Changing tides | Scott Tilton's oyster farm is the latest venture in a career that's ranged from digging clams to retraining fishermen

Scott Tilton has been working on the Maine coast since he was a teenager, when he'd spend his summers off from Wiscasset High School clamming in the area. Since then, his career has revolved around the coast and the fishing industry. He spent 12 years working for Great Eastern Mussel Farms in Tenants Harbor, and later did a stint for the National Marine Fisheries Service, during which he traveled across the country "from Mississippi catfish farms to California sushi processors," teaching companies about federal food safety regulations.

As that job came to a close in the mid-1990s, Tilton turned his attention to the changes he'd observed in Maine's fishing industry, which was shedding thousands of jobs a year due to declining fish populations and increasing federal restrictions. The job losses, Tilton says, were going largely unnoticed, spread as they were over thousands of self-employed fishermen along the coast. To address the problem ˆ— and the lack of assistance fishermen were receiving ˆ— Tilton and officials from the Maine Department of Labor wrote a grant to form the Fishing Industry Retraining Project, an innovative program that helps fishermen find new careers.

Tilton, 46, was the director of that program until last year, when he stepped down to devote his attention to Weskeag River Shellfish Farms, a South Thomaston oyster aquaculture company he started in 1999. (He continues to work with the retraining project as a consultant.) In March, the company made its first appearance at the International Boston Seafood Show to start publicizing itself ˆ— and its oysters ˆ— to the worldwide market.

Tilton recently spoke with Mainebiz about his new undertaking, as well as larger trends in Maine's fishing industry.

Mainebiz: How did Weskeag River Shellfish Farm get started?
Tilton:I've been involved with the fishing industry, especially shellfish, for all my life, pretty much. I used to dig clams for a living. I always thought, when the tide was a long tide and you're bent over, there's got to be an easier way to do this. I'm not sure that I found one ˆ— it's still pretty hard work.

I'd always wanted to work on my own and produce a crop by myself. So when I started the Fishing Industry Retraining Project, one of the things we explored was aquaculture. I went to a number of the classes [for fishermen] and saw what was done. Part of the class was they give you a little bit of [shellfish] seed and you can experiment with that. I did that, and I really got bit by the bug ˆ— I wanted to try growing oysters on my own.

So [in 1998] I started with a small, experimental lease on the Weskeag River [in South Thomaston], and I just found that it's an ideal situation for growing oysters. It's above a bridge with a reversing falls, and there's a salt water pond that's ideal for growing oysters. The water temperature really heats up in the summer time, much more than most Maine waters, to about 75 degrees, so the oysters really like it ˆ— there's a lot of phytoplankton there. Because of the reversing falls, there's also a huge current, so there's a lot of oxygen and the growing conditions are just perfect for growing good quality oysters.

In 1999 I became incorporated [as Weskeag River Shellfish Farms]. At that time I was working full-time for the Fishing Industry Retraining Project, as the state director, but I would [cultivate the oysters] on the weekends ˆ— I didn't have much vacation time because I was always checking on the oysters.

Then last year I finally switched so that I'm no longer working full-time with the Fishing Industry Retraining Project; instead I'm working full-time with the oysters.

I understand that you have local investors.
What I decided to do in order to raise capital ˆ— I didn't have much of my own ˆ— was to have a number of shares of the company, a certain percentage of ownership, and I made those available to different people in the area. My brothers invested and friends invested. Then, through the public hearing process ˆ— you need to go to the town and have a meeting and a public hearing before the state will grant you a lease [for aquaculture] ˆ— other people heard I had some shares available, and a number of people in the community bought some shares. It was an infusion of capital, but it also got the community involved.

That community involvement seemed striking to me, because so much of what makes the news about aquaculture is contentious fights over siting of pens.
It's a shame, it really is. Part of it is the very process ˆ— it's designed to foster conflict, even if there isn't any. All of a sudden people [who live near a proposed aquaculture lease site] get this big, thick lease application in the mail which they don't even understand. It's 40 or 50 pages long and it's all about the big company coming in, and it scares people. So people do get concerned about it.

Quite frankly I think it's more of a landowner issue ˆ— it's not an environmental issue. It's people who have property who don't want to see a working waterfront right near where they are. That's what the real issue is. There is no negative environmental impact from shellfish aquaculture ˆ— there is none, unless there's an accident or something, and that can happen on a lobster boat.

It seems like more of the controversy has been about finfish. My impression is that salmon pens, for example, are more visible than shellfish operations. What does your site look like?
I originally went out with a design that was floating cages, so they'd be on the surface of the water, but just barely visible. But neighbors in this area had some concerns, so I moved primarily to underwater cages. The very small seed still have floating cages, but they're pretty far upriver. [In the areas of the river that] most people visit, all they see is buoys ˆ— you'd think it was a bunch of lobster traps, but they're actually larger cages that I put weights on. I call them oyster condos.

Who are your customers?
I sell primarily through Great Eastern Mussel Farms right now, and that's because I'm a very small farm. I'm not really set up with all the things needed to sell direct to out-of-state markets. I hope to get there at some point, but it requires a facility on shore that the state can inspect. So I just work off my boat; I box the oysters and clean them on the water and then I bring them inshore, primarily to Great Eastern Mussel Farms. They ship them to restaurants in Washington, D.C. and New York, and they're down in Portland in a number of restaurants, including Fore Street. Restaurants are the primary market, not supermarkets.

Are you able to make a living doing this full-time?
I'm turning the corner this year. This is a farming operation, so you always have different crop situations, and I had some oysters that died last winter because of the harsh [temperatures]. Those are ones that I have in the area below the bridge, and those got a little bit too cold, so I lost maybe 30% of them. Above the bridge, they survived very well and they're very strong, but they're smaller. So I'm starting out slower than I had hoped just because of the mortality. I think this year will be self-sustaining, rather than relying on the investors.

What are the investors expecting as far as a return at some point?
What everyone gets is a portion of the profits, based on their percentage. The value of the shares has increased, they're now two-and-a-half times what the shares were valued at in the beginning; that's another thing the investors are looking at.

How do you determine what the shares are worth?
I get asked that a lot ˆ— people think there's some kind of formula. But it's basically what people sense is the value ˆ— if they're excited about the farm, they see the operation, what the projected income is, they see the performance and they believe in what we're doing. The market determines the price of the shares, really. We've been able to sell each share for $2,500. When we started out they were $1,000.

How is it working out for you personally? After leaving the retraining project, is it turning out how you thought it would?
The job I had was an administrative job. I was really grateful for the opportunity to do it, because we served over 1,400 people with the retraining program, but my heart has always been on the ocean and outside. I love being outside, and I love this work.

One of the reasons I got into this was that I really believe in farming ˆ— food is essential, and this is producing a really high quality product in a very environmentally sound way.

How did you get involved with the retraining program?
Back in 1994, I was working for the National Marine Fisheries Service, and there were a lot of cuts ˆ— federal jobs were being cut back as result of the Clinton administration, so that job was ending. But just at that time, Maine was in the position of really needing to respond to the fishing crisis of Amendments Four and Five, which changed gear types and limited the days fishermen were allowed to go out . At the same time, I was very aware of other fisheries that were in crisis ˆ— not just the groundfish. Shrimp was going down very sharply, the urchin industry at that point was just starting to cut way back and the clam industry was in crisis.

A lot of these things were off the radar. For example, there were 5,000 fewer licenses over a period of two or three years for clamdiggers in Maine ˆ— that's a huge loss, but nobody pays attention to it because it's not a company doing layoffs. It's individual fishermen saying, I can't make it. I was aware of it, having been a clamdigger myself, so we devised a program that didn't respond just to the groundfish crisis, but to the fishing industry as a whole.

The federal government came up with a program of buying boats [to decrease the size of the groundfish fleet]. They would buy the boats, so the boat owners would at least make something, and usually the boats were destroyed and the permits were retired. That's great for the boat owner ˆ— but that's not necessarily the captain, or the crew. So I made the argument that the federal government [was] removing the workplaces of thousands of fishermen who don't benefit from these closures, and then can't benefit from unemployment and can't get into the normal dislocation programs that are available because it's not a specific company that's laying them off.

So we wrote a very specialized program that has eligibility criteria that's very specific and meets the needs of fishermen.

How successful do you think those efforts were?
We've had over 1,400, probably closer to 1,500, people come through the program. And somewhere around the neighborhood of 75% [of those people] go on to find new jobs. About 20% will go through the program and say, I'm just not ready to make a change from fishing. And then five to 10% we lose track of ˆ— it's tough. People are embarrassed and don't like to admit that they're no longer able to fish.

By and large I think the program is seen as a real benefit to people ˆ— we've really had to cultivate that image, because it was seen originally as part of a government strategy to dismantle the fishing industry. I can see why people thought that, but if you work at Bath Iron Works and they have a layoff, you can go and find career training. If a woolen mill or Georgia-Pacific shuts down, there's very comprehensive programs that are available to those dislocated workers ˆ— and the fishermen never had it. They began to see that it was just an issue of fairness.

With Amendment 13 having just gone into effect, what do you think the situation looks like going forward for fishermen in Maine?
You do hear a lot of doom and gloom, but fishermen are tremendously tenacious workers. There's going to be a fishing industry that survives this.

But the biggest concern is that they need to have a certain volume of fish coming over the dock in order to keep onshore businesses active ˆ— once they're not active, there's layoffs, and then there's pressure from the processing plants to close. It's valuable real estate, so there's tremendous pressure on those sites from other sectors of the economy, [like] tourism. Once they're gone, they can't come back.

The midcoast economy seems to have pulled very significantly away from a fishing economy.
In the 1980s, Rockland was the second largest pier north of New Bedford ˆ— and there's hardly any fish through there now.

Do people feel that loss, or are they more focused on simply moving on to the next sector that's doing well, like tourism?
The economy is always changing ˆ— there are new opportunities and old ways of doing things that disappear over the years, but fishing is food. We need to eat and we need to take care of our resources and we need to protect the industries that produce food in America. The great thing about fishing in Maine is, for the most part, it's always been small, independent, homegrown individuals.

Out west, in Washington and Alaska, fishing is done by huge corporations. It loses a certain connection with the small fisherman, and that's what I hate to see. There's a character and a spirit on the coast of Maine, and I think it's still alive but there's a lot of pressure to change that. I hope we don't lose it.

Getting back to the aquaculture issue, I think the fundamental concern there is a battle over a working waterfront ˆ— is this going to be a state that uses its natural resources to produce food for the men and women of the United States? Or are we just going to be a place with a pretty view where, because of their property taxes, people with big homes on the shore are controlling the view and stopping an age-old industry? That's the battle line.