Sea Urchin Farming Australia

Sea Urchin Farming Australia

We have some sea urchin farming in Australia. And we have some wild caught sea urchin here. The sea urchins that are harvested from the wild are prized for their roe, which is a delicacy in Japan and Korea. The sea urchin species we farm is not well suited to the Japanese market because of its size and appearance, so it's more suited to the local market. We sell them to restaurants and to a small number of retailers.

The two biggest challenges with farming sea urchins are the predators and the fact that they don't breed very readily in captivity. But they do breed, so we're able to continue to harvest them indefinitely.

We found a place where there were no predators, so that was lucky. Then we worked out how to get them to breed in captivity without too much difficulty or expense. It took us about five years of research and development just to get them breeding sufficiently often for us to be able to scale up into commercial production.

I've been interested in sea urchins as a potential business for a while, and have done some research into it. Here's what I know so far:

Sea urchin farming seems to be most practised around Japan, California and Canada. In Japan, the urchins are grown in cages submerged in the ocean. In California, they are grown on land in tanks of seawater. The Canadian farmers do both.

In Canada, the main markets are California and Japan. It's not yet clear how much export to Australia would be feasible (though I've heard some people suggest that it might be possible to ship them frozen overnight by air).