Billionaire entrepreneur and island resident Jim Mellon is making his first foray into fiction with a children’s book about animal welfare.

Juno’s Ark follows the adventures of a big-hearted dog called Juno, inspired by Jim’s rescue Podencos, a breed of Spanish hunting dog.

Juno rescues bedraggled chickens, mistreated cows and unhappy pigs before being introduced to the concept of cellular agriculture, trying chicken grown in a laboratory.

Investor Jim is at the forefront of the cellular and precision agriculture space and is the author of Moo’s Law, a bestselling guide to this radical new agriculture space.

Jim told Island Life: ‘Juno’s job is to get the younger generation to understand, in the same way as I tried to make the older generation understand when I wrote my book Moo’s Law, that there are solutions coming.

‘Animals that are industrially farmed, as opposed to farm in good conditions, won’t need to suffer to the extent that they have and are suffering, in the relatively near future.’

He explained that ice cream, yogurt, cheese and, in Starbucks in the west coast of America milk, is already now made using precision fermentation, without reference to cows at all.

He explained: ‘It’s important for me to get out the message that this is not an attack on farmers who farm in the way that it’s done in the Isle of Man, which is absolutely fine and humane and natural. It’s an attack on intensive farming, which is a completely different thing.

‘If people want to make an effort to look into intensive farming they would be quite shocked.’

He added: ‘I just want this to be plain that we understand that we are doing in cellular agriculture and precision fermentation is not going to take over from farming any time soon, indeed even in the next 50 years.

‘But if it can chip away at the bad farming practices in some parts of the world then that’s an achievement and I would be very proud of that.’

Juno’s Ark, aimed at seven- to nine-year-olds and with colour illustrations by Simone Fumagalli, is Jim’s first fiction title. ‘I had to really let my imagination run riot and find a theme,’ Jim said.

The real Juno started life in a cage in an animal dog shelter in Ibiza, where dogs were chained up, badly fed and lived in horrible conditions.

Juno’s mother, Juniper, who now also lives with Juno and Jim, was probably forced to have pups, despite being fragile and small.

Before Jim and his partner could bring Juniper home with her eight-week-old puppies, she escaped from the shelter and roamed around Ibiza for three years, while Juno and her siblings thrived at Jim’s home.

Jim said Juno was an adventurous dog by nature: ‘She has been known to go away for 18 hours on her own, scouring the countryside in Ibiza!’

Juno’s Ark is published today (Thursday) priced £7.99.

All proceeds from will go to Danos Una Oportunidad (DUO), a dog shelter in Ibiza, and to Compassion in World Farming International, the leading farm animal welfare charity.

There are also fun children’s resources at junosark.com