Q: [0:00] If we could just start with how you like to introduce yourself.

 

A: [0:04] My name is Annie Fagan.  I’m a mariner, scientist, educator, and I work in marine extension for the Maine Sea Grant program.

 

Q: [0:14] What year were you born?

 

A: [0:16] 1993.

 

Q: [0:17] Can you tell me a little bit about where you grew up?

 

A: [0:20] Yeah.  I grew up in Camden, Maine, Mid-Coast Maine.  That’s where I grew up. (laughter)

 

Q: [0:27] Where are your parents from?

 

A: [0:29] My parents are originally from Connecticut and New Jersey.  They’ve been living in Maine most of their lives at this point in the mid-coast.

 

Q: [0:41] What did they do either when you were growing up, now –

 

A: [0:43] Yeah.  My parents met working for the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School, which is an outdoor education organization.  It used to be based on Hurricane Island in Penobscot Bay, and now they’ve got a base in Wheeler Bay.  At that time, they were both doing a lot of sailing, outdoor education, leading expeditions.  My dad went on to work as a boat captain for most of the rest of his career, captaining privately owned sailboats all over the place in the US and the Caribbean until about the last 10 years, and then he worked as an office administrator for a small consulting firm.  My mom took some time off to raise us and then has had a bunch of jobs since then, mostly in education, school administration, a little bit of healthcare administration – stuff like that.

 

Q: [1:39] Great.  Thanks.  Did you grow up on the water?

 

A: [1:42] Yeah.  Camden’s on the water.  So, in that sense, I definitely did.  Had amazing access to the ocean and marine environments.  I spent some time in the summers when I was a young kid, learning how to sail at local day summer camps and stuff like that.  For a while, when I was younger, my dad worked for one particular family for quite a while, and they would usually invite the crew to bring their families on the boat maybe once or twice a summer.

 

Q: [2:14] Nice.  Do you have any siblings?

 

A: [2:16] Yeah.  I have a younger brother who lives in New Jersey and an older sister who lives in South Portland.

 

Q: [2:20] Great.  Do you have any history of fishing in your family?

 

A: [2:23] No, not really.  No commercial fishing in my family.

 

Q: [2:28] What about recreational?

 

A: [2:30] Probably.  My partner is a big fly-fishing person, but I would say not a huge, shared hobby in my family in general.

 

Q: [2:38] Sure.  Do you have any family experience in other roles in the fishing industry?  That could be bookkeeping, processing, marketing, with bait or gear.

 

A: [2:47] I don’t think so, or not really, that I’m aware of.

 

Q: [2:51] Cool.  Thank you.  Could you describe a little bit more what your dad’s job was like when you were younger, captaining?

 

A: [2:57] Sure.  He worked as a boat captain for privately owned – I guess maybe the average person would say yachts – sailing boats.  The work really depended on the owner.  For example, he worked for 10 or 13 years for one single family when I was younger, and that particular family loved to cruise in Maine in the summers, so that’s where most of the sailing would happen.  But they also would race.  So, my dad has done some pretty big sailboat races.  Other boats that he worked for just wanted the boat available to cruise for fun or with their family, or maybe they would want it to be in the Caribbean for the winter.  The work varied, but it was definitely a full-time-and-a-half-type job and sometimes involved him – almost always, he hired or had other crew that would work with him on the boat.  If he was racing or doing something like that, then he would be orchestrating that whole – the practices and the teams and that kind of thing.

 

Q: [4:02] Cool.  Thank you.  Can you describe your educational background for me?

 

A: [4:08] Sure.  I grew up in Camden, so I went through the public school system there, and then I went to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.  I majored in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.  Studied abroad a couple times, once for Italian and once for ecological field studies.  That’s the end of my formal schooling to date.

 

Q: [4:31] Great.  And are you married?

 

A: [4:34] Yes.

 

Q: [4:36] Do you have any children?

 

A: [4:37] No children, just a four-legged one.

 

Q: [4:41] Now, transitioning out of the more demographic questions to questions about your role or positionality, how would you describe your role or history in the fishing and aquaculture industry in Maine?

 

A: [4:54] My role in those industries is all on the aquaculture side.  I worked in the industry a little bit, first at a raw bar shucking oysters.  I feel like that was kind of my first aquaculture job.  Then, I worked in research and development at a small oyster farm and hatchery on the Damariscotta River.  Now, I work for the Maine Sea Grant.  My work is in Aquaculture Extension, and that means a lot more statewide initiatives.  I do research, education, and outreach all around aquaculture, so that can really run the gamut.  Sometimes, it’s technical assistance for farmers that are seeing something on their farm, wanting help, or just getting started.  We do a lot of training and workforce development, a lot of applied research, solving industry problems, and we also work with groups like municipalities, regulators, teachers, students, researchers.  If you’re interested in aquaculture, we’re interested in helping you.  Our tagline is marine science for Maine people.  We really are in service to the whole state of Maine, and those needs are ever-evolving and pretty dynamic.

 

Q: [6:11] Great.  I would love if you could take me through time a little bit and talk about how you got into working at the raw bar and how that led you to where you are now.

 

A: [6:20] Sure, it’s kind of a long and winding story.  It’s funny.  I grew up on the coast of Maine but never knew what aquaculture was until I was an adult.  I look back on that and find it really strange because it’s everywhere.  I met my partner working for Outward Bound.  At the time, I was leading sailing expeditions, and she was running school bases in Maine and Florida, sometimes in the Bahamas.  We started to feel like we were ready to not live where we worked anymore and have a life on land or something closer to a nine-to-five.  We moved back to Maine.  We both are from here and have family here and landed in Portland, and honestly, just in looking for something to pay the bills, I found the job at the raw bar.  I was shucking full-time, and that was my first exposure to just an amazing sort of oyster culture that we have here in Maine.  I was interacting with a lot of product.  I was learning on the job about how to talk to customers about oysters and answer questions.  I was seeing the amazing variety and shape and color and different culture methods of all the different kinds of oysters that we have here.  That sort of sparked an interest for me.  Some way or another, I learned about this program called Aquaculture in Shared Waters, which is a long-running training program offered by Maine Sea Grant and several other organizations that all partner together, and it’s designed to help people start an aquaculture business.  I was hearing all about oysters, and my partner and I were at a transition point in our lives.  We both have marine backgrounds.  I have a science background, so we thought maybe we could take this class and maybe start an oyster farm.  It was great.  We loved the course.  We got pretty fired up to the point where we were thinking about siting and where we might have a farm and thinking about what that lifestyle would look like.  Then COVID happened.  So, that threw a wrench in all of our plans, but definitely for us, we were thinking, OK, probably not the best time to start a business and do something that we have never done before or invest a lot of money into something that feels pretty risky.  But I had caught the bug, so I started thinking about how I could learn more about the industry without having to put a lot of money up of my own and figured I should just get someone else to pay me to learn more about it.  That was how I ended up banging down the doors of a bunch of different farms, and it ended up being a really good match for me and Mook Sea Farm.  They were looking to ramp up their research and development capabilities, so I started out in that role with them and ended up also doing a lot on the production side, helping to raise oyster microalgae and run experiments in the hatchery.  From there, it was a hop, skip, and jump to the job that I’m in now.  That’s been my trajectory, and that story I just told is all compressed into the last four or five years.  So, a new chapter in my career for me.

 

Q: [9:47] Sure.  So, how long – go ahead.

 

F: [9:48] I think maybe the same question – I was just thinking – what year did you start working at the raw bar since that feels like the beginning of your –?

 

A: [9:55] OK.  That was pre-COVID.  I’m resisting the urge to get out my camera roll in my phone because that’s often how I remember years and dates.  I would say that was probably 2019.  I think we took Shared Waters that winter of 2019 into 2020.  I was working at the raw bar at that time, I think, and we moved here to this peninsula where I’m sitting now in 2021.  I think that’s probably when I started working at the hatchery.  I started in this role with Maine Sea Grant last January of 2023.

 

Q: [10:39] Great.  Thank you so much.  I’m going to get back into the Sea Grant stuff, but can you describe just a little bit more what it was like to work in all those different facets of the farm?

 

A: [10:51] At Mook?

 

Q: [10:52] Yes.

 

A: [10:53] Yeah, sure.  Mook is a really unique company, and this is part of the reason I wanted to work there because they have a farm.  They’re raising oysters and selling them.  They also have a hatchery, which is pretty unusual.  There’s only a few commercial hatcheries in the state of Maine, and they’re supplying oyster seed to farmers, not just in Maine but all up and down the East Coast.  So, that was pretty unique to me.  Also, every hatchery grows microalgae because that’s what you need to feed the baby oysters, but Mook Sea Farm has some really interesting proprietary technology that allows them to produce a lot of microalgae in a small space.  They just have a lot of different things going on inside one company.  That’s part of why I thought it would be a good place for me to learn, and it definitely was.  The work started out mostly, like I said, in research and development.  We would do experiments about all kinds of things, any pressing problems that were coming up across the company, so not just in the hatchery, but maybe in the packing plant or on the farm.  It was really rewarding because sometimes we might have someone come up with a problem or pitch an idea for some small-scale experiment that we might do.  Maybe we’re doing it two weeks later.  We finish a few weeks from then, and there’s kind of an instant applied change that you could be making in a process somewhere in the company.  That was really cool to be a part of, and it felt really different from doing research in an academic setting, where you might be proposing something and then doing the work a year later, and then the work takes a couple years, and then no one’s going to hear about it for a couple more years, because that’s just like how the machine churns.  Being in that applied, rapid environment was really cool.  Then, when I started getting pulled more into the production work that winter, that was just such a deep dive in how to grow microalgae, how to raise baby oysters, all the science and monitoring and husbandry that goes into that – that was all new for me.  Sometimes, depending on the experiments we were doing, I might have gotten out onto the river, but for the most part, my time was in the hatchery indoors, either working in production or research.

 

Q: [13:16] Great.  Thank you so much.  I’m curious.  Do you or did you ever hold any commercial fishing licenses?

 

A: [13:24] No, I haven’t.

 

Q: [13:27] I feel like this question is going to take us through a lot of things.  I’m going to ask it as it’s written and then figure out what the best way to answer is.  The question is, do you have any experience in the industry beyond directly fishing or harvesting, which you’ve described a little, but I’m going to give you some prompts that might help think about that.

 

A: [13:46] Sure.

 

Q: [13:47] Do you have any experience in bookkeeping, bait, or gear preparation?

 

A: [13:52] No.

 

Q: [13:54] What about post-harvest processing, marketing, or trade?

 

A: [14:03] I’m only taking this long pause because I’m thinking about it.  No.  Some of the work we do at Sea Grant might go into those arenas.  I have colleagues who do projects in those areas, but so far, my work hasn’t really taken me to that place.  Maybe, with the exception of post-harvest, is a good example.  Sometimes, we might get growers asking us, “What’s the best way to bring my product down to temperature, or what are the recommended handling practices for XYZ?”  We touch some of those areas, but I haven’t had as much experience there.

 

Q: [14:43] Cool.  I think this last one might be a good segue into what your work with Sea Grant looks like.  Do you have any experience in advocacy or community-based organizations related to fisheries or aquaculture?

 

A: [14:56] That’s a good question.  I would say that I don’t personally.  Sea Grant is a non-advocacy organization, so that’s not the one thing we can’t do.  But because we get funding from Congress and through NOAA, we don’t take a stand on any policy or legislative issues.  We’re very much in the neutral advisor role.  That’s me myself, but we certainly partner with organizations that might do advocacy or community organizing around fisheries or aquaculture, and sometimes that can be a really good match because they were able to do things that we don’t do, and vice versa, but we don’t end up in that role.

 

Q: [15:43] Sure.

 

F: [15:44] I’m thinking that your role makes me think of several gaps we actually have in that question because you’ve already said, I think, quite a few really interesting ways in which you’re involved, which makes me think our categories are limiting, which is extension, which is different, as you point out, from advocacy.

 

A: [16:00] It’s a weird animal, yeah.

 

F: [16:01] You talked about food preparation and interfacing between the product and the consumer.

 

A: [16:07] Right.

 

F: [16:08] And research and development as well as the input side on hatchery seed rearing.  It seems like you have a lot of interesting ones, which are actually ones that we just haven’t asked as specific subcategories.  So, helping us see our own gaps. (laughter)

 

A: [16:23] Yeah, sure.  I think a lot of these topics are things that me or colleagues might provide advising or training on, even if it’s by connecting somebody to somebody that knows the answer to their question.  We do that kind of thing all the time.  Anyway, glad to help the questions.

 

Q: [16:42] Yeah.  I was going to say that transitions us into now.  I’m curious.  What does your work with Sea Grant look like?  How would you describe your role?

 

A: [16:52] Sure.  I’m getting better at doing this, but it’s such a funny animal because the work is really dynamic.  It changes all the time, and we try to be responsive to the needs that we’re hearing about from the people that we work with and the people that we serve.  But right now, my work is pretty varied.  I was hired to coordinate the Maine Aquaculture Hub, which is a funded project that existed before me, is now in its second round of funding, and it’s meant to be a network that brings people together across the state.  There’s a steering committee of a bunch of different organizations that coordinate the hub along with me.  The project work includes things like an economic impact assessment of the aquaculture sector, so looking at trying to get some data and numbers for how those impacts shake out across the state.  We are developing online curriculum training modules about aquaculture.  There’s been a lot of public outreach and engagement funded as a part of this project.  So I’m running a cooking demo series this summer, highlighting – actually, we’re going to highlight both farmed and wild products and hope to draw some guests to break down some of the mystery of preparing seafood and make it more approachable and show people how it can be eaten at home.  Then, we also funded – as a new iteration and curriculum for the aquaculture and Shared Waters program, which is the same class I took years ago, we offered this winter a series of workshops for women and non-binary folks in the industry here in Maine.  That was a new offering for us and a part of the project that I’ve had my hands in quite a bit, and I’m really proud of.  That’s all to say that’s the project I manage now.  That’s most of my work.  Then, in addition, stuff comes up.  People reach out with questions.  There’s ongoing research needs that I get pulled into.  I end up talking a lot with people who are interested in careers in aquaculture or wanting to start a business.  Sea Grant tends to be a first point of contact for a lot of those types of questions.  Then, I have an education background, so I love teaching.  That’s part of what makes things like Shared Waters so fun and enjoyable for me, and I end up doing, when I have the chance, education programs with local schools or teachers that are looking to connect their students to these types of topics.  So, all kinds of stuff, really.

 

Q: [19:38] Great.  Yeah, I’m curious if you could talk a little bit more about the most recent iteration of Shared Waters and what your experience was like with that.

 

A: [19:54] Sure.  The idea for a more targeted curriculum of Shared Waters has been brewing for a few years, pre-me at Sea Grant, and coming in the form of folks suggesting or requesting, “Hey, what would it look like if we had a training that was just for women or just for people of color or just for an underrepresented group in the industry?”  So, through the hub, this second round of funding, we proposed a needs assessment to more formally gather information and data that would build on those anecdotal requests that the program has been getting.  So, I worked with a graduate student at the University of Maine and another colleague last fall.  We did a little over 30 interviews with women who had been through the Shared Waters program before in its other iterations and asked them a lot of questions to get a sense of – what was your experience like in that course?  In that program?  What did you like about it?  What did you not like about it?  What have your experiences been like in aquaculture since then?  People go on from the course to do all kinds of stuff.  So, sometimes they end up in aquaculture, and sometimes they end up somewhere else.  With both of those, in the course and after, trying to get a sense of how much gender has played a role in their experiences as they perceived that.  Then we also ask some questions about – what would you want it to look like if we were to offer a targeted program that would be for women or nonbinary folks?  Is that something that would be valuable to you or not?  Would you be interested in it?  And if you are, what would you want it to look like?  And what kind of curriculum would you want to see covered?  Basically, what have been the gaps in your learning experience or information that you feel like you had a harder time accessing. That was such a great, really interesting process.  We learned a ton.  You can imagine that the answers run the gamut because women aren’t a monolith, so everybody had different opinions, and it was really interesting to hear about those. Based on the feedback that we received, we felt like there was a significant need and interest in a targeted program.  So, we designed a curriculum based on the topics that women had told us they would really want to learn about.  It turned out that there was almost no overlap with the curriculum that we had already been offering.  I’ll give a couple of examples of topics that we covered in the workshops, some of which are useful for everybody.  So, we’re like, “Maybe we should add those back into what we already do because they’re so important.”  We heard women talking a lot about having a harder time accessing technical skills, especially in the maritime field.  So, things like navigation.  Trailering was a classic example of something that – what we heard from folks is that that can also have a gendered component.  Just to take that example a little further, most small farmers in Maine, a lot of them are launching boats from public access points.  A lot of harvesters, too.  We heard from plenty of women who learned how to trailer in public parking lots, and that can be really challenging because there’s people around, and everybody has an opinion, and they express that they would love to be able to learn and develop those skills in kind of an open, non-judgmental, starting from the basics and moving all the way up space.  I think a lot of people can relate to – anyone who’s ever backed a trailer up in a public place, you probably had someone else telling you how to do it better.  That was one piece.  We heard a lot of interest in women who were saying, “I love this work, and I want to do it for a long time, and I want to also take care of my body while I’m doing it.”  Aquaculture is super physical.  It’s really manual, and the work can be brutal.  A lot of the gear – gear you wear, or gear that you’re using to hold your animals, or whatever it is – is designed for people that are ultra-strong and have really big bodies and hands.  We heard from women that they wanted to learn some tools to be able to use that gear better, to have less pain on the job, to reduce the risk of injury.  They were interested in learning from each other, too, about how to move through those challenges ergonomically on the farm.  Some other topics we covered – some business topics.  Being a woman in the business landscape can be really different.  We got some great expertise there.  We did a workshop around kind of communications and storytelling and showing up in the online space as a woman or non-binary person.  We did a workshop on social license.  That was the one piece of overlap.  We always talk about social license in aquaculture and Shared Waters.  Social license is the idea of cultivating trust in your business and your community.  There are lots of ways to go about that, and it’s a really important part of the process here in Maine.  Some women experience that as different because of their gender.  The way we move around socially in the world can be impacted by that.  It was really neat to do that workshop with that lens added to it.  Another thing we heard a lot about in the interviews was interest in the curriculum, for sure, but also just wanting to network and connect and build relationships with other women in the field, and so we built into each workshop get-to-know-you time or structured networking activities.  We always had time afterward for people to just connect and get together.  I know from my experience in the course – or a slightly different course years ago – that having that person-to-person contact with the instructors and other students in the course, some of whom were already farming, was really important in helping it stick for me and helping me feel like I might have a place in the industry.  It was really rewarding, I think, to be able to provide that to other people.  We have plans to keep expanding that network part as well.  That was a little bit about the workshops.  One really cool thing about it was that we decided that we wanted the instructors to be women as well, just to close that loop.  In affinity training, that’s kind of a best practice as well.  That pushed us to form some new partnerships and bring instructors into the program who hadn’t participated before, some of whom aren’t super active in the aquaculture space, and some of whom are.  There was some really cool cross pollination that happened there, and that felt really good to broaden that circle.

 

Q: [27:01] Cool.  I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about – what are your reflections now that that’s happened on it and looking towards the future?

 

A: [27:11] Yeah, so many.  We just had our last workshop a couple days ago, so I know I’m going to be thinking about it a lot.  Well, we had a ton of interest in the program.  I guess that’s where I would start.  We had almost two people apply for every spot, and so that was very exciting to know that we were offering something that there was interest and demand.  It was also crushing to not be able to wrap in all those people for this very first year.  But it does make us feel like we need to find a way to keep doing this.  We’ve applied for funding in a couple different places to be able to offer something like this again.  That’s my first takeaway, is this is valuable, and there is interest in it.  So, that’s one of my takeaways.  I think one of the coolest parts for me was just – and this happens in general when you get folks in aquaculture and Maine together, especially people who are coming from – we had pretty varied geographical representation.  We had some folks who have been farming for a long time, and some folks who are employees on other people’s farms, some people who are new.  We kind of intentionally engineered the cohort to have that diversity in it because we wanted people to benefit from that range of experience.  There was just so much co-teaching and collaboration that happened, which was really cool.  We asked participants if – we let them know what the workshops were going to be, and said, “Hey, do you have expertise that you would want to share as part of any of these topics?”  A bunch of people leaned into that opportunity.  It was really cool to be able to set that up and give people opportunities to share their knowledge with one another.  The aquaculture community in Maine tends to be a really collaborative and inclusive place, and we see a ton of that farmer-to-farmer teaching.  That was a huge highlight for me.  It was unique to be in a space where gender was pre-determined to be an open part of the conversation, and it felt great.  We set working agreements as a group to talk about how we would treat one another, how we wanted to work together, and how we wanted to show up.  There was a ton of compassion, humility, and understanding that came out in those agreements, and also just in the way that people supported each other during the workshops and learned together.  Certainly, you can have that environment in any group, but it was just a huge defining vibe of the course in general that felt really special to me.  Already, it’s inspired us to think about how we keep this momentum going and how we keep building strength and connections for this group of people.  Maine is ahead of the curve in some ways when it comes to women in aquaculture.  We took our work from that needs assessment that I mentioned to a conference in Florida called Women of Water that was offered for women in aquaculture all across the country.  When we shared about the research, we got a lot of reactions, like, “I wish this was happening in my state.”  “I’m the only female oyster grower that I know.”  “How do we get something like this where I am?”  I’m sure we’re not the first people to think about doing something like this in particular, but we’re hopeful that this program could be a model for other places or other states.  This is certainly not the only underrepresented group in the aquaculture space that deserves more attention and more equity when it comes to training opportunities.  It’s a first drop in the bucket but feels like a good drop.

 

Q: [31:20] Cool.  This is an interesting shift, and I think a difficult question to answer, but I’m curious if you could describe what an average day looks like for you.  You’ve described a lot of different responsibilities, so I guess I’m wondering how does that look in a day.

 

A: [31:35] Sure.  It’s so funny because it does really change.  I can give an example on both ends of the spectrum.  Sometimes, some part of my job is a lot of maybe coordinating over email, tracking budgets, sitting at a desk, working on my computer, maybe having meetings with farmers or other team members.  At the way, other far end of the spectrum would be – a couple weeks ago, I had the wildest day in the life.  It was during seaweed week.  It’s actually more than a week, but it’s about a week and a half festival that my colleague Jaclyn Robidoux of Maine Sea Grant and Heritage Seaweed, which is a shop in Portland – they sort of co-host, and there’s lots of pop-up events, restaurants putting on special dishes all over the state, and the intent is to kind of highlight the wild seaweed harvest and the farm seaweed sector in Maine.  So, as part of that, I put on an event in Stonington.  We put together a panel of folks to share about what’s happening in aquaculture all across the state.  I partnered with Linda Nelson, who’s the Economic and Community Development Director for the town of Stonington, to add this event to their civic conversation series around their economic resiliency strategy in their town.  This particular day, I was driving across the state to our office in Orono, picking up a bunch of materials that we wanted to share for the event, driving to Stonington, which is amazing, beautiful place, totally different from the slice of the world that I live in, setting up for this event, hosting this panel, meeting lots of local residents, answering questions, seeing this really cool community conversation happen around aquaculture, spending the night, and then the next morning, got to jump on a boat with Abby Barrows, who had been a part of the panel the night before.  Jaclyn and I got to help her with their kelp harvest.  That would be a wild day in the life, out in the field, public engagement, or being on farms, and it can be anywhere in between.

 

Q: [33:51] Great.  Thanks.  How do you feel that your background or identity shapes your work in the fishing sector – fishing and aquaculture – including how others perceive or treat you?

 

A: [34:05] That’s a good question.  I guess on the background piece – it’s funny.  I look back on the last maybe four or five jobs I’ve had, and at the time, I was just choosing the next thing that seemed interesting or useful.  Now, in this role, I draw on a lot of those experiences that, at the time, didn’t seem connected, like the raw bar, jobs I’ve had in research, working on an oyster farm.  I think having that applied and industry background is really useful for me in this role.  It’s small in comparison to a lot of the farmers that I work with, but having that grounding in what it means to work in aquaculture, what are the best parts of that, what are the challenges that come with that is really useful to me, and is part of why I took this job because I saw it as an opportunity, at a state level and beyond, to support people in some of the problems that I found maybe challenging or difficult when I was doing that work.  I think I bring that.  Then, other parts of my background in terms of skills would be education.  I love teaching.  This is a field where that’s a huge asset to be able to – whether it’s working with a sea farmer to teach them better ways to do what they’re doing out on the farm or train them up if they’re new, or even just explaining and sharing about aquaculture to the general public or a group of young students because ideas (inaudible) culture tends to be a pretty mysterious and confusing thing to people who haven’t been exposed to it, and the average person has no way to go see it or understand visually what’s happening.  That part of my background serves me well.  Then, as far as my identity, I hold some that are underrepresented in aquaculture.  I think being a woman, being queer, being disabled, those are all things that I know whenever I meet people who share those identities, it’s exciting, and it’s nice to know that that community is building, and I think holding those parts of myself is also part of what motivates me to make sure that I’m finding opportunities to help open doors or make aquaculture more inclusive for other people.  That definitely is part of what shapes my work, and when I think about the type of work I want to be doing, I don’t imagine ever putting that thread down.

 

Q: [36:49] Great.  Thanks.  How do you feel your role interacts with any present or future family or caregiving responsibilities?

 

A: [37:02] That’s a good question.  I don’t have any children and don’t plan to.  I did find when I was working in the industry that the hours are long and the work is intense, and so part of me transitioning into this role was looking for a bit more of a balance that worked better for me and my partner and being able to spend more time with my family and things like that.  So, in that sense, it feels like a really good fit.  And for me, where I’m at right now, early career, I have that freedom and flexibility to work long days, to be traveling for a conference, or to be overnight somewhere.  For me right now, it’s a good fit with the responsibilities that I have.

 

Q: [37:59] Great.  Now, we’re going to transition into some questions about environmental change.  Feel free to answer those from your perspective, or if from your role, you have a culmination of perspectives you’d like to share, whatever feels right for the question.  Can you describe any changes in the marine environment that you’ve noticed or have heard a lot about?

 

A: [38:21] Sure.  Man, it’s hard to know where to start because there are so many, but a few examples that come to mind are climate change.  The ocean is getting warmer.  We all know that.  The Gulf of Maine is warming more rapidly than most other bodies of water in the world, so we’re kind of on the front lines here in terms of water getting warmer.  For me, that doesn’t necessarily have as direct of a personal impact.  I’m not harvesting a resource or cultivating one, but for the farmers that I serve, it definitely plays out, sometimes in positive ways.  It might make certain parts of Maine better for growing oysters, which grow faster when the water is warmer.  So, that’s an aspect of it.  It also brings a lot of other issues, ocean acidification being one.  That’s something that has a huge impact, especially on shellfish.  It makes it harder for them to build their shells.  The hatchery that I worked at when I was in the industry has – that affects the work that they do as well, and they’ve had to make some modifications to how they raise their oysters, especially their baby oysters, to deal with that.  Something else that’s like hard to miss if you’re living on the coast of Maine is just new species coming in.  Green crabs would be one great example.  We see so many more of them than we used to, and that affects a lot of the shellfish harvesters that we work with.  Even just thinking about when I was a kid, bumming around on islands or out in boats with friends or my dad, you used to see lots more blue mussels than we do now.  I think species change is a big one, and that translates onto the farm as well.  For example, biofouling is a big issue on seed farms.  That’s something everybody has to manage.  Whenever you put something in the water, stuff wants to grow on it – tunicate, sea squirts, marine algae, all kinds of things.  That tends to usually be detrimental to whatever you’re growing.  It might choke off water flow or make it harder for those oysters or shellfish or whatever organism it is to get food out of the water.  So, farmers spend a lot of time and energy managing that biofouling.  What we hear is that the composition of the animals that they’re seeing is also changing, so that means they constantly need to be adapting to that.  Similarly, for animals that have a planktonic larval form and then settle – that’s what we call it, when a shellfish turns from maybe a swimming baby oyster into an oyster that’s now no longer moving in its adult form.  A lot of that settlement has changed, and probably a good example would be blue mussels.  This plays out in a couple ways.  One is that blue mussel farmers – most of them – use wild seed to start their crop.  So, they’re putting out ropes or other rough materials and waiting for blue mussels to settle or land and attach on those ropes.  The timing of that settlement has also changed, and the availability of that spat or those baby mussels.  There are farms in Maine now that have – I know of at least one farm that has actually gone straight – they’ve moved all together to purchasing baby mussels from a hatchery because they needed a reliable seed source, and they couldn’t get it anymore where they lived.  We work with another farm that’s trying to develop ways where they can grow out their own baby seed indoors and then plant it out on their farm.  For farmers who aren’t raising mussels but maybe are raising oysters in cages where baby mussels end up attaching to those cages, which is a huge nuisance if you’re not trying to grow baby mussels, the timing of that settlement is also changing.  Farmers that are used to maybe raising their cages out of the water at a certain time to avoid that settlement are now having to, every year, be observant and do the best that they can to mitigate that, in that context, what’s a nuisance/pest.  So, those are a few changes that come to mind and really just scratching the surface.

 

Q: [43:18] Yeah.  You’ve mentioned a few different effects of those, but I’m curious if there are any other ways that you really want to highlight.  That series of changes, I know, like climate change, biofouling, these differences in settlement, how else is that really impacting the work?

 

A: [43:32] I would say it’s – I don’t know.  The impact is that some of the farming techniques that people use, or the environments that they’re used to working in, or the local knowledge that they have from being in a place for a long time, some of those don’t apply anymore, or aren’t useful in the same way that used to be or need to be changed.  We are an organization that often gets called on to address things like that, and so we end up working hand in hand with folks often to try to solve those problems.  I guess I would say that it has created a lot of new opportunities for research and adaptation that maybe wouldn’t be there otherwise.  In some cases, they really are opportunities.  There are things that are now possible that weren’t before.  I guess the other thing I would say is that because of all the downstream effects, climate change being one example, I think it has a couple things.  One, I hear that often as a motivator from a lot of the sea farmers that we work with.  Everybody wants to do something to make the planet a little bit better.  Aquaculture can be a tool not only to provide a really sustainable protein that doesn’t require a lot of inputs or fresh water or things that you might need to farm on land but also is very often improving the health and the quality of the environment that you’re raising it in.  When I ask sea farmers why they’re doing what they’re doing, usually one of the first three things they’ll say is because they want to do their part to – we’re not going to turn back the clock on climate change by doing it, but it can, on a small, micro scale or a local scale, mitigate some of those impacts.  That impacts my work, too, because it’s a driving motivation for what might be getting people into it.  The other thing I would say is that because some of the downstream effects of climate change have impacted other fisheries, too, some folks are looking to aquaculture as a way to keep working on the water and have a bit more control over the resource that they’re managing.  It’s another tool in their toolbox to maybe diversify the income that they bring home from fishing.  It’s not a transition that works for everybody.  Fishing and farming are really different.  It’s definitely not a magic bullet.  But when you look at the people that are farming along the coast of Maine, we work with plenty of folks who have either transitioned into aquaculture or are adding it to the fisheries that they already practice.

 

Q: [46:47] Could you tell me about things that you’ve seen as responses, adaptations, ways that people have coped with these changes they’re seeing?

 

A: [46:55] Yeah, I can, and there’s so many, but I’ll try to give a few examples.  Speaking about Mook Sea Farm, where I worked – so, I was mentioning ocean acidification, and that’s something they keep really close tabs on.  The water that they use for their hatchery indoor seawater systems comes straight from the Damariscotta River.  They noticed several years ago – this was before me–  that the pH of the incoming water was getting to be pretty different from what it had used to be, and it was affecting the health of the larvae and the baby oysters that they were raising.  They started – and since then, other hatcheries – this is now standard practice – buffering the water in those tanks, so adding a food-safe compound just to keep the pH at a place where it’s best for oysters to grow.  Like I said, now that’s pretty standard.  That was a change that they felt like they had to make in order to keep doing what they were doing.  Other changes?  I mean, it really varies, and some of them are playing out as we speak.  I didn’t mention this before, but I think increased storm and precipitation is another change that we’ve seen play out on the coast of Maine and in many other places, and that has an impact on shellfish farmers, particularly because when there’s a lot of freshwater input into a salty body of water over a small amount of time, it can be a better place for things like vibrio to grow, which is a bacteria that’s harmful to humans when we eat it in too high of a concentration.  So, if there’s a lot of rain in a growing area in a small amount of time, the regulators will close that area to harvest.  Last summer, as an example, it rained almost all summer, all the time.  There was a lot more closures than there have been in the past.  For the average small farmer, there’s not that much you can do about that.  Most small shellfish farmers in Maine probably don’t have a place where they can hold oysters or be buffered from that kind of change.  We do hear about farmers who – I mean, farmers are always looking at the weather.  They’ve been doing that for forever, but they might be planning a harvest at a different time than they would usually do it because they know there’s a rainstorm coming or something like that.  Again, using Mook as an example, they have built, I think, in the last 10 years, maybe in the last 15 years, a recirculating aquaculture facility so that they have the ability to hold oysters indoors for weeks at a time, and that allows them to “harvest.”  I’m putting harvest in quotes because they’re doing it from inside their building even if there is a rainfall closure because they have the ability to just shut off the exchange water, so the water that would be coming in from the river, and instead just recirculate the water that’s in there already.  That protects the oysters from any of those harmful bacteria that there might be more of in the water, and they can still make sales.  That’s a good example because I think it shows there’s a varying ability of individual farmers or farms to respond to those changes.  But storms is another one.  I think we’re going to see more and more storms on the coast of Maine.  I mean, just this past winter, we had some really devastating storms.  I think the devastation was more felt on the wild fisheries side.  A lot of people lost access to maybe piers or wharves that were destroyed that they used to launch boats.  Most of the farmers that we work with did OK.  A lot of folks here in Maine sink their farms to the bottom in the winter, and that can help insulate from some of those storms if they’re happening during that time.  I’m learning a lot from our Sea Grant colleagues in other states, especially on the Gulf Coast, where hurricanes are a thing.  That’s an example of something – when I think about us having more intense storms in the future, I think we’re going to have a lot to learn on the aquaculture side about how to prepare for those and how to respond to them from our colleagues and our networks in places that are used to dealing with those much more intense storms.  So, those are a couple of examples that come to mind.

 

Q: [51:44] Sure.  Have you seen any attempts to adapt or cope with the biofouling or the green crabs?

 

A: [51:52] Yeah, green crabs, that’s a good example.  There are some really bright, creative, determined minds in that space.  Some examples of work we see around green crabs – and a lot of this I know about through our colleague, Gabby Bradt, who works at New Hampshire Sea Grant.  She does a ton of outreach and research around green crabs.  There’s a lot of people focused on figuring out how we can monetize that resource because that is a great way of getting something out of the ocean.  If it’s worth money, then that helps people be able to do that better.  Everything from processing those crabs into other things like fish sauce.  New Hampshire Sea Grant worked on a project where one of the outputs was whiskey that had green crab-something-or-other in it.  There’s a lot of creativity in that space.  I don’t think we’ve necessarily cracked the code, but there are some startup companies here in Maine that are working on stuff like that.  Could we crush them up and put them in fertilizer? It’s not a crab that people necessarily – that some people want to eat as it is, and there tends to be less meat in a single green crab than a crab from Chesapeake Bay of a different species.  That’s part of the challenge there.  Recently, I’ve heard from colleagues in Maine – I think this would be a really exciting area.  There are plenty of folks, actually, that are interested in eating crabs that way.  For example, the Cambodian community in Maine – that’s very similar to some foods that they are used to eating.  Part of it is reframing the question of where are the markets for these items or these fisheries that are kind of emerging, and how do we tap into those?  In that case, it would be a great fit of providing a really culturally appropriate and valued food source to people who are accustomed to preparing it and cooking it and love to eat it.  Yeah.  Those are a few examples around green crabs.  I forgot the rest of your question.

 

Q: [54:04] Or biofouling?  Any other adaptations you might be seeing?

 

A: [54:13] This is an informal adaptation, but farmers talk to each other a lot, so when people are seeing biofouling organisms that they don’t recognize, or they’re seeing them at a different time, they’re going to be reaching out to their neighbors that are farming in the same area.  “Hey, have you seen this?”  Or they’re going to be calling us or other – “Who’s seen this before?  Who knows it?  What’s the best way to get it off my stuff?”  A lot of that kind of farmer-to-farmer teaching that I was talking about.  We were also talking earlier about changes in times of settlement.  I’ll give an example of a project we haven’t funded yet, but we’d love to, is looking at new technology that might help us better be able to understand the phonology and the timing and the abundance of those settling organisms.  Looking at the blue mussel as an example, larval shellfish are really hard to tell apart.  If I was looking at a mussel or an oyster or a scallop under a microscope, when they’re in that early stage, they all look almost exactly the same.  But there’s some new technology we’d love to get our hands on called a bivalve larval imaging sensor, and that would allow us to take a water sample, take all the shellfish larvae that are in there, and the machine, once you train it with a set of images, it can speciate and count, so identify by species and count all the shellfish larvae that are in there.  Very cool.  We would love to get our hands on one of those.  That would be an example of a tool that would allow us to, more accurately and probably more rapidly, take a water sample from someone’s farm site and say, “No blue mussels there.”  Two weeks later, now we’re starting to see a lot more of them.  This is probably the time that they’re going to settle.  You should think about flipping your cages or keeping them out of the water longer or something like that.  This is us looking ahead into the future a little bit and thinking about what are other tools that might be available now that weren’t before that can help us get better information about the changes in the timing of what we’re seeing.

 

Q: [56:27] Cool.  You’ve listed so many different adaptations which are so useful for us.  I’m curious if you feel like those are really helping.

 

A: [56:37] Yeah, that’s a good question.  I hope so. (laughter) I think so.  I primarily work with sea farmers in Maine, and the best resource that we have often is like the brains of all the farmers.  People here have been farming for decades.  We have a lot of experience, best practices, and knowledge that gets passed on in the industry, and we also have a lot of new entrants.  That combination of experience and fresh perspectives makes a really fertile proving ground for resilience and creativity and new adaptations that come up, and they get shared out pretty rapidly.  Some of the examples we’ve talked about today, 10 years ago, were a new standard thing that somebody was trying and now have become best practice across the board.  I think that some of them are definitely working, and also, sometimes it feels like you’re constantly just trying to catch up to the newest change or the newest trend or the newest problem.  So, it’s a yes-and.

 

F: [58:04] You talked about quite a few different impacts that I think from what I captured mostly was about impacts on oyster or mussel farmers.  I wonder if you have any observations about environmental changes and impacts on seaweed farms.  I think that is probably most of the small farms, but I don’t know if they’re any scallop farms.

 

A: [58:21] There are scallop farms in Maine.

 

F: [58:24] I know there’s a couple less common – but yeah, just wondering if you have any observations through your work about those environmental changes and their impacts on some of those other species that are farmed.

 

A: [58:32] Yeah, there are a bunch of species I haven’t talked about today that we’re farming in Maine.  We have the only eel-raising facility in the country.  We do have people here farming scallops.  That part of the shellfish sector is relatively new.  There might be maybe four or five scallop farms in the state.  That’s a good example of a type of farming that’s very much – we’re still figuring out the best way to do it, and we’ve learned a lot from Japan and other countries and places where they do that really well.  Seaweed, for sure.  That’s another great example.  I was talking earlier about crops that are good for the ocean, and seaweed is a great example of that.  They sequester carbon and other compounds.  They can pull nutrients out of the water.  There are places where people are planting kelp not to eat it or to harvest it but just to remediate pollution or shore runoff or things like that.  In terms of adaptation, it’s a little harder to say because – it’s funny.  Maine leads the US in terms of landings of farmed kelp.  We are knocking it out of the park in comparison to other states, and still, that industry is less than ten years old. It’s been a huge, huge effort across the board by a lot of folks.  Kelp is a good example of one that a lot of kelp farmers are fishermen.  Kelp farming happens in the winter, which is a season that, for a lot of fishermen in Maine, they’re not bringing home as much, or maybe they’re not out on the water as much.  Kelp, in comparison to something like oysters, is pretty simple.  You seed it.  You leave it be.  It doesn’t need anything from you other than tending your lines, making sure it doesn’t get tangled or fouled up, and then you come back and harvest it, and that’s it.  One thing I think about when I think about kelp is it’s a cold-water species.  That’s why we grow it in the winter and every year, at harvest season, which tends to be late April/early May – harvest season just wrapped up last week in Maine.  It’s always you want it to grow as long as possible, but once the water starts reaching a certain temperature, stuff is going to biofoul your crops.  So, things are going to settle on there – algae, snails, things that nobody wants to eat.  When I look ahead 10, 20 years from now, I imagine we’re going to see that harvest season probably move earlier in the year as temperatures get warmer.  That’s something that farmers are going to be thinking about and planning for.  Maybe the solution is just to plant a little bit earlier.  Maybe it’s going to drive changes in farm structure so people can put more yield on the same amount of space, things like that.

 

Q: [1:01:51] I’m curious, with all of these different adaptations, what do you think has made it possible for farmers to make them – you mentioned relationships, but some other words we have that you could draw on – resources, knowledge, training, organizations, Sea Grant probably.

 

A: [1:02:06] Yeah.  Sea Grant is just one example of – we have an incredible network of support organizations and individuals, I would say, in the marine space, in general in Maine, but certainly in aquaculture and fisheries.  A colleague of mine recently shared with me an infographic of kind of all the different organizations of support and the niches they fill, and it’s mind-boggling.  It’s amazing to be a part of that.  So, Sea Grant is one example.  We work really closely with groups like the Maine Aquaculture Association.  That’s a trade association that represents sea farmers.  The Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center.  They do research, a lot of education, and workforce development around aquaculture.  We have the Aquaculture Research Institute at the University of Maine and a lot of faculty and students that are studying aquaculture or doing applied research.  So, those are all examples.  Then, on the business side, we have a really, really robust small business, startup entrepreneurship support system in Maine, which is also really important.  Ultimately, sea farming is a business.  People are trying to make a living, and having support on the financial side is going to make for a more resilient business network when these challenges do come up.  Farmers are better prepared to absorb a loss or damage from a storm, a reduction in their harvest or their yield for that season, unexpected mortality, or any of those kinds of things that come along.  That’s sort of the nature of farming or getting your living from a wild resource.  They’re better able to handle all those things when they have a stronger financial standing.  So, we have a lot of organizations in the state that really help with that. I think that farmer-to-farmer or harvester-to-harvester cross-pollination and teaching is also really important.  I think education is a really important part of it, too.  We all want to be doing a better job here in Maine of teaching young people about fisheries and aquaculture and how to make a living on the water.  I work with a lot of incredibly passionate educators and teachers who are trying to get those topics into the classroom, show people that there are lots of different skills that are needed in the industry.  You don’t have to be a fisherman or a farmer.  You could be working in accounting, HR, marketing, or sales for any of these marine resource companies.  I’m mentioning that because I feel like cultivating the next generation that’s going to inherit these fisheries sea farming, and marine resource industries is also a long game of building resilience into the system, too.

 

Q: [1:05:23] Absolutely.  I’m curious.  Do you feel like most farmers are able to make the adaptations they want to?

 

A: [1:05:37] That’s a good question.  I guess I’m not sure if I can answer.  We support farmers often in trying to find solutions that work for them, and farmers, harvesters, – everyone is working with limited resources and a finite amount of hours in the day.  I don’t know.  I see a lot of success in that space.  I think if you ask the average farmer, “Are you doing everything that you want to be doing, or do you want to be doing more,” they’re going to say more.  I think that’s what it’s like to be a farmer or to be a harvester.  You’re always chasing the ball and trying to plan as best you can for what’s next.  Part of the challenge on the farming side, as opposed to maybe the fishing side, is a lot of times, you’re not making money for several years.  It might take you – here in Maine right now, it can take a few years to get a lease.  That would be to get your application through the state process for leasing the area that you want to farm in.  That can take a little bit of time.  Then you’re going to plant your crop.  Seaweed, you plant it in the fall, you harvest it in the spring.  That’s a pretty quick return on your investment, but it’s a pretty low-value crop.  Something like shellfish is going to be a higher value crop, but it’s going to take a year and a half on the fast end, maybe three years in a colder place to grow.  So, if you’re starting a business, you need to be ready to not be making any money off of it for several years.  That’s part of the math, I think, in the sustainability and the resilience piece, too, for a lot of small startup farmers.

 

Q: [1:07:47] Can you think of any adaptations or other future strategies that you think a lot of people really want to make but can’t or think are going to happen soon?

 

A: [1:08:04] I don’t know.  Yeah, I guess I can.  One example that comes to mind that’s playing out right now is – I was speaking earlier about vibrio.  That has always been something that state regulators do a really good job of watching out for the consumer and making sure that the oysters that we eat are safe.  A lot of that regulation in Maine is actually – it came from industry.  Using the Damariscotta River as an example, basically, farmers got together and said, “Hey, we’re seeing more of this.  We’re worried about it.  We want to institute some rules for ourselves to make sure that the product is staying cool, and we’re minimizing the chances that anyone would get sick from this, from vibrio.”  Until this year, those controls, which include – they’re in place from maybe June to October of each year, so the warmest months when this would be the most risk, and they include things like getting your product – you have a certain amount of time to get your product out of the water and to the dealer, or it needs to be on ice.  You need to get your product down to temperature within a certain amount of time.  You need to shade your product when you’re harvesting it.  These are all protective measures that reduce the risk of anything bad happening to the consumer on the far end.  This year, for the first time, those control measures are being implemented statewide.  That’s because warming water being a contributing factor, the Department of Marine Resources is trying to be proactive about what they see as an increased risk of vibrio, not just in those growing areas that were previously regulated, but anywhere in the state.  That’s a new reality for everyone who was outside those growing areas where that already existed, and that’s a lot of conversation and back and forth and feedback between regulators and seed farmers about how those are going to play out.  It is pushing farmers to think about changes that they might need to make.  One example I’ll give that’s come up right now, as it’s written, has to do with home sales.  Under the vibrio control measures, people won’t be able to sell out of their homes in certain cases anymore, and that’s something that some shellfish farmers do.  That’s pushing some folks to say, OK, then what do I need to do to maybe I’m building a small dealer space on my property, or maybe I need to change something about the way that I’m distributing my product, or maybe that previous sales channel that I had isn’t open to me in the same way anymore.  That’s a long-winded downstream impact of how an environmental change then affects the regulation that’s needed, then affects the way that a farmer might do business or handle their product.  I imagine that’s going to push other changes.  Down to a very basic example, there’s a lot more people this summer who are going to be thinking about – I need a lot of ice, and I need it all the time, and there’s not a ton of industrial ice makers on the coast of Maine.  Access to ice sounds so simple, but it’s really important, and it’s now more a part of the business landscape for people than it might have been before.  That’s an example of something that working waterfront, in general, might need to adapt to.  We might need to get more ice makers.  We might need to think about how to support people in purchasing them together and sharing equipment, all that kind of stuff.

 

Q: [1:12:10] Yeah, absolutely.  Thank you.  As you look towards the future, what would you say is your biggest concern for Maine’s marine environment?

 

A: [1:12:29] I don’t know.  I guess climate change.  It sounds so simple, but the environmental changes that are coming from it are really serious.  They’re changing the way that people do business and make a living, and in some cases, taking tools out of the toolbox that people used to have before.  Those environmental changes are also driving a lot of physical and cultural changes, and the storms that we had this past winter are a great example.  It’s hard to track because we don’t have a ton of data about this, but some estimates I’ve heard are that we lost as much as 60% of our working waterfront infrastructure, and that means things like docks and piers and wharves, and that’s devastating for the fishery and for farmers and everyone who relies on that infrastructure.  So, there’s that piece, the physical devastation piece, that I worry about.  In Maine, over the last decades, we’ve seen plenty of fisheries disappear, and fishermen are incredibly resilient.  They’re incredibly bright.  They’re really good at handling things that come up, and when the resource disappears or isn’t harvestable anymore, it’s hard to find a way around that or through that.  That’s what I would say is my biggest fear.  When I talk to young people, I mean people of all ages, but especially young people, I hear that reflected a lot.

 

Q: [1:14:13] Yeah.  Going off of that last thread, I’m going to rephrase this question, thinking about Sea Grant and your position on advocacy.  What do you think a lot of people want to tell policymakers their biggest priority should be when they think about the future and climate change?

 

A: [1:14:28] Yeah, this is one of those questions I can’t really answer – anything policy-related, so I’ll pass on that one.

 

Q: [1:14:34] Great.  Have you participated, or farmers you know – have they participated in any climate resilience or adaptation training for aquaculture?

 

A: [1:14:48] That’s a good question.  I’m not sure that I know of any trainings that are climate-specific.  I think climate is something we should be talking about more in our training programs.  Right now, it’s a topic that comes up with certain curriculum pieces, but we don’t have a broad look at it.  I think that would be really useful.  There’s definitely some organizing around climate.  I would say – I think it’s called – the Shellfish Growers Climate Coalition would be a good example of farmers that are coming together to organize around climate issues and advocate for themselves on that front.  But as far as climate training that is specific to fisheries and aquaculture, I’m not familiar with those.

 

Q: [1:15:42] Do you think there are particular strategies that aquaculturists would really like to see that would help them build resilience against climate?

 

A: [1:15:53] Yeah, that’s a good question.  Going back to the vibrio example, there are a lot of shellfish growers this summer in Maine who are going to be learning, as they go about how to comply with those regulations.  The industry as a whole is totally –people understand why those exist.  They are really invested in delivering a really safe and quality product to their consumers, and it is still going to be a new challenge to learn how to do that.  Can you say the question one more time?

 

Q: [1:16:42] Sure.  I’m curious if there are strategies, trainings, anything like that that you think people in the industry would really like to see with reference to resilience and climate.

 

A: [1:16:58] I don’t know.  I would say – I think the needs that I hear are just around, “How do I deal with this?  What do I do when this happens?  What do I need to be thinking about down the road?”  Going back to storms for a minute, I feel this winter that we were fortunate – sea farmers.  There was some gear loss.  There was some damage to farms, but it could have been a lot worse.  I think that’s an example of something where, 10 years from now, I won’t be surprised if we are spending more time and energy training people on how to rapidly prepare for an oncoming storm.  Some gear is better suited to sinking, for example, than others.  Some of these changes might drive other changes in the actual stuff that people are using to farm.  Farming is also really place based, and so one of the most important decisions you make as a sea farmer is picking the place you’re going to be doing your farming.  I don’t know of any examples of this yet, but certainly, it’s possible that a place that used to be really good for growing kelp or shellfish 20 years ago won’t be good 10 years from now.  That’s going to be another reality for farmers.  Something else that’s coming to mind, I would say, as something that we see more and more farmers doing is just collecting environmental data at their sites.  They’re tracking temperature or pH or salinity, and alongside that, we see – I’ve talked to two or three folks this year who are building startups around buoys or environmental monitoring tools or sensors specifically for aquaculture farms.  That’s kind of a new niche.  So, those are requests we get from farmers sometimes, too, of, “Hey, I feel like I need to know more about this environmental parameter.  I’m seeing it change at my site, and I want to have more information about it.  What’s the best way for me to do that?”  So, better monitoring and sensing tools would be a good example.

 

Q: [1:19:31] Are there any changes you’re seeing that are non-environmental that are really impacting aquaculture in Maine?

 

A: [1:19:37] Totally.  Definitely.  This sounds funny to say, but affordable housing is one that’s affecting all of us everywhere, but certainly on the coast of Maine.  We had a lot of we had an influx of new residents during COVID, and part of that drove a huge increase in the price of home sales and rent, so it’s increasingly harder to find a place to live on the coast of Maine, and that makes it harder for farmers to source labor.  When I worked at Mook Sea Farm, I worked with plenty of folks who – you had to live within an hour because we have an on-call system.  If there was an alarm or an issue in the hatchery, there was a rotating list, and you might get a phone call.  You need to be able to respond within an hour, but we had a bunch of staff members who lived right on that one-hour line, and that’s a long haul.  Not everybody can or wants to be driving that far to work.  We collaborate with and support plenty of apprenticeship, internship, or externship programs that are designed to kind of expose people to careers in aquaculture, and one of their biggest challenges is finding a place to house their intern for that summer or their farm seasonal laborer.  That’s a big one that comes to mind.  As the population of Maine changes, which it will continue to do forever, there’s a continual effort to help people understand the practices, the cultural heritage, and the realities of fishing and sea farming.  I think that that’s also a long-haul change.  It goes back to that social license piece of how do you help people understand what it is, the value that it brings, the challenges that it brings, and the benefits that it has.  Because the leasing process for a farm site in Maine allows for public input as it should.  It’s shared water.  It’s part of the public resource.  We sometimes see tension in that space.  You might want to put a farm somewhere, and somebody else might not think that that’s a good idea, or they might not want to look at it from where they live on the shore. Those are social dynamics that play out in the aquaculture space when it comes to the leasing process and then having a farm in that place thereafter.  So, yeah, I think those social factors affect all of us, and they play out in specific ways when it comes to making a living on the water.

 

Q: [1:22:49] Are you seeing any ways that people are trying to adapt to those?

 

A: [1:22:53] Definitely.  Well, the housing one – that’s a tough nut.  We’re all trying to crack that, for sure.  I think that in that specific case, on the sea farming side, it’s everything from support organizations trying to provide more funding to account for that reality with their interns to my neighbor farmers got a cousin who’s got a couch, and that’s what’s going to make this employment situation work for the summer, and everything in between.  On the social dynamic side, that sometimes tension, conflict, perceived conflict, or need for more information and communication drives organizations like Sea Grant to say, “How can we engage?  How can we better educate people about this process?”  In some cases, it has driven changes in the process itself, and steps have been added in to allow for more public input or more communication between people applying for a lease and people who might live in the area.  Definitely, I see, across the board, a lot of work by farmers to just get engaged in their communities, to get to know their neighbors, to learn who’s using the waters in their area, where the fishing grounds are, to build that social license and that trust with the people that are in that community.  That can look like everything from bringing some oysters to your neighbor who sees your farm site all the time to coaching a local soccer team or having a table at a community event to share information about your farm and everything in between.  There are lots of ways to do that community engagement, and it’s a really important part of the puzzle because aquaculture happens in the public space often and in the public eye, and for most people, it’s foreign.  It’s something that they’re not familiar with and that they don’t know.  Most of the farmers that we work with feel a responsibility to try and bridge that gap as much as they can.  That’s a win-win for everybody when they’re able to do that.  Yeah, absolutely.

 

Q: [1:25:24] Can you talk about any positive change or opportunity you’ve seen?

 

A: [1:25:31] Sure.  Just in general, in aquaculture?

 

Q: [1:25:34] Yeah.

 

A: [1:25:36] Sure.  I mean, it’s hard to know where to start.  So much innovation on the small scale of how do we farm this thing better or develop this new market?  Kelp is a great example there because that’s a relatively new sector in Maine.  In the last 10 years, it’s grown tremendously, and that’s great.  We need to grow more kelp, but also, there’s a need to develop markets to make people want to eat it.  There’s so much interesting stuff happening in the seaweed space, from developing new products or ways of eating it – things that aren’t edible – we’re seeing a lot of startups and interest in Maine in things like making bioplastics out of kelp, putting it into cosmetic products or pharmaceuticals.  So, the types of resources and benefits that we can create from the things that we’re growing, I think, has expanded a tremendous amount.  Then, on another end of the spectrum, we’re growing things in Maine that we didn’t used to be growing.  Because I get to do a little work on the research side, I get to see some of that stuff as it’s just starting.  There’s a graduate student here who, part of his work, is trying to figure out, can we farm razor clams?  That’s not something that’s ever been done in Maine before.  In other places, people eat them.  It would be great to have maybe a reliable source that didn’t take away from the wild population, if we could do that.  I think my favorite – what gets me most excited is solutions or opportunities that benefit, for example, both farmers and wild harvesters, and scallops is a good example because both farmers and wild harvesters right now depend on wild seed. We’re working on trying to figure out how to grow scallops in a hatchery setting, but it is tough.  They’re very needy.  They have a really long larval period.  So, until we crack that nut, everyone uses wild seed, and I’ve heard scallop farmers share about how they feel that their farms are adding more reproductive material back into the ecosystem, and that’s a boon for the wild fishery.  There’s so much demand that – farm scallops, wild scallops – people want them both.  They’re both a delicious product that you can feel good about buying.  A bunch of my colleagues just got back from an exchange trip to France, where they were trying to learn more about the scallop fishery there.  There’s plenty of things we can do for scallops as an example that benefit people across the spectrum who interact with that resource.  That kind of collaboration in the seafood space is really exciting.  We all know getting people together who come from different places usually ends up with a better solution, and maybe not to the problems that we thought we were going to be solving in the first place.

 

Q: [1:29:18] Yeah.  As you look towards the future, what is your hopeful vision for the future of Maine’s fisheries and aquaculture?

 

A: [1:29:28] I hope and I think that people are going to continue to understand and value the cultural piece of it, the heritage of it, the way of life.  I think across the board, part of the reason that sea farmers and fishermen do what they do is because they care about the resource that they’re working with.  They want to be responsible stewards.  They love working on the water, and it’s such a special thing about living here.  That makes me hopeful.  I think just seeing people coming to Maine wanting to be a part of this, feeling like it’s a way to grow food, for example, that they can feel good about, feed their community in a way that’s good for the planet – that makes me hopeful because Maine isn’t the most diverse place, and we need young people and people of different backgrounds and people with new ideas that are going to come here and help us figure out how we’re going to face whatever’s happening next.  When I meet people who moved here from California to work on an oyster farm, that makes me hopeful because that tells me we’re doing something right, and if people can see themselves in the work, then it’s going to make the industry stronger and more resilient and a more welcoming place for people that might want to be a part of it.

 

Q: [1:31:22] Have you noticed any changes in women’s presence/status/participation over time?

 

A: [1:31:30] It’s a great question.  The first thing I’ll say is we don’t have enough data about this.  I get asked all the time, “How many women farmers are there in Maine?”  We don’t have a super accurate way of answering that question right now.  There are many, and there are, from my perspective, increasingly more.  The workshop series we were talking about earlier, I think, is an indication that there’s a lot of interest in support for that group.  I think when you look at farm ownership and lease holding across the board, it’s still primarily very male-dominated.  The fact that you can enter as a small farmer and start on a small scale is a good thing and is helpful.  But when it comes to accessing capital, making sales, interactions in the community, certainly we hear from women anecdotally and in research that those can still be challenging spaces.  I think that we’re seeing more and more women and non-binary folks and people from underrepresented groups interested in it, and that’s a cycle that helps feed itself.  We have a lot of leadership positions in aquaculture that are held by women in the state, so heads of research organizations, large companies, regulatory leadership.  A lot of my mentors and people that I look up to are women and men, of course, but it helps to have representation in those roles because we know that globally and, in general, women hold about 50% of roles in the fisheries space, and they tend to be represented more in the processing/marketing roles, and less so when it comes to things like owning the business, being the one doing the harvesting.  I think we’re seeing more representation in that space in Maine, and it feels to me that it’s picking up momentum.

 

Q: [1:34:01] Great.  Is there anything else you want to share before we conclude the interview?

 

A: [1:34:08] I don’t think so.  My brain’s out of ideas.

 

Q: [1:34:11] Hillary, do you have any questions before we close?

 

F: [1:34:14] Just one small one that is in the many things you told us about these impacts – and I just wanted to ask a follow-up about the impacts of green crabs, I guess, particularly on oyster or mussel farmers since they’re prey of the green crabs.  I was just wondering if you had any more to say about what those impacts are.  Is it that they’re getting into the cages and eating them?

 

A: [1:34:38] Yeah, that’s a good question.  So, one example might be for folks who do what we call bottom culture – so, they’re spreading out their oyster seed on the bottom of their lease rather than having it in a floating cage or some other structure.  It’s a totally different way of farming.  The oysters need less handling and stuff from you.  You generally plant them out and then come and get them two years later or maybe three years later.  You also accept that you’re going to lose a much higher percentage of that crop than if you were holding them all in a contained place and checking them all the time.  Those oysters, for example, are subject to predation, and it is kind of mind-boggling the size oyster that a green crab can take on and get inside of.  So, that’s an impact.  Farmers take care to plant out seed that’s big enough that they feel like it has a good chance of surviving that type of predation.  But I’ve seen some pretty bone-chilling videos of green crabs eating two-inch oysters.  That surprised me.  So, predation would be one way that it plays out.  I would say this is something we know less about, but when mussels or oysters are in that – so, for mussels, for example, where we’re using wild seed, green crabs may also be eating some of that wild seed or eating them when they’re in larval form, and that affects how much is left for farmers to collect and then grow out.  Those would be a couple examples.

 

F: [1:36:18] How much (inaudible) bottom culture, much less than –?

 

A: [1:36:26] That’s a good question.  I don’t know what the percent breakdown is.  I would say more farmers are doing top culture in Maine than bottom culture, but some farmers do both, and that’s another resiliency piece that people build in if they have multiple sites.  They might have one site that’s really good for this type and one site that’s really good for this type.  That allows them, in some cases, to market a couple of different products: top-grown/bottom-grown.  Other farmers do one or the other, and that’s how they stick to it.  I don’t know what the exact breakdown is, but people are definitely doing it.

 

F: [1:37:05] Thank you.

 

Q: [1:37:06] Great.  Then, I will go ahead and turn this off.

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