Andrew Whiston Email & Phone Number

I've spent the last 30 years in Aquaculture Facilities and Public Aquariums worldwide. My particular interests are energy and resource efficiency; promoting the idea that good environmental choices should also be good financial choices.In 2018 I designed Scotland's first renewably powered King Prawn farm. Over the last 6 years I've keep our core team together and we've got rather good at Prawns. Breeding and growing them and evolving our de-risked farming solution. A management buy out and reorganisation in late 2023 put us back in family ownership and we've fitted out our new solar powered prawn farm in St Andrews: Eden Valley Prawns. As key partners in the £2.2m UK Sustainable King Prawn Project we're tying together low salinity production, renewable power, alternative feeds and waste remediation and valorisation using crops.Our next milestones at Eden campus are building a commercial scale Prawn Hatchery to supply seedstock to the emerging UK industry and expanding our pilot demonstrator farm. Once we have the pilot operational and significant amounts of product on the market. An SEIS/EIS round to fuel this growth is targeted for Q1 of 2025. Onshore Aquaculture offers our best chance of growing sustainable animal protein for a rapidly increasing global population. Unlike traditional farm animals, aquaculture species don't waste energy on keeping warm or standing up. They can be grown at high density, using renewable energy and sustainable feeds. Even their waste is useful.But the current generation of RAS isn't making that ambition a reality. Poor design lacking in resilience has led to many spectacular headlines. Relying on "ecosystem services" to provide clean water and to deal with the wastes is not sustainable. The need for commercial speed has produced very risky solutions that are prone to failure, as can be seen with roller coaster share prices. So, that's our goal: De-Risking RAS and making it genuinely sustainableHow? By developing safe, evidence based, robust systems that minimize pollution and resource usage. Professionally, I'm a Marine Biologist trained at the University of St Andrews. At heart, I'm a seafarer. I sit on the management committees of the NEC Regional Inshore Fisheries Group and the Communities Inshore Fisheries Alliance. I consult widely on fisheries and the marine environment.There's plenty of room in the sea for all so long as we manage access using common sense. Sustainable wild fisheries are vital sources of food and identity. Without them, food security is at risk, and coastal communities will perish.

Listed skills include Leadership, Aquaculture, Marine Biology, Animal Husbandry, and 46 others.