Man driving a small motorboat

The Loch Duart Way (Part 1)

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Loch Duart isn’t just a company or a place, it’s our very own breed of Scottish salmon. Our fish are the direct descendants of the wild salmon that still swim in these waters, with a taste and texture, that’s quite simply unrivalled.

Watch some films about working at Loch Duart and how the team look after our salmon.

Find out more about what it’s like to work at Loch Duart and how we look after our unrivalled salmon.

Working at Loch Duart

Gary Shand, Site Manager of Laxford talks about his career progression at Loch Duart:

“When I started here I had no previous experience in aquaculture but luckily I’ve been able to be mentored by some of the leading people here at Loch Duart and in the aquaculture industry. All these people have had a major hand in helping me reach my potential and I continue to learn daily.”

Gary also talked about the communities that Loch Duart works in and how to get started in the sector.

“Community is vital to the area that we live in. Loch Duart sponsor many things such as football teams, rowing clubs and they play a big part in helping the community out…without Loch Duart communities like Kinlochbervie where I grew up and Scourie, they wouldn’t exist.

“The ideal candidate to come and work at Loch Duart is someone with an extreme hunger to learn. You don’t have to have any previous experience in aquaculture. There’s nothing that’s going to stop you reaching your potential here. As long as you want to learn, this is the perfect place to come and work.”

Batch Weights

Gary is also proud of Loch Duart’s low impact, small-scale farming methods. This includes how Loch Duart look after and feed their salmon at sea.

“We do some batch weights and health checks. The West Sutherland Fisheries Trust make sure that everything we do is recorded correctly. We take ten fish then take a lice counts, inspect the gills and check for any scaling or any damage on the fish. When getting  batch weights we take about 100 fish (the biggest and the smallest) to find the average size. We don’t want to upgrade the feed size too early because the smaller fish won’t have that chance to grow.”

“We want to take care of every fish that we have, whether it’s the smallest or the biggest.”