The Guardian - 08.08.2019

Section:GDN 1N PaGe:15 Edition Date:190808 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/8/2019 18:05 cYanmaGentaYellowbl

Thursday 8 August 2019 The Guardian •

National^15

Clean tails

The king

prawns

grown in

Britain

Saeed Kamali Dehghan

A

t a farm in Lincoln-

shire , two aquacultur-

ists are busy feeding

thousands of larvae

in a dozen large tanks

designed to reproduce

a seawater environment. In less

than three and a half months, each

wriggling little creature will weigh

30g, ready to be harvested and sold

to retailers and restaurants.

FloGro Fresh is billed as the

UK’s fi rst warm-water king prawn

producer, and the fi rst to bring

Pacifi c whiteleg prawns fresh to

the market – most prawns in the

UK are imported frozen from India,

Vietnam , Thailand , Ecuador or

Honduras.

In an industry rife with human

traffi cking and modern slavery ,

and notorious for its destruction of

marine ecosystems , FloGro is one

farmer’s attempt to produce farmed

prawns that are sustainable and

ethical. “The beauty of our operation

is that it’s entirely fresh; everything

that comes from overseas has

been frozen,” said Ralph Maxwell,

FloGro’s managing director.

The team “get the order in

the morning, go and harvest it

immediately from the tank and

they’re shipped to the customer

overnight and will be in the

restaurant the following day – so

in less than 24 hours you have that

order ,” he said. “There is provenance

and there is traceability to

everything we do, so if the customer

or chef wants, they can come up and

see the prawn. ”

More than 81,000 tonnes of

shrimp and prawn, worth more

than £69 0m, are imported annually,

according to Seafi sh, the industry

body. Only 0.1% of the total volume

of species arriving to the UK from

British vessels were shrimps and

prawns, but warm-water prawns

were the sixth best selling seafood.

The Marine Conservation

Society has given the thumbs-up

to FloGro ’s methods of production

and sustainability. Its closed-loop

aquaculture system uses renewable

energy – rooftop solar panels and

windpower. The 750 cubic metres

of water, heated via a biomass boiler

fed with wood pellets to ensure it

remains at 28C at all times, is fi ltered

and recycled. Prawn excretions are

spread on land as fertiliser.

A major issue with intensive

prawn farming in places such as Asia

is the use of polluting chemicals

and antibiotics. According to the

Environmental Justice Foundation,

“the production of prawns

can be responsible for serious

environmental degradation, such

as the destruction of mangroves,

wetlands and coral reefs, destruc-

tion of marine and coastal

biodiversity and mass drowning

of sea turtles and other protected

species. It has also been linked

to human rights abuses, such as

child, forced and bonded labour,

intimidation, violence and murder .”

Neil Campbell, the head chef

at Yotam Ottolenghi’s London

restaurant Rovi , said the restaurant’s

relationship with the farm was key

in choosing their product.

“I can pick the phone up and

speak with Ralph, talk about prawn

sizes, weight, feeding habits, quality

and so on,” he said , adding it was

reassuring “that the prawns and staff

there are getting a good life. ”

Campbell, who comes from a

family of Isle of Skye fi shermen,

said FloGro’s sustainable farming

methods were equally important.

“The system which Ralph and his

team use is state of the art. With the

ever-growing world population and

rising food consumption, our sea life

is under threat. We need farms that

can produce it [in the right way].”

FloGro receives a shipment of

150,000 larvae from the US every

four to fi ve weeks. Boxes containing

baby shrimps in highly oxygenated

pure seawater arrive at Heathrow

airport. The larvae go through an

acclimatisation period before being

placed in blue tanks fi lled with

salted water, known as nursery

tanks. They stay there for 28 days,

growing to 10 times their size.

Another 28 days are spent in six

intermediary tanks where they grow

to 2g –3g each. They spend the rest of

their lives in 12 “grow-out” tanks.

In contrast with conventionally

farmed prawns in Asia and Latin

America, which are often fed with

fi sh meal obtained through illegal

fi shing, FloGro prawns are fed with

fi sh meal from France sourced from

off -cuts from human consumption.

“We’re not killing fi sh to put in our

prawns: it’s only the waste product

from human consumption,” said

production manager Richard Clarke.

The prawns are harvested

twice a week. They die instantly

when put into iced water and are

then vacuum-packed and kept

chilled until delivery. They are

subesquently sold for £20 per kilo.

Maxwell said the response so

far has been overwhelming , and

heartening: “Our problem is that we

can’t supply enough .”

‘We’re not killing

fi sh to put in our

prawns: it’s only the

waste product from

human consumption’

Richard Clarke

Production manager, FloGro

▲ The FloGro

team can harvest

shrimp from

their warmwater

tanks in

Lincolnshire and

ship them to UK

restaurants by

the next day

PHOTOGRAPH: SAEED

KAMALI DEHGHAN

▼ De-shelling at

Sassoon Docks

fi sh market in

Mumbai. India

is one of the

main exporters

of warm-water

prawns to British

customers

PHOTOGRAPH:

ANDREW SOLE/ALAMY

Kafka’s archive reassembled in

Israel after years of negotiation

Agence France-Presse

Jerusalem

Israel’s national library has unveiled a

missing batch of Franz Kafk a ’s papers,

ending more than a decade of legal

wrangling between Israel and Ger-

many over his legacy.

As he battled with tuberculosis in

an Austrian sanitorium, Kafk a, a Ger-

man-speaking Jew from Prague, asked

his close friend Max Brod to destroy all

his letters and writings.

After the writer’s death in 1924,

Prague-born Brod, who was also

Jewish, felt he could not carry out his

friend’s wishes and in 1939 fl ed Nazi-

occupied Czechoslovakia for Tel Aviv

carrying Kafk a’s papers in a suitcase.

Brod then published many of the

works and played a key role in estab-

lishing Kafk a’s success as one of the

20th century’s key literary fi gures.

Brod’s own death in 1968 ushered in

what a spokeswoman for the national

library, Vered Lion-Yerushalmi, called

“the Kafk aesque story” of the Brod

archive, with the hoard being split up

and part of it stolen and off ered for sale

in Germany.

Since March 2008, the library has

been fi ghting to reassemble the collec-

tion and house it in Israel, its chairman,

David Blumberg , told a press confer-

ence yesterday. “The national library

claimed the transfer of the archive to

it because that was Brod’s wish in his

will,” he said. “We started a process

that took 11 years until we completed

it two weeks ago.”

In May, following a court ruling in

Wiesbaden, Germany handed over

thousands of papers and manuscripts

which Israel said had been stolen a

decade ago in Tel Aviv and later off ered

for sale to Germany’s literary archive

in Marbach , and to private collectors.

Other parts of the hoard had pre-

viously been located in a run-down

apartment full of cats in Tel Aviv,

stored in a disused refrigerator and

also in bank deposit boxes in the city.

The fi fth and fi nal cache was located

in a vault at the Zurich headquarters of

UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank, and

released following a Swiss court ruling

with the bank’s cooperation.

Pacifi c whiteleg

prawns, grown

in the UK

▲ Sketches from one of Franz Kafk a’s

journals at the Israeli national library

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