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But fishermen did not flock to the training program, and many, including Ted Ames, wonder if cod farming is a viable proposition. Ames, whose seminal work on mapping the historical spawning grounds of cod in Maine’s inshore waters won him a $500,000 MacArthur Grant in 2006, asked the fundamental question. “If cod are a dollar a pound on the market and cost two dollars a pound to grow, what’s the point? I think they’d be better served by putting this money into restoring the wild fishery and letting Mother Nature do the work for free.”

But ever since Maine Governor, John Baldacci’s Task Force on Aquaculture identified cod as a “promising species for culture in Maine,” in 2003, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has funneled millions of dollars into the state’s cod project. In 2003, Nick Brown, director of the Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research (CCAR), secured a $358,022 Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant to demonstrate the viability of cod farming in Maine, while George Nardi and partners at Great Bay Aquaculture, garnered $289,774 to produce juvenile cod at their New Hampshire hatchery. Faced with a steep decline in the value of Maine’s aquaculture industry after salmon farming collapsed in 2001, Sebastian Belle of the Maine Aquaculture Associa- tion got on board with the idea, shared by many, that cod would become a major driver of Maine’s aquaculture industry.

“We believe cod can be the next salmon,” said former Great Bay Aquaculture vice-president, Chris Duffy, speaking to an international gathering of industry pioneers in 2003. Great Bay and CCAR have continued to develop an offshore production system where cod, halibut and other species would be grown in submerged cages in the US Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), federal waters between 3 and 200 miles offshore.

Over the years, Brown has received millions dollars in state and federal funds to create the CCAR facilities. Roughly $5 million dollars has gone into buildings designed primarily for research into growing cod and other high value finfish species in the open ocean, and millions more from the Saltonstall Kennedy Grant program, originally established to help fishermen, has gone to fund specific projects.

In 2008, CCAR and Great Bay stocked their first commercial scale pens in state waters off Sorrento, and recently began harvesting marketable fish at a profit. “We’re selling to the Asian live market,” said Great Bay’s George Nardi. “We can sell smaller fish for around 100 percent more than we’d get on the fresh market.”

The project’s limited success is indicative of the wide array of challenges facing cod farmers, and several big players have thrown in the towel. The Canadian company, Cooke Aquaculture, which had collaborated with Great Bay and CCAR, suspended its cod program in April 2010, after investing $2.6 million into the project.

“It’s the first time we’ve actually gone into something and then had to turn around and say, this doesn’t make sense,” Cooke spokesperson Nel Halse told a New Brunswick reporter.
In 2008, the Shetland cod farming company, Johnson Seafarms, went into receivership with over £40 million ($80 million) in debt.

Output from Norway, which once promised to be producing 100,000 tons of farmed cod by 2010, dropped from 16,523 tons in 2008, to 11,000 in 2009, and aquaculture giant, Marine Harvest, dropped its cod program in 2009.

What’s the Problem?

Much of the enthusiasm for cod farming in Maine was based on a 2003 report, produced by Gardner - Pinfold, a Halifax, Nova Scotia, consulting firm, for the Governor’s Task Force on Aquaculture. The report recommended cod as a species for consideration, but did so “with less confidence due to limited commercial experience,” and added a number of caveats highlighting challenges.

Seven year later, Garner - Pinfold produced another study for Genome Atlantic, a Canadian company that has spent millions on breeding cod for aquaculture. Principle author Michael Gardner is less than optimistic. “If someone were to ask me today whether they should invest in cod farming, I would caution them to look at the risks,” said Gardner. “It’s a long shot,” he added, pointing out numerous obstacles to growing cod profitably, the biggest of which is the rebounding of cod stocks at the northern extremes of their ranges. Some scientists speculate that climate change has benefited northern cod, and exacerbated the problem Maine faces of having water that, as the 2003 study noted, often exceeds the 14 degree C limit for cod.

There are also the technical hurdles, not only for growing cod—hatchery, feeding, and monitoring—but for keeping them in the pens. Over 228,000 cod reportedly escaped from Norwegian pens in 2008, a much larger percentage than salmon, because cod are more prone to escape. Disease, particularly Nodavirus, has hampered production from the outset—it took Nardi and company three years to get disease free juveniles out of their hatchery.

“I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade,” said Gardner. “But it’s good to know where the parade route is going, and this one is headed into a thicket of complexity and risk.”

Another major problem with cod, Gardner pointed out, is that they reach sexual maturity and stop growing before they attain market size. “Cod populations are not well defined,” he said, indicating one of the difficulties that cod breeders have encountered in their efforts to domesticate these fish. “It’s difficult to identify one family or another as having the traits you want.”

But George Nardi, who received a $249,940 dollar Saltonstall Kennedy Grant this year “for the development of cod aquaculture for downeast fishermen,” believes the project is still viable. “We’re not Cooke,” said Nardi. “We aren’t trying to get to the commodity scale overnight. We’re trying to grow with our markets in a way that will let a small producer survive.”

In Nardi’s view, the Asian market provides enough revenue to allow a small grower to learn and expand. “Sometimes it’s frustrating,” he said, acknowledging the unexpectedly slow development of the industry. “But sometimes you have to be happy making pennies instead of losing dollars.”

Nardi hopes to gradually grow the niche markets that will keep a few small scale cod farmers operating profitably while he and Nick Brown and others work on the technical problems, such as escapes. “Cod tend to pick at the net, and find every hole,” said Nardi. “So we switched to a smaller mesh and we’re getting very little escapes now.” Nardi believes too, that the use of genetic markers will accelerate the breeding of high performance cod suitable for aquaculture. In his view, it is just a matter of time before the kinks are worked out and the market improves, and operating on a small scale would allow the nascent Maine industry to endure.

Research continues, and CCAR has built a new facility for testing offshore aquaculture systems. But efforts to move cod farming offshore are on hold, and may be for a few years if legislation, now pending in the US Congress, goes through.

Legislation

One of the constraints to cod farming, identified by Gardner - Pinfold and many others, is an “unfriendly regulatory environment.” Since the 2007, when Senators Stevens and Inouye introduced the National Offshore Aquaculture Act, industry and environmental groups have been at odds about how to permit large-scale fish farming in the EEZ. NOAA, which awarded itself a $300,000 SK grant to study the legal considerations of Open Ocean Aquaculture, drafted the 2007 Open Ocean Aquaculture Act to meet the needs of industry. The bill went nowhere.

In 2009, Senator Lois Capps introduced the National Sustainable Offshore Aquaculture Act of 2009, which came under fire from all sides.

“The 2009 bill was an effort to derail aquaculture,” said Nardi. “It was designed to stop everything.”

A 2010 bill: The Research and Aquaculture Opportunity and Responsibility Act, introduced by Sen. David Vitter, threatened to impose yet more restraints.

“At some point,” said Nardi, “we need to decide if we are going to have an aquaculture industry.” Nardi warned that offshore aquaculture development would happen somewhere. “Wouldn’t we want to use our technology ourselves,” he asked, rhetorically, “instead of buying back those fish from somewhere else?”

The Cod Academy

In spite of the challenges and slump in farmed cod production around the North Atlantic rim, Maine and the NOAA aquaculture program continued to support development of cod farming, over alternative species, such as oysters, scallops and seaweed, which were also recommended in the Gardner - Pinfold study. Sebastian Belle, of the Maine Aquaculture Association, spearheaded a cod aquaculture training program that he hopes will benefit Maine fishing communities and maintain a working waterfront.

Longtime waterman turned fish farmer, Clayton Coffin, now manager of Great Bay’s Sorrento cod farm, will be among several experts sharing their knowledge with prospective cod farmers in a program that Belle has dubbed, “The Cod Academy.” Funded with a $184,000 SK grant, the 6-month training course is designed to give up to 15 fishermen and family members—who are willing to invest 50 percent of the start up costs—an opportunity to enter the cod farming business on a small scale.

In an article by Muriel Hendrix in The Working Waterfront, Belle says he modeled the idea on a program used in Norway in the early 1980’s to help fishermen transition into fish farmers. “When I first pitched the idea to Mike Rubino [head of NOAA’s

Aquaculture Program] his reaction was ‘what a great idea. I’ve never heard of anything like that. Let’s see if we can find a way to help you financially to do that.’”

According to Dick Clime, president of Coastal Enterprises Inc., he and Belle and George Nardi of Great Bay Aquaculture, are largely responsible for designing the course. While intended to start in August 2010, the program was delayed due to a shortage of participants. “We think if we start the course in January, when people aren’t so busy, we’ll see a stronger turnout,” said Clime.

A Flawed Model

Belle failed to mention, however, that most of the small Norwegian salmon farm start-ups were later absorbed by economy-of-scale operations, as were the family-owned salmon farms in eastern Maine. According to Dr. David Love, of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for a Livable Future, Maine fishermen are being offered a chance to participate in what he called “a flawed model.” Noting that it takes several pounds of wild fish to create one pound of farmed fish at a net loss of protein from the sea, and that escapes and effluents from intensive net pen operations have damaged nearby ecosystems. “Farming carnivorous species exploits people’s disconnect with the natural world,” he said. “The question shouldn’t be: how do we reduce the level of wild fish in the feed? It should be: are these the species we want to be farming?”

Love, who comes from an oyster farming family in southeast Virginia, contends that there were numerous models for small-scale aquaculture such as aquaponics, where fish and vegetables are grown together in land based re-circulating systems, and less risky marine species such as mollusks and seaweed.

According to Marianne Cufone of Food and Water Watch, (F&WW) an environmental group with a focus on offshore aquaculture, the numbers add up in favor of aquaponics. A study by F&WW cites the cost of one offshore fish farm near Hawaii at $13 million plus, with investors expecting to generate 25 jobs, and an annual yield of 5 million pounds of fish. “A $4.2 million investment in aquaponics, scaled up to $50 million through re-investment of profits, would yield twice as much fish, ten times more jobs and an additional annual harvest of 42.6 million pounds of vegetables,” said Cufone.

The collapse of cod farming due primarily to a resurgence of wild cod, implies that nature is a more efficient cod producer than fish farms. As Ted Ames suggested, investing those millions of state and federal dollars into restoring wild fisheries could give fishermen a chance to make a living with what they already have, and already know. To propose restoring inshore fisheries that support local economies as they did when Del Raynes fished the waters of upper Penobscot Bay, may not be out of the question.

In New England and elsewhere in the world, from Chile to Iceland, investments in protecting marine ecosystems have paid off. Closed areas on Georges Bank have helped foster record year classes of haddock, and the scallop industry now embraces rotational closures. Icelandic small-boat fishermen using hooks and working within sight of shore, have steadily increased their quotas over the last 20 years and helped keep their communities viable. Near shore fishermen in Chile and Thailand, when organized in co-operatives, given management guidance and exclusive access rights to their local waters, have cultivated benthic species like sea urchins, clams and oysters as one would in a garden, often increasing harvests and prices.

Elsewhere in the nation, and world, innovators are creating sustainable land based aquaculture systems, and rehabilitating near shore fisheries, but Nardi, and many others, including NOAA’s Mike Rubino, continue to assert that carnivorous fish farming has the greatest likelihood of creating jobs in eastern Maine, offsetting the US seafood trade imbalance, and meeting global seafood demand. While the millions invested so far have produced a Maine cod farming industry that may rival periwinkle picking, the US wants to increase the value of the domestic aquaculture industry to $5 billion by 2025, and commodity scale offshore aquaculture is a part of that plan.

Going offshore is a high risk gamble with public funding that is drying up in a troubled economy, and so far few fishermen have volunteered to share that risk by pioneering the industry inshore. Dan Namur, head of the Saltonstall-Kennedy Program, was unaware that major aquaculture companies had thrown in the towel on cod, and was unable to respond by press time as to why the program is lavishing millions on ventures fraught with so much uncertainty. But Nardi expressed faith that the investments in cod farming would eventually pay off. “I’m an optimist,” he said.

Paul Molyneaux has researched aquaculture around the world. His 2007 book on the industry is “Swimming In Circles”. Avalon Books-Thunder's Mouth Press