Duncan Bates founded Akaroa Salmon with his father Tom three decades ago, with an experimental licence from the Akaroa County Council.
It was an experiment that paid off. The initial pens full of hand-fed fish have now expanded to include a specialised processing plant and hatchery which produces over 200 tonnes of king salmon a year.
Although the lockdown had taken away Bates' customer base, every day now is a bit better, Bates tells Kathryn Ryan, and his father's resilience is inspiring the company to keep fighting.
Akaroa Salmon employs 50 people, with 25 percent of its market made up of exports. Bates hopes Kiwis will help support the company to make up for their current lack of access to foreign markets because of logistical difficulties.
Luckily, the company switched its focus to the New Zealand market decades ago after competition squeezed them out of the once-lucrative US market.
It was after this crisis that Akaroa Salmon established its brand and a solid base of domestic trade.
In the late '80s and early '90s, Chile entered the US market, forcing prices down and making the Bates' family business untenable. They decided to target the local market, instead.
“That’s when Dad came into his own at that period because he just jumped in his car and introduced himself to the likes of chefs like Simon Gault and introduced our product to these people and that’s really how the Akaroa brand came about.”
Other blips along the road have seen the company readjust to changing market conditions and seek new supply chains.
“When we had the earthquake here in Christchurch a significant area of our market stopped operating, much the same way as the market has stopped operating now,” he says.
Similarly, but on a much larger scale, Covid-19 restrictions hit the company hard, with export markets and the domestic customer base closed down. However, with an online presence and perseverance, Bates' team managed to keep some revenue coming in.
“The first week of lockdown I sat at my desk and thought ‘what am I going to do?’. All our business is essentially gone. All our trade customers. The export markets still existed to a degree, but getting product to those destinations was incredibly challenging because of the consolidation of the airline industry.
“But fortunately we had an online shop in use, so we marketed the hell out of that and the New Zealand population got behind that and that was a great revenue stream for us in the first two weeks.
“We had some trade customers still operating and in particular, Hello Fresh, which is a food parcel-type of company, and so we just grabbed what we could. We managed to get a pipeline to a customer base in Singapore and the every day it just got a little bit better and continue to do so.”
The company has been able to pay staff and feed its fish, its two main areas of concern. The lockdown and current economic downturn does not faze him, taking it one day at a time.
“One of the things that I learned from my father was the fortitude and resilience that he had during very difficult economic times in the late 1990s when interest rates went through the roof… you have to keep going.
“This is just another one of these things that you are confronted with and there’s been so much investment through the years that it would be really silly just to say ‘I’ve had enough’ and walk away from it.”
Bates' father Tom was an pragmatist from the beginning, keeping his head when his beef farming operations were hit by sweeping changes brought in during the 1980s.
Tom was involved in speculative construction projects in Christchurch to support the farming operation.
Upheaval within the industry during the mid-1980s led to a new ideas and more radical shift in direction – from farming the land to primary production on the coast.
“It was becoming increasingly difficult to make a living out of farming. When all the subsidies were being removed and farmers were told to operate on a level playing field, so to speak, it was a tough time.”
“We had a little family holiday out in Stewart Island and we saw a salmon farm being established out there and we took that idea home with us and dad was always an innovative character looking for ways of diversifying and he felt that there was an opportunity that suited our particular location."
Aquaculture during that time consisted of some oyster farms around Auckland and a few mussel farm operations being established around the Marlborough Sounds, Bates says.
“Salmon farming was quite new. That was very new worldwide."
The transition was a learning curve, Bates’ says, and his basic knowledge gained from agricultural diplomas proved useful. So, too, was Bates' year spent on another salmon farming operation. The rest of the knowledge was picked up in the process.
“Dad picked up the compliance side of it and I initially I worked at the Tentburn Hatchery north of Southbridge on the coast. At that time, it was the New Zealand Salmon Farming Company’s hatchery, and I worked there for a little while and then I went down and worked on its production farms on Stewart Island. I stayed down there for just over a year there and learnt the fundamentals of how it needed to be done.
“When I look back on it now no-one really knew what they were doing. There was a degree of knowledge of how the infrastructure worked and regards to knowledge of the fish we were trying to farm we were stumbling in the dark a little bit."
Farming king salmon is challenging, he says, and refining the process was never-ending.
“The biggest challenge is the life cycle of the Pacific salmon. We get our smelt off the hatcheries in the Spring and then we get about 18 months to grow them and harvest them and if we don’t harvest those fish in that timeframe then they enter the maturation phase. At that point, all their energy goes into that, they basically will begin to eat their own flesh, they stop eating. If you don’t harvest them then obviously the investment is wasted.”
