So you want to be a snail farmer

Let me tell you a story. When we wanted to go into snail farming we spent months fruitlessly searching for information just like you may be doing now. We found some old stuff on the net and looked up the academic texts though they didn’t help much. We also went to visit a man who farms African snails. That was useful because it helped us decide we didn’t want to go down that route. African snails have to be kept warmer than European ones and we were thinking about the cost of heating and the effect on the environment. They do seem to lay eggs more freely and live longer but we didn’t know that then. So one question to ask yourself is: what kind of snails do you want to farm? The answer will be linked to where you are going to put them and where your market will be: who is going to buy them from you and what are they looking for?

In my desperate search for information I kept ringing one snail farmer I found through a tourism website but only got the answer phone. He never returned my calls but around Christmas time I struck lucky and caught him at home. Perhaps he had been indulging in a little Christmas cheer because he was willing to talk and quite encouraging about the proposed venture promising that if we got started he would buy our produce at 4p a snail. Even before we worked out the costs 4p each didn’t sound like very much but I didn’t say so. He spoke at length in general terms but was very vague about the details. He told me he used to offer training for would be snail farmers but wasn’t doing it any more.

Then I found another farmer who was offering a day’s consultancy for £300 and I booked myself onto the course. There was another couple there at the same time and we sat together for a whole day in his grubby sitting room watching a large cockroach crawl up the wall behind his head while he chain smoked. He mentioned casually after a while that he didn’t actually have any snails at that time but didn’t explain why. I've since wondered why I didn't ask the obvious question. He gave us a book apparently recording all the details of the rearing process but it said all sorts of questionable things like: snails get used to being fed at the same time each day. He talked expansively about the opportunities. He generalised a lot when it came to costs which I thought was suspicious at the time but in fact I’ve had trouble pinning down the exact costs too. He said there was room in the market for another 50 farms the same size as his. He also claimed to have sold 32,000 snails in his first month of trading. I have since wondered if this was pure fantasy or just an exaggeration. We certainly should bear in mind that his farm was up for sale and he left the country not long afterwards.

If you want my take on the business then I’ll tell you a few home truths – no exaggerations I promise.

Snail farming is labour intensive. I have seen a mechanised system which washed the snails automatically at intervals but the farmer who bought it said it wasn’t reliable, used a lot of water and was too expensive to run.

Animals never do what they are supposed to do, whether it is growing to the size you want or mating and laying eggs.

You may have to spend a lot of time cooking. When we started we were more interested in looking after the animals than anything else. We assumed our USP (Unique Selling Point)was that we could supply live snails to restaurants: they can buy imported frozen or tinned snails more cheaply but they can’t very easily buy live ones which, for the discerning chef, make a much better quality meal. What we found was that very few chefs have the time or the inclination to deal with live snails if we will take them out of the shells and freeze them for them. We have to sell a proportion direct to the public and, in these days of ready meals, they definitely need to be ready to eat. That all means I spend a lot more time in the kitchen than I really expected. I wondered if I might be able to find a caterer who would do that part for me but so far I haven’t managed to find anyone.

Marketing takes hours and hours and miles of travel and talking persuasively to lots of people … and having to take comments like: ”Oh no! I wouldn’t have anything like that on my menu!”

The restaurant trade is very volatile – most chefs don’t stay in the same place for long, pubs close, restaurants change their buying policy … and that was before the credit crunch!

We’ve had a lot of publicity in local and national press, on TV and radio and it has never brought in a single enquiry resulting in a sale of snails for food. What it does bring in is enquiries from people wanting to set up snail farms.

You are not going to make your fortune from snail farming. All small businesses take time to start making money so you need to be able to support yourself financially until it does and even then you may still need other sources of income to live comfortably. Perhaps you should think of it as part of a portfolio career or one aspect of a mixed farming or other enterprise.

If after all I’ve said, you still want to go ahead with finding out more detail about snail rearing so that you can then decide whether to take it up either as a hobby or a business then I will help you. But in the interests of the viability of my business, I will have to charge you for my knowledge.