If you enjoy dining on mussels, it may interest you to know how a mussel farm works. In this video, we ride with a crew on a mussel-harvesting vessel. Mussels are delicious, nutritious, and sustainable because they filter the water they swim in. The site where the crew harvests the mussels is called a mussel farm because of the volume of mussels they bring in.
Traveling to the Mussel Farms
Mussel farms use large rafts (40′ x 40′) in the middle of the water. These rafts use large, strong lines where the mussels attach themselves. At 5 AM, the crew goes to the raft area and prepares new lines with “mussel seed.” The crew uses previously caught mussels which weren’t big enough to be used as food, grinds them together, and pours them into cotton tubing, which is wrapped around the mussel lines.
Harvesting the Mussels
After the lines are submerged and sink into the water, the biodegradable cotton wears away, and mussels attach to the lines. When the mussels are mature, the crew pulls up the lines. Their vessels have equipment to make the mussel harvest easier. Their machines also clean and sort the mussels by size, and smaller mussels are used in the next batch of mussel seeds.
