Livestock of the sea: 'We're not fishing, nor are we cows'

The business started in few small ponds on the site of one of Australia's failed agriculture projects (Humpty Doo Rice project in the 1950s) and the produce was processed in a backyard, with just six kilograms of fish sold each week.

Now, Humpty Doo Barramundi is the biggest Australian owned fish farm, producing between 140,000kg and 150,000kg of fish every week.

Chief executive officer Dan Richards said the family business, located halfway between Darwin and Kakadu National Park, has come a long way in 30 years.

Mr Richards' family became involved in the business about one year after it started.

"Initially there was three guys, businessman mates in Darwin who started the business," he said.

"By chance one of them was my wife's father and a year later one of the three wanted out and the other guy who it was his brainchild, invited my dad and us out to have a look.

"We went out to see this place an hour out of Darwin on the Adelaide River floodplain and then the road didn't quite reach and the power line didn't reach and there was no drinking water and no facilities... but we were in love."

Mr Richards now runs the business alongside his wife Tarun Richards and their three children, Isabel, Cameron and Alex.

In 2016, Mr Richards was awarded a Nuffield Scholarship and undertook extensive research which focused on the viability of barramundi as a white fish equivalent to salmon.

"I spent 20 weeks travelling through 20 countries basically, all around the world looking at everything from laboratories to meeting fish farmers all around the world, research facilities and marketing places," he said.

"Barramundi are a wonderful fish for farming, they look increasingly likely to be the tropical equivalent (to salmon).

"I think there are some public perception issues around salmon in recent times which we don't necessarily want to emulate."

Mr Richards said he believed barramundi can be a widely available, highly reliable, consistent and tasty product which consumers value.

He said the global aquaculture industry was becoming "increasingly sophisticated".

Now, Humpty Doo Barramundi are part of a selective breeding program which they have been running in conjunction with CSIRO for five years.

Mr Richards said they breed for robustness and performance in the Territory's tropical environment.

"Nature didn't select barramundi specifically to be farmed," he said.

"It selected them to be successful, robust, aggressive predators and that's where we're starting from, but we're selecting animals who are pretty relaxed in a farming environment and tend to perform well consistently."

Like all primary producers, Mr Richards said a major concern for his industry was biosecurity.

"When I did my Nuffield scholarship I visited sites like a farm owned by Barramundi Asia in Singapore which was contending with seven different barramundi diseases that could stop barramundi in their tracks," he said.

"That farm since that time has ultimately failed as a result of the disease burden."

Mr Richards said a major concern was imported fish.

"There's a lot of barramundi, or in quotes barramundi, imported from south east Asia into Australia, 60 per cent of the barramundi consumed in Australia is imported," he said.

"That imported barramundi has been shown to be carrying some of these diseases so the risk of that fish then getting out into the environment through being used as bait or in a crab pot or the like is a real and present danger."

Mr Richards said there was "very little testing" done on fish entering Australia and lobbying to national biosecurity bodies and government had so far had little success.

"There has been some work done to prove that those diseases are present in the imported fish but then the government tries to put the onus, 'can you risk assess and prove it has the potential to get into the farm' - it's a high hurdle for industry to have to demonstrate," he said.

"We know that disease has been wiping out fish and farms over there, we know that it's in the product that's coming into Australia, how much do we have to prove?

"It's exactly the same transmission pathway that was responsible for the entry of White Spot which then has wiped out the prawn farm in south east Queensland.

"Prevention is an awful lot better than trying to find a cure."

The question of where fish farming fits in agriculture as a whole was a "bit of a funny one", Mr Richards said.

"We're not fishing, nor are we cows," he said.

"We're producing about half of the fish that comes from the Northern Territory now ourselves on our farm.

"We're definitely farmers, not hunter and gatherers like commercial fishermen."

As a product, Humpty Doo Barramundi has the national contract for Woolworths, so all Australian barramundi in the stores is from the farm.

They also hold contracts with Costco and PFD Foods, and supply to fine dining restaurants across the country.

Mr Richards said in the early days his father identified a significant margin opportunity between the cost of feed and the cost of fish, but the business was not producing the volume of product to benefit from it.

Now the industry is more mature there is significant volume and the margins are much tighter.

"For the first five years we just discovered ways to not successfully grow barramundi," he said.