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Loch Duart works with Noble of Girvan to keep high quality boat building in Scotland.
Loch Duart, the salmon farming company based in Sutherland and Uist, will be commissioning a new boat from Noble and Sons in October 2011. For Loch Duart, this is not ‘just another order’ – it reaffirms our ties with a key supplier and a great tradition of Scottish boat building.
This boat is a huge investment for Loch Duart and certainly the largest fleet-related project we have ever undertaken. It is only our complete faith in Nobles that has enabled us to attempt it and the support of Highlands and Islands Enterprise has been crucial to this contract.
But why do it at all? After all, we already have a large fleet of Noble-built boats (see below) – but we need one more because the Minch can be a pretty inhospitable place to operate and the boats in our current fleet are too small to work this stretch of coast. So our requirement was for a boat built to suit a particular stretch of water, which is notably rough.
The Lady Catherine – on schedule for launch in October 2011
Our farming operations on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides currently depend on harvesting the fish to meet the ferry schedule – a schedule which is designed, quite reasonably, to meet the needs of the residents and people wishing to visit these wonderful islands. The timing requires our harvests to start extremely early in the morning and requires our staff to work under extreme time pressure. Neither of these are conducive to producing a high quality result and reliable delivery to our customers.
Our philosophy behind the decision:
Scotland needs Scottish boat builders. This is an industry which has been devastated by the decline of the fishing industry and the loss of profitability in the salmon farming industry. The skills we have left are held in the hands and brains of fewer and fewer, older and older people. These skills are crucial to recovery when current regeneration plans begin to show fruit. But we are losing jobs and skills in a fragile rural economy, where they are hardest to replace. There are dead men's shoes issues for the young and they leave communities, never to return. We need to support these people and keep these skills for future generations.
Scotland's wild places aren’t just for holidays, although we need and value our tourist industry! Tourism means that people return to rural idylls for holidays – but what support is there for the communities in Scotland’s wild remote places? There is a danger that only tourism and retirement homes will be viable in these fragile areas, leaving those whose families have lived there for centuries with no future and no jobs. We need to retain local people with viable and sustainable jobs based on traditional skills. These jobs are vital to the balance of the rural economy, also to the long term food security of our country.
Sourcing policies are changing. In a world with declining resources and rising raw material prices, transporting goods from one side of the earth to the other is not sustainable. When the crunch comes, every country will need a range of skills and we will have lost many of them. We have to try to keep a core of skills in this country.
The consumer’s view of food production is predicated on low-cost food, which demands unattainable and unrealistic efficiency in the rural economy. This attitude must be challenged because it drives young people out of the country, leaving the knowledge and skills in the heads of an ageing and declining section of the population. We have to safeguard the people in our fragile, rural communities who can provide us with good, healthy food, even at higher prices. If these food producers are not valued and supported, we are destined for nothing but cheap commodity food produced by larger and larger corporations, whose eyes will be on the bottom line and not on the health of the nation.
Loch Duart is supporting Scottish jobs for Scottish people in fragile Scottish communities. This matters most because no-one else is doing it except where the cost is lowest. This is a crucial issue for Scotland's people, environment and business.
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