Wales’s first community-led aquaculture business has secured long-term support from leading rural insurer NFU Mutual to focus on commercial growth and return value to the coastal community that built it.
The ten-year loan to Pembrokeshire-based Câr-y-Môr forms part of NFU Mutual’s wider commitment to protecting rural lives and livelihoods across the UK.
Founded in 2019 and owned equally by more than 800 members, the community benefit society, whose name Câr-y-Môr translates to ‘for the love of the sea’, grew Wales’s first regenerative sea farm from concept into a working business on the back of local support. Establishing the sector from scratch meant absorbing significant regulatory, licensing and infrastructure costs, funded largely through community shares, alongside private and public borrowing. The NFU Mutual support refinances the growth debt and provides additional capital on patient terms, giving the business the headroom to build up its aquaculture business and reinvest surpluses into coastal jobs, local industry, and community activities.
Today, Câr-y-Môr employs a team of 19, works alongside 15 fishermen and gatherers, a dozen local farmers, and more than 100 restaurants and retailers around the UK, providing shellfish, seafood and seaweed products. It also runs programmes introducing thousands of young people to the connection between sea, soil, and community.
Owen Haines, Managing Director of Câr-y-Môr, said:
“We started by asking whether a community could help create a new kind of coastal business, and it’s thanks to hundreds of humble, caring people taking a risk that this was able to get off the ground.
“NFU Mutual’s long-term approach means a stable partner is taking on the growth costs the community has carried so far, so we can focus on the commercial viability of our seafood and farming businesses, and on giving back to the people who believed in us from the start. We’re grateful to NFU Mutual for understanding that we’re trying to do something new to create jobs and help the environment, and for backing us on terms built for who we are.”
Jonathan Priestley, Head of Finance, Actuarial and Investment Office at NFU Mutual, added:
“As a Mutual, it is important to invest our members’ money sensibly and in a way that will benefit our communities.
“Câr‑y‑Môr is a small-scale, community-led business providing many benefits to the Pembrokeshire community and further afield, which aligns to our responsible business commitment to make a positive difference for our members, our people, for farming and rural communities, and for the environment, by doing business the right way.
“Part of being a responsible business means supporting ventures which will help to deliver meaningful change while continuing to provide sustainable, profitable growth.”
NFU Mutual Chief Executive Nick Turner visited Câr-y-Môr in Pembrokeshire last year to see the work firsthand.
