(waves gently breaking) (mellow guitar music) - [Sebastian] One of the exciting things about agriculture in the state is how fast it's growing.

We are the fastest growing food production method in the world.

And in the state of Maine, aquaculture is growing roughly 2.4% per year on an annual basis.

One of the most interesting things about aquaculture in the state of Maine is how diverse it is.

We grow over 20 different species of plants and animals and use roughly 10 to 12 different production methods on any given year.

We have a big group of new young farmers coming into the sector.

The average age of a farmer in aquaculture in the state of Maine is 36 years old.

So we are the new young face of the working waterfront in Maine.

(mellow guitar music) - [Briana] The water is changing.

The world is changing.

And in order to continue to be who we are, we have to find new ways of staying on the water.

Ocean Approved was started as the first commercial kelp farm.

We renamed it Atlantic Sea Farms, and basically the model is we work with these 24, four fishermen along the coast, or aquaculturists, and these folks are getting their own leases, and we're training them on how to harvest, how to farm.

Keith is this person.

He's been kelp farming now for three years, which makes him one of the few fishermen out there that have been farming for that long in Maine, so he's a real pioneer.

- [Keith] I've always diversified as long as I've been fishing.

And lobstering isn't the only thing because it has a tendency to go up and down in waves.

And so we try to get into another project, not just solely have one project going, it fits into my lobster in season better than anything else.

You don't have to work at the kelp season during the summertime and early fall, and that's when lobster is prime.

- [Briana] So kelp is really amazing because it's, it grows very quickly, but it's also a winter crop.

So it's counter cyclical to the lobster season.

But the falls is a super exciting time for us 'cause it's when our nursery starts up.

So James Krimp, our supply manager, goes out and gets just a few wild kelp leaves.

So this is a wild piece right here.

See, right in the middle of here is sorus tissue.

This is their reproductive tissue.

It's what we use to spore out, make all off our kelp seeds.

So when we bring the seeds out of the nursery, they're on these spools with line wrapped around them and with about 30 day old kelp babies growing on them.

We bring it out to the fishermen.

- [Keith] And what we do is put a three eights rope through the seed spool when we start and the rope comes out of this hand and the seed spool will unwrap onto the rope and the spores will collect to the rope over a period of time.

And hopefully in the spring, it'll be growing very nice and tall.

- [Briana] From an environmental perspective, this is even more exciting because every time we plant a blade of kelp and then take it out of the water, we're actually removing nitrogen and carbon from the water.

The stuff is so good for you.

It's filled with potassium and calcium.

It's one of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet.

One thing that people can be a little bit resistant to is the idea that we're fishing the sea, now we're farming the sea.

But the reality is we used to fish here in Maine for several different species.

And we have an economy that is almost completely dependent on lobster that is increasingly vulnerable to climate change.

In order to be who we are, and stay on the water, and make money on the water, and be the mariners that we've always been, we need to continue to look to diversify.

And that's what aquaculture is going to give us the option to do.

(mellow guitar music) (waves gently breaking) - [Fiona] This is an enhanced natural process that needs a vessel.

That's all.

- [Man] This looks suspiciously, suspiciously like agriculture, like driving the tractor.

- It is.

It's very similar.

That's what I, I usually explain it as potato or carrot farming.

I mean, it's a simple idea, but of course the devil's in the detail.

There's a lot of experience needed, but he's been doing it all his life.

So there's a big pump, and they add water in, and there are gates inside of the hold, and we broadcast it, and he'll just move around over the leaves.

And that's where the skill of the farmer comes in because you have to do that taking into account the tide.

You know, you gotta get them evenly.

This is actually relatively labor, less labor intensive than on rope.

Plus also, there's the lease there.

Nobody has any problem with it.

So people in Maine are more tolerant if there's not too much visual impact What we try to do is resolve any issues on land.

The worst thing you can possibly do is have competition on the water for, for a resource.

And that's what we've learned in the Netherlands, too.

You need to deal with these issues, and there may be, there may be conservation issues, there maybe clam issues, worming issues or something else.

So, and it's complicated and not always easy to find the right people to talk with.

To be honest, I would say I've learned by the mistakes that were made in those, in those situations, in the Netherlands.

The aquaculture community wasn't really compromised, very compromising with the enviro groups.

And in fact, that was something that built up some polarization.

And since we're the first ones here, we would like to do it differently.

So we've put a lot of work into community outreach.

In fact, I'm part of the Friendship Bay partnership.

We're trying to develop a management plan for this area.

Anyway, that's nothing to do with state or it's a separate conservation group.

And that's where it's a lot of education where people think it's either conservation or industry, and it's not.

Anybody who wants to work within a marine environment is in our best interest to maintain the ecology as well.

(mellow music) (mellow music) - [Andrew] So we've been operating in Maine for about 20 years now.

Cooke is a family owned business that started out over 35 years ago, raising Atlantic salmon in the ocean.

It was a fairly new concept at the time.

Started with 5,000 fish, and the company has grown, expanded to have operations around the world.

People are looking for healthy, local, fresh seafood produced here in the state of Maine.

So our challenge is to meet that demand.

And what we've seen is that we're able to diversify the working waterfront in Maine.

Some of the places that we operate were traditionally herring fishing communities like Eastport, Maine, and that industry has really slowed down.

And aquaculture has been able to come into communities like that and change the economy to be an aquaculture economy, but it's still a marine based economy.

It's a working waterfront economy.

- [David] Oh, I'm very proud of what I do.

It's enabled me to stay in the community because a lot of us, when we started, when we come to work in the aquaculture, we had left the, the fishing industry.

Like I had to go to a mill, and you know, and you know, I was happy there, but when I had a chance to come back and work around the water.

The business has taken a 180.

It's, now, when we feed our fish, we do it with a huge feed system that holds 300 ton of feed.

We have people running computers, they have cameras in the water, and the business's gone, you know, the technology has just gone through the roof.

- [Russell] With they automated feeding, we can keep the cages cleaner.

We don't have feed everywhere.

The, all the feed's stored in one spot and were accurately inventoried.

When the feed's seen in the camera, then they know when the fish appetite's over, and they switch to the next cage.

- [Andrew] It takes about 18 months to raise a salmon to maturity.

Once we raised them to market size, we harvest the fish, and we follow the site for 10 12 month period of time.

There's lots of, of life here.

This is, it has been a site that's been active for a number of years, over 20 years.

And what I believe that aquaculture does, it is able to supplement the industries that are here and enhance some of the industries that are here.

It has become tired of the part of the landscape here in Maine.

- [David] We have 288 employees right now that work directly for Cooke Aquaculture.

And plus there's a lot of spinoff from contractors and vendors.

The aquaculture industry has allowed me to live the American dream.

It really has.

My family are close.

I have a good job.

I have a nice home.

And, and I enjoy going to work every day.

(mellow guitar music) - [Jeff] Our farm is kind of a four step process.

We buy, we buy seed from a hatchery when it's about one to two millimeters in size, and we grow it in up wellers there's that are at the dock, at the marina.

And then bring the seed down here to the nursery where it gets put out in small mesh bags.

At a certain density, that after it grows for awhile, we take them out of those bags, run them through the grading machine, and put them back at a different density in a larger mesh bag.

We grow the oysters in the bags until they're about the size of a silver dollar and then bottom plant them on a 10 acres of lease that's over here to the, to the east.

Depending on the beds we're harvesting and the density and so forth, we can harvest in a day somewhere between five and 10,000 oysters.

And we sell them directly to a couple of dozen restaurants in Maine.

In the summertime that adds up to be a lot of oysters.

We sell to a couple of fish markets that do some wholesale business, but I like the idea of selling the oysters close to home.

I don't, we don't ship them to California.

Between the wholesalers in Portland and Southern Maine and the retail customers we have in the markets, we sell almost two thirds of our oysters in state.

And then the rest go to Boston and New York, which isn't all that far.

(mellow guitar music) - [Josh] I've really never had, I guess, a real Job.

I've always been sort of independent.

Grew up on Islesboro and started lobstering when I was 11, graduated from Islesboro Central School, and then went to the University of Maine, got a resource agribusiness management degree, came back and went fishing, kept lobstering.

Then my wife got interested in aquaculture.

The next thing you know, we started a mussel farm.

We have nine rafts total, two sites.

Right now, there's roughly six rafts full of product and three rafts full of seed so that we can keep like a continuous rotation as we harvest.

All of our seed is caught wildly by placing ropes in the water column where we feel the wild seed sets going to come through.

And then they, they naturally set on the mussel rope and then we grow them out from there.

This is a re sock line.

That's about 40 feet long.

It's two years old.

So we'll get probably 200 pounds of product off this.

- [Shey] Aquaculture has been a new industry for Islesboro.

We're very much still on the ramp up side of things.

Our first year we sold, we harvested 700 pounds.

And our second year we harvested 7,000 pounds.

And, you know, we're just this year getting to a point where we're harvesting 7,000 pounds a month.

And we hope to grow, to grow that.

We're working a little bit direct to restaurants, particularly locally, but primarily selling to wholesale seafood distributors here in the state of Maine and starting to ship out of state.

- [Josh] We have five employees: three full-time and then two part-time.

You know, these farms are producing enough product that you have to get out of the state.

So it makes it a year round job instead of just something that's maybe seasonal.

It's a clean, environmentally friendly occupation.

You know, it's not, it's helping water quality.

It's not hurting it.

I think as long as people are good stewards of the industry and stick to the rigorous standards and fairly high standards of the seafood that's been produced, that it'll only help us.

- [Shey] It's interesting because it is helping to grow a different kind of economy certainly than what we have traditionally had here on Islesboro.

But I think it has potential for the economy along the entire coast of Maine.

For someone like Josh who loves to work on the water every day, it's getting to learn a new aspect of what's happening and how to responsibly farm a new product.

- [Josh] I just really enjoy working on the water every day.

I never really have to sit in an office.

Sometimes the weather is not great, but it's always different.

And it's Maine, and it changes hourly.

It's just rewarding.

(mellow guitar music) - [Nate] I wanted to work on the water.

I wanted to continue in a traditionúthat's been in my family for a long time.

And I view aquaculture as an extension of that, a way to preserve that tradition of working on the water, making your living on the water, caring about the resource, being a steward of those coves and those communities.

I grow American oysters in the Scarborough River primarily, and I grow it out in mostly floating containers, floating bags until a year two, in which case it comes out to Cape Elizabeth and goes, goes onto the bottom.

Things are getting big.

This is sort of a staging area for market product.

The slightly colder water changes the rate that they, they layer shell, and so the shell tends be a little bit harder.

I also grow sea scallops off of Cape Elizabeth.

So this is a batch of juvenile scallops.

We collect these at about 240 microns off shore and grow them out.

Scallops are, are proving to be a little bit more of a challenge than oysters to grow.

It's a process.

And so pretty exciting to be one of the first of a few farms to be doing that with sea scallops.

Most people when they hear about a project, are very curious and they want to know more.

You have to talk to people, you have to show them what it is you do and why you do it, and you have to show them the benefits of that.

If you want to work alongside an existing fishery with your business and grow your business, you have to function in some capacity with the people that are already there doing that.

If you have open communication, you can usually work it out.

People want to live on the water.

It's not necessarily just the amazing natural beauty, but it's also to be a witness of sort of that traditional experience and to see people out working or sailing or farming oysters.

(mellow guitar music) - [Krista] During my childhood, it really felt productive.

I really felt productive working and catching lobsters and kind of chasing 'em.

It was really fun and exciting for me.

I just love how peaceful and serene the water is.

So growing up here was awesome.

I loved going boating and going out to haul with my dad.

And so when I was 15, I started running my own boat.

I got my captain's license.

I think it was year 2016, so I've been captaining my own lobster boat since then.

I took an aquaculture class and actually really fell in love with it and decided the following year to volunteer on a farm.

And so the guy who was running the farm, he offered the farm to me, and I decided to buy it.

So these are my second, my second year oysters.

These should all be ready to go next year.

It takes three years to grow my oysters.

So I started 'em here at my seed sites where the water is a lot warmer, and as they grow and they get bigger, I move them out to my purging sites where they'll, they'll stay there.

The colder waters where we have our oysters, all of the energy of the oyster instead of going into growing is going into building up a really thick, hearty shell.

So I clean the oysters really well.

And when you scrub them up, their colors shine through.

They're very meaty, but they're also very sweet and crisp.

You can really taste the freshness.

All of the people in the community that I've talked to have been really supportive.

The land owners have been really interested and excited that someone's, you know, using the river.

But I'm also growing a product that filters the water and you know, keeps the surrounding area of the river clean.

When you see people out there kayaking and fishing and then you see my oyster farm and then you see lobster boats going by, everything is like all interconnected.

And we all just share the ocean.

And I think that that's really important.

And that's what I really love to see when I go out to my site.

(mellow guitar music) - [Matthew] So we started out 10 years ago.

We had a lot of tough years, but we really were able to stick with it because we believed in the product, and we believed in the environmental mission.

We decided to diversify our crops into mussels and kelp.

And we're very fortunate we did that because now 10 years into it, that diversity is paying off, particularly this year.

One thing that makes this site pretty special is it's very efficient and it's space usage.

So we put the kelp lines very close to the mussel rafts so that we could fit a ton of biomass on a very small 11 acre footprint.

And we make that a big priority on our farm so that we preserve the open space at the bay for other users.

Each species on its own has a environmental benefit.

Mussels are filter feeders, so they filter the water, and they help improve water clarity and water quality.

And kelp isn't it filter feeder, but it's an extractive species, so it absorbs excess nutrients from the water.

Our kelp farms are a series of horizontal long lines, so they're ropes that are horizontal to the ocean's surface that are deployed seven feet below the surface of the water.

And on these ropes, we see kelp, little spores of kelp, and in the fall, we let it grow throughout the winter.

And then we harvest it in the spring.

So we take our boat, and we hook up to one of our horizontal long lines.

We use our net reel to bring that line onto the boat, and we strip off the kelp as it comes in into our containers.

We hope to break a hundred thousand pounds of kelp this season.

We have right now four, four crew members that are going out and harvesting kelp.

We actually hit a really big milestone.

We were able to offer benefits to all our employees, part-time and full-time, which felt really good.

It's something we wanted to do for a long, long time.

So we're just trying to be a more mature, better company for our people, for the environment, and for our community.

It's been a long road for us.

10 years of having this company and growing the business.

You know, maybe five years ago, we started to see the other side of, of the hardship, right?

Hard work and things started to pay off.

Diversity is really the name of the game for us, growing multiple species on the same footprint that benefit each other and benefit the ocean around them.

And that's really core to what we want to do here.

- [Sebastian] So Maine aquaculture has been around for over 45 years, and we're really charting a new way into Maine's future.

The Maine brand is worth something.

People know that Maine seafood is some of the best seafood in the world.

And so we get paid a little more than our competitors from other parts of the world and other parts of the country.

By producing local, healthy seafood and delivering it direct to consumers and building the Maine brand, we're helping build Maine's future.