Fish tales | Is Maine's aquaculture industry poised for a rebound?
After years of work and more than $85 million in investments, New Brunswick-based Cooke Aquaculture last October began harvesting some of the millions of farm-raised salmon from its operations in Cobscook Bay and Machias Bay.
But harvesting couldn’t hit full swing because the company had no nearby processing facility. So to handle the load, Cooke is spending $2.5 million to revive its Machiasport processing facility, which the company closed in 2004 after environmental violations and widespread disease among the fish.
Preliminary work to update the 21-year-old plant already has begun, and processing could start as early as mid-November. Once the facility reaches full production in early 2009, it will employ 80 people and process about 32 million pounds of fish a year, almost as much as the industry produced at its height in 2000, a solid indication that Maine’s slumbering salmon farming industry is ready for a reawakening, thanks to Cooke.
At least, that’s what some industry experts believe. New aquaculture regulations, put in place to protect wild salmon populations and the ocean environment, have been an imposing hurdle to the industry’s growth, says Sebastian Belle, executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association, a trade organization that represents about 150 aquaculture farms in the state. But Cooke’s willingness to embrace new rules and its focus on environmental sustainability has helped it move past the industry’s growing pains. “They’ve turned the whole thing around,” Belle says.
The return of a processing facility in Maine could be a catalyst for future growth of the state’s once-promising aquaculture industry, leading more aquaculture farms to locate in the area.
Though the company didn’t make a formal announcement that it would reopen the Machiasport facility until July, Gov. John Baldacci broke the news May 27 at the dedication of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Cold Water Marine Aquaculture Center in Franklin. The plant will process all fish farmed at the company’s 10 sites in Maine, which currently are sent to Cooke’s two processing facilities in New Brunswick. That will save the company the money and hassle of trucking its fish across the border.
“It was always our intention to reopen either facility,” says Nell Halse, vice president of communications for Cooke, referring to the two plants the company acquired in Easport and Machiasport. “We didn’t have the volume of fish to keep it open, so we had to rebuild our production and put enough fish in the water.”
Swimming upstream
Founded in 1985 by Gifford Cooke and his sons Mike and Glenn — the current CEO — Cooke Aquaculture has grown from a 5,000-fish farm at Kelly Cove in New Brunswick into a multinational corporation with more than 100 farms in Canada and Maine that hold over 25 million fish and generate $270 million in annual revenues.
When the company broke into the international market by moving into Maine in 2004, Maine’s salmon farming industry — once heralded as the state’s most promising aquaculture industry — was at a near standstill. A disease outbreak in 2001 and legal battles in 2003 depleted most of the state’s salmon stock, and left the three largest salmon farming companies operating at a loss.
The challenges didn’t deter Cooke from swooping in and buying all three companies for undisclosed sums. In June 2004, Cooke purchased Atlantic Salmon of Maine, owned by Norway-based Fjord Seafood, its two hatcheries in Solon and Oquossoc, its 14 farm sites and its processing plant in Machiasport. In July 2005, the company purchased the East Coast operations of New Brunswick-based Heritage Salmon and its farms and a defunct processing plant in Eastport, and in December 2005 bought the East Coast holdings of Stolt Sea Farm Inc., owned by Marine Harvest of Norway, including a hatchery in Bingham and several farm sites.
The faltering industry gave Cooke the opportunity to expand its operations to better compete with its Norwegian and Chilean rivals. “The owners [of Cooke] felt there was an opportunity in Maine to do things right,” says Halse.
It’s taken Cooke a few years to establish itself in Maine, due in part to an antitrust lawsuit that forced the company to temporarily surrender some of its lease sites (all of which it got back after no other interested leaseholders came forward), and to new industry regulations that meant updating its Maine operations and leaving some of its farm sites empty for two years.
But Cooke has weeded its way through the industry upheaval, keeping its eye on the ultimate goal of reviving Maine’s salmon industry. The company has experienced nearly exponential growth since 2006, when it had only 500 employees. Today, Cooke and its subsidiaries employ 1,400 in Maine and Canada and processes 90 million pounds of salmon a year, and plans to do about a third of that in Machiasport.
That would put the salmon industry nearly on par with its heyday in 2000, when production hit 36 million pounds of salmon worth nearly $79 million, according to the Department of Marine Resources. Production in 2007, in contrast, was just 8.5 million pounds worth $21.4 million.
Though increasing production is vital to revitalizing the industry, some say more help is needed to give the Maine market the edge it needs. The National Cold Water Marine Aquaculture Center in Franklin has been working since 2004 to breed lines of salmon that reach market size faster and are more resistant to disease, says Bill Wolters, the center’s director and research leader. “We need better stocks and we need to raise them more efficiently,” says Wolters.
No matter how the industry grows, it likely will mean more jobs for the Down East region, where people have been holding out hope that Cooke would come through with its promise to bring salmon processing back to the area. “The response has been very positive,” says Halse.
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