Looking back, thinking ahead: Ben Hadfield

What have been the high points for you in 2025?

The success of the Dawnfresh and Wester Ross Fisheries acquisitions made in the last couple of years has been very pleasing.

Seeing the effect the Dawnfresh Loch Etive project, and the post-smolt produced in the loch, on the business in Scotland has been really good. We’ve enjoyed significant increases in harvest weight, lower mortality compared to 2022 and 2023, and increased volume. We can’t give the number (until after Q4 2025 reporting) but we've had a record volume for the Scottish business unit in 2025 and part of that is down to a really good execution of the post-smolt project.

It's not always the case that two small acquisitions go as well as they did with Dawnfresh and Wester Ross, but I'm blessed with a really strong team in Mowi, and while the integration has been in all areas throughout the business, from my (farming) perspective, it's gone great. Wester Ross Salmon is a niche brand, which is enjoying fantastic uplift in the US. It's doing really well for us.

Broodstock facility

It's also given us a location for our landbased broodstock facility at Ardessie. Right now, we have over 40 million Mowi-strain eggs being incubated in the incubation unit at Ardessie, which is largely on budget, and was a little bit delayed because of electricity supply issues but is now working well.

We're moving most of our inventory over the next year or so to the Mowi strain which correlates very strongly with survival in the sea and better biology. The Mowi strain is about 60% of our inventory now but we're hoping that by the end of 2027 that will be 100%.

What will be the most significant challenges and opportunities for Mowi in 2026 in the four regions you have responsibility for – Mowi Faroes, Scotland, Ireland, and Canada East?

The Faroes has had a record year: record harvest volume, great production, really strong cost control and good biology, so keeping that going is always a challenge but Faroes is a fantastic place to farm.

Scotland's been flying this year, biologically and volume-wise, but it's still got to control the costs associated with differentiated production of Label Rouge salmon, organic salmon, Wester Ross salmon, etc, and the obvious challenges that we have here with high wellboat and vessel demand due to good sea lice control and good amoebic gill disease control.

Ireland’s got to become more profitable, that's very clear, and Canada East has to get back the stability that we had before. We had two or three good years there with really high harvest weights and increasing production, and then we had huge environmental challenges this summer that were difficult to deal with. Having said that, Canada is now stable, mortality is back to low levels and it's really just about preventing the same occurrence in summer next year, so we're moving quickly to do that.

What do you see as the most significant challenges for the salmonid farming industry in Scotland and globally in 2026?

The negative narrative against salmon farming and the activist pressure, which continue to grow. Anyone that takes time to understand the science and how sustainable this industry is shouldn't think any of that's necessary. But it just seems that more and more resource is being deployed on that. It's quite sad and it's actually almost laughable, especially from a wild fish perspective because the amount of money going on conservation from the wild fish sector is paltry, it's unacceptable, but they seem to readily spend money on attacking salmon farmers at every opportunity.

It's a waste of precious resources (for wild fish conservation) but it creates a sort of lurch to more and more regulation which is tricky for us to manage. If you look at what's happened with the Scottish Environment Protection Agency’s Sea Lice Risk Framework, there was the chance to have a robust model and take Scotland's regulation of aquaculture - which is already world leading - a step further. The opportunity was there, but what did SEPA do? They made sure that the architecture of the model was just so precautionary that it was unrealistic and therefore no one in their right mind could accept it. And then we had appeal againt it.

It's just sad, actually, and it’s not something that I can change.

I would, however, point out that the relationships that we have with local fisheries practitioners such as John Gibb and Bob Kindness and even the Awe Fisheries Board, are excellent. We enjoy working with them, we enjoy minimising any potential hazard from aquaculture operations, and we enjoy contributing to some real coalface conservation projects.

On Friday: Andrew Bett, chief executive and co-founder of Salar Pursuits, which offers salmon farms retrofit protection against lice, jellyfish and algal blooms