Thanks to Emma Sheehan for this.
CGTN: RAZOR: How mussels could help soaring food demand and the environment – Watch the Video
Jo Colan and Giulia Carbonaro
Feeding the world’s ever-increasing population is a growing challenge, pushing the limits of what the planet can sustain. By 2050, the demand for food is expected to be 70 to 100 percent higher than today. How to face such a challenge in a sustainable way?
The Holmyard family in Devon, UK, believe they have a possible solution – farming mussels.
“Offshore Shellfish is John’s dream basically,” says Nicki Holmyard, who together with her husband John founded the company off the coast of South Devon. “He had a dream when he was 17 and was interested in mussels, went to university, studied mussels, and then he really wanted to do something with them.”
John started his career in the late 1980s in the mussel farms in Scotland, where he was one of the pioneers of the sector. But his passion for mussel farming and his ambition to feed more people brought him to found his own company, where two of his children also work. Offshore Shellfish is based in Brixham, Devon, where the temperature of the water is just right for the mussels to grow.
“We’re round about the boundary of where the water coming down the English Channel meets the water coming up from the Atlantic,” explains John. “And where you get that zone of mixing, you often get very good growth of plankton.” The mussels feed on plankton, the single-cell algae on which the marine food chain is based.’
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