Aquaculture and sustainability: a discussion with Dr. Lisa Elliot, founder of Australian Crayfish Hatchery

In the year 1800, a little over 200 years ago, there were 1 billion people on Earth. Today there are 7.7 billion people and by 2100 there will be close to 11 billion people on Earth.

How are we going to feed everyone? What exactly is aquaculture and what does it have to do with the global population?

Aquaculture is the farming of aquatic organisms including fish, molluscs, crustaceans and aquatic plants. Even farming pearls, crocodiles and ornamental fish is classified as aquaculture. Globally, the aquaculture market is worth over $50 Billion USD and production is led by China who produces over 65 billion metric tons of aquaculture products annually and aquaculture is the fastest growing primary industry in Australia.

Driving the growth of the Australian aquaculture sector is the world demand for fisheries products that the world's commercial fisheries are increasingly unable to meet due in part to greatly depleted fish stocks and global population growth. The Australian Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment estimates the value of Australian aquaculture production is worth around $1 billion annually.

Aquaculture in Australia dates back thousands of years with evidence of an Aboriginal community farming eels in Victoria (United Nations) and Australian writers such as Bruce Pascoe have educated many of us about how first peoples have farmed, nurtured and lived in harmony with nature in Australia for millennia and another remarkable fact is that indigenous Australians used to transport yabbies between waterholes to restock impoverished waterbodies. The first true aquaculture in Australia.

The earliest commercial aquaculture products was the Sydney Rock Oyster from New South Wales in the 1870s and it is only in more recent times (since the 1960s) that farming freshwater crayfish in purpose-built dams has really commenced. 

Join us for this insightful discussion with entrepreneur and visionary Dr. Lisa Elliot, Managing Director and founder of the Australian Crayfish Hatchery, the first state-of-the-art redclaw crayfish hatchery of its kind.

Transcript

In the year 1800, a little over 200 years ago, there were 1 billion people on Earth. Today there are 7.7 billion people and by 2100 there will be close to 11 billion people on Earth.

How are we going to feed everyone? What exactly is aquaculture and what does it have to do with the global population?

Aquaculture is the farming of aquatic organisms including fish, molluscs, crustaceans and aquatic plants. Even farming pearls, crocodiles and ornamental fish is classified as aquaculture. Globally, the aquaculture market is worth over $50 Billion USD and production is led by China who produces over 65 billion metric tons of aquaculture products annually and aquaculture is the fastest growing primary industry in Australia.

Driving the growth of the Australian aquaculture sector is the world demand for fisheries products that the world's commercial fisheries are increasingly unable to meet due in part to greatly depleted fish stocks and global population growth. The Australian Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment estimates the value of Australian aquaculture production is worth around $1 billion annually.

Aquaculture in Australia dates back thousands of years with evidence of an Aboriginal community farming eels in Victoria (United Nations) and Australian writers such as Bruce Pascoe have educated many of us about how first peoples have farmed, nurtured and lived in harmony with nature in Australia for millennia and another remarkable fact is that indigenous Australians used to transport yabbies between waterholes to restock impoverished waterbodies. The first true aquaculture in Australia.

The earliest commercial aquaculture products was the Sydney Rock Oyster from New South Wales in the 1870s and it is only in more recent times (since the 1960s) that farming freshwater crayfish in purpose-built dams has really commenced. 

Join us for this insightful discussion with entrepreneur and visionary Dr. Lisa Elliot, Managing Director and founder of the Australian Crayfish Hatchery, the first state-of-the-art redclaw crayfish hatchery of its kind.