Q: [0:00] How do you like to introduce yourself?

 

A: [0:05] Joanna Fogg, Owner and Operator of Bar Harbor Oyster Company.

 

Q: [0:11] Awesome.  Tell me about where you grew up.

 

A: [0:14] I grew up here on Mount Desert Island.  I was born and raised here, and I have spent most of my life here.  I’ve traveled a fair bit, but this is where I grew up, and I have been really grateful that I did grow up here.  I’m also fortunate that I’m raising my daughter here as well.

 

Q: [0:31] That’s awesome.  Are your parents from here too?

 

A: [0:34] Yes, my father is from here, and my mother moved here right after college.  She met my father at Bates and moved here after graduating.

 

Q: [0:46] Got you.  What’s their background like?

 

A: [0:49] Their work background or their – my mom actually worked as a postmaster in Seal Harbor for years.  She worked at a laundromat that she co-owned.  She cleaned a lot of summer houses.  My dad was a regional salesman for a plumbing company.  He traveled a lot for that.

 

Q: [1:14] Got you.  So, no familial background in fisheries?

 

A: [1:17] No.

 

Q: [1:18] Do you have any siblings?

 

A: [1:20] I do.  I have an older brother and an older sister and four stepsisters.  My brother is a mariner.  He went to my Maine Maritime, and he ships out on oil tankers now.

 

Q: [1:32] Wow.  Do you have a history of fishing in your family aside from –

 

A: [1:38] Not fishing.  No.  I have mariners, yeah.  I have a grandfather who – the Navy and who also went to Maine Maritime, but not in fisheries or aquaculture.

 

Q: [1:49] Got you.  Are you married?

 

A: [1:51] Yes.

 

Q: [1:52] Do you have any children?

 

A: [1:53] Yes.  I have one daughter.

 

Q: [1:54] How old is she?

 

A: [1:56] Seven.

 

Q: [1:57] Do you want your children to go into fishing when they grow up?

 

A: [2:01] If she wants to, I hope so.  I hope she’s interested in aquaculture.  Yeah.

 

Q: [2:05] Do you bring her out on the water with you?

 

A: [2:07] Yes. (laughter) Sometimes, reluctantly.  She actually has gone out since she was really, really little.  Her car seat would fit in a fish tray, and I would go out and put her in a fish tray and put her on the boat with an umbrella over her or under the worktable while I was working alone, and I would breastfeed her out there.  Or if it was a day that I had childcare and didn’t have to bring her, I would bring my pump out there.  It was one thing that made having my own farm conducive to being a mom because I could actually do all of that.

 

Q: [20:42] Does she have any friends that she can relate to that experience with?

 

A: [20:46] I don’t know any – not that I know of.  Not that I know of. We’re the only sea farmers that have kids that age, anyway, that I know of around here in the area, so I don’t think so.  At this point, she prefers – she likes doing delivery now more so than she likes being on the water.  She likes to sit in the front seat of the reefer truck and go into restaurants, deliver oysters, and buy oysters.  We buy oysters from some other small farms, so she likes to go and do that bit.  She might be on sales someday.  We’ll see.

 

Q: [3:22] That’s awesome.

 

A: [3:23] Yeah, yeah. (laughter)

 

Q: [3:24] How would you describe your role in the aquaculture industry in Maine?

 

A: [3:29] Wow.  My main role is that I am running a relatively successful company.  It’s taken us a while to get off the ground, but I’m instrumental in supplying seafood, fresh local seafood, to the island, but I also spend a fair amount of time doing outreach.  I’m on the board of the Maine Aquaculture Association, so I’m pretty involved in what’s happening in the legislature and how different things affect sea farmers across the state and promoting that.  I’m always willing to take time to work with school groups and give interviews and things like that because I do believe that this sector is really important to the sustainability of our people and food.  On the entire eastern seaboard, I think that sea farming is really important as far as providing the protein that we’re going to need, particularly on a planet that is seeing some pretty rapid climate change.  I dedicate a lot of my time to putting energy into that and trying to educate myself and educate other people and collaborating on those issues.  Then, I also get to be a mom. (laughter)

 

Q: [4:42] So, a very active role.

 

A: [4:44] Yeah, I think so.  Yeah.  I’m not doing it to get rich because I don’t think that will ever happen. (laughter)

 

Q: [4:50] How did you get into this?

 

A: [4:53] Well, like I said, I grew up on the island.  I did work in wild fisheries, so I worked on lobster boats for about seven seasons.  Then I transitioned from that to work as a chef and mate on private yachts.  I’ve worked on boats predominantly in the Caribbean, but also in the Med and have done a couple of transatlantic deliveries.  I found myself in 2014 searching for boat work and often being away in the winters because there aren’t many yachts here in the winter. The climate’s not conducive to that.  I was often traveling a lot, and so was my husband.  He’s a chief engineer on a longliner in Alaska, so he grew up fishing and has also often been away for work.  He still ships out.  But in 2014, I was in the West Indies, working on boats, and he was in Alaska, and it was like, how are we ever going to A, possibly start a family, and B, come home, but also maintain our livelihood of working on the water? We were worried about climate change and the future of the wild fisheries in Maine.  A lot of things had been overfished.  Lobstering is a closed industry, and we also projected that it might not have a great future with the water warming that it is.  So, started doing a little bit of research and talking to people and just came across oysters.  We knew nothing about it.  We started watching YouTube and figuring things out.  It was like, “Wow, it seems like with the way things are going, this could be a pretty viable resource in our waters, and it’s something that we could probably do locally.”  So around then, we just got some LPAs while we applied for a larger lease.  He continued to ship out, and I did also maintain a couple yachting jobs here as we started on those small things.  And then, in 2016, we got our standard lease, which is 22 acres.  At that time, it was a 10-year lease.  We just started growing into that.  It took us a while.  We started out small, like a lot of farms do.  We got literally maybe 12 cages and a couple handfuls of seed and just tried to figure it out – maintained our other jobs so we could fund things.  It takes three years for us to grow an oyster.  We didn’t see even any income until 2017.  It just made sense for wanting to be able to do something that we cared about, and to maintain our livelihood working on the water, and to be home.  We care a lot about this island, and it feels like home.  There also aren’t a lot of other food resources that are being grown locally, and millions of people come here every year – millions of people.  It just kind of fit, and we dove in.  We just gave it a shot. (laughter)

 

 

Q: [7:49] Awesome.  What licenses – commercial licenses – do you hold?

 

A: [7:56] Right now, I have my aquaculture license, my (inaudible) shippers license, and a lot of other small permits.  I have a couple limited permits and buying a station application, but I don’t hold any commercial fisheries.  I do have my dealer’s license and my aquaculture license.

 

Q: [8:13] Were there any barriers in getting that (inaudible)?

 

A: [8:17] It’s a long road to get a standard lease.  I mean, it took us – the leasing process is long and complicated.  I think the review process is longer than it should be.  I think there’s a bit of a backlog, but it also makes sense that it is not necessarily an easy thing to get.  When you’re sea farming, you’re using public waters.  These are shared waters.  They don’t belong to us.  It took us almost a year – granted, we were doing other things at the time – to have a complete application.  So, that’s a 60-page document to make sure that we’re going to have – with your gear plan and your seeds, everything that you need to do to say, yes, we’re serious about this, goes into the application, and then the state has to deem that complete.  There’s a public scoping session and then a legal hearing.  All of that took about a year, and then it was about two years for us to be granted permission to actually get that lease from the Department of Marine Resources and the Army Corps of Engineers.  It was about three years from when we started to want to be oyster farming to actually get that lease.  A lot of people can’t wait that amount of time.  We were able to keep other jobs going.  Like I said, my husband still is – he still ships out about seven months out of the year.  It’s a pretty big barrier to be able to have to wait that long.  There’s a lot of capital that goes into it before you even sell a single oyster, and even more years before you maybe will turn a profit.  A lot of what I do is trying to figure out the right scale of our operations, what is economically sustainable, and what that size looks like.

 

Q: [10:01] Did you have any – were you mainly on your own at the beginning?

 

A: [10:04] I do feel like we – I mean, there were a lot of things that we felt like we were able to do because we both have a history of working on the water.  There were a lot of skills that we were kind of able to transfer from our prior experience and our education that helped.  We definitely got help from other sea farmers.  So, Fiona is a good friend of mine, and she also owns a sea farm.  Hers was just a mussel farm at the start, but she was familiar with the leasing process.  A lot of sea farmers are just really collaborative and kind people, and generally, I have found this sector to be extremely collaborative.  We definitely talked to other sea farmers who kind of gave us some of the ins and outs of the system, helped us get ideas for what gear structures might work or may not work.  There was a lot of talking back and forth to different people about how to make it work.  I feel like we got a lot of help in that sense.  Then, I also feel as though we got a fair amount of help from the DMR and a little bit from the harbormaster.  The process itself, when you’re getting a lease, is somewhat interactive.  I think there’s a statistic out there that it’s like, oh, 99% of them go through, and I equate that to essentially a good college professor helping you get an A on an essay.  So, if we submit something and it’s not quite right, or that doesn’t seem like it’s going to hold water, or there’s an issue, then the state would be like, “Oh, well, you need this, or try this, or like, that isn’t going to work,” and then you amend it, and then you amend it again until you get it right. (laughter) We did get some support from the people who are helping regulate that as far as what would be acceptable and what wouldn’t be, so all of our original ideas weren’t great, but then we modified and learned from that process and moved along.  But we definitely had help.

 

Q: [12:03] That’s great.  It sounds like it’s a collaborative community.

 

A: [12:07] It really feels like it is across the board, for sure.  Yeah.

 

Q: [12:10] That’s great.  Do you have any experience in the industry beyond harvesting itself, for example, in bookkeeping, bait or gear preparation and post-harvest processing, marketing or trade, and advocacy or community-based organizations related to fisheries?

 

A: [12:26] Yes. (laughter)

 

Q: [12:27] (inaudible).

 

A: [12:29] Yes, all of them.  Yeah, I’m all of those things.  I do my own books, do all my own invoicing.  We do all of our own sales, all of the client relations.  We build our own bags.  Gear work from start to finish.  The oysters that we put in are run through my hands at some point, (laughter) literally, and as far as the sales, and yeah, metaphorically.

 

Q: [12:57] Awesome. What does an average day of work look like for you?

 

A: [13:02] It depends a little bit on the season, and then I kind of try – I’ve found that my days are more productive if I don’t try to do everything in one day, although often that doesn’t happen.  In the summer – I’m naturally an early riser – I’m up by 4:30, usually.  I have my coffee.  I might be sending invoices or returning emails pertaining to sales or licensing or whatever committees or outreach and stuff that I’m involved in.  My crew shows up at my house to get the trucks and kind of make a plan at like eight o’clock in the morning.  We’ll go over whether that day is going to be – whether we’re flipping cages, whether we’re harvesting, whether we’re hand sorting oysters, culling them.  Often, in the height of the season, we’ll have two different – I’ll have six employees, and so we’ve got three different boats.  One team might be working on one thing while another is doing something else.  Usually, my work involves being on one of our smaller boats with usually one or two other people and hand sorting.  I focus more on the end product because I’m also lining up the sales, and I have to have a good estimation of what is available so that I can then bring it to market.  We harvest and deliver two days a week.  Right now, we’re at a scale where – summer – we’re doing about 20,000 oysters a week.  We’re doing a lot of culling them, rinsing them, bagging them, and then getting them ready so that we can just dump and go and deliver them the next day.

 

Q: [14:43] Wow, that’s a lot of oysters.

 

A: [14:44] It is a lot of oysters.  Yeah.  It didn’t start like that, but we’re at that spot where I can still consider us a small farm, but we’re also moving a fair amount of product.  We did over 400,000 oysters last year.  90-something percent of them stayed on MDI.  I’m not moving them any further than that.  We’ve got a small half-ton pickup truck that has a reefer unit on the back.  My biggest boat is 28 feet.  It’s all small-scale stuff producing a fair amount of food.

 

Q: [15:14] What’s your team like?

 

A: [15:16] It shifts a fair bit.  I have a couple of people who are full-time year-round.  My farm manager has currently worked for us for – I think this is his sixth season.  He grew up lobster fishing, and I think is drawn to this because it’s a nice, steady, easy – it’s not easy, but more even than fishing week would be.  It’s been great to have him because his skills as a boater and his small boat handling and operations and know tying and gear work – his ability to just change the engine oil and troubleshoot things if we get breakdowns has been really helpful.  We have another woman who has also been with us for about that long.  Maybe this is her fifth season.  She only works seasonally because she likes to do scallop diving.  She drives a dive tender and likes to do some other stuff in the winter.  She has come a long way with us, and also handles the boats really well, and is just really steady.  Then, everyone else that we have is pretty much seasonal, and that comes and goes depending on – usually, we have a lot of people who are part-time because they really want to work on the water.  But we also can’t pay as much as even what you might make scooping ice cream downtown or waiting tables and things like that.  We have a lot of people who might work a few days a week for us, but then they also make money waiting tables or doing something else.  Those seasonal employees vary.  We have one who has come back – this is his third year, and he’s our driver mainly.  He is also seasonal, but that’s when most of our oysters move.  He is our delivery driver.  He’s a slightly older employee who lives in North Carolina in the winter, and he’s great at just like – he’s meticulous with driving and has got good precision and mechanical skills and things like that.  So, yeah, we have a driver and then typically four or five other people on the farm on any given day.

 

Q: [17:24] Awesome.  That sounds like a good crew. (inaudible).

 

A: [17:26] Yeah, we have a lot of fun people.  People come and go, but yeah, it can be a lot of fun.

 

Q: [17:32] Awesome.  How do you feel your background or identity shapes your work in the fishing sector, including how others perceive you?

 

A: [17:41] I think my background as a human ecologist helps me in a lot of ways because I have found running a small business, I have to wear a lot of different hats, and so I’m using a lot of different disciplines, essentially, and needing to understand how they connect and overlap in order to solve a lot of different problems.  My ability to network and communicate, I think, has been huge.  There are a lot of times when a lot of things might break down, or I’ll have issues, and I won’t actually know how to fix it, but being able to get the right people to help me or learn how to fix things is essential to my success as a businesswoman.  But yeah, that whole interdisciplinary – I mean, I will really someday be testifying at a hearing in Augusta one day and then scrubbing mud off of something and painting the bottom of my boat the next day.  There’s this huge range of things that I do, which having a pretty interdisciplinary background has certainly prepared me for that.  Some days, it’s overwhelming, but I also think I’d be bored without it. (laughter) The fact that I never know what hat I might be putting on and how my day-to-day can look pretty different makes it really stimulating for me and is often invigorating and exciting.

 

Q: [19:03] I like what you said about – there’s sometimes you don’t know how to fix something, but you know how to find the avenue to find help for that.

 

A: [19:12] It’s so much of what it is.  Yeah.  Last week, seriously, my reefer truck broke down, my ice maker broke down, and our hauler broke.  And it was like, “I am not” – my husband is a marine engineer, and, of course, he was in Alaska.  And I’m like, “I don’t know how to fix any of this stuff.  This is not my wheelhouse.”  But I had a client who knew about ice makers, and he wanted to be able to make it work because he wants our product.  The fact that – just getting on the phone with the right people – and I think also having some transparency about what I do – I’m a businesswoman, but I also am very transparent.  I think there’s some kind of – I’m not out to make a million dollars.  I want this to work.  I think there is something about putting that good energy out there and just trusting that I’m going to bring you good food at a fair price, and that comes back.  I’ve got nothing to hide as far as what I do.  It’s a very honest business.  So, if I need help, most people are inclined to help because they want to see us succeed.  I think they also know that if they had an issue, I would help them if I could.  There’s that kind of reciprocity that just seems to work out in sea farming with other farmers and with the people who are buying your product.  We like knowing where our food comes from, and we like seeing small, sustainable businesses succeed.  I have faith in that.  I have some trust in that system most days. (laughter) Most days.

 

Q: [20:47] Absolutely.  That feels really genuine (inaudible).  How does your role in the fishing – how does your role in the fishing sector work with your family or caregiving responsibilities?

 

A: [20:59] A lot of it can really be day by day.  The fact that I’m the owner of my own company gives me a little bit of leeway in some ways.  So, I can, for example, drive myself in on my own boat and be there to pick up my daughter when she gets off the bus.  Because I’m the boss, and I can do that.  There are other times when it can be more of an infringement because when shit breaks loose, it’s also like, the buck stops at me.  So, there will be times when I can’t parent the same way I’d want to.  I can’t finish the bedtime story because I’ve got to respond to a client or there’s some issue with HR.  I have an employee who has an issue that I have to deal with or something like that.  So, there are a lot of times when it can benefit me, and then there are some drawbacks because, ultimately, all of the responsibility is on me as the owner and the operator.  It’s a little bit back and forth.  I feel like, overall, I have more freedom as the owner and operator of the company because I can, when possible, delegate what I need to so that I can also be a full-time mom because that’s my first job.

 

Q: [22:15] I’m going to switch over to more environmental questions.  Can you describe any changes in the marine environment you notice?

 

A: [22:23] Definitely.  I’m sure you’ve heard it.  Overall, it’s getting warmer.  Sea temps are getting warmer.  We knew this in 2014 as we started sea farming.  It was part of the reason we got into it was just – we were afraid that other fisheries weren’t going to do as well as the sea temps started to warm up, and so we are seeing an overall average of increasing sea temperatures.  That’s nothing new.  With that comes, well, new bacterias and also new species or a prevalence of native species that we haven’t seen.  If there are things that are more likely to like warmer climates, we’re seeing more of those.  I think probably the levels of biofouling on our gear have increased, as well as some other species, different tunicates, and things that we weren’t seeing as much earlier on, and we see more of now because they’re thriving more in the warmer sea temps.  More irregular weather than I remember here growing up.  So, more big, big storms.  I feel like we’ve seen more of that.  Thankfully for us, it hasn’t caused any real damage to our gear because we sink things.  Longer growing season.  So, overall, our growing season is longer, which, in general, comes as a benefit to us, but less ice pack.  I think, in my lifetime, we will get to a point where we don’t have to sink our cages due to the ice.  I think that we’ll get there if I continue this for another couple of decades.  I think that we will we’ll end up having a two-year instead of a three-year oyster because they will be growing that much longer.  So, we’ll have a product that we can bring to market in less amount of time because they’ll be growing more.  I don’t know exactly what else will come with that.  I mean, that sounds like a good thing economically for me if it costs me a lot less money to grow a two-year oyster than a three-year oyster.  But we may see some other things that come with that that don’t make that easy, and there may be some other challenges.  I’m not a scientist, so there are some things I may be like an ostrich and put my head in the sand.  I’m like, “I don’t want to necessarily know what’s coming down the road.”  I do, but yeah, I think we’ll see some challenges that I don’t even really know yet come with that.

 

Q: [24:47] Got you.  What are some of the ways this has already begun to impact your work?

 

A: [24:53] So, having a longer growing season is better for us in many ways because, like I said, if I can bring an oyster to market sooner, it costs me less money, so that could be huge.  The most recent thing that’s at the forefront now has been the Vibrio control plan that’s rolling out across the state of Maine.  It started on June 1st.  You guys probably heard a fair bit about this, but that has been at the forefront of my mind as a grower and a harvester is how we’ve had to change our process as a result of that.  I think that is completely climate change-driven.  Vibrio is a bacteria, naturally occurring bacteria, that’s in the water.  It starts to thrive and reproduce at 65 degrees.  When we see sea temps of that regularly, we know that we could have a prevalence of that in the water.  If it’s consumed at high levels by people, those people can get sick.  Now we’re ice plunging all of our oysters when we harvest them, and that adds a lot of time, which is expense for us, as well as having to buy the equipment to produce that ice and to move that ice, and then the time temperature controls and the logging that’s required.  That’s the biggest shift right now that we’re kind of facing in regards to having to deal with climate change, is all of the added cost and work that is going into something that I do see as climate change driven.

 

Q: [26:24] Have you had to make any changes to your gear?

 

A: [26:27] We have not had to make changes to our gear due to climate.  No.  We still continue to sink all of our cages in the winter.  We’ve done some modification of anchors, but that wasn’t really climate change.  We haven’t changed our gear for this.  For the Vibrio, we had to buy a large flake ice machine, as well as some Xactic tubs to ice plunge our oysters in.  But we haven’t changed our gear plan or our gear layout because of it.

 

Q: [27:03] Looking forward to the future and thinking about adaptations that you have to make, are there any resources, relationships, knowledge, training, or organizations that you’re drawing from to respond?

 

A: [27:16] Can you repeat the question?

 

Q: [27:18] In relation to adaptations you’ll have to make in the future, are there any resources, relationships, knowledge, training, or organizations that you’ll draw from to respond?

 

A: [27:29] There may be a need for things like crop insurance depending on what the changes are.  I think there are a lot of unforeseen changes right now that can come down the line.  I think, for me, as an environmentalist, some things that I want to see are gear structures that are either repurposed, recycled, or are more sustainable.  Right now, all the pontoons on all 850 cages that I have are all plastic, and there’s no good method for actually repurposing that or recycling that plastic.  The pontoons are expensive, and I think that we need – I think there needs to be a better system for that.  I think there are organizations that can help with that.  Also, one thing I’m wary of – not sure it is climate driven, but microplastics in the water.  Right now, we don’t have any regulations around that, but I know that there have to be some level of microplastics in our water.  And oysters are very much the water.  We eat what they eat, and they are what they eat.  That’s one thing that I think we may need to get some support with down the road.  As that changes, how can we adapt?  Are these levels going to be safe for us?  What are the levels?  And how can we make sure that’s not an issue with our product?  Because I’ve built a company on raising seafood that is really good for you, but if we aren’t sure exactly what’s in them when it comes to microplastics, then we’re going to have to adapt.  I think that could be a huge thing.  For us locally, and I think it’s an issue in other areas, one of the changes that I think is happening is – well, it’s a gentrification of the coastline, which is, in part, part of climate change.  People want to move to the coast if they can afford to, buy their second, their third, their fourth, whatever house is, or retire along the coast of Maine because it’s beautiful and it’s cooler than a lot of other places, which means for us, we have a very hard time finding housing.  So, I am currently in the process of trying to put up employee housing for at least a farm manager.  But it is really a crunch.  I have a lot of people who want to apply in the spring.  They are anxious.  They are eager to work on an oyster farm.  They love the idea of it.  They’re willing to work for what I’m willing to pay them.  But they can’t find housing.  I think as we see more and more temperature is rising and sea level rising, we’re going to find that there is a cramp on our land, and that is going to affect the working waterfront and the people who are engaged in that community and housing for them.  I think that’s another big thing that we’re going to have to adapt to, is finding affordable housing for people who are going to live on farm wages.  Coastal housing for people who live on farm wages.  There’s an issue there.  There’s a little bit of a disconnect, a rift, right now, and I’m very much in the throes of it because I need employees, and they need houses.

 

Q: [30:48] And they all don’t fit in your house probably.

 

A: [30:50] Sometimes, it seems like they would, but no, they don’t. (laughter) There’s enough stuff happening at my house.

 

Q: [30:56] To expand on the working waterfront topic, do you have any trouble accessing your farm?

 

A: [31:02] Not currently.  We’re grateful.  We use Hadley Point as an access.  We keep our boats there and our moorings there.  Thankfully, it’s only a few miles from where I live, and there was just – yeah.  I know that is an issue for a lot of people.  We’re lucky that we have a public place to keep our boats.  We pay mooring fees, which are affordable.  There aren’t that many other commercial fisheries happening there because it’s not a deep-water port, so we’re not competing with lobstermen or other things like that because it’s such a tidal area, there’s no dock, which, at times, is a pain.  There’s no way nearby for us to get fuel and things like that.  It’s not easy for us to load or unload things.  But because it’s not easy for that to happen, there’s not as much commercial traffic, so it kind of works for us.  At this point, it’s worthwhile.  It works.  I just have small, flat-bottom boats. (laughter) Yeah, it would be great if there were some more infrastructure so that I would – I still fuel up all of our boats by putting multiple five-gallon cans in the back of my truck, going to fill them up at a gas station and then bringing them down and then pulling them out.  It’s a pain, but I can’t complain because I do have access.

 

Q: [32:29] What is your biggest concern about the marine environment for the future of Maine’s coastal fisheries and aquaculture industries?

 

A: [32:38] I think I’ve already hit on a couple of them.  As we see the ocean warming, I think we will see – with warming oceans comes ocean acidification, and I think it could be less hospitable for oysters and all of the ecosystem.  I do worry a little bit about that, and I’m also concerned about microplastics and how that’s going to go.  I know Vibrio has existed in our waters for a long time, and I think that we’ve got that under control, but what’s going to be the next thing?  I don’t know.  I think some of the things that I’m most worried about are things that I don’t know yet, the unknown things that we don’t have the data (sp?) on to prepare for.  I think that’s part of it.

 

Q: [33:29] If you could tell policymakers in Maine what the biggest priorities should be to help people adapt to this, what would you tell them?

 

A: [33:37] I think some of the biggest issues now facing the working waterfront are our housing and that issue and also being able to get low-interest loans.  So many crops in this country are subsidized, and a lot of those crops end up going to be feed for other crops that it actually isn’t the smartest way to use our money.  If there is going to be funding or low-interest loans or subsidies for crops, I think that things in aquaculture make more sense.  I mean, we don’t need any fresh water.  We aren’t feeding things to other things.  The amount of resources that go into sea farming to get a certain amount of protein and nutritional value are so low comparatively to any land-based protein.  What we need is money. (laughter) I want systems that are going to help us, like low-interest loans.  Get us gear.  Get us ways to recycle gear.  Get us housing so that we can actually be doing something.  Help us keep our waters clean.  Let’s get more efficient testing out there.  What are the microplastics?  What are the Vibrio levels?  Let’s just get some more resources to actually figure out how our water quality is and allow us to work it in ways that aren’t strapping us financially.  There would be no way for us to have started our business if my husband hadn’t been funding us through commercial fishing in Alaska seven months out of the year or taking out loans. We’re in the process of getting a loan to start our housing project, and the interest rate is crazy.  I’m strapping myself to do part of a housing project because I can’t afford to do all of it, but I also know that I can’t afford to run a company without employees who have housing, so I’m in this crux of damned if I do, damned if I don’t.  The federal government can help with that.  It can make it easier for us to get ahead so that we can actually be producing food.  I think that being able to harvest a diverse amount of things from our coastline is really important.  I don’t think that we can rely on a monoculture of fishing, just lobsters or anything.  I think that we have to be able to have a diverse harvest or catch so that we’re resilient and so that we’re supporting a diverse ecosystem of things.  I think there’s not as much attention on that as there could be, and we could use some support in that.

 

Q: [36:27] Thank you.  Have you participated in any climate resilience or adaptation training or programs for the fishing industry or aquaculture?

 

A: [36:38] Not formally, no.

 

Q: [36:40] OK.  What strategies do you think would be effective in building resilience against climate-related impacts?

 

A: [36:48] We currently don’t have crop insurance.  A lot of it doesn’t even cover stuff that we would be able to have.  I think having good networks for shipping products during times of either feast or famine could help move product when we needed to or reserve product when we needed to.  I think just more emphasis on water quality, and what is coming down the line with that.  Also, there’s so much that goes into the – I mean, we don’t face it so much because almost 90-something percent of our product stays right here on the island, so we’re hyper-local.  But when you’re talking about moving, essentially, oysters, mussels, live animals, there’s so much that goes into refrigeration and that cold bit.  I think we could use more technologies that are allowing us to – the packaging being greener.  I mean, right now, all of my stuff is moved in plastic mesh bags.  There are other avenues for less plasticky plastic bags and things that are like that, but it’s not scalable and it’s super expensive.  If I’m going to do that, like, I don’t know if I can afford to switch to a greener bag.  I’d like to see that roll out at a cost that’s equivalent to something else and systems that can make it just greener across the whole board.  I could have a solar-powered tumbler if I could afford the solar panels and the batteries to run my generator.  But that’s going to set me back like 10 grand that I don’t have right now.  We could make this a lot greener if we had the technology and the funds for it.

 

Q: [39:48] Are there other types of changes, not only environmental, that are impacting your work you want to tell us about?

 

A: [38:55] I think the market demand for oysters.  Outside of the environment, I think people’s consumption of different foods is starting to change, and people vote with their dollars.  I think that as we see more pressure on other land-based proteins, people are going to start to rely more on seafood.  I mean that that trend has been going for at least a decade. People are eating more seafood.  Doctors are saying it’s healthier to eat seafood.  I think people are starting to realize that the actual cost of a hamburger is.  So, those other types of proteins – I think, we’re going to start to see a larger demand for oysters, and that Maine oysters are going to start to take up a larger share of the existing market because Maine oysters are the best. (laughter) People are starting to discover that.  I think those shifts are happening, and so being able to keep up with that demand and keep it as green as possible throughout the shipping channels is happening.  I’m not worried about market saturation.  I’m worried about getting as much as what my oyster actually costs and is worth, but I think that we’re going to see more and more people eating seafood and probably bivalve because they’re cleaning up the ocean.  Even people who are less likely to eat meat for possibly humanitarian reasons are maybe opening up their minds to that, or changing their ideas about that, because eating locally has such a – I think people sometimes weigh – “OK, I don’t want to eat meat because it’s maybe bad for the planet, or because I don’t want to hurt an animal.  But if I can eat a bivalve that doesn’t have a brain or a central nervous system, and it was harvested right here, maybe that’s actually the smarter choice for the planet.”  I’m here to tell you it is and to encourage that.  I think that we’re going to start to see more of that shift, especially as the lands get drier and hotter, and it’s harder to make protein and things on Earth.

 

Q: [41:15] Sounds like a no-brainer.

 

A: [41:16] (laughter)

 

Q: [41:18] Can you tell me about any opportunities or positive changes you’ve experienced in the industry during your time?

 

A: [41:24] Yeah.  There have been different things that are coming up.  I am excited.  I am about to apply for a grant from the USDA, which is a low interest loan over a long term for employee housing.  I’m not sure if I’ll get it, but I feel like that’s maybe an option.  Things kind of open up in small ways.  Nothing really big is coming up.  I feel like there are a lot of moments when there’s this clearing, and a sunbeam comes down, and it’s happening.  There are times when opportunities are there.  I think I’ve had a lot of interactions with youth, in particular.  I love working with younger people who are interested in farming when kind of the a-ha moment is like, “Oh, this is what a sea farm is.  This is what it looks like to be a sea farmer.”  And it becomes an opportunity because it’s becoming real in a young person’s mind that it’s a thing.  So many of us – we know what farming looks like, and we place your silos and pigs, and we romanticize about that.  Every kid, particularly on coastal Maine, knows what fishing is and what lobstering is.  But as a sea farmer, there are very few people who actually know who we are, what we do, what it looks like to be a sea farmer.  Every time I have a chance to engage with someone new on that and give them a window into our world, it’s really validating and really rewarding because we become real, and we get to be established again and again.  I feel like the most opportunity I feel like is happening to the sector is when I work with young people who are like, “Oh, I want to be a sea farmer.  We’re going on a boat now?  OK.”  And that idea that we’re neither exactly farm nor fisheries or really, that we’re both and that connection between land and sea becomes real in someone’s mind, is an opportunity for me.  I’m like, “OK, there could be a future here.  This could happen.” (laughter) You come up with the ideas to fix this, and I’ll give you a job as soon as you can reach my worktable.  (laughter)

 

Q: [43:45] That’s awesome.  Have you had any opportunities to go into your daughter’s school and share the work you do?

 

A: [43:55] Not with her class directly.  I do have school groups, some that have come out to the farm directly, although that’s hard because we only have small boats, and there’s liability and stuff.  But I do work – I’ll meet school groups at Hadley Point and bring as much of our farm to them as we can.  So, bring our gear, bring different size oysters, bring the tools that we use on the boat.  We do have at least a few school groups a year that come to do that part.  They get to see what we’re doing and get an idea of what it’s like to be out on the farm and what aquaculture looks like.  My daughter is some – I’ve had some of my daughter’s friends out, and she, of course, is out on the water a fair bit, which is nice.  She did say when – she filled out her “I want to be a,” and she wrote oyster farmer last year on her first day of kindergarten. I was like, “Oh, this is good.”  I was like, “Yes.”  Her teacher didn’t know that I owned and operated an oyster farm.  And she’s like, “I’d never seen anyone answer that before.”  Then, months later, she figured out why. (laughter) But yeah, that was gratifying.

 

Q: [45:00] That’s awesome.  Do you feel like your gender has played any kind of role in your job?

 

A: [45:06] To some extent.  I can only see it within the world that I know it, which has been female my whole life.  I think because I see it as a really collaborative industry, and I associate being collaborative and communicating a lot as feminine traits, it plays into that.  It also plays into a lot, I think – that whole multitasking bit.  At any given point, there are eight different things going on (laughter), maybe more.  I think that is something that women evolved to do because, in general, we were the ones that were taking care of kids and doing all these other things.  So, running a small company, whether it’s a sea farm or any company, I think you’re always going to be faced with multitasking.  I think that is something that I am – and it’s a strong suit because I think that it’s partly being female that I’m good at multitasking and good at collaborating and good and getting a lot of different pieces and moving parts to function in a day. (laughter) I have some greeting cards I found that I now bought a stack of them and give it to everyone.  It says, “I’m just over here running a tight shipwreck.”  Some days, that’s how it feels.  I’m just over here running a tight shipwreck because a lot of times it feels like I’m running around putting out fires.  But really, at the end of the day, it’s working.  It’s tight.  It’s a tight shipwreck.

 

Q: [46:37] That’s awesome.  Do you feel like your role and presence in the community motivates other women or sets a pathway for people to see what opportunities are out there?

 

A: [46:45] Yes.  I make sure I hire a lot of women.  A lot of women do, I think, work or apply and want to work for us, I think in part because we have a pretty strong social media presence, and so they see a lot of women driving boats and working on boats, and feel like, “Oh, I can do that,” or are less intimidated to show up.  When I first started commercial fishing, I was like – I don’t know.  There were probably at least 12 boats going out of the harbor.  If there’s two people in every boat, that’s 24 people.  I was one in 24.  I don’t think that’s the case in aquaculture.  I believe, currently, it still is only 15% of leaseholders are female, so we’re still a minority.  But I sure as shit don’t feel like a minority.  I definitely don’t.  Every woman or person who comes onto our farm and onto our boats learns how to drive the boat because A, it’s empowering, and B, it’s great for everybody to know how to do everything, especially – it’s safer.  Everybody has to know how to drive a boat, so we work on that.  I do think that empowerment is contagious and uplifting.  Yeah.  It’s important to me.  I love encouraging women to work on the water.

 

Q: [48:04] It’s awesome.  I’m fascinated by that a-ha moment of like, “Oh, I can do this.”  It’s demystifying (inaudible).

 

A: [48:11] Yeah.  Giving people the opportunity to fail and to figure it out and to bump –thankfully, none of my boats are pretty, so I’m like, “You’ll figure it out.  All right.  I’m not going to get mad if you ram the dock a little too hard the first time.  That’s what it’s going to take.”  I give people like freedom to fail and succeed until they succeed continuously.

 

Q: [48:38] What is your hopeful vision for the future of Maine’s coastal fisheries

 

A: [48:44] I hope that we can strengthen our working waterfront by giving people affordable housing and continue to harvest a diverse amount of species and products from the ocean and even broaden that.  I think that what we’re harvesting isn’t possibly as much as it could be as far as from a diverse standpoint.  So, increasing the number of species that we can sustainably harvest here, emboldening the working waterfront – I would love to be able to see some programs that also help small companies provide benefits.  So, this is the first year I’m stretching myself to offer a stipend for health insurance for two of my employees.  It’s strapping us a little bit, but they work hard.  We do manual labor around the clock, and we need health insurance. Fishermen should have health insurance.  There are so many things that don’t just come with the job but are so expensive.  I hope that there is some either collaborative buy-in or something so that we can actually get the right type of health care for our working waterfront.  I don’t know of any programs where it’s actually affordable to buy health care (laughter) for our families, which is just crazy.  So, if the two people that I put on – I’m giving them a stipend for health insurance, which is like taxed when I give it to them.  I pay a tax on it, and they pay a tax on it, and then they have to go buy a plan on it.  That’s not going to cover their families.  It’s not going to cut – it’s a sorry excuse for health insurance.  I think that we need to have a better system for taking care of our working waterfront.  These are the people who are supplying food.  We’re feeding the tourists, we’re feeding the communities, and we don’t have a good health care system.  We’re also doing some of the most manual labor.  It’s backbreaking.  That would be a hope of mine, as well as technologies that are going to make our work less demanding and greener.  If we can come up with better ways to flip cages, better ways to handle our gear, mechanisms for all of that, that is going to make it less physically demanding so that we can provide a safer working environment for the longevity of people’s terms working.  That would be a hope of mine.  Yeah, this may be enough hopes for now.

 

M: [51:18] Yeah.  I have a few questions, just things that I noticed and would love to follow up on.  Could you describe your educational background a little bit?  You mentioned being a human ecologist.

 

A: [51:29] Sure, yeah. I graduated from College of the Atlantic, so I have a BA in Human Ecology.  I traveled a bit.  I was a transfer student, so I traveled a bit, studied in Central America for a year, and went to Hampshire College for a year, but I graduated from COA.  I have a fair amount of – sternman on lobster boats, and then a fair bit of working passage on sailboats, and then private chefing on yachts.

 

M: [51:57] How many years total Have you worked on the water?

 

A: [52:01] I got my first job on a boat the summer I turned 17.  I was funding a backpacking trip around the world.  I’m not that old, but like 22 years.

 

M: [52:16] Wow.

 

A: [52:17] Yeah.

 

M: [52:18] If you don’t mind me asking, what year were you born?

 

A: [52:20] ’84.  1984.

 

M: [52:22] I’m curious.  You talked a lot about looking towards the future and adaptation.  Are there any adaptations aside from the housing you’re currently in the process of making?  You had mentioned biofouling.  I’m curious if you’re addressing that in any way.

 

A: [52:34] We are not currently addressing any other issues.  We’ve just kind of made it through the – just made it through the vibrio stuff in order to make that harvest happen with the housing bit.  We’re putting up – it’ll be employee housing, but we’ll also have a farm stand and different location – office and space.  With biofouling, I’m just keeping an ear to the ground to systems, the cage flipping systems, that are happening.  I’m in the process of researching different types of bags for us to deliver our oysters in, so they might be greener as far as that goes.  But nothing else that we’re directly working on now.

 

M: [53:24] Then, my last question – I’m curious if you’ve been seeing green crabs.  We’ve heard that a lot from people who farm oysters, and I’m just curious your experience.

 

A: [53:32] We see some of them.  For us, I don’t think that’s the main issue.  Green crabs rarely are able to get into our bags, and once they’re on the surface, it’s never an issue.  I think we’ve probably seen more dead loss, actually, from starfish in our bags.  But even that hasn’t been bad for years.  As long as we sink our cages properly, in general, that’s okay.  Mostly for us, I think it’s been a prevalence of tunicates, which are just more likely to thrive in warmer waters.  When those present themselves when you have a lot of tunicates on your bags and on your oysters, it adds so much weight to your gear, which is a lot harder to do, and it smothers them.  I like to clean that up.  Those can be issues.  And seagrasses.  All of this is just – a lot are native, but they’re just growing to greater deals in warmer water.  Anything that is not an oyster is a weed in my garden.  The more weeds there are, the more work I have to do.  I think we’re just going to contend more and more with that.  And now, with the vibrio controls, we have to keep closer track of how long things are out of the water and when they go back in, so they’re re-submerged for a long enough time for any potential vibrio levels to be low enough so that tracking system is going to have to change how we handle anything that is potentially market size.  So, yeah, changing those systems and that logging system so that we’re all on the same page on the farm, and how we handle all of our product is – it’s different.  We’re busy trying to make sure we get that nailed down.

 

M: [55:19] Yeah, great.  Those are all the questions I had.

 

Q: [55:21] Awesome.  Anything you wanted to share with us?  Any final thoughts?

 

A: [55:26] I don’t think so.  Just that I appreciate your work and the type of – I think this is all – these are all valid questions and topics.  The planet is changing pretty rapidly, and I do wholeheartedly believe in the importance of farming the sea and supplying food that is as local and sustainable as possible.  I think that we need to have sea farming as a part of our plan for feeding the planet.  It’s not a perfect system.  I hope that through more talking about things and sharing the knowledge that we have, and asking the hard questions, we’ll get to the systems that will help us improve on the best ways to produce that food and keep the oceans clean.  I think that sea farmers are some of the best-poised people to be advocates for water quality and for keeping our planet clean.  I think sometimes there’s a misconception that the people who are working the waterfront maybe aren’t environmentalists, and it’s just such a – that just doesn’t make any sense to me because we really are.  We rely so much on it, and we’re out there all of the time.  Yeah.  I think just paying attention to that and being able to share dialogs about what’s happening and the changes that we’re seeing, and to try and collect as much information as possible so that we can continue to thrive and to move and adapt as we’re going to have to of things that we can imagine coming down the road and things that we don’t know yet.

 

Q: [57:07] Awesome.  Thank you so much for your time.

 

A: [57:08] Yeah.  Thank you.

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