Eel Farm Prospects

At the Maine Fishermen’s Forum, the Maine Elver Fishermen’s Association heard from Sara Radamaker, from American Unagi, regarding her efforts to start an aquaculture operation for glass eels.

“For the last four years, I’ve been growing eels and seeing if this is going to work,” Radamaker said.

Radamaker said it makes sense to culture glass eels in Maine rather than ship them to Asia.

“We’re shipping it all overseas; they’re making all that money and getting those jobs,” she said. Radamaker said she started operations in 2014, in her basement, just to see if she could grow them.

“For the last four years, I’ve been growing eels and seeing if this is going to work,” she said. “I come to eels as a person in aquaculture. I’m not a fisherman. I’m not a scientist. I’m a fish farmer and I’ve been growing eels, algae, all that.”

Radamaker said that, when she returned to Maine, she wanted to start land-based aquaculture business.

“But there’s not a lot of fish that work in that situation,” she said.

But eels seemed like a great candidate, she said. Currently, Maine is shipping all of its baby eels overseas for growout, leaving the jobs and earnings to other countries, she said.

“It’s also good for a fishery to have local support, to have a place where you can sell your eels in case that market crashes,” she said. “Having the industry here is going to be important.”

She said she started in her basement in 2014 with a couple of eels, “just to see if I could grow them.”

The “basement eels” did well: “They tasted fabulous,” she said. “They’re a phenomenal fish to eat. The U.S. market is growing, and more people care about where their food is coming from. So this business in the aquaculture industry is possible now. Ten years ago, you couldn’t have done this business here. People didn’t care where their food was coming from.”

After the basement project, she said, she built a pilot facility at the Darling Marine Center in Walpole, where she’s now got thousands of eels.

She said she built the incubator space to mimic commercial densities.

“I’m following what Europeans do—land-based, no hormones, no antibiotics,” she said.

Now going into her third year with the facility, she been market-testing the product.

“Do people want to buy it, do they care?” she said. “The numbers look good. It’s a special market, so it’s not huge.”

In the coming year, she said, she plans to raise financing to expand operations.

“Then we have to figure out how to source the eels and who wants to be involved,” she said.

Speaking to the harvesters, she said, “This industry is not going to happen without your involvement, whether it’s you putting your quota in and becoming part of the company, or just having a place locally to sell your eels.”

Radamaker said she expects to take a full year to raise capital for an expanded facility.

“You can’t operate these facilities at small scale and make money,” she said. “So the last couple of years we’ve been trying find a size that’s economical, but not so big that it requires the entire quota.”

She said she’s seeking to raise $4 million. So far, she said, chefs who have bought her product seem to love it.

“We’re going to be expanding on what we’re growing,” she said. “We’ll continue to grow more eels and put more in the marketplace, and we hope to have financing raised by next year, so we’ll be stocking a new facility next year.”

Maine’s industry has a dedicated aquaculture of 200 pounds on the books, but has not yet implemented it, noted Jeff Pierce, a Maine state representative who is MEFA’s former executive director. That discussion will arise at the ASMFC hearings, he said. Currently, Radamaker buys elvers from dealers.

Because the ASMFC hasn’t yet implemented Maine’s quota for elver aquaculture, Radamaker has been buying elvers from dealers. Pierce said it’s expected that the ASMFC will review the topic when it resumes talks on Draft Addendum 5.

The Draft Addendum is available on the ASFMC website, www.asmfc.org (under Public Input). For more information on American eel, contact Kirby Rootes-Murdy, Senior FMP Coordinator, at krootes-murdy@asmfc.org.