Sea Urchin Farm Tasmania

Sea Urchin Farm Tasmania

Way back in the early 2000s, with the rise of the Australian dollar and increased investment in places like China, there was a mood of optimism in Australia.

It is easy to be negative about Tasmania today, says Greg Irons, describing life on his small sea urchin farm on Tasmania's east coast. But that was not his feeling when he started farming more than 10 years ago, when he had the time and energy to get up early and dive for hours a day.

Irons is an ex-pat Kiwi who moved to Tasmania for personal reasons but who also saw commercial opportunities. He was influenced by a newspaper article about a successful sea urchin farm in British Columbia. He arrived in Tasmania and found no sea urchin farms at all - so he decided to start one and purchased a boat called "Diana" (named after Diana Krall).

He started off with a commercial licence to gather wild urchins. To do this, you need to dive down 20 metres or more. The deeper you go, the bigger the urchins are likely to be; they can weigh up to 2kg each. You need to be able to hold your breath for two minutes and stay down for three or four minutes at a time,

I enjoyed the article on sea urchin farming in Tasmania. I worked in a shellfish lab at the University of Melbourne for a year before going to college and we were doing some work with sea urchins. I did my senior thesis on sea urchins (at the end of which, I'm afraid to say, I knew less than when I started).