Salmon pioneer goes it alone

Press, 13 July 1984, Page 29

Salmon pioneer goes it alone

Nelson reporter The “father” of New Zealand salmon ranching, Mr Clive Barker, has left the Bubbling Springs Salmon Farm at Pupu Springs, Takaka, to strike out on his own. Mr Barker launched the Bubbling Springs scheme — the first in New Zealand — and worked for 11 years to see his claims vindicated that fish released at sea would return to the farm. Mr Barker said he intended to apply his expertise in this field to two projects. One was sea caging in the Golden Bay and Marlborough Sounds areas. He would not reveal the second. He left Bubbling Springs because he wanted to branch out for himself. He said that this proposal was at odds with his principals who felt he could not handle both projects. So he resigned. Few people in New Zealand would have greater claims to a knowledge of bureaucratic processes than Mr Barker. He has had to claw his way through masses of red tape, prejudices (not all governmental), by-laws, water right, and other applications to prove

his claims that ocean ranching of salmon, if managed correctly, could be as successful in New Zealand as it has been overseas. To provide the venture with bread and butter in its formative years, many Bubbling Springs salmon, at the “pan-size” stage, were sold to New Zealand restaurants against the protests of acclimatisation societies. Mr Barker had always held that why so many of the millions of young salmon released into Golden Bay did not return was because of genetic failure. Until he began breeding the farm’s young stock from the fertilised eggs of “homegrown” stock, all the hundreds of thousands of young salmon released came from southern hatcheries. Only one or two ever returned to enter the Takaka River. Two years ago he released the first of “homegrown” salmon into Golden Bay. Last season they returned, if not in the thousands, certainly in the hundreds, up the Takaka River and into the Pupu Stream. The farm is now managed by Mr Jim Galloway, formerly of the Ministry of Fisheries, who has worked on salmon farms in Canterbury and Hokitika.