At a farm in Lincolnshire two aquaculturists (love that name) are busy feeding thousands of larvae in a dozen large tanks designed to emulate a seawater environment.
This is the UK’s first warm water king prawn producer. In less than three and a half months, each wriggling little creature will grow to weigh 30g, ready to be harvested and sold to retailers and restaurants. FloGro Fresh is the first company in Britain to bring Pacific white leg prawns fresh to the market – most prawns consumed in the UK and Spain are imported frozen from India, Vietnam, Thailand, Ecuador or Honduras.
The team at FloGro get the order in the morning, go and harvest it immediately from the tank and then they’re shipped to the customer overnight and will be in the restaurant the following day. So in less than 24 hours the buyer has that order.
More than 81,000 tonnes of shrimp and prawn (worth £691.8m) are imported to the UK annually, according to 2017 figures released recently by Seafish. Only 0.1% of the total volume of species arriving to the UK from British vessels were shrimps and prawns, according to the report, but warm water prawns were the sixth best selling seafood species in the country.
(some content courtesy of the Guardian on line)