124 | T T Karen Phelps Aquaculture venture adds distillery Tours of the pāua farm and historic meatworks buildings will commence in April adding another arm to the overall offering. TOURISM Ocean Beach Ocean Beach has just opened a distillery on site adding to the growing aquaculture and tourism venture. The Bluff Distillery is currently producing gin with rum and other spirits to follow further down the track, says Ocean Beach managing director and majority shareholder Blair Wolfgram. Tours of the pāua farm and historic meatworks buildings will commence in April adding another arm to the overall offering. “We are one of the narrowest parts of New Zealand – 200m from coast to coast - so it’s the one place in New Zealand you can do the coast to coast with a gin in your hand,” he says with a laugh. The 136-hectare site in Bluff was once home to New Zealand’s largest freezing works and has been transformed from a series of 45 abandoned industrial buildings to New Zealand’s foremost land-based aquaculture centre of excellence. Species currently farmed at Ocean Beach include pāua, whitebait, asparagopsis armata (red seaweed used to reduce methane in livestock) and macrocystis (bladder kelp). Blair says discussions are also progressing with a land-based salmon farmer, a karengo seaweed farmer (nori), and he would love to see a mussel hatchery as well farming Bluff oysters on the site. “Across our team and our partners teams there are 60 plus people working on site. A huge amount of progress when you consider there were two or three people when we bought it in 2018. “The total team working at Ocean Beach should double over the next 18-24 months as all businesses continue to expand,” he says. Ocean Beach is working with the Southern Institute of Technology to establish a New Zealand Certificate in Aquaculture (Level 3) on the site. “We will need more good people to join our teams in the future so we are working with SIT to train those people now. Auckland University of Technology (AUT) has also established satellite labs on the site to provide a place for PhD and Masters students to gain hands on experience in the field of aquaculture.” Blair, who is also the Deputy Chair of the Aotearoa New Zealand Seaweed Association, says land-based aquaculture operations will become increasingly important with challenges such as climate change and invasive pest species entering our ecosystem. “One of the strengths of being land based is we have the ability to control organisms entering and leaving the site as well as water quality and temperatures,” says Blair. “Here species are farmed in the optimum temperature range and when you get changes in climatic temperature you can nullify this with technology. Where Ocean Beach is located the water is very cold and very clean. It’s much easier to heat water than to chill it and the beautiful cold water speaks for itself.” There are still opportunities for tourism and aquaculture businesses to lease space on the site. The entire Ocean Beach site spans a range of industrial spaces varying from 100-3,000m2 as well as fenced concrete yard space. There is heavy vehicle access off State Highway 1 and the site is located 1km from South Port. With large volumes of fresh and seawater supply, aquaculture coastal permits to utilise substantial volumes of sea water, Ocean Beach is well set up to accommodate a variety of business operations, says Blair. He says that partners benefit from existing infrastructure and coastal permits. “They can essentially clip into the existing system and get started quickly, requiring significantly less capital and time to establish an aquaculture operation.” 0800 802 546 bonisch.nz admin@bonisch.nz SURVEYING PLANNING CIVIL ENGINEERING LAND DEVELOPMENT We’re proud to support Ocean Beach NZ and the growth of our region Supplying Project Management & QS services to Ocean Beach 021 0828 0753 www.noblepm.nz
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