Our red tide resilience studied in the journal Sustainability

There is a particular satisfaction in seeing work done quietly on our farm enter the published scientific record. In April 2024, the peer-reviewed journal Sustainability published a case study centred on our Hermanus operation: "Mitigating the Impact of Harmful Algal Blooms on Aquaculture Using Technological Interventions: Case Study on a South African Farm".

Harmful algal blooms — red tides — are among the most serious natural threats to abalone farming along the South African coastline, and they demand constant vigilance. We were reminded of this between February and April 2019, when the waters around our farm experienced a severe red-tide event dominated by blooms of Lingulodinium polyedrum.

The study, by Tahmina Ajmal, Fazeel Mohammed, Martin S. Goodchild, Jipsy Sudarsanan and Sarah Halse, examines how digital monitoring technologies can help land-based aquaculture withstand these events. At its heart is a novel hybrid forecasting model, developed around a TriLux multi-parameter sensor, which tracks the condition of the seawater on which our animals depend. Real operational data from our farm correlated well with the model, suggesting that forecasting of this kind could become a practical management tool for harmful algal blooms across the industry.

As a land-based producer of Haliotis midae, we live by the quality of the water we pump. That our approach to monitoring and resilience is now studied and shared in the open scientific literature is a quiet point of pride — the challenges of farming alongside the ocean are, we believe, best met in the open.

Read the full open-access paper in Sustainability.