Shetland.

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

Producing = placing on the market for the table and/or on-growing.

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

There were five Several Orders in place for scallop fisheries in 2019 (see Fig. 2) all of which are located in the Highland region.

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. The highest proportion of Pacific oyster businesses are located in Strathclyde while the highest proportion of mussel businesses are in Shetland.

Business production levels by species are shown in Table 6. There were 15 businesses producing more than 100 tonnes of mussels, this remained the same as in 2018. Out of these 15 businesses, nine produced more than 200 tonnes. These nine businesses produced 78% of the total mussel production in Scotland. There were seven businesses that produced more than 200,000 Pacific oysters. The production from these businesses accounted for 87% of the Scottish Pacific oyster total.