Q: [0:00] We like to get started with how do you like to introduce yourself.

A: [0:05] I introduce myself as Eden.  I use she/they pronouns.  Prefer they, but I will respond to she.  That’s kind of it.  It’s usually just my name.  I don’t know what else.  I live in Portland.  I’ve been in Maine my whole life.  I’ve been at Bangs Island Mussels for a little over three years now, and at this point, I am the land manager.  So, kind of exciting.  I don’t know.

Q: [0:47] Great.  We’ll move into all of those different things soon.  What year were you born?

A: [0:52] 1998.

Q: [0:54] Can you tell me a little bit about where you grew up?

A: [0:57] My family moved around a lot, but I went to school in Cape Elizabeth, and then my family lived partially there, and then I spent a lot of my other childhood in Gray/New Gloucester, so mostly Southern Maine.

Q: [1:17] Can you tell me a little bit about your parents, what they did when you were growing up or now?

A: [1:21] They had my brother and I when we were pretty young, so they were – my mom was a waitress, and my dad was in construction.  They ended up getting divorced, but then my dad and his new wife started a business doing horticulture for the most part.  So, they do a lot of plant stuff, but in commercial offices, and that is – it’s been going for like 15 years or so, and now my dad is a commercial trucker.  So, a lot of movement.

Q: [2:02] You mentioned a brother.  Can you tell me a little bit about your siblings?

A: [2:05] I have two.  I have one younger brother that is 24 – Caleb.  He’s a delight.  Then my other brother is Benjamin, and he is 13, so quite a bit younger, but they’re great.  My brother, the older of the two, Caleb, he’s moving down from Bath next week to live in the Scarborough area, so it’ll be nice to have him a lot closer.  They’re really fun.  They’re really cool.  They’re good kids.

Q: [2:40] What does Caleb do?

A: [2:42] He’s autistic, so he has been trying out different careers and stuff, trying to find a comfy place.  He’s felt very secure at the Walmart warehouse.  He’s been doing night stocking.  He’s been doing that for a while, and he really enjoys it.

Q: [3:03] Do you have any history of fishing or aquaculture in your family at all?

A: [3:08] Not entirely.  A lot of passive fishing.  My dad’s family has done a lot of just going out fishing on the weekends kind of thing.  That was a lot of what we did growing up.  Then, my mom’s side of the family – they’re centered around Boothbay Harbor area.  They are a fairly long line of shipbuilders.  They had founded – it was Stevens and Goudy at one point.  Now it’s Washburn and Goudy, but they were building boats for a wicked long time.  So, not necessarily fishing but trying to help.  But a little bit.

Q: [3:55] Yeah.  Can you talk a little bit more about that?  If that was something you experienced a lot in your childhood?

A: [3:59] Yeah, not too, too much.  My grandfather – well, I can’t say that.  I’ve been on the water my whole life, but my grandfather – he’s been building boats since he was fresh out of high school.  It was just something – he knew that that was what he wanted to do.  We spent a lot of time around their house.  The property has a couple of boats that are half sunk into the ground and a couple that are like project things that have been projects for 20 years.  It’s always just kind of been a very – we’re on the water all the time.  My grandfather’s side of the family has a cabin on Heron Island, which is just off of Rutherford Island/Boothbay Harbor area.  That’s been in his family since 1911.  That we go to every year.  They’re the caretakers.  I’ve spent most of my childhood out on the water helping them, lifting things, replacing shingles, doing weird house tasks.  A lot of just handiwork stuff, but it’s really fun.

Q: [5:19] Can you tell me about any really impactful memories from your childhood of being on the water?

A: [5:22] I don’t know of anything that’s too particular, so much as I just remember it was always a very happy place for me.  I think I always enjoyed being either on the water or swimming.  I think, having spent so much of my childhood on the ocean, there’s a part of me that will always just feel at home.  There were a couple times that were – you’re out, and the water’s crazy choppy or something, and you’re a child, and you’re like, “I don’t know.  I’m not in control, but somebody else might be.”  But there was a couple times that made me recognize that outside of the romanticized idea of the beach and sailing and stuff, there are elements to the water where you have to be careful.  I think that that more so stuck with me than I think – I mean, the enjoyment always does, but that was a – we got to be thinking about things outside of what’s presented, I guess.  Yeah, I think that was probably most of it.

Q: [6:45] Can you describe your educational background?

A: [6:48] I went to Cape for elementary, middle, and high school.  I did not go to college.  Wanted to, but it didn’t work out that way.  I did a couple of years on and off at SMCC, so community college classes, just trying to get a couple things taken care of if I ever wanted to transfer.  But in that time, I had switched up whatever career path I was following a few times.  I did a lot of medical assisting for a couple years, and then a couple of years, I did criminal justice.  It was a little all over the place.  I stopped that just before COVID, and I have worked here since COVID, so not too, too much, but I’m hoping to get back into it whenever I can find the time.

Q: [7:48] Great.  Thank you.  And then just a few more demographic questions before we sort of transition.  Are you married?

A: [7:52] No.

Q: [7:53] Do you have any children?

A: [7:54] No.  I have a cat.  He’s basically my child. (laughter)

Q: [7:58] That’s a child, for sure.  Sort of transitioning to your role in the sector, how would you describe your role in the fishing and/or aquaculture sector in Maine?

A: [8:08] Mostly production management, I would say.  So the farm that we work on – mussels, most part.  We also do kelp.  I am in the mussel part almost entirely.  We are harvesters and distributors.  That means that we harvest, and then we also ship to customers.  I do the shipping, packaging of things.  The room that I’m in, it’s a lot of big machinery.  So it’s just a lot of keeping track of machines, keeping track of numbers, that kind of thing.  Yeah.

Q: [8:55] How did you get into this work?

A: [8:59] It was a little serendipitous.  I was working for a bank that offers – there’s a competition that they do for local small businesses that have a sustainability drive, and it’s a grant competition.  One year, I had gone just to watch because I was curious.  Matt, the owner, was presenting that year, and I remember – sweet job – and two or three years – and I’m like – I got to try it.  It worked out, and I started part-time on the production team, and now I’m the manager of it.  It was definitely one of those – it gave me a direction to go down.  I’m really fortunate that it worked out that way.

Q: [9:47] Can you remind me how many years you have been working here?

A: [9:51] Three.  It was three in March.  Yeah, it’s been very fun.  It’s been very fun the whole time.

Q: [9:58] Did you have a moment that hooked you or where you knew, “Oh, I want to keep doing this?”

A: [10:03] As soon as I realized I didn’t have to do any customer service, it was an absolute game changer.  Growing up, I had wanted to be a marine biologist, which takes a lot of extra steps, but I was always told no, there’s not enough money in that field.  It worked out that I got this job.  I felt like, “Oh, I can just control my circumstances.  I don’t have to worry about interacting with too much of the public.”  I did a lot of service work up until this point, and it was really nice not to. (laughter)

Q: [10:42] Can you describe for me what an average day might look like for you here?

A: [10:47] It’s a little split up during the week.  Right now, we’re back at our processing and harvesting time.  Mondays and Wednesdays is when we do our harvest.  We harvest during the day.  Then we process at night.  I’ll come in on those days at noon.  We get all of our boxes set up for shipping – tags, labels, everything set up.  A lot of it is dependent on information that they have at the water.  We keep track of this line off of this raft – put here.  It’s making sure that that’s all coordinated.  Then we process from 1:00 to 11:00, maybe midnight sometimes.  We’re getting out at 10:00 right now, which is really nice.  That’s cleaning the mussels, running the machines, packing up orders, getting all that squared away, and sending out invoices to customers – stuff like that.

Then on the off days like today, restocking any of the bags I used last night, tidying things up, and then a lot of it is paperwork, a lot of making sure that all of our mussels are tracked because we had a – first time ever, but we had a recall earlier this week or last week rather, and we were able to get back everything that we had sent out.  It was recalled after we had packed and shipped everything, which was stressful, but we were able to get back everything except for four pounds.  I know where those four pounds were sold from, so at that point, it’s up to them to figure it out.  We were able to get that coordinated so quickly because a lot of my off time is spent plugging in information.  I enjoy doing that.  That’s most of my week.  Then just housekeeping tasks, making sure that machines are lubed up and running properly.  We’ve done a couple of major overhauls on our machines this year.  So, keeping things running smoothly.

Q: [13:11] Yeah.  You mentioned this season.  Can you describe a little for me, maybe the way your work varies by season?

A: [13:17] Yeah.  In theory, mussels are year-round.  Right now, April, May, June of every year, there’s a red tide bloom.  I found out recently that Casco Bay has a higher probability of being impacted by red tide than most of the rest of the coast.  I’m not exactly sure why, but something that hits us pretty regularly.  We didn’t have it last year.  The year before, we did.  It’s hard to predict, but that will close us down.  I think the year before last we were closed for two and a half months, and then last year we weren’t closed at all.  It depends on – we do weekly or biweekly testing.  No.  Two tests a week – that’s the word – to make sure that toxicity levels are where they should not be.

Then, there’s also certain times of the year where in the colder seasons, so fall through – usually October to April, when there’s more storms, the seas are a bit more chaotic.  Mussels will put more of their energy towards their byssal threads, which are what keeps them secured to things, than they will to their shell growth or their body growth.  A lot of the stuff that we get in that time will be a bit smaller, higher breakage, doesn’t grow as quickly.  Sometimes, if we’re getting down to a point where nothing really looks ready, we’ll close for a couple weeks just to let things pop back up.  We did that last month, I believe.  We just got back recently.  It depends on the year, but you can usually bet that beginning of summer and maybe the last month of the year, we might take some time off.  But otherwise, it is year-round. (laughter)

Q: [15:31] Can you describe to me from the very beginning of the process, the tiniest mussel, all the way through it being shipped out?

A: [15:40] Yes, for the most part.  I’m still trying to figure out what the water crew does out there other than mess around. (laughter) We will either seed our mussels or we catch them natural set.  We have more success with the natural set.  They grow on large rafts.  We have large rafts set up throughout the bay, a couple of different locations, and then each one has two to six rafts at each one, and the rafts are 150 feet long on each one of them – tied on is a 37-foot piece of – it’s a rope that – it’s kind of like loose fiber so that there’s more surface area for mussels to settle on to.  That’s where they grow.

Either we will set those lines bare, and then we can predict throughout the year when there’s spawning events, so we can anticipate, like, “Oh, if we set them this week, they’ll probably set for the month.”  Or if we are seeding as we’re harvesting mussels, we’ll grade out the small stuff that isn’t up to market size, and then we’ll take that and send it through a machine that – I describe it as sausage maker.  It’s a cotton sock that we put over a funnel, essentially, and then just funnel mussels through into the sock, and then that will degrade in the water, but at that point, the mussels will have clung onto the line that we’ve strung through it.

Those lines set differently if they’re natural or if they’re seeded, so I prefer the natural lines.  They do a better job at getting themselves oriented in a consistent way, whereas the seeded ones have a tendency to bunch up here, bunch up there.  I don’t know how they managed to do it, but mussels have a way of knowing how to set themselves up for success.  I enjoy that.

The water crew will go out and those lines they’ll haul.  They have a smaller version of the machines in my room on the boat, so they run it through a de-clumping machine that breaks apart the large clumps.  Then there’s a grading table that they have so they can get out most of that seed.  Then, they load it into big bins called Xactics.  We’ll usually do eight to 10 of those a night.  Each one can hold up to 700 to 1100 pounds or so, and that’s raw product.

So, they’ll bring that back here.  They get back around noon or 1:00, and then that’s when my team comes in, and we’ll bring everything into our processing room, and it goes through a horseshoe of machines, but it will be dumped into one hopper.  It goes up through there, and then it goes into a de-clumping unit that has a built-in grater.  It’s almost like a jaw, essentially.  And the open part of the jaw is where mussels fall into.  In the jaw are rotating brushes with harder plastic spikes, essentially.  Those will cling to the bits of the byssal thread and tear that from itself so that they’re easier to – we don’t want them clumped up.

Those will fall into the grading unit.  We’ll get all that seed out.  They go back up into another machine that’s our debysser.  We have very technical terms.  That is set up.  It’s also a series of rotating bars and that pulls the byss out.  They get graded again to get all of the final seed out, and then they go onto our inspection table, and that’s where we have a team of four people on a conveyor belt with lights and water and everything set up, and they’ll hand inspect the mussels from there.  The machines do a really good job of getting everything cleaned and graded out to size, but we’ll have people on to pull out anything broken or hairline fractures on it.  It’s an opportunity for bacteria to get in, so making sure that everything is a mussel that you would want on your plate.  We get some interesting stuff on there, so making sure that no stray anemones make their way into a bag.

Then, stuff gets bagged up.  We do two-pound bags and 10-pound bags, and then we tag them, pack them into either shipping containers or different vessels for our local customers.  We’ll ice them, pack them up, and then the following morning, they get sent down to Araho, which is a distribution center in Boston.  From there, they make their way.  It’s quite the journey.  We do a lot up and down the East Coast, but we do have quite a few like Mid and West Coast customers.  One of the recall customers – or from the recall the other day – bags had been already sent to a restaurant in Vegas, so they had to send those back.  I didn’t realize they had somebody in Vegas who ate our stuff.  So, that was kind of cool.

Q: [21:50] What are the edges of your range?

A: [21:53] I’m still trying to figure it out because it mostly – we distribute to mostly – we distribute to distributors, I guess.  A lot of our customers are fish shops who have their own clientele.  We will have a large company based out of Colorado, but they will get 600 pounds twice a week, and from there, they’ll split it up between any of the restaurants in their area or the shops and stuff.  I’m still trying to figure out if the large distribution is in Colorado, where outside of Colorado are they going?  Do they go past it?  I don’t know.  I think beyond finding out about Vegas, which was really cool, we had a customer in Idaho, a lot of people in Florida, and most of the southern coast.  But a little ways.

Q: [23:04] How long does it take a mussel to get to the point where it can be processed and shipped out?

A: [23:11] Ideally, from when it gets seeded down – I want to say a year and a half, two years or so from spawn.  We also have a remote settlement facility where we take microscopic spawn and attach it, in theory, to lines that will set out.  That’s something that we’ve been trialing a bit these past couple years with a pretty OK success rate.  From there, it’s about two years or so.  If we’re doing natural set, it’s the same situation where it’s spawn.  That’s also about two years.  The seeding is a bit of a shortcut because, at that point, they’re already – you can see them at that point.  I think if we seed things down, we can expect to have it in six months, maybe a year, depending on the size.  But a lot of the stuff that we’re harvesting now is stuff that we had set in the end of 2022.  A lot of it is preparing in advance for – are we going to have – if we’re seeding now, we’re anticipating having that be for maybe 2026, so longevity, ideally.

Q: [24:36] Do you have a sense of scale of the company?

A: [24:42] Sort of.

Q: [24:44] How much product do you move in a year?

A: [24:49] A lot. (laughter) I actually just did a lot of these numbers the other day because I was interested.  The year, we will do two harvests a week and two harvests a week, each one is five to 7000 pounds.  We can safely do 12 to 14,000 pounds a week.  If everything works out and we don’t have red tide, that would be every week of the year.  It’s not always the case.  I would say, if we’re doing comfortable numbers, probably 50 maybe – at least 50,000 pounds a year, I would say.  I don’t have it off the top of my head, but we had figured out – we have a way of figuring out exactly how many individual mussels we process in a year because we count how many mussels there are per pound, and we keep track of that.  It was some ridiculous number.  It was like six million something.  We moved quite a bit of product.

Q: [26:11] Yeah, wow, that’s amazing.

A: [26:13] It’s great.  It’s really cool.  It’s also jarring sometimes because you don’t realize, like, “Oh, I’m wheeling around a container that has 1000 pounds of mussels in it,” and that’s 1000 pounds of like an animal that’s in here.  It’s interesting to think about sometimes.  I like it.

Q: [26:34] Great.  I’m going to run through a bunch of different questions about your experience.

A: [26:38] Sweet.

Q: [26:29] You’ve already touched on some of these things.  So, if there’s anything you feel compelled to talk more about or haven’t mentioned, this is a great time.  Do you hold any commercial fishing licenses or have any LPAs in your name?

A: [26:51] No.

Q: [26:52] Do you have any experience in bookkeeping, bait, or gear preparation,

A: [26:58] Not bait or gear too much.  I do a lot of the bookkeeping here, but we don’t really use – bait doesn’t really apply to us too, too much.

Q: [27:12] Sure.  What about hatcheries, research or development, that kind of stuff?

A: [27:15] I have dabbled.  It’s something that I’m super interested in.  Gil (sp?) my coworker, leads the hatchery setup that we have here.  She’s so smart.  It was really funny.  Last year, we both got injured on the same day.  We took a skiing trip, but it did not work out well for either of us.  But it worked out because we had that time to put together our hatchery more completely.  In that time, I got quite a bit of knowledge on setting up a settlement facility – just a lot of plumbing.  It’s a lot of plumbing.  I’ve been helping her out with that and trying to get as much knowledge as I can.

Q: [28:02] Cool.  I know you said you distribute a lot to distributors, but any consumer interface, food prep, anything like that?

A: [28:09] Not too, too much.  I think because of a lot of what we do here, the people who I interact with the most are the other distributors, a lot of other people in the industry, but not as much individual people.  I have, in the past, also worked for restaurants that serve Bangs Island Mussels, so I’ve been on the other end of it before, but I have not experienced that on this end.

Q: [28:48] Yeah.  Can you talk a little bit more about – I don’t know – selling seafood and now being on the processing end if you feel like there’s any –

A: [28:55] It’s fascinating.  It’s a weird, full-circle moment sometimes.  I spent six years at a restaurant.  We served mussels every single day, and I never really paid attention to – I knew that they were good and I liked to eat them, but I didn’t really, at the time, acknowledge, “Where are these coming from?”  Other than I know that they’re from Casco Bay.  Now that I am back on the complete other end of it, it’s interesting.  There’s almost a reassurance.  I’m like, “Oh, I know exactly where my food is coming from.”  If I’m plating up this mussel app for somebody, I know now that I can tell you exactly where that mussel came from and whose hands it passed through.  I don’t know.  Sometimes, any prepared food or going out to eat, there’s always a part of me that’s like, “Oh, where did this come from?”  But now I’m like, “I know,” at least for part of it.

It’s interesting being on this end and knowing what’s also expected from customers.  I think a lot of what we do at Bangs is – we focus quite a bit on quality.  Our biggest thing is making sure that we are producing the best mussels that we can. We really pride ourselves on that.  I think knowing on the other end of – I never really encountered anybody finding a mussel that was bad or anything.  So, just trying to be like – as I’m processing here and inspecting, keeping in mind in the back of my head if I was giving this to a table, would I feel comfortable knowing that there’s a crack in this shell or something?  How would I want this presented to me if I were going out to eat?  I think that that dynamic has definitely helped put things into perspective here.

Q: [31:06] For sure.  What a cool thing to happen.

A: [31:08] Yeah, it was really weird.  I was like, “Oh, we were doing this the whole time?”  It was fun.

Q: [31:15] Great.  And do you have any experience in –?  You’ve mentioned a lot post-harvest processing.  But what about marketing, anything with trade, stuff like that?

A: [31:24] Not too, too much here.  I’m learning a lot of the trade stuff as I go.  Most of my previous job history was in a lot of customer service or food service.  One of the things coming into here was – I don’t know – I’m not super comfortable using a table saw.  A lot of the machines that we have are Italian, and the manuals that we got are mostly in Italian.  So, trying to teach myself how to make major repairs on something where I don’t have a lot of previous information – it’s definitely been on the job.  But then marketing, I guess, not too, too much.  That’s mostly Annie’s purview.

Q: [32:18] Great.  And what about advocacy, extension, or any community-based organization related to aquaculture?

A: [32:25] I’ve been dipping my toe into that this year.  I was fortunate enough to do the Women in Aquaculture workshops that Annie and Jax had put together, but just getting into it.  I would love to do more.  I’m super passionate about opening doors for people because this is super cool, but it’s also very – it presents as very – you have to be a certain kind of way to get in here.  I think informing people and creating opportunities for people to do something that’s really fun and interesting – and it’s hard work, but it’s also a great way to end the day of like, “Wow, I did this crazy thing today, but I also moved 7000 pounds of mussels.” (laughter) I would like to get more into that.  Yeah.

Q: [33:30] That might segue nicely into our next question, which is a big one, so feel free to answer it in any way it feels right.  How do you feel like your background or identity shapes your work, including the way that maybe you’re perceived or treated?

A: [33:45] I don’t know.  I’m fortunate enough that this particular workplace, the crew that I work with, is very accepting, despite – we all have different views on things.  I think what I really value about my team is that people are still open, and you have a seat at the table to present what you’ve got going on.  In that way, it’s definitely been a privilege to come into a place like this and feel like I can present myself in a way that feels authentic without fear of reprisal.  I think, in the same hand, there’s obviously differences in the experience.

This company has two female and one female-presenting employees, and everybody else is a cis white man.  There’s certain things where it’s just a different experience.  Delivery drivers don’t call the six-foot-three-280-guy “sweetheart.”  It’s different interactions with people.  A lot of the time, it’s not threatening, and it’s not like I’m really encountering malice with a lot of people.  It’s just ignorance, which is also why I’m fortunate that here, people are willing to listen and educate themselves otherwise, but you don’t always get that.

I am, I guess, non-binary – queer.  I’ll just go with that.  But I prefer they/them pronouns.  I will respond to “she” because I know how I present.  I know that what I’m doing, where I am, I’m more likely to hear that, even if I do reiterate, that’s not really how I feel.  So, I’ll take the L, but it’s definitely – I don’t want to say minor things because it’s an identity issue, but at the same time, I can handle those sorts of minor things as opposed to – I have yet to have anybody be hostile.

I think there’s also a degree of – being female-presenting, I therefore live that experience.  Being in a male-dominated industry, there’s obviously cis straight male attitudes towards people with women’s bodies.  I’ve definitely encountered people who get a little too comfortable too quick.  It’s hard, I think, especially now that I’m in a management position, being somebody where – I had one employee who was especially difficult, and it’s hard for me.  I’m five-four.  I’m living in a woman’s body, and I’m trying to tell this very tall, built man, “Hey, you need to do this thing.  I need you to follow what I’m telling you to do,” because a lot of the time, they’re like, “I don’t care what you have to say.”  I feel like a lot of times where, I don’t really get taken seriously.

This one particular employee was making physical contact right out the gate.  I’m like, “I know you’re not putting your hands on your male co-workers.”  I know you only feel comfortable – because I watch you.  I work with you, and I know how you interact with them, and I know that you’re not – this treatment is different.  I understand what the discrepancy is, but we need to figure out for you why one person gets to have their boundaries respected, and another one doesn’t.

Again, I’m fortunate enough that situations like that we handle efficiently.  People get spoken to.  We are very good at holding people accountable here.  Can’t speak for a lot of the other industry.  I have been privileged in that my experience so far has been fine.  It’s been typical of how I walk through the earth anyway.  I do think that there are – interacting with people who work outside of this space, even just my coworkers, as opposed to the delivery guys or clients and stuff – you can tell the women that work with you are probably not having a great time.

It’s challenging, but it’s also – I don’t know.  I guess it’s a constant opportunity for me to feel more comfortable establishing my boundaries and laying them out and not being willing to compromise on them because I’m your boss. (laughter) I don’t know.  It’s tough, but I also think that aquaculture, as opposed to commercial fishing – I think because aquaculture is newer as an industry, and there’s a bit more of like a sustainability focus to it, I think that there’s more opportunity for people to be open-minded, as opposed to good old boys commercial fishing.  There’s always room for progress.

Q: [40:29] Yeah.  Thank you so much for sharing.  Sort of a similar shift – it’s a related question, but not necessarily.  How do you feel like your work or role interacts with any family or caregiving responsibilities you may have, if you have any?

A: [40:44] I’m fortunate enough that I don’t have anybody that I have to take care of at home.  I think, at least here, that is something that we strive to make sure that the few people that do have families at home, if you need to head out, you can head out.  We make sure that – if somebody’s on the water, it’s a little different because they got to get back here.  I don’t know.  I guess we’ve only got three people here with kids and everybody else – aging parents?  Something’s going on?  Please feel free to go.  I haven’t really noticed too much of an issue with that here.  But also, not an awful lot of us have people that we have to care for.

Q: [41:47] Sure.  Then transitioning to environmental change, can you describe any changes in the marine environment you’ve noticed in your time working here?

A: [41:56] Yeah.  Sometimes, it’s jarring just how much change you notice in such a short period of time.  I started in spring of 2021, and it’s not major changes, but there are things that you notice that are different.  I think one of the things I did recently was keeping – I made a comparison of different residual stats that we’ve had from products.  We keep track of how much seed we get out of the processing shift, how much byss we get out of it, and then how much trash.  Those things are dependent, for the most part, on water quality.  There’s other elements that impact on running through machines.  There’s different things that affect it, but for the most part, you can tell kind of where the mussels are at based off of what we’re getting for residuals.

From the last three years of data, there’s a lengthening between seasons, if that makes sense.  There’s parts of the year, like the springtime, we’re still dealing with a lot of that winter byss.  We’ll get a lot more in that time, as opposed to the end of the year.  Maybe we’ll get more seed because stuff is spawning a bit more often at the end of the summer, and you can see the spawning season has started to get a little bit later in the year as October has gotten warmer – November.  Right now, we’re still encountering a lot of the winter byss into June and July and stuff, as opposed to usually, it’ll cut out around like April or May.  It’s incremental shifts where the timeline gets pushed a little bit further out of whack.  It’s just to accommodate – mussels don’t set as well if the water is warmer or there’s just different things that we try to keep track of.  It’s hard as things have been getting a little bit less predictable.

Then the storm situation always just makes things tough.  I think, this past year, with those two major floods we had in January – I’ve never seen flooding like that before, and I’ve lived here my whole life, so it was like, “Oh, this is obviously caused by something.”  It’s something that we were able to kind of prepare for here.  But even then, the flooding on the second storm in January came up so high that a lot of our machines got damaged.  We can only take so many precautions.  It was crazy.  It was nuts.  Things like that, where it was the first time we had had any flooding here, and then we had two major floods back-to-back.  Yes, it’s January, but January is not always like this.  So, small time changes, but then also crazy storms have been hard to keep pace with.

Q: [45:40] Yeah.  How are those impacting your work doing the processing?

A: [45:44] So, with this major storm earlier this year, the flooding came up so high it came two feet into the processing room that was submerged – the bottom two feet.  At least one of our machines – the motor for it is within those two feet.  That motor had been completely soaked with salt water, and it is an integral part of the system.  We had to very quickly find a solution and an alternative motor.  But in the meantime, until that got delivered – because our machines are from Italy – it became – OK, we’ll have to manually shovel these things, as opposed to using something that manually tips them.  That’s a lot more work, and it makes the night longer.  So, those sorts of things – mechanical problems that come from unpredicted weather that’s definitely tough.

Something that we’ve been dealing with right now is because storm season has gotten so intense, the mussels are making a lot more byss, and it’s getting a lot stronger.  It’s getting so strong to the point that our machines are having a hard time working through it.  That adds more time to the shift.  It’s more like, how do I find alternative solutions to mechanical problems that are coming out of things I don’t have control over?  I would say that’s mostly the bulk of it.

Oh, no, we have – when it rains a lot in Casco Bay, if we get more than two inches of rain in a single storm, the wastewater treatment plant will stop processing.  So, all of that business gets sent into the bay.  When we have major storms like that, we’re likely to be shut down because of high pollutant levels in the water.  And mussels are filter feeders, so that’s all up in their business.  As we’re getting a lot more – we’re not getting snow.  We’re getting rainstorms in the winter kind of thing.  A lot more time is spent – OK, we can’t harvest today, and it’s going to rain again tomorrow, so we might not be able to do it again this week.  Because of that, mussels will grow too big, or they get overset.  It just creates problems down the line.  It’s just been very wet. (laughter) It’s hard to accommodate how constantly wet things are, which is odd because it’s the ocean, but too wet is not, not good, I guess.

Q: [48:39] Yeah.  Is there anything you’re doing to try to cope or adapt to that?

A: [48:44] We’ve been trying to make adjustments to our seeding times, trying to track spawning events and maybe anticipating – maybe we’ll do it a little bit later because if we’re closed, that will give – if it sets later, then maybe we won’t have to worry about overset in the storm season, trying to keep track of our previous data and just looking for trends and trying to see – have these things been occurring?  What can we do to adjust it?  I think with the – like, with the byss situation, it required – we changed out a bunch of the stuff in the machine so that they’re fresh and brand new.  That has helped quite a bit.  But just making sure that all of our stuff is running as smoothly as possible so that, at the very least, we can try and mitigate any hang-ups.  But it’s hard to predict.

Q: [49:54] Do you feel like those things are moving you in the right direction like they’re working and helping?

A: [49:59] I think so.  I think it’s also – a lot of what we do we’re learning a lot on the fly.  Even just keeping track of these certain things, like, are the teeth and the bars dull?  OK?  Well, that’s not going to work through the byss as well as we wanted.  That’s helping me not just know what we can do to make sure that we’re being more efficient here, but also what we can be doing with the machines to make sure that everything is – it’s been a lot of learning. (laughter) It’s been a lot of learning of how to make sure that everything is absolutely in tip-top shape so that we can deal with the uncontrollable elements and try and get as much that I can control in a place where I know that I’ve done the most that I can, but it’s quite the learning process.

Q: [50:55] Yeah, I’m curious with like that learning, what are you drawing on to help you with that, if anything?

A: [51:03] A lot of it – I am fortunate enough that quite a few of my coworkers have previous experience in the industry or have been here for a while and know how the machines work.  I’m not a particularly machine-minded person myself, and so a lot of it I have been learning through just Googling things, rereading manuals multiple times, and asking as many questions as I can.  I’m fortunate enough that I have quite a few resources here, but there is a lot of it where it’s just me, like, “OK, well, let’s see how many times I can turn this and see what happens.”  I think if you take things apart, you can usually figure out how to put it back together.  So, go through that and then see what I can do.

Q: [51:57] Yeah, and are there any – I don’t know – organizations or trainings or things that you could draw on to help as you look towards the future?

A: [52:06] Not that I’m aware of.  I’m not super familiar.  I think there’s also – I think a lot of the workshops that we had done in this Woman in Aquaculture series had been based around different skills that maybe are not as readily available.  I think one of them – we spent an entire day just teaching people how to tie knots and hooking up trailers and stuff like that, and a lot of things that would seem basic – if you’re going into this, you should already know how to do that, but I didn’t, and a lot of people don’t.  It was interesting hearing from a number of other people there that like, “Oh, this is information I’m just finding out for the first time.  Nobody’s ever taught me this before.”

On my end, I’m not aware of too many opportunities other than going to a training, a school of some kind, or some sort of trade activity.  But I think that there’s definitely room for more, especially just the rudimentary stuff, like differences between wrenches.  They don’t tell you these things.  Yeah.  I would like to go to more.

Q: [53:35] As you look towards the future, what other things do you really hope to do to think about adaptation or think about learning more?

A: [53:48] I would love to go back to school just in general.  I think on my end, I’m always looking for more opportunities to learn.  I really enjoy learning.  What I do here, I have a lot of opportunity to figure out how machines work.  On top of that, I can figure out plumbing for the most part.  There’s a lot of opportunity where I’m at, which I’m grateful for.  I think a lot of the different – I’m trying to think of the word – different things that we could do.  Hold on a second, sorry.  I’m trying to constantly think of different machinery we can bring into the space to alleviate a lot of the ergonomic difficulties that come with the job.

That comes down to – I keep track of people on social media.  I’m following a lot of pages.  I’m in a few newsletters.  We had gone to the Seafood Expo in Boston this past year, which was super interesting.  That was a great opportunity to connect with different people who make different shipping packages and different things to make just the job easier.  I think going to as many – any function – as possible.  I think just getting out there as much as you can, no matter what will help to a degree.

Q: [55:41] Yeah, for sure.  As you look towards the future, what is your biggest concern for the marine environment?

A: [55:48] A lot. (laughter) We’re fortunate in Maine to have a fairly healthy marine ecosystem still.  I can’t speak to numbers too much on my end, but I think that there’s – a lot of people in Maine really do care about the water.  It’s our shared space.  It’s our home.  I think one of the biggest things that I’m worried about is the exponential rate that climate change has been getting worse.  One of the things that we do here – we have nets that go around our rafts that keep ducks out, but the nets are made from a polyurethane twine system, and that is used because organic matter has a higher propensity of disintegrating.

We use a lot of the plastic to make sure that it doesn’t fall apart in the water.  But when you’re making repairs to that, as you’re cutting, that’s tiny pieces of plastic that can get anywhere, and we try to be very conscious of that here, but there’s obviously things that you can’t get.  I remember reading an article a couple months ago about – they’ve been finding what they thought were – they thought it was a new type of coral, but it ended up being chunks of plastic from netting that had calcified and turned into rocks that animals that eat coral had been trying to eat to get nutrients out of it, but they’re just eating plastic.  I remember seeing that and being like, “I am working on one of those nets later today.  That’s not great.” (laughter)

There’s so much that goes into it that requires – boats need fuel.  A lot of it is dependent on – we use a lot of gas.  The infrastructure for the industry right now is based around consumables that aren’t sustainable.  I think a lot of what we use is plastic because that is what will last the longest in ocean conditions.  But in doing so, we’re also putting plastic in the ocean, even if it is secured.  Sometimes, it could undone, and now that will just sink to the bottom.  Not even just plastic.  There’s everything else that’s in the water.  But that’s one of the things that I’m most conscious about because I can see it.  So, stuff like that.

It’s hard because it seems as though a lot of legislation is trying to be passed to keep better track of where are people putting their things and what are you dumping in the water, just to make sure that people are doing things up to code.  There are a lot of people – that feels like an infringement.  I think that the educational difference is a bigger hurdle to try to get past because you can be worried as much as you want about what’s going on, but if people don’t want to follow the changes that other people are trying to make so that we can mitigate this, you’re not really going to make an awful lot of progress.  It’s one of those things where I’m kept up at night thinking about, “Oh, the world is burning,” but then I’m like, “A lot of people don’t think so.”  It’s tough, but again, I guess education is one of the only ways you can get people to think differently.

Q: [1:00:13] You kind of anticipated my next question, and I’m going to ask it again anyway in case anything new comes up.  If you could tell a policymaker or someone in charge – what is really important, do you think, for them to do or to have in mind to help people adapt to the problems that are happening?  What would you say?

A: [1:00:30] I think, especially given today’s climate, there are quite a few people who have been doing things the traditional way.  That’s how my family’s been doing it.  This is how we’ve been doing it for generations.  I feel like a lot of those folk are the hardest to convince that the policy changes that we’re making, even though it’s extra steps for you during the day, it’s for the sake of your grandchildren having a job.  That being said, it’s hard to communicate that without people taking that, in and of itself, as an attack.  I’m a big proponent of you have to meet people where they are.  Even if it’s somewhere that you really don’t want to go, you have to take a step into that mud so you can help pull them back out.

A lot of that – you have to figure out the language that people are speaking if you want to communicate with them effectively.  I grew up in a fairly rural, poor family with a lot of interesting opinions.  I didn’t go to college, and now I’m a farmer, and there’s an expectation of a belief system there.  On my end, I can understand the feeling of, “Oh, these college honkies are coming down and trying to tell me what to do when I’ve been doing it forever.”  But yeah, it’s their job.  It’s because they went to school to figure this out so that they could help you because we didn’t have to – anyway.

I think that trying to bridge that gap between the more embedded-in-the-industry folk, the more traditionalists, trying to have an understanding between them and the people who actually have the capacity to make the changes – they have to try and find a way to form a middle ground.  If we could figure out that, we could solve a lot of problems, but I think steps can always be made by being empathetic.  I think it’s easy to see – people just going about their business as they always have, knowing the impact that it has, and get frustrated because I’m like, well, that’s also my space that you’re damaging, even though it’s none of ours.  It’s the ocean.  I would like to use it too and not worry about it being full of things.

It’s easy to get frustrated, but I think taking a step back and being like, “OK, well, also, a lot of people – this has been their only source of income for their entire life and their parents’ entire lives, and they live in a community that has for the most part been forgotten.”  So, everybody is barely getting by, and when they are getting by, it’s on 14-hour days lobster fishing or whatever they’re doing.  So, having somebody who probably hasn’t done it before, probably lives somewhere else, and having them come in and be like, “You’re doing this wrong.  Here’s what you need to be doing differently.  It’s going to help us all in the end” – yes, you’re right.  This is correct, but people may take it as an attack.  Yeah.  I guess just trying to find that empathetic middle ground.

Q: [1:04:38] Yeah.  Absolutely.  Thank you.  Sort of another shift.  Have you participated in any climate resilience or adaptation training?

A: [1:04:48] I have not.

Q: [1:04:52] What do you think –?  And again, you touched on this, but just in case, there’s anything else you think might be useful.  What strategies do you think might be effective in building resilience against climate-related impact?

A: [1:05:04] Broken record.  I always say education, even just open-minded education.  It sounds weird.  I remember my first day that I came in here for an interview.  I walked in, and one of the guys was like, “Oh, nice to meet you.  She’ll be down in a minute.  Let me show you around here and tell you what we do,” and just openly being like, “Let me tell you.  I want you to know these things because I think it’s cool.  I know you might think it’s cool too.”  Taking an approach like, “Hey, we need to take care of our house a little bit better,” I think, is always a decent means of making some sort of progress.

Getting back to the exponential rate at which climate change has been making things more difficult, at some point – I mean, we’re well past where you could try and deny it, I would argue.  But if you’re still feeling like, “Oh, well, it’s nice out today” – OK.  But have you noticed that maybe your product has been getting a little bit smaller.  Are we seeing – trying to relate – have you seen differences in your yields in what you’re producing?  Are you making less money?  Let’s figure out what the source of that is.  Is it structural issues with the industry and commercialism?  Probably, maybe.

But are there also factors of it that are directly related to the fact that the water is hotter and more acidic, and there’s different elements that are different and are categorically different from five years ago, let alone 30?  Trying to present people with facts in a way that’s not like I’m info dumping on you and just giving you a bunch of information, but trying to relate those facts back to you, like, “This is how this impacts you, and your family and what you and your community are up to,” also, in a way that’s not like I’m attacking you, but as a “we should care about each other because we’re all that we have.”

So, I guess, yeah, I’m just a big advocate for sharing information as much as you can and making sure that it’s fact-checked/available.  Those sorts of things, and then also just reiterating to the people that do have the power to make decisions – we’re at the point where we have to make – we’re past irreparable damage.  We have to make extreme changes if we have any chance of survival, which is drastic, but that’s where we’re at.  At the same time, reiterating to the people that do have the power to make those decisions – we can’t make a huge change all at once.  You have to meet people where they are and figure out what they can accommodate because while it is us on the bottom, it’s not entirely us on the bottom.  Let’s see what we can do without making life more difficult for the people that already have a hard time.

Matt, the owner here, he’s in a lot of – he goes to the town council meetings.  He goes to a lot of the – just meeting with people that have the ability to make change and trying to really reiterate, “This is what we’re needing.  This is what we’re needing that will directly benefit us, and here’s what’s realistic.”  So, just getting involved, I think.

Q: [1:09:17] Yeah.  Can you tell me about any opportunities or positive changes you’ve seen?

A: [1:09:24] I definitely think a lot of what we’ve been doing here – it’s incremental.  We installed a water recycling system in the processing room so that we’re able to – actually, it cut our water use by 50%, which is really cool.  But instead of having two separate water sources, taking the runoff from one, and in the recycling unit, it pulls out stuff – the organic matter – and then sends it into another system, and that water is using that water source.  So, trying to limit what excess waste we’re doing on our ends, making sure that, if we are using water, we keep it to the minimum of where it needs to be, and making sure the lights are turned off at the end of the day.  I definitely think that small mechanical changes that we can try and get to limit our impact – I think those are helpful.

A lot of our focus here is sustainability so that we have a job in the future.  That’s why we do a lot of our reseeding efforts, so that stuff isn’t just going back out to sea.  Even then, we have specific sites in the bay where we dump our trash, and a lot of the trash – if a mussel has a hairline fracture, it’s still alive and can heal that.  So the places that we dump, we stagger it, so it’s not some major thing, but that ends up becoming a mussel bed.  We’ve seen, over the course of time, that that becomes its own little ecosystem because where the mussels are, some of them are dead, and that’s food.  So, providing opportunities for the little critters that do the bulk of the work to have a place to stay.  It sounds like, “Oh, we’re dumping our trash into the sea,” but it has a purpose there.  We do a lot of stuff like that with the focus of we can do what we can here so that, hopefully, things will be better for the next farmer.  Little stuff.

Q: [1:11:58] Yeah.  Looking towards the future, what is your hopeful vision for the future of Maine’s fisheries and aquaculture?

A: [1:12:05] I would like to see a bit more focus on the industry as a whole.  I realize that Maine is known for its fish and stuff.  But I think aquaculture is having a moment because it’s newer.  It’s newer, and there’s a lot more acceptance of changes.  I think, in that way, it’s easy for this industry to get the funding that it needs and the connections that it needs, whereas I think there’s a lot of multi-generation lobster fishermen up the coast in towns that haven’t really – that’s been the industry.  There’s a lot of consistency there, but there’s not enough – I think it comes back to empathy on a legislative level.  I think that a lot of the frustration, to a degree is – I think a lot of people feel like they’ve been forgotten.

Then, on top of that, there’s a lot of the – “Oh, well, the problems with Maine lobstering,” which is its own box of frogs.  I think that it’s easy to get stuck in the negative spiral, especially when you’re already like, “I’m poor.  I am a lobster fisherman.  I’ve been living here my whole life.  My parents were living here their whole life.”  It’s easy to get into that spiral, not even just on the coast, but that’s something that happens a lot with Mainers in general.  A lot of sparseness in the communities makes it tough.  I would love to see the same level of focus that aquaculture has been getting dedicated towards a lot of the other industries along the coast, and even just – I think kelp has been coming up quite a bit recently, and that’s something that’s a bit more accessible.

So, lobster fishermen haven’t – if there’s a season for them, they can fit kelping in, and that, in and of itself, growing kelp has a lot of positive impacts.  So, opening up doors for people to have access to alternative revenue streams that at the same time have a long-term benefit to them.  Trying to find the balance of making sure that people have money to live while also caring about the place where they live.  It’s tough.  It’s tough.

Q: [1:15:15] Yeah.  Do you feel like you’ve noticed – This is different – but do you feel like you’ve noticed any difference in women’s and non-men’s participation and presence in fisheries and aquaculture in your time working in it?

A: [1:15:28] It’s hard for me to say just because this has been my introduction to the industry for the most part, outside of recreation in the past.  My dad was a commercial fisherman in Alaska for a while.  I had heard so much of – “This is a man’s field” kind of thing.  I grew up anticipating, “Oh, I don’t know if that will be an opportunity that I’ll have.”  But then I started here, and the first manager that I had was Gil, and she’s now running the RSF. (sp?)  So, little things like that, where I’m like, “OK, there are plenty of other people around.  You just have to find them and hope that they’re cool.” (laughter)

Even in my hiring for the land team, I’ve noticed an increase in women and female-presenting folk coming through, as opposed to – I was getting a lot of mid-forties cis white men for a while.  And, A, they don’t really want to listen to me, but B, that’s cool.  I’ll take you.  But I also would like to have a seat available for maybe somebody who doesn’t have as much opportunity.  A lot more of the women-plus folk that I’ve seen coming through are also coming from an educational background, as opposed to – I’m getting a lot of men who aren’t.  I’m curious about that difference of the trade aspect of it as opposed to the scientific aspect of it.  But it’s cool to see either way.

Q: [1:17:43] Yeah, great.  Thank you so much.  Is there anything else you wanted to share before we end the interview?

A: [1:17:48] I don’t think so.  I really do enjoy what I do.  I, again, cannot emphasize how much of a privilege it is to work at a place where my identity is respected, and I feel as though there are some things we don’t agree on, but the team that I work with – we care about each other.  I think that that’s hard to find, but I think especially in the industry where you spend so much time together under dangerous circumstances, a lot of the time, there’s almost a trauma bond.  I think that that is a resource that really would benefit people having – just feeling like you’re supported by your team.  We’ve all worked together for so long that we’re like a family.  It is nice to know that if anything happens, we all feel like we’ve got each other’s back, and trying to find a way to perpetuate that onto other people would be nice because it’s lovely and it makes work a lot easier.  I think that also just comes down to being open and being able to hold two things at once.  We will get there as we get there.  I think that’s about the bulk of it.  Yeah, that’s all I got.  But thank you so much.

Q: [1:19:37] Great.  Yeah.  Thank you so much.  I will turn this off.