In 2017, nine midcoast Maine fishermen formed the Maine Aquaculture Coop and started doing math that didn't favor their own timelines. They'd pool resources to farm scallops. Each member securing their own state aquaculture lease, sharing the expensive processing equipment, splitting marketing costs. The hope: eventually $20,000 to $40,000 extra per year from a small lease.
Four years from spat to harvest. Four years of money tied up in $20 lantern nets, hundreds of them. Four years drilling tiny holes through juvenile scallop shells to pin them to ropes using a Japanese technique. Four years watching September water temperatures, checking if they've tipped into too warm for growth.
"Realistically we're all too old to get much out of this. I'm going to claim that we're all wearing a white hat and we're doing it for the good of the coast of Maine."
Peter Miller, 67, fishing out of Tenants Harbor for 45 years, is blunt about the timeline.
What the Water Took
Miller remembers when seasons rolled into each other predictably: "Lobstering in the summer and fall, scallops in the fall and winter, shrimp in the winter, groundfish in the spring. You could just go round and round the seasons and get by."
Faster than 96% of the world's oceans, rewriting the seasonal patterns fishermen have relied on for generations.
Miller watches lobsters follow the cold water east. He's considering something unthinkable a decade ago: "If I got a scallop farm up and running, I could harvest year-round, as long as they pass the toxicity test. Then, I might just give up lobstering."
Miller frames it for the next generation: "The next generation that can't get a scallop license, if the lobstering goes down, where are they going to be?" He already knows where he'll be. Too old to see much return himself.
Seven Years In
Marsden Brewer, third-generation Stonington fisherman, heads the cooperative. He'd been chasing scallop farming for 20 years before 2017. Traveled to Japan to learn from Aomori Prefecture fishermen who've practiced ear-hanging since the 1950s. The lantern nets, the spat bags, the timing of when to capture wild juveniles drifting through late summer water. All learned from people who've been doing this for generations.
Now Marsden works a three-and-a-quarter acre site in Penobscot Bay with his son Bob, the cooperative's vice president. The tube-shaped nets hold platforms of scallops they've been nursing for years. Start-up costs are expensive, "can add up to an amount that can be a stretch, even for a well-funded fisherman." The cooperative structure lets them share what individual fishermen couldn't afford alone. Still requires capital most don't have.
Each season teaches something new. NOAA scientists found that by September, water temperatures in some sites edge toward too warm. The four-year cycle means making decisions now about conditions you won't see until you're four years older. Site selection matters more than expected.
And you're still, Miller says, "at the whim of Mother Nature."
But there's something Marsden can do now that he couldn't before. He still participates in wild scallop harvest in winter—can't farm then because freezing kills them—but the farm means "I can scallop in state waters year-round." His wife Donna runs Red Barn Farm, their Stonington retail shop. They won a trophy at the Men Who Cook contest serving PenBay Princess scallops on the half shell. Two-inch "half-mature" scallops the Maine market had never seen, a Japanese approach to a Maine product.
High-end restaurants want them. Chefs can get fresh scallops with coral gonads attached, impossible with wild harvest but feasible with farmed scallops that can be tested for biotoxins. The market exists. Whether the four-year wait works for fishermen used to going out and catching something today—that's another matter.
What They're Building
As of 2023, scallop farming wasn't yet fully commercial scale, though Maine Sea Grant believes it might be the next big thing. The cooperative operates three lease sites with applications for a fourth. They announced proudly: "We are the first entity in Maine to grow and sell a live Atlantic sea scallop."
Luke Holden, founder of Luke's Lobsters and cooperative member-at-large, explains the math: "We'd like to build a year-round opportunity for commercial fishermen. At the end of the day, you're paying insurance and your mortgage on your boat for 12 months a year, we want to help fishermen reach closer to 100% utilization."
Boats sit idle for months while fixed costs continue. But the cooperative model only works for fishermen who can afford to wait four years for return on investment, who have capital for start-up costs even when shared, who can absorb the risk of Mother Nature not cooperating.
Whether younger fishermen will take this up remains to be seen. Whether warming water makes scallop farming easier or harder as temperatures keep climbing. Whether the September readings that already edge toward too warm will cross that threshold in five years, ten years. Marsden continues sharing knowledge with fishermen looking to diversify, but he's honest about his own timeline: "I'm too old to ever get rich at this."
"For a fisherman, you keep going."
Seven years into a decision that won't pay off for them personally, they're building infrastructure for a generation that might not have the choice they had. To fish the way their fathers and grandfathers did. Betting on four years when you're 67, in water already different from what you learned as a boy.
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Kelp as winter income: Keith Miller, a lobsterman from Spruce Head, went from harvesting 2,200 pounds of kelp in his first year to 170,000 pounds by his fifth year around 2022, showing how some fishermen are finding success with different aquaculture species during lobster's off-season.
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Free training programs launched: In 2023, Maine organizations began offering free aquaculture training through the "Aquaculture in Shared Waters" program, teaching fishermen how to cultivate oysters, mussels, scallops, and kelp as the industry recognizes the need to support diversification.
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Scallop research initiative formed: The Gulf of Maine Research Institute, University of Maine, and Coastal Enterprises Inc. created the Scallop Aquaculture Initiative in January 2021 with private funding to identify challenges and growth opportunities for what's still an emerging industry in Maine.
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Maine's aquaculture boom continues: The state issued around 200 new limited purpose aquaculture approvals yearly between 2017 and 2021, up from less than 50 a decade earlier, reflecting growing interest among fishermen seeking to diversify income as traditional fisheries face pressure.