The smallest losses holding back New Zealand’s biggest aquaculture ambition

When people talk about the future of New Zealand aquaculture, the conversation often centres on scale. New farms, new species, new export markets. Brad Skelton works much closer to the beginning.

Seed mussels, known as spat, are the foundation of the Greenshell™ mussel industry. They are also where much of the system’s potential is quietly lost. A large proportion of spat fail to survive the first few weeks of farming, before they are established enough to stay attached to farm structures. Those early losses have a knock-on effect throughout the production cycle.

“High losses of seed mussels are the single biggest constraint on growth for the Greenshell™ mussel industry,” Skelton says. “If you can’t reliably get through those early stages, it limits everything that comes after.”

That problem has taken on new urgency as aquaculture has been identified as a major growth opportunity for New Zealand. Government ambitions to lift the sector to $3 billion in annual revenue by the mid-2030s rely less on expanding farm space and more on improving performance within existing consents. A recent aquaculture development plan makes clear that improving spat supply and survival is central to that goal.

Against that backdrop, Skelton recently secured a five-year Endeavour Fund grant worth $6 million to continue his work on reducing spat losses.

“This funding allows us to move forward at pace,” Skelton says. “It’s the continuation of several years of applied research, but now with the scale and stability to properly test new approaches and work alongside industry partners.”

The project focuses on the earliest stages of mussel farming, where natural behaviours and environmental variability make losses hard to predict and control. Rather than chasing a single technological fix, the research is aimed at developing practical approaches that can be integrated into existing farming systems and used by the industry.

Skelton’s career has been shaped by working closely with industry from the outset. He completed his PhD at the University of Auckland investigating production inefficiencies in the Greenshell™ mussel sector, and has continued to focus on solutions-driven research that sits between science and application.

During his doctorate, he also stepped into entrepreneurship, entering the Velocity $100k Challenge and securing a place in CIE’s Venture Lab incubator where he explored enclosed nursery systems designed to grow spat beyond their most vulnerable stage before seeding them onto farms.

For a scientist, that move into commercialisation was unfamiliar territory.

“I wasn’t exposed to entrepreneurship during my undergraduate training,” he says. “Taking part in Velocity and Venture Lab was a way to understand how commercial decisions are made and how industry thinks about risk.”

Through those CIE programmes, Skelton gained exposure to business planning, mentoring and the realities of market readiness and the need to be adaptable. The experience did not shift him away from research, but it did change how he approached it.

The importance of timing, in particular, has stayed with him.

“Even strong ideas struggle if the timing is off. Being too early or too late can be just as challenging as having the wrong solution.”

Those insights now inform how he designs research projects and engages with funding. As public investment increasingly prioritises impact and application, Skelton sees commercial awareness as a practical skill rather than a philosophical shift.

“Commercial understanding helps. Engaging with end-users changes the questions you ask and the problems you prioritise. It makes the work sharper.”

Alongside his work on mussels, Skelton is also leading research into scallop aquaculture, an area that sits at the intersection of commercial opportunity and environmental restoration. As lead scientist on the Save Our Scallops initiative, and initiative funded through EnviroStrat, he is exploring whether scallops can be farmed using existing aquaculture infrastructure, drawing on approaches used overseas. A second strand of the work focuses on using farmed scallops to help restore depleted wild populations, particularly in the Hauraki Gulf, where fisheries closures have highlighted the fragility of natural stocks.

“I want to see scallops back on the menu but also thriving in the wild. Those two goals don’t have to be in conflict.”

Alongside his Endeavour-funded research on spat loss, Skelton is also investigating breeding horse mussels for ecosystem recovery and developing ways to reduce predation pressures on farms. He is collaborating with researchers in Denmark and the Netherlands, extending the relevance of his work beyond New Zealand, and leading an international group of mussel scientists working to map the major challenges facing the global industry.

Across all of it, his focus remains consistent. By paying close attention to the earliest stages of complex systems, he believes larger change becomes possible.

“If you can get the early stages right, you unlock possibilities much further down the line.”