The Race to Farm the Ocean: The industrial agricultural complex is taking over fisheries

Originally published in Sierra Magazine.

Written by Marin Scotten.

For more than two decades, one company has dominated the salmon farming industry in Maine. Cooke Aquaculture, a billion-dollar multinational corporation based in New Brunswick, Canada, currently holds 23 active leases across the state, raising millions of salmon in open-ocean net pens. Critics say its operations have forever transformed Maine’s coastal waters and reshaped its fishing industry.

“This is a $4 billion worldwide corporation that takes the profits—whether it’s in Maine or Tassal in Tasmania—back to Canada,” said Crystal Canney, the executive director of Protect Maine’s Fishing Heritage. 

As questions rise over the future of domestic seafood production, the Trump administration is pushing to expand industrial aquaculture operations like these in federal waters.

Sometimes referred to as the “chickenification” of fish for its similarities to factory farming, industrial fish farming, or finfish aquaculture, is the commercial production of fish in high-density, controlled environments, including cages and pens. 

Maine’s working waters are not dumping grounds for foreign corporations | Opinion

Originally published in The Portland Press Herald.

Written by Rock Alley and Jason Faulkingham.

Communities should not be forced to accept pollution, escaped farm fish, weak monitoring and limited transparency as part of the cost of doing business.

Rock Alley is a Jonesport lobsterman and president of Protect Maine’s Fishing Heritage Foundation. Jason Faulkingham is a lobsterman from Beals.

We’ve spent our lives learning Maine’s waters.

If you work on the water, you learn to pay attention. You learn the tides, the bottom, the weather, how your gear moves. Families pass down their trade and their best spots from generation to generation.  

For lobstermen and women, fishermen, clammers, wormers, shellfish growers and the businesses that depend on us, Maine’s bays are our workplaces. Clean water is not an abstract idea or slogan. It is the difference between making a living or losing one, and between a thriving community or a collapsing one.

That is why lawmakers and regulators should be paying close attention to the Conservation Law Foundation’s (CLF) lawsuit against Cooke Aquaculture.

Ahold Delhaize subsidiary Hannaford latest company to be hit with civil suit over seafood sustainability claims

Originally published in Seafood Source.

Written by Chris Chase.

Ahold Delhaize subsidiary Hannaford, a grocery chain located in the Northeast U.S., has become the latest company to be targeted by a civil lawsuit over its seafood sustainability claims. 

A federal suit, filed in the state of New York, alleges Hannaford and Ahold Delhaize’s marketing of its farmed salmon as sustainable is misleading consumers.  

“In reality, Hannaford sells industrially farmed salmon whose production inflicts grave harms on pristine marine ecosystems and has caused the destruction of marine life around the world, from Canada to Chile,” the complaint states. “No reasonable consumer would believe that such farmed salmon products are sustainable.”

The plaintiff in the case, Kathleen Boyle, is being represented by advocacy group FarmSTAND, along with the Center for Food Safety, Reese LLP, and Jennings & Earley PLLC.

Protect Maine Questions Why the State Doesn't Want to Look Under the Salmon Farms

A recent Sentient Media article took a look at testing under Cooke Aquaculture’s net pens. Heather Govern (CLF), Crystal Canney (PMFHF), and Dwayne Shaw (DSF) were quoted:

“Govern and Canney also argue that the state lacks sufficient independent sampling and inspections beneath the net pens, while Shaw points to gaps in monitoring escaped farmed salmon.”

Read the entire story here: bit.ly/4hHXECP

This is an important point about independent testing beneath the salmon pens. In July, Protect Maine’s Executive Director and its President Rock Alley of Jonesport approached the Department of Marine Resources (DMR) Commissioner at a scallop hearing to ask a simple question – Why is DMR allowing Cooke with its history of  violations around the world  to do testing and monitoring underneath its own net pens and report the findings?  The unfortunate truth is the DMR Commissioner didn’t have an answer.  Protect Maine feels it’s unacceptable when the department is using a grant funded robot under the water to site lease already and is failing to use it underneath the net pens which would increase transparency and government oversight.

Read DMR’s press release on its grant funded machine: https://www1.maine.gov/dmr/news/tue-08192025-1200-grant-supports-continued-efficiency-improvements-maine-dmr-aquaculture

Mainers Fight to Protect Wild Salmon From Fish Farms

For more than three decades, Dwayne Shaw has fought to keep wild Atlantic salmon from disappearing in Maine. As the executive director of the Downeast Salmon Federation, he helps operate hatcheries and restore rivers and watersheds where the last remaining wild Atlantic salmon in the United States exist. The Atlantic salmon fisheries closed in the 1940s after dams, pollution and overfishing drove the population into decline. “We have secured them, to an extent. However, they remain at critically low levels,” Shaw tells Sentient.

Now, Shaw worries that the recovery of Maine’s endangered wild salmon could be jeopardized by other salmon: those raised in open-net cages along the coast.

New Lawsuit Against Salmon Greenwashing

Sound familiar? This lawsuit filed on behalf of Farm Stand speaks to alleged misleading representations of “sustainably farmed” salmon.  

The lawsuit looks at the Chilean waters of Patagonia where net pen salmon have been driven by large corporations. 

Among the issues in the suit,

o   Parasites

o   Impact on the marine environment

o   Depleting forage fish to make food to grow the farmed salmon

o   Crowded industrial net pens

o   Excess nutrients

These are some of the similarities cited in Conservation Law Foundation’s suit against Cooke Aquaculture.

Friendship Lobster Boat Races

Protect Maine at the Union Fair

Maine should better understand the risks of salmon farming

The Maine coast has long sustained thriving ecosystems, natural beauty and generations of fishers and wild harvesters. These same waters now support windjammer sailing, coastal hiking and whale-watching tours. But quietly, Maine state officials are clearing a regulatory path for a potentially damaging industry: industrial fish farming. While other regions are closing salmon farms due to their environmental toll, Maine has become one of the last remaining viable areas in the United States for their expansion.

An alluring pitch for oceanfront fish farming is that it generates reliable jobs by producing sustainable and efficient food without depleting the ocean. Scientists use standard metrics to evaluate these claims, including the “fish-in, fish-out” ratio, which shows how many pounds of wild fish inputs, rendered into fish meal and oil, that it can take to produce a single pound of farmed fish output.

June 2026 Update

If you ever wondered if industrial scale aquaculture was a serious problem, the news in the past few months tells us it is AND more so than ever. In this newsletter we are going to deal with salmon raised in net pens in the ocean. But it’s not just farmed salmon, we are seeing an increasing number of foreign companies that operate leases in Maine waters for exclusive use.

Protect Maine has been working around the state and in Downeast towns to pass ordinances and provide information about the potential dangers of farm raised salmon. Nine communities have passed ordinances that fit within in their communities. Protect Maine - Ordinances