New report sets broad goals for Maine’s aquaculture industry in the next decade

Within the final 8 years, Maine’s aquaculture harvest has greater than doubled in quantity and in worth, and a few predict that the state’s aquaculture exports might be price as a lot as $800 million by 2025. A brand new report is recommending how that progress must be managed over the subsequent decade. However critics say it is too targeted on increasing the trade, and offers brief shift to different customers of the ocean commons or the ecosystems that all of them depend upon.

The doc units broad targets for aquaculture’s subsequent decade in Maine, beginning with streamlined allowing for public water leases that “balances the rights of the applicant and the general public.

And it identifies the potential prices of particular actions: $100,000, as an illustration, to assist a state worker who would assist candidates get by means of the allowing course of and have interaction with host communities, $100,000 to combine aquaculture into Okay-12 schooling, and 1 / 4 million {dollars} to create a Maine Seafood Council to market each farmed and wild-caught seafood.

“It is one software that can be utilized together with the numerous instruments the state has in fascinated by the longer term,” mentioned Gayle Zydlewski, who directs Maine Sea Grant, a federal-state program housed on the College of Maine that led a collaborative effort to create the so-called Maine Aquaculture Roadmap.

“There’s undoubtedly so much taking place on this area. And the roadmap is supposed to assist the sector strengthen alternatives to attach with native coastal communities. So it truly is a time to be fascinated by our working waterfront (and) aquaculture and fisheries, recreation and tourism,” Zydlewski mentioned.

Greater than 140 stakeholders weighed in, together with Chebeague Island oyster farmer Bob Earnest, who sees the plan as a helpful information for rising the trade in a sustainable means.

“We do not need the federal government managing what number of oysters we produce. (They’d not be environment friendly at that.) However we additionally don’t desire each retired individual like me within the state of Maine promoting unsafe product as a result of we’re issuing too many licenses and never doing sufficient schooling. It isn’t a simple proposition. This highway map speaks to all the suitable facets of that evolving trade,” Earnest mentioned.

He added, although, that the sustainability of small, unbiased farms might be challenged by an rising inflow of enterprise capital that is backing industrial-scale shellfish farming, and proposed finfish farms on and off the coast.

And there are sharper critics.

“The shortage of even mentioning any type of tradeoff of aquaculture in any of those conversations is vastly regarding,” mentioned Marissa McMahan, a Georgetown-based marine scientist who participated in one of many stakeholder focus teams. She’s additionally considered one of 19 individuals who signed a latest letter to Sea Grant criticizing the highway for overlooking the worth of shared waters for a lot of exterior of the aquaculture trade.

“There is no point out of the tradeoffs, and there are potential environmental impacts. There are large potential social impacts. It is all linked,” McMahan mentioned.

Different critics who signed the letter embody lobstermen, the director of Stonington’s Maine Heart for Coastal Fisheries, a number of UMaine researchers and Downeast Salmon Federation Director Dwayne Shaw. He mentioned the highway map fails to supply a plan for assessing the cumulative impacts of aquaculture leases on ecosystems and wild fisheries, and the way aquaculture can damage efforts to revive them.

“Its not a complete plan however extra of a little bit of advocacy for financial improvement using aquaculture. And since aquaculture is so advanced with numerous kinds of farms being proposed, it is essential that we transfer cautiously,” Shaw mentioned.

However supporters keep that fears about unbound progress are unfounded. Brianna Warner is the CEO of Atlantic Sea Farms, the state’s greatest seaweed processing firm, which gives free seed to 27 unbiased lobstermen who spend their off-seasons rising and harvesting seaweed.

“We’ve got this factor in Maine which I discover very fascinating that places worth judgments round ‘huge is dangerous and small is nice,’” Warner mentioned.

Warner mentioned the state’s leasing software course of is vigorous and protecting of customers and the surroundings. If Maine actually desires to create extra jobs on the water, she added — good-paying jobs with advantages — some aquaculture operations are going to want to get large enough to realize the income streams that make that doable.

“Look, I feel the trade must develop responsibly however I do not suppose there’s any indication that it isn’t,” she mentioned.

The highway map authors plan one other have a look at the problems in 2026. And within the meantime Sea Grant director Gayle Zydlewski mentioned she is in search of additional conversations with the plan’s critics, and a broad multi-sector seafood planning effort, Sea Maine, is getting below means as nicely.