 My name is Natalie Springle. I work for the University of Maine Sea Grant program. As Leslie said, I live on MDI. I live at the head of the island and my office is at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, and I have been with, let's see. I think I have to do this. It's not advancing my slides. I checked it. Oh, look at it. All right. Is that advancing? Aha. Now that we figured out the technology. Yeah. So when Sue sent me an email and said, would you be willing to come talk about aquaculture for Down East Audubon? I said, absolutely. I would love to do that. As you all know, aquaculture has been in the news a whole bunch the last several decades, but especially the last few years along the whole coast of Maine and specifically around the greater MDI and Frenchman Bay region. We've been having a lot of aquaculture conversations. So we're always looking for opportunities to share a little bit about what aquaculture is, what it isn't, sort of the basics of aquaculture. So some of you might know me through my husband, Rich McDonald, who's a former board member who sends his best. We were laughing that I was coming to see his people, but he couldn't come because he's traveling tomorrow. But anyways, so the Maine Sea Grant program, I'll just tell you a little bit about what Sea Grant is and how we're connected to aquaculture and then we'll jump into the topic at hand. So I've been with Maine Sea Grant for about 24 years in a week, which kind of blows me away. And we are a federal state partnership between NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. So that's the federal agency that does the weather, the charts, and there's also research and outreach arms, which is how we're connected. And then the state land and sea grant university, which in this case of Maine is the University of Maine. So our central office is up in Orono at the University of Maine and we have extension agents like me up and down the coast from Eastport to Kiddery, working on all kinds of different issues related to fisheries, aquaculture, community development, climate change, coastal resilience, kind of anything that's going on on the coast. We are somehow connected. Our mission is to support the responsible use and conservation of our coastal and ocean resources through research, outreach, and education so that our communities can thrive. So my role is I've been an extension agent doing outreach and education in the community development realm and working waterfronts for a long time. And I coordinate our extension program throughout the state. So I will say right off the bat that I love to talk to folks about aquaculture. I am certain that there are all kinds of opinions about aquaculture in this room. I'm sure that there are some people who have concerns about aquaculture and I'm sure that there's folks in this room who are really intrigued by aquaculture maybe are curious about, huh, what would it take to grow some seaweed off the dock? Like that kind of stuff. So aquaculture is one of those topics that just people have opinions about it. So my role tonight, I'm not a farmer. I don't know the ins and outs of how do you grow oysters? I'm sort of more big picture. Like what are the basics of aquaculture? What does the industry look like? What are we growing? What are the regulations around it? How can you be involved in the public process and the decision making around aquaculture? So I'm hoping to kind of give you some basic information. So I've got a bunch of slides. This is the basic gist of what we're gonna cover. So a little bit about the history of the industry, how it came to be, what's farmed in Maine now? What do you need to know to be a farmer? What are the basics of that? There's, you know, that's like multi years of learning but just the basic topics. Permitting and regulation, upcoming listening sessions. So opportunities for you all to share your opinions with the Department of Marine Resources through a series of listening sessions that have just been announced. So it's good timing. And then at the very end, I'll share a map that shows kind of what does the aquaculture landscape look like around this sort of geography for the moment, an ever-changing thing. So that's the basic gist of what we'll cover. And I'll jump right in. That sound good? All right. So a little bit about the bigger picture history of aquaculture even before Maine. This Jacques Cousteau quote, I just think is so fun. With Earth's burgeoning human populations to feed, we must turn to the sea with new understanding and new technology. We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about. Farming replacing hunting, 1973, sort of an interesting quote. And it sets a pattern for the difference between aquaculture and wild harvest fisheries. So sort of that is a sort of a theme that comes up a lot in aquaculture. For folks who don't spend a lot of time on the coast, it's easy to kind of mix the two. They're clearly both methods of getting seafood on people's table, both methods of working with the natural resources in the ocean. Aquaculture is literally farming. Wild harvest fisheries is more sort of hunting gathering. It's like collecting what is growing there. So why do I have a picture of a whole bunch of dead white guys on the screen? Back then. So the Stratton Commission is, I wanted to, I like to share the Stratton Commission with folks because it was sort of marked a turning point in U.S. policies relationship to the ocean. So the Stratton Commission was a study commission in, I think it was like the 1950s into the 60s that really did a deep analysis of how do we use the ocean? This was a different time, right? So this is like post-World War II era, which is kind of the, when aquaculture really started getting its start in the U.S. So if you think about the history of that era, this was a time when we were sort of trying to solve, we were beginning to have more environmental consciousness, a better understanding of what our relationship is to the natural resources. Rachel Carson was gonna come out with Silent Spring pretty soon. We were beginning to think about outer space. We were thinking about deep sea exploration and we were trying to figure out how the heck are we gonna feed this rapidly growing population? We were sort of starting to understand the population bomb, all that kind of stuff. The Stratton Commission was a commission that basically looked deeply at marine issues and provided a whole bunch of recommendations that have since become and still are policy related to how we deal with the ocean. So the Stratton Commission spawned the National Environmental Policy Act, the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Management Act, which is still how we manage our federal fisheries to this day. The National Sea Grant Program, where I work came out of recommendations from this and aquaculture. So aquaculture in the sense of we, a little bit the Jacques Cousteau kind of feeling, we must look to the sea to figure out how to feed people. So that sort of marked this new era of how we were looking at the sea as a place for food, which we, in new ways than commercial fisheries. So that was kind of the bigger picture national context back here in Maine. We were right on board. So Maine has been at the forefront of aquaculture in this country since the beginning. And to this day, Maine is definitely still at the forefront of aquaculture in more recent years. We're very much at the forefront, especially of seaweed aquaculture, and I'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. But this sort of pioneering, innovative, entrepreneurial approach to aquaculture that is still very much a part of the scene in Maine started way back. And the funny thing is that it's, so on the left, the picture on the left, so these are archival photos that we just have literally in our file cabinets in the Sea Grant office. The photo on the left from the Down East Enterprise, I don't know, does anybody remember the Down East Enterprise newspaper Down East? I don't think it's existed for several decades, but it's showing coho salmon grown on the East Coast, right? So crazy things that we would never do today. We would never grow coho salmon. That's a species native to the Pacific Northwest. We don't grow coho salmon on the coast of Maine anymore. We haven't in decades, but there was experimentation. We were trying to figure out what could work. And so we tried coho salmon. It didn't work. It got discontinued. There was all kinds of experimentation on the right is just an early picture from some, the University of Maine got into aquaculture exploration pretty intensely from the get go. In the 1970s, there were a number of graduate students and PhD students who were really the pioneers in farming oysters in particular, who are still farming oysters to this day down in the Damer-Spotter River. The gentleman in the middle is Ed Myers, who maybe some of you encountered Ed Myers before he passed away a few years back. He was sort of a pioneer in the conservation movement and a pioneer in aquaculture. Some people know him as one of the founders of the Maine Island Trail Association. I had the privilege of meeting him a bunch of years ago, a really incredible guy. His claim to fame in terms of aquaculture is that he secured the very first lease that the state of Maine gave to a private individual to be given the right to the permit to grow aquaculture, to have a private enterprise in public waters to grow species. So he was working with mussels. He tried salmon, didn't pan out. He stuck it out with mussels. And he kind of was one of the early pioneers who kind of got the whole thing started. So oysters, mussels, and salmon were among the early species. The Pacific Northwest species of salmon, quickly we wisened up and stopped bringing Pacific Northwest salmon to Atlantic waters. The oysters really started kicking in around the 1970s and you've probably all, you might all be familiar with the Damascota River being sort of where the nexus of the oyster industry is to this day in terms of the highest sort of concentration of oyster farms, but now people are farming oysters throughout the coast. But salmon, Atlantic salmon really kicked in about 10 years later, roughly around the 1980s is when we started seeing more and more Atlantic salmon farming. And what's interesting about Atlantic salmon farming, especially when you think about Atlantic salmon today, back in the 1980s, it was a totally different thing. It was very much, if you think about the 1980s, another marine resource industry that was quite important to the history of the main coast is the sardine industry, right? The herring fishery that we then take the herrings, put them in a can, we call them sardines, the same species. So the sardine industry was on a decline, rapid decline, and it was such an important industry to the coast of Maine. By some estimates, there were something like 70, 75 sardine factories on the coast of Maine up until the 60s, 70s, there are none now. And already in the 80s, that was on the decline. And particularly for the down east regions, there was massive economic loss, economic challenge. And so folks were looking for other ways to turn to the sea. In many places along the coast, people turn to lobster, and we know the lobster story, and that's a story for another day. But the sardine, but in the down east region, which was heavily reliant on sardines, this was part of one of the reasons why salmon kind of came in as a, let's find another way to turn our attention to the sea to make a living. So the salmon industry started as a number of small independent owner operators who literally were cobbling together their salmon pens from like stuff that they were finding in their backwoods to start building, little by little building what became the salmon industry. So the salmon industry was really kicking off 80s, 90s, and then in the 2000s, things changed fairly dramatically. And I'll get to that in a minute. I wanted to kind of bring us up to the 2000s because that's sort of is a nice mark for the history of aquaculture and the present day. So sort of this new era that we're in now. So I'll get back to salmon in a minute. Today, what's being farmed in Maine? So this is just farming, right? So it's important to specify that I'm just talking about farmed species, not species that are fished. Again, the difference between the two. So shellfish, seaweed, and finfish are the three categories of species that we're growing at sea at the moment. Shellfish are the bivalves, the mussels, the oysters. Those are the most common shellfish that we're growing. But there's also an emerging sea scallop aquaculture industry. We know that we have been fishing for scallops for a long time, but there's been some really cool innovative work in terms of growing sea scallops. And then there's also some work in research around soft shell clams, surf clams, hen clams, co-hawks. Those are some of the ones that there's a lot of interest and work being done on them. But in terms of like active, active fishery, oysters, and mussels are the two bigger ones. And then in terms of seaweed, this is sort of the newest kid on the block for us. Seaweeds have been grown in Asian countries in aquaculture form for hundreds and hundreds of years. But in terms of the US, again, Maine is kind of a pioneer in seaweed growing. And we grow several different kinds of kelp. And there's also some experiments done with growing dulse and a few other species. And then finfish, the only finfish species that we're growing at sea right now. And I'm not really gonna get into the whole land-based aquaculture thing. I'm sort of focusing tonight on what's in the ocean. So at sea, Atlantic salmon is the only one that's being grown in Maine. We've done some experiments with growing cod at sea, especially on the northern end of Frenchman Bay, but that came and went. It wasn't economically viable, so it moved on. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about each of those. So back to salmon for a second. So I'll start with salmon, then I'll get into shellfish and then we'll talk about seaweed. And then I'll get into the regulations and that kind of stuff after that. So salmon farming, the image up on the left is sort of a typical salmon farm, as you would see it today. Has anyone seen salmon farms out on the water? Several people, yeah. So that's fairly typical. That happens to be off of Eastport, down East, which is where the sort of critical mass of salmon farms are still in the eastern part of the state. That is where, as I mentioned earlier, where the industry kind of really launched. There is some salmon farming, I believe, the westernmost salmon farm in the state is the one off of Black Island near Swans Island. And I'll show you a map towards the end so we can situate that. One of the reasons why salmon farming, in addition to the desire for economic development in the down East region after the Sardine collapse, one of the reasons why salmon farming was promising down East is that because of the tides, because of the big in and out tides way down East, so you've probably heard that the Bay of Fundy and the approaches to the Bay of Fundy has among the biggest tides in the world. So that means that there's a lot of nutrient flushing going on. The more you go East, the more we have the bigger tides. So nutrients, it also kind of equalizes the water temperature. So if you're up in Cops Cook Bay down off of Eastport, the temperature extremes are a little less extreme than they are here. So the risk of what they call super chill, which is when a salmon farm has temperatures that are so low that it starts impacting the fish, that happens a lot less in sort of waters that have less extreme temperatures. So there's sort of a bunch of different reasons why it really grew down East. You can see in the upper right, that's what a salmon looks like before it moves on to the processing plant. The thing about salmon that makes it quite unique and different compared to shellfish and seaweed is that it's really capital intensive. It costs a lot of money today to make a go of it as a salmon farmer. You need the ability to open a business with this much infrastructure. There's a lot of infrastructure. You need space, you need to be able, especially now, because the regulations have changed, you need to be able to move your fish from one area to the other to enable areas to be fallow for a while so that the pens can clean themselves out. So it's a lot of capital right from the get-go. So it's not an industry where a fisherman who might wanna diversify his income in the winter is just gonna make a go of it. It's like much more intensive of a business. Things really changed pretty dramatically for salmon around 20-ish years ago. So in early 2000s, the salmon industry in the down east region was experiencing, well, in this region too, was experiencing all sorts of challenges related to, there were environmental concerns, the environmental regulations were not nearly as strong then as they are today, they were dramatically changed. There was a lot of work done on identifying what are the best husbandry practices to avoid disease, like infectious salmon anemia, to avoid, what's the other one, sea lice, sort of paying attention to a lot of the issues that we all hear about in the press that sort of give us pause when we think about salmon farming. If you also recall in 2001, the Atlantic salmon itself, the fish that goes wild and comes back up our rivers every spring was put on the endangered species list. So then there was a whole wave of concern around, well, what if the fish escaped from these pens and are they gonna dilute the gene pool of the wild fish? So in the late 90s, early 2000s, a lot of this came to a head and the industry basically massively consolidated. There used to be something like 20, 25 different independent salmon farming operations that were much smaller scale, that consolidated little by little down to three companies. And now today, all of the salmon farmed in Maine is owned by one company, which is Cook Aquaculture, which started as one of those small family companies, they just started, happened to start on the other side of the border in New Brunswick. So their home port is Blacks Harbor, New Brunswick, which if you ever go to Graminand, you take the ferry from Blacks Harbor. So that's where their headquarters is in that town and in Graminand and they expanded and over the course of six or seven years by something like 2005, 2006, they had basically acquired all of the independent farms in the Down East region and had the capital and the connections that were necessary in order to make a go of it in what ended up becoming sort of a globalized company. Since then, Cook is huge, right? Cook has like expanded all over the world. They've got, you know, they're in wild fisheries, they're in aquaculture, they're, as you can see from their map all over the world. What makes them also particularly unique is that they're a fully integrated company, which means that starting from the hatchery stage, so the salmon that are farmed start their life in a hatchery. Well, tiny, tiny, there's one at Craigbrook Fish Hatchery, which is very cool to go check out to see sort of the different cycles of the salmon. So they're grown in the hatchery and then over time they're moved into the ocean in the pens that we saw and the pens are separated by age classes. It's pretty sort of very active husbandry. And so then they go, then when the fish have been moved according to their age classes and then they're ready for market, they get shipped to processing plants, which are also owned by Cook. So vertical integration mean they own every single step of the supply chain. If you're in the grocery store and you're looking for Atlantic salmon, if you buy True North, that's Cook Aquaculture. That's the same company. So at Hannaford, they sell True North, that's Cook. And they have a processing plant in Machiasport. They have several in New Brunswick as well and different places in the world, but the one that are salmon from Maine, it gets processed in Machiasport. So they're a fascinating company. There's, you know, this is salmon. Of any of the aquaculture, I started by saying that like people have opinion about aquaculture. Everybody has an opinion about salmon aquaculture, for sure. The one thing that I will say is that the environmental regulations today, compared to 20 years ago, are like night and day. The salmon farming industry is like in the US, way more regulated than in other places in the world. So there is that. And the, I just lost my train of thought. Oh, I remember what I was gonna say. I meant to say this a few minutes ago. The other thing that makes salmon really different than shellfish and seaweed is that you have to feed the salmon, right? So shellfish are filter feeders. Seaweed are photosynthetic. They don't need to be fed. So, and we'll talk about shellfish as filter feeders in a minute. Salmon need to be fed. So I'm just gonna go back to that image. So do you see all the tubes between the farms there? That's, those are tubes that are bringing the food to the salmon into the pens. And so as an example, one of the sort of regulations that were put into place to clean up the salmon industry in the early 2000s was it used to be that the food pellets were literally just getting sort of shot into the pen. And it was really difficult to know how much to put into the water. So there were concerns about overfeeding or the salmon just not being, not eating everything. And then sort of bioaccumulation of that feed under the pens. Now this industry, another reason why it's so capital intensive is that it's highly, technology is a big part of the industry. So if you were to go down East and see that those salmon pens just off to the left, there's a barge that's sitting right there in the water. And if you go into the barge and I've had the opportunity to do this and it's technologically kind of whiz banging. And so you go in and there's somebody sitting in the barge and they have a screen for every single pen and they're actually literally watching how much food is going in and when the fish stop eating, they turn off the pipe that's sending the food in. So the issue around overaccumulation of like biomass in the bottom of the pen, which is not a very good thing for the environment is eliminated because they're right on it. They're turning it off as soon as the salmon stop eating. So they've made all kinds of sort of changes along the way. Cook can, some people feel that if it weren't for Cook aquaculture, we might not have a salmon industry in Maine. It may not have managed to survive. Other people feel that Cook is a big challenge because it's contributed to the globalization of natural resources in our oceans where both of them have truth to them. There's no doubt about that. So this is a chart that is showing you the amount of finfish leases. And I'll talk in more detail a little bit later about what a lease is. But, and so finfish, the only finfish we're growing in Maine is salmon. So basically you can see the change over time from 2009 on the left to 2021 on the right. You can see that the number of leases has been hovering in the ballpark of 25 for 15 years. And that the acreage of these leases is hovering in the ballpark of 650 acres in Maine are used for salmon farming. This has been pretty even keel since 2009. Once in a while, Cook aquaculture will submit for a new site, but mostly they've been managing the same 25-ish sites that they have accumulated over time. And I have similar charts to share with you guys to see the difference in shellfish and seaweed. So that's like a quick overview in salmon. The one thing that I just wanted to add about salmon is that I'm sure everybody in this room knows about American aqua farms, which was the Norwegian company that was proposing salmon farming for Frenchman Bay off of Bald Rock and off of the Hawth, off of the Porcupine Islands. That kind of, I'm not going into detail related to that particular farm because it didn't happen. That their application was discontinued, their application to get permission from the state and the federal government to operate a salmon farm in Frenchman Bay was discontinued by the Department of Marine Resources who found the application incomplete. And we could go into details after, if anyone's interested in why. So they never even got as far as like having it evaluated by the state and given the thumbs up or the thumbs down, their application wasn't complete. So they were sort of stopped at that point. And from everything we've heard, there's no indication what they're doing one way or the other but chances are good that it's dead. I wouldn't quote me on that because you never know unless I'm looking at Alex to see if you've heard anything different. But the assumption is that they're, they made a go of it and triggered probably in my time working in this world, in this field about 25 years, the single most controversial proposal ever. And so that's kind of dead in the water. It was also the only other thing I'll say about it it was going to be in the water as opposed to land but a very different technology than anything that's ever been tried in Maine which was one of the contributing factors to the controversy. Okay, let's move along to shellfish farming. And so shellfish farming totally different than salmon farming, completely different, different scale, much smaller, much less in terms of infrastructure that you need from the get-go. You sort of think of it in terms of scale like salmon you need a ton of capital, you need a lot of infrastructure. Shellfish you need significantly less but you still need some and then seaweed is sort of the least capital intensive I'll say. So shellfish farming, this is oyster farming. This is an LPA which is a limited purpose aquaculture site. It's for those of you who know the local waters this is off of the 20s near Hadley Point at the top of Frenchman Bay. So a place that people like myself vote around all the time. So shellfish farming is really different because you don't have to feed them. That's like a really big one, right? So shellfish are filter feeders meaning that the water will run through their system. They pick up all the nutrients that they need to survive and then the water just kind of keeps flushing through them. So by many accounts, they also keep the water clean in the bays and estuaries where they are because they're picking up the nutrients that they need. And let me get to the next one. So a little bit about oysters. Oysters are grown in several different ways. You start by the little tiny seed oysters, the spat as they're known on the left. Oyster farmers will purchase the spat from hatcheries. So there's several hatcheries in the state of Maine that literally grow little tiny baby oysters in a hatchery in a lab environment and then sell them to oyster farmers who then transfer them when they're old enough, big enough, hearty enough into the ocean. In the middle, you see a couple of different ways of growing oysters. A lantern net is in the middle. Oyster trays are up on the right. And essentially oyster farmers are looking for systems where they have their oysters separated by size and age in enclosures. The oysters sort of are free in these enclosures. The water can flush through and they're immersed in the water. The woman on the upper right is a local farmer. That's Joanna Fogg from Bar Harbor Oyster Company. So what she's doing here, she's getting ready to flip the tray over, which she does with some regularity to, so the trays kind of the floats are up here. This is the water level. And then the trays with the oysters are under them. One of the concerns that anyone who does any work in the ocean environment, whether you're a sailor or anything else, is you're trying to figure out what to do with all the biofouling, with like the barnacles and the tuna kits and other things that attach to any surface. So they flip them over so that the sun can kind of dry out all that stuff and then flip them back over. So it's sort of a hands-on continual work. Now it's the winter, so they're either submerged or taken out. So it's kind of a constant, there's constant management of the farm animals, a lot of grading, separating by age as they grow at different rates. And then in the end, you get to the oysters that we all consume in the local restaurants. So several different ways of growing them. Oyster farming, I'll show you a chart in a little bit. Oyster farming has been growing in the last 10, 15 years. Again, Damroscata is kind of where the largest amount of farms are, but there's a fair bit of farms throughout MDI and throughout this region. And I particularly appreciate this family story, the woman in the top photo, because she and her husband grew up in a working waterfront family, fishing families. They kind of saw the writing on the wall, it was really hard for them to figure out how to be able to get a lobster license. So they sort of diversified, tried to figure out other ways to make a living. Her husband still fishes in Alaska during parts of the year. She was working on schooners, but they really wanted to be part of the working waterfront here in Maine. So they started an oyster farm as young entrepreneurs and they've really been able to make a go with it. So they're kind of a neat story of who is the aquaculture farmer? A lot of young people, a lot of people coming out of college who maybe have studied aquaculture at school, a lot of women are getting into aquaculture. Proportionally way more women than men are getting into aquaculture in comparison to like the wild fishery like lobster. So it's sort of an emerging growth area for folks who are trying to figure out ways to work on the water in an environment where our systems on the water are just changing. Mussels are another type of shellfish. And I stole a couple of photos. People recognize them, Alex, from Hollander and Deconing, which is a local mussel farm. There's a couple of different ways of growing mussels. Mussels can be grown on ropes, like on the left. And so you'll see a raft out in the ocean and it will have, if you can get close to it, you can see that there's lines that are hanging down from the raft. And the mussels quite literally, the little tiny mussel larvae float through the water column and they attach themselves to the ropes that are hanging from the raft and there they grow. They attach themselves with their bissel threads, which is like fine hair like threads that they use to sort of hold on to a substrate. So when you see them in the intertidal zone and they're attached to rocks, they're using bissel threads. And so they grow there and then once they get big enough, they get pulled off of the raft, of the ropes. And then I'm just gonna introduce Alex, since you're here, do you mind that I'm introducing you? Alex is a mussel farmer. Thank you for coming, Alex. And Alex works for Hollander and Deconing, which is the blue steward ship that is the name of the boat in the upper right picture here. And these guys bottom, grow their mussels on the bottom. Can I put you on the spot and ask you to say like two minutes of how you do bottom culture? You weren't expecting this, I'm sorry. Is that okay? Yeah, so the very basics of bottom culture is basically moving some of the wild mussel harvest natural systems. Business trees, my family's been farming mussels since the 1700s in London. Like my great grandfather was the first generation to get a deal for an engine theory or a little one cylinder and he was up there. So like about 20 years ago, he named the name of both there was already problems starting with wild mussels and population, basically. So we saw a big opportunity to start farming here. Basically mussels, the ecological niche of mussels is the zombie water approach. It is, there are so many of us, we have so many babies, everything eats them, but there's just so many of them that some of them so much. One of the problems they might need to ecologically is that when they are the grain of sand size, they are incredibly easy to eat by almost anything. So naturally you get the mussels set on the intertidal zone where they have 24 hours a day to put up shell thickness, but only 12 hours a day where there's subject to predation and water. Now what we do, the kind of, the trick we found is that once they go through grain of sand size by fingernail size, the areas where they can survive open up tremendously and they actually can be fried. So our general business model is to take an area that is nothing but boring much before we started. They literally, you can't have more than four organisms from square yards. It has to be really natural, not having bacteria. And basically we take an area like that and then once that through the mussels reach that fingernail size, we transplant them from the intertidal zone where they are too dense and they die in very large numbers. Like, you know that much, we had that lost somewhere between 25 and 35% of all the mussels in the intertidal. That's normal. And so basically we take them and then transplant them to the farm sites where now they have 24 hours a day to eat, they grow way faster, they're better densely, they're happier. Then harvest them, bring them to the shore of our system and send them out. And kind of the basics that we mentioned going out from, or happy, if you are the happy point beach towards the 20th where she was, there is a million pounds of standing biomass on the bottom there. That section, we've got one of these there that we harvest approximately half a million pounds a year for food. And so I mean, that's about equivalent to a 250 pound per year cattle farm. We don't feed them, we don't water, no medications. And our farms, the last little step, come on, I'll have for it, our farms build to the equivalent amount of the living swimming pool every 90 seconds, which really helps preventing climate clouds and moons like they have both of themselves and our animals. Thank you, Alex. Yeah, that was great. Thanks for letting me put you on the spot. See, he clearly is a farmer. I'm not a farmer. You can tell me you're not a farmer. Yeah. So when you put it in your team, can you talk about the mussels too? They do. Now the, okay, it's gonna get a little nerdy here, but mussels are known as the ecosystem engineers. When mussels start an empty area, it extracts all forms of other life. So mussels, they do, they have almost two plants. They have what's called pseudophisies, which when they filter in the water, they separate everything into effectively two parts. I want to meet this, I don't want to be sad. Everything they don't want to meet, they kind of glue together with like slimy as the state efforts. And then the actual species goes, they stick out as well. So what you end up with is this nutrient rich layer that's a QHB right under the mussel match. So when mussels like algae, they bury together and make a match, which is fine seeding ground for all sorts of natural organisms like worms and then snails and all that sort of activity, which then attracts fish, it attracts crab, it attracts lobsters. And so part of my work actually, but I have a lot, one of the coolest things for me to do is go down, jump off the lease, and then swim off to it. Because it's kind of like, I imagine walking through the Cerachara desert and coming to an ecosystem. It's like, there's nothing here, there's nothing here. There's like, actually the area. And fortunately, mussels are cold-blooded, not particularly metabolically fast. So their level of poop is very slow, so it doesn't bite the human. It gets broken down as fast by the other organisms on the site as it can. Which you can tell by some of the duck farms that have been farmed for 250 years. And they're still farming the same size with no lobsters. Thanks, Alex. Good question. So here's the Equivalent Shellfish Chart from the Department of Marine Resources. This is all their data. And again, it shows you on the right in the blue how many lease sites there are for shellfish. So this includes all the shellfish that are grown. So this isn't just mussels or oysters. It's both and a few of the other ones that are sort of a little bit more emerging. And then so we've got about 130, 120 leases for shellfish throughout the coast of Maine. And they cover about 650 acres in the state. And so we have had some growth in the last 10 years in the mussel industry. Though we'll see in a little bit that the seaweed industry is growing even faster. So moving on to seaweed, I tried to zero in on images of this region so you guys might recognize. So this particular farm, because this is the farm, right? It just looks like the ocean with some buoys in it. But if you kind of squint, you can see that underneath the orange buoy, the big one and to the left under the white buoys, there's a darker patch that seaweed growing under there. So this happens to be the farm that's off of Sorrento, off of Krebel Island. This is a farm owned by spring tide seaweed, Sarah Redman, who is very much a pioneer in Maine in terms of helping sort of figure out how the heck do we grow seaweed in a farming kind of environment. And this has been a farm site of hers for a while, way back in the day, back in the 80s, this particular site is where folks did some experimenting for growing cod. This exact site that didn't end up panning out, the site was fallow for a bunch of years. And so Sarah's been working with the leaseholder to grow seaweed there. So the way seaweed works, and when I chatted a little bit with Sue at the beginning, when we were sort of thinking about doing this, Sue had mentioned that it seems like there's a lot of interest in seaweed. So I'm gonna spend a minute talking about seaweed and then I'm gonna differentiate how seaweed farming, what is seaweed farming compared to wild harvest seaweed? Because both are happening in our geography. And so I think hopefully that's useful for you all. So seaweed farming, didn't think the video would start right off the bat, but we'll just let it go. So seaweed farming also starts with little tiny seeds just like a plant does, though they are not plants. They're a marine organism and algae. So little tiny, tiny plants, little tiny seeds are grown on strings that get looped around a PVC pipe when they're old enough to move out of the tank. So they get looped around the PVC pipe and then when they're ready to be deployed into the ocean, you can see that the thicker line is run through the PVC piping to set it into the ocean. And then as it's being pulled, as that bigger line is being pulled, the string that has the seed on it basically loops around the rope. And then that's how you end up with the substrate that goes into the water to grow the actual kelp. So this is, let me just go to the next one. So this is a colleague of mine, Jacqueline, who provided me with this slide because seaweed farming is kind of hard for people to wrap their brains around because when you think about seaweed, you think what I see in the intertidal zone. So yes, seaweed grows in the intertidal zone. When we're growing seaweed in a farming kind of way, we're, the farming that you just saw, the deploying of the seed, that was kelp. So kelp is the most widely grown species in Maine. It's the majority of our commercial species that is grown on farms. I'll talk a little bit about our sea vegetable wild harvest industry in a minute, but for the farming, it happens at sea, it happens in the winter, which is what makes it a really interesting working waterfront job kind of an opportunity, particularly for fishermen who may not fish in the winter. They might fish in the summer, in the warmer months and then a growing number of fishermen are getting into growing seaweed in the winter. It grows best in the winter and it grows submerged. So you don't really see it. So you know, you kind of know what's happening because you live in Maine and you hear about it, but essentially the yellow ball in the very first picture, orange, sorry, the orange ball, remember that orange ball is A over there all the way on the left or it's the one on the right. And then in between the two is the line that has the string of seaweed looped around the line. And then there might be side lines that come off the horizontal lines that go down and it's weighted down and the whole thing floats like a curtain in the water column below where you might sail or kayak. Like it's deep enough that it's out of the way. And then when the harvester is ready to pull the seaweed in, it grows incredibly fast. They usually seed it, they put it in the ocean in April-ish and then they pull it out like several months later. And when they pull it out, this is what it looks like when they're pulling it out. So they're literally just pulling that rope back out of the water and then they're cutting the kelp off the line. And those kelp can be 15 feet long. And so 10-ish years ago when seaweed was really starting to take off in Maine, the biggest bottleneck in the development of that industry was what do we do with all this wet goopy biomass when it comes out of the water, right? So since then there's been a lot of innovation and a lot of creativity to figure out, you can dry it, you can blanch it, you can process it, you can freeze it. Like there's been an incredible amount of investment in trying to figure out what do we do with the product? It's highly nutritious. There's a growing market for it. You may have heard, there's seaweed beer now. There's like all kinds of different seaweed products. There's seaweed in those veggie burgers that are gaining all kinds of popularity. There's seaweed being sold in little cubes that are frozen to put into smoothies. It's sort of this rapidly growing opportunity. So we're following in the footsteps of our colleagues in Asian countries who have been doing this for generations. And seaweed is growing quickly. Seaweed farming in compared to the others is growing really quite quickly. I mean, it's still quite small. We have 25 lease sites-ish. This was 2021 statistics. So it's not, and a lease site, I'll tell you about lease sites in a second, they're not very big, and it covers maybe 110, 120 acres. So the number of people getting into seaweed is growing. There's a lot of interest in it, and we'll see where it goes. It's definitely an emerging opportunity for folks on the coast. I have a lot of folks. I was kidding, that's definitely the world. So they have to, the big, huge round buoys mark this as a farm. But generally speaking, well, first of all, it's in the winter. The growing happens in the winter. So the amount of people on the water is like way, way, way, way, way less. And they're submerged. They're fairly, they're far enough deep. I don't know, but I can find out. I'm forgetting how many feet deep. Does anyone know? What do you- Six to eight feet. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. So because there's been a lot of interest in seaweed, I just wanted to just kind of note a little bit of the difference between seaweed farming and seaweed harvesting. So farming in the water, right? In the water column, as we've just talked about. Seaweed harvesting intertidal zone along the shore between high and low tide or subtitle just below low tide. Seaweed harvesting. So this is the wild harvest fishery. Seaweed harvesting is done one of three ways by hand. So by hand tends to be mostly what we call the sea vegetables. So the sea vegetables are the ones that people like to eat, like the kelp, the nori, the dulse, the sea lettuce, the Irish moss, all those species that are good. You can put them in your stir fry. You can put them in all kinds of different things. There's a growing number of people who are wild harvesters, but when I say a growing number of people, there's not hundreds and hundreds of people making their living on the coast of Maine this way. There's several dozens of people on the coast of Maine making their living by wild harvesting sea vegetables. Most of them by hand, there's several farmers in her harvesters, I should say in the greater MDI region who have operations. The one in the middle, that picture happens to be from Nova Scotia, but that happens in Maine too. That happens to be seaweed harvesting that gets done from a boat with a rake. And at the end of the long rake from the backside where we can't see it, there's basically each of the tines has knives in it or like scissors that can literally cut the seaweed. In that case, they're going after rockweed. So rockweed is the ubiquitous seaweed that you see anywhere on the main coast between high and low tide. It's the most common seaweed. This one is not rockweed is not, you can eat it, but your body's gonna have to work really hard to digest it to get the nutritive value out of it. So rockweed is used in fertilizers. It's used in animal feed and animal supplements. It's used in human food supplements, that kind of thing. Rockweed is in a lot of like our foods and products that need sort of an emulsifier in it, like toothpaste or ice cream or those kinds of sort of foods and products. So that's what rockweed is used for. So handrakes for rockweed or mechanical harvesters are also used in rockweed harvesting. This is the one on the right. So it's literally a platform that gets moved around on the surface of the ocean. And then the funnel looking thing on the front side, that is quite literally where the blades are to cut the rockweed. And the funnel itself is a minimum of 16 inches deep because that's the minimum regulation of how, you have to leave at least 16 inches. So if the rockweed is attached here to the rock, you can't cut shorter than 16 inches because the rockweed will continue to grow after it's been cut, if it's cut up at this side. If it's cut way down at the bottom, then it's toast. You kind of eliminated its option to grow back. But if you leave it, leave a lot of the hold fast and then a foot and a half beyond it, then it regrows, it continues to grow. So these are typical wild harvest methods of getting rockweed. Okay, time is up. Okay, just, what's up? Thank you. Okay, I'm gonna start winding down here. I just have a few more topics I wanted to share with you. So I just wanted to share this just to kind of give you a sense of how much of each of these kinds of farms are out there on the coast of Maine. So shellfish is the most common for sure. Salmon, as we talked about, has been sort of even keel for a long time. And going on what Alex was saying actually about sort of the almost like the underwater reefs that some of the farms can create, there's a lot of experimentation happening where they're doing what's called multi-trophic aquaculture, multiple species grown on the same lease site to take advantage of the shared nutrients between those species. So that's some of what's going on with shellfish and marine algae together. What do you need to know to be a farmer? These are just some high level, anytime we do talks about aquaculture, there's some folks who are like curious, what if I wanna get into it? So these are kind of the general themes that if you were to take an aquaculture class of which there are some, and if anyone's interested, I can give you more information about the courses that exist to really get into it. You need to know about permitting and regulation. You need to know about site selection. And I would venture to say that site selection is the single most important thing for farming, ecological for sure, what's the optimal temperature, wind direction, salinity, depth, all that ecological stuff. But also what are the social dimensions of the area in which you wanna operate? If you're American aqua farms, the salmon company from Norway, you might have done a little bit more homework to realize that if you propose to put your salmon farm at the foot of a national park, you might come against some social perceptions that aren't very accepting of it. So doing your homework about where do you wanna put your farm as a farmer, both ecologically and socially is really, really critical talking to the Harper master, talking to the adjoining property owners, all of that is really critical for would-be farmers. You have to know about the gear and the equipment we've touched a tiny bit on that. How do you farm? You talk to people like Alex who have done it before. What are the biosecurity and public health issues? This is food, right? So these are really important. Business planning, like so many different businesses, people get into farming because they love to be outside, they love to work with natural resources, but can they run a business? And then the whole, how do you get your product to market? These are some of the key themes just like farming on land that people pay attention to. What are the regulations? And what are the regulations? What are the permits that people need to get? And this leads into how you as citizens can get involved in the decision making around where aquaculture is cited. So in a nutshell, there are three different types of leases and license to run farms. The statistics that I've been showing you, those charts are all related to standard leases. So standard leases can be up to a hundred years. Once they're approved, they can go for 20 years and they can be renewed. And you do have to have a public process where the public can be involved in providing testimony or a thought about the farm before it gets approved. An experimental lease is much smaller. An experimental lease tends to be used, like for example, College of the Atlantic had an experimental lease for a little while because our students wanted to kind of learn how do you grow oysters and how do you grow seaweed? And then a limited purpose aquaculture license is way smaller, it's just 400 square feet. Is that what this room is maybe? I don't know. What's that? This room is bigger than that. This room is bigger? Okay, I'm really bad at spatial dimensions. And you only have your lease for your license I should say for a year. It can be renewed, but LPAs as they're called are really for, I think I might wanna get into it but I really ought to dabble for a year or two before I massively invest. And so that's sort of the origin of LPAs and there's a lot of folks that have gotten into it by doing LPAs and pulled on to them for a while. How the Department of Marine Resources, the DMR, decides whether to approve or deny a lease application is an adjudicatory process. So it's highly regulated. The criteria that the Department of Marine Resources utilizes to decide whether people can get their lease approved or not, their proposal approved is very, very, very specific. They can only issue decisions based on these eight points which vary a little bit depending on which of the three you're applying for but essentially is it gonna impact the ingress and egress of riparian landowners? Is it gonna like get in the way of people getting to their property? Is it gonna impact navigation, fishing or other aquaculture uses? Is it gonna impact the local ecosystem? Is it gonna impact the use and enjoyment by people within a thousand feet? Is there an available source of the organism to get the farm started? And in some cases, again, depending on the type of lease, are there gonna be noise and light concerns? And so this is what the DMR can rule on. They cannot rule on whether it might, is it gonna impact my property value? That kind of stuff. Is it gonna impact my property value if I live on the coast and there's a farm out front? Like they legally can't look at that kind of stuff. Whether that's fair or not, is a question that is for the legislature, right? But in terms of like actual leases that are getting proposed, this is what was passed by the legislature and is codified in law. There are other requirements depending on the type of application the Army Corps of Engineers might get involved. If there's gear, the US Coast Guard might get involved. And DP, Department of Environmental Protection might get involved. So there's a variety of different agencies that might have some jurisdiction depending on what is applied for. And then how the dizzying blue and white map is, I'm not gonna go through it. I just put it out there because it's kind of interesting for those who get kind of nerdy about this sort of stuff like me, what the process is for a farmer to submit an application and what are the steps that that application has to go through in order to get to the point where they maybe get issued a permit to go ahead and farm and the places where the public can be involved. So the public can be involved in the scoping session which is an informational session that the farmer has with the public. That's a great place to get involved because the farmer hasn't submitted their application yet but they're required by law to have this meeting with the public. And so they wanna hear from you, what do you think about my idea and what are changes that I should make to it so that you'll be reasonably okay with it? So it's a great back and forth opportunity at the scoping session. You can get involved at the hearing stage for sure. I will say that the Department of Marine Resources whenever they hear that one of us from our team is doing a talk like this, there's like a point that they always want us to make which is that the public hearing stage, unfortunately, it can't be the stage where if you're concerned about aquaculture as a whole like there's too much aquaculture going on in my neighborhood or I'm concerned about my property values or that kind of thing, all concerns that the DMR has heard, you can't bring that to the public hearing. The public hearing is about this particular farm, this particular application. And so there's been a lot of instances where people share these sorts of thoughts in the assumption that it's testimony that the state will consider but the state can't consider it. They can't do anything with it in that form because it's a process that's for that one farm. So that's an excellent question I'm about to tell you. So in the back of the room, there's a bunch of these aquaculture in Maine which kind of explains some of this in a little more detail for anybody who wants where you can do that. This is actually serendipitous and I'm sorry that that text looks so darn small on your screen. The Department of Marine Resources has definitely heard that aquaculture is a thing that people wanna talk about and that they want their voices heard about aquaculture. So they are, they literally just last week announced a bunch of listening sessions that they're doing in the coming weeks around the state to give people the opportunity to share sort of the larger issues or concerns or excitement that they have about aquaculture. So these are listening sessions that are gonna be about like, what do you like? What's working well? What are the opportunities? What are the concerns? They're sort of opening themselves up to these sessions around the state to hear from folks about aquaculture. I know that's really small. If you go to the Department of Marine Resources website, you just Google Maine Department of Marine Resources it'll take you to their homepage and all their upcoming events and announcements are right there on that page. So the last one is Elkhard. Right here in part 20 part is one of the hands since. Right here, Elkhard, one of the hands. Yeah. And then my very last slide is the local map. This as well. So this is a screenshot of a map, an interactive map that's on the Department of Marine Resources website. So again, if you Google DMR aquaculture map you will be taken to a page where you can zoom in, you can zoom out, you can go anywhere on the coast and figure out what it is that you wanna look for. So I'm just gonna point out a couple of things and then I'm gonna stop talking and let you guys ask questions. If I can, ah, here we go. So I mentioned the westernmost salmon farm on Black Island. That's that green square right there. The blue or I'm sorry, the green dots that you see kind of scattered all over the place. These are active LPAs. So LPAs were those small 400 square foot sites. The pictures that I showed you where I was, you could see the bow of my kayak and there was a small little string of oyster. That is right up in here. That's one of the LPAs right in here. This is Hadley Point. And Alex, the stewardship that we just saw that picture was like right in here, right? Also right off of Hadley. Could be here. Yellow dots are LPAs that are in the process of getting discussed by the Department of Marine Resources. The DMR has a pretty substantial backlog of applications that are waiting to be processed, which is one of the things that will come up in the public sessions next week because it's very frustrating for farmers. And then like this one down here that I mentioned, the different shape green squares or triangles or whatever shape they are, those are the leases, the standard leases which are represented in the charts that I showed you. So that kind of gives you a sense. Oh, and then I wanted to point out here as well, that is where the seaweed farm is that I showed you right there off of Sorento. That's on a standard lease. And they have another one right here that's growing seaweed. So on the site, does it say what is being farmed? On the website, yeah, if this was a mouse, if my pointer was a mouse, I could click on that green square right there and it would pop up and it would tell me the name of the business or the name of the person. It would tell me what they're farming on that, what they're licensed to farm on that site and a few other pieces of information about it as well. Yeah, the size. And that's my last slide. So why don't I just leave the map up because maps are cool. And I'll leave it at that and happy to have questions. Yes.