Zeeland growers: “Record mussels this year”

“You have good, better, best, but these are really fantastic”, mussel grower Jan Schot expresses the enthusiastic feeling of the Zeeland mussel growers this year, when they brought in the first harvest of Zeeland mussels on Wednesday afternoon off the coast of Yerseke in Zeeland. The enthusiasm is due to the fact that the mussel shells are exceptionally well filled this year.

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Around noon, the first Zeeland mussels from the bottom culture were symbolically taken on board. For the occasion, they were brought ashore by drone.

You get the impression that the mussel farmers in Zeeland say every year that the mussels are of an unprecedented quality, but this year the fish percentage is 30 to 35 percent, which is why they speak of records, explains Addy Risseeuw. He is the foreman of the Zeeland mussel farmers. “The amount of mussel in the shell so early in the season is very exceptional. What we are seeing this year, growers have not experienced in the last ten to fifteen years.”

Johan Boskamp, ​​former football coach of Anderlecht, among others, was on Tuesday evening until 1 o’clock to analyze the Italy-Spain football match at VRT, but on Wednesday morning Boskamp was already on board the mussel boat in Yerseke to taste the first mussels. “I eat mussels at least twice a week during the season. I’m half Belgian anyway, but when it comes to eating mussels, I’m a whole. I don’t think there is a Dutchman who eats more mussels than I do. They are so damn tasty.”

The annual production of Zeeland mussels is fifty million kilos, but about twenty years ago it was sometimes double that with a hundred million kilos. “To compensate for this decline, we are starting a pilot project outside the coastline of Zeeland, in the so-called pre-Delta,” adds Addy Risseeuw. “We are going to start small and hope to be able to start full production there around 2030. Then, in addition to the Oosterschelde and the Wadden Sea, we will have a third area in the Netherlands with mussel plots.”

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