River Stone’s founder, genetics engineer Joseph Ayoub, had fond childhood memories of food having a delightful and distinctive flavours and aromas which had sadly been gradually diminished by 70 years or so of intensive commercial farming practices.
Disillusioned with his research laboratory job, Joseph took a bold step, quit his day job in 2007 and set up a small barramundi fish farm in Riverstone NSW that emulates the natural pristine environment of the Barramundi fish. Joseph’s goal was to remove the toxins and heavy metals typically found in the farmed Barramundi, but found mercury levels was still too high in his Barramundi farm that he tracked down to the use of commercial fish feed from unsustainable sources.
So, Joseph went about to develop his own fish feed sourced from sustainable ‘clean and organic’ inputs ensuring nil toxic metal content!
In the pursuit of attaining the best tasting Barramundi protein, a twist of events occurred when the fish manure was thrown away as fertiliser at the farm trees and vegetables patch. To Joseph’s surprise the fish manure had caused the trees and plants to grow prolifically and the fruit yield, fruit size along with the colour and smell was just amazing that took him back to those childhood memories – the irony was that the gold was not so much in the fish but in the fish poo!