First appeared on Adelaide Now on 2 November 2017 and syndicated through Newscorp. Click here to read the full article.
THE Southern Hemisphere’s largest abalone producer has invested $1 million into a new processing plant in Adelaide, providing a jobs and economic boon for the state.
Yumbah Aquaculture opened its base at Wingfield yesterday to process more than 600 tonnes of abalone a year from its four farms, including at Port Lincoln and Kangaroo Island.
The business has created 12 full-time jobs to prepare and package the abalone destined for domestic and international markets, worth more than $26 million in sales each year.
Yumbah’s processing manager David Connell said the plant would improve farm efficiencies and its state-of-the-art machinery would guarantee a premium product.
“There’s still another $500,000 of machinery being developed to go into the system … enabling the (processing) speed to pick up and create more jobs,” Mr Connell said.
He estimated another 10 jobs would be created in the next six months and abalone processing could be increased to 900 tonnes a year.
Yumbah Aquaculture was now the only Australian abalone farmer to own and control every aspect of the operations from feed development through to processing, packaging and sales.
Yumbah’s two other abalone farms were at Narrawong, in Victoria, and Bicheno, in Tasmania.
About 80 per cent of the product was exported to Japan, Asia, the US and Europe.