This post originally appeared in Blue Dot Living. Written by Jack Dodson.
As Keith Decker assumed the role of CEO of American Aquafarms in 2021, the firm was seeking to build a massive salmon farm off the coast of Acadia National Park. The first order of business was damage control. It wasn’t just the bad press about his predecessor, who had been convicted and jailed on fraud charges in Norway a decade before. There was also growing public resentment toward the project.
It was meant to be the largest salmon farm in the world, with a 30,000-ton pen to grow the fish. The proposal claimed it would produce 66 million pounds of non-GMO salmon each year and make Maine the testing ground for mass-production aquaculture.
The farm would be situated in one of the poorer areas of the state, where job creation is a constant topic of interest. Locally, the company pitched the project as a job creator; more broadly, it said it aimed to curb the U.S.’s dependence on imported seafood.
But the project would have an unexpected effect: It led many in Maine to research aquafarming for the first time. Concerned with what they found, these budding activists launched blogs to document environmental issues, emailed each other scientific research on the topic, contacted scientists, and began organizing politically.
Opposition brought together a diverse group. A citizen-led initiative called Frenchman Bay Unitedworked with local scientists investigating the proposal in their spare time. Acadia National Park’s superintendent publicly disavowed the proposal in July 2021. Environmental group Maine Coast Heritage Trust came out against the idea a few months later. Within six months, the Sierra Club had launched a campaign opposing all similar projects along the coast of Maine.
American Aquafarms countered with a video series called Community Conversations in which Decker answered questions. He argued that the area was economically depressed and needed to be “revitalized.” In a letter to the local paper, activists called the videos “not a true conversation.”
Within a year and a half, the project was dead.
The efforts by activists didn’t kill the farm; state officials who halted the project said the proposal was missing crucial details. Still, their work unleashed a grassroots effort to fill in gaps that locals felt Maine law left exposed. A year later, the state passed a law that solidified a limit on the density of aquaculture farms that can be built off Maine’s coast.
A Tightening Regulatory Environment
For several years, the scale of aquafarming projects in Maine grew significantly even as other parts of the world sought to regulate the industry more tightly.
California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska banned net-pen fishing because of its effect on the environment. British Columbia announced plans to phase out these sites by 2025. And Argentina bannedall salmon farming from its Tierra del Fuego province in 2021, effectively blocking out any salmon aquaculture in the entire country.
But in Maine, after American Aquafarms’s project stalled, several other companies sought to build salmon farming operations. None were at the scale American Aquafarms proposed near Acadia, but activists began to take on the industry as a whole. They also took a hard look at one company that already had dozens of farms up and running in the state: Cooke Aquaculture.
The investigation of a Cooke-operated site prompted Washington to enact its ban in 2022. State officials said the company tried to cover up the scale of the damage wrought by a “salmon spill” — an accidental escape of farmed salmon that can threaten native populations.
The Die-Off
The dead fish unsettled the residents of Beals Island. They texted each other photos and grainy videos of upturned fins floating in Eastern Bay as they slowly boated past. Rumors began to circulate: Salmon in the large net-pen operated by Cooke Aquaculture must have died en masse.
The pens fall under the geographical jurisdiction of two Maine towns, Jonesport and Beals Island. Glenda Beal, then selectboard chair of Beals Island, wondered why she hadn’t heard anything about the die-off from the state or Cooke. She sent an email on July 8, 2024, to Maine’s Department of Marine Resources (DMR) and Cooke to get answers.
“I learned about a possible die-off through rumor, and since then have been told very little about the facts,” Beal says. “Our town (and Jonesport) should have been notified immediately, in my opinion.”
Jonesport selectboard chair Harry Fish found out from a news report. “We’ve never heard anything from Cooke Aquaculture for years; they’ve been down there for a long time,” Fish said weeks after the event.
According to DMR’s communications director Jeff Nichols, it took four days for his department to send out investigators, who confirmed that there had been an algal bloom in the area — the same reason Cooke had given in local press. This would have cut off oxygen to the fish in the pens.
Nichols pointed out that according to the law, aquaculture companies are not required to notify either the state or municipality of mortalities on their sites unless it stems from disease.
The department concluded its investigation into the case without establishing a clear number of fish that died. Nichols said this was because Cooke’s harvesting made it difficult to track how many fish had suffocated. He said that even if his department had that figure, it would be confidential under DMR regulations.
A Growth Industry
Cooke, a New Brunswick, Canada-based multinational corporation, was launched in Blacks Harbor, Canada, in 1985. At the time, the company had 5,000 salmon in its enclosures. In 2004, they expanded into Maine, buying smaller outfits like Atlantic Salmon of Maine and Phoenix Salmon.
At the time, aquaculture wasn’t a large industry. Cooke turned out to be ahead of the curve: In the past decade, large-scale aquaculture proposals have exploded in popularity among investors, particularly those from Norway.
Today, it’s the largest aquaculture firm in the state of Maine and the only company that holds leases for harvesting Atlantic salmon. They operate 24 marine farms and three land facilities, employing about 200 people across the state.
Through subsidiary brands like True North Salmon, Cooke produces farm-raised Atlantic salmon that are hatched on their sites, grown in the ocean, then later brought to Canada for processing after harvest.
Their position in the state economy has weight. By their own calculations, they spend $500 million each year in Maine across 500 vendors — something they note in lease application materials. Downstream industries that contract with Cooke include shipping and ferries, ground and air transportation, engineers and surveyors, academia, finance, environmental consulting, shipyards, vehicle maintenance, and more.
Cooke’s incursion into Maine was met with some regulatory skepticism, though. In 2005, Maine’s Office of the Attorney General brought an antitrust suit against the company, alleging they’d be a monopoly, owning all the leases for salmon farming in the state. They also raised environmental concerns.
“In Maine and neighboring New Brunswick, the industry has experienced a series of shocks in recent years as a result of disease outbreaks, worldwide competition, and environmental and political controversy,” then-Special Assistant Attorney General Jessica Maurer wrote.
In a settlement, Cooke was required to surrender its interest in four sites to DMR and sell its interest in two more sites within six months. Within a year, the attorney general’s office was issuing statements that if they couldn’t find a suitable buyer to take over the sites from Cooke, they would remain under the company’s operation. As of 2024, both sites were still owned and operated by Cooke, which is now the only lease-holding salmon aquaculture company in the state.
More recently, several firms have tried to open similar salmon aquaculture facilities in Belfast, Bucksport, Gouldsboro, and Jonesport. All encountered strong pushback from locals.
Violations & Animal Rights Concerns
During the past decade in Maine, Cooke has received six letters of warning, 20 notices of violations (NOV), and one administrative consent agreement, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). The consent agreement, which was issued because the company had exceeded the amount of salmon it could legally hold in its pens, cost Cooke $156,213 in state fines and $33,478 in federal fines in 2019.
“For a single company, 20 NOVs in 10 years is on the high end of the range,” DEP Deputy Commissioner David Madore said in an email.
Cooke was also the source of animal rights concerns after a 2019 undercover operation by the Washington, D.C., organization Animal Outlook showed fish being killed by beating and suffocation and tossed into garbage cans during sorting at a Cooke-run site in Bingham. The Maine Department of Agriculture’s Animal Welfare Division investigated later that year, finding no punitive measures were necessary after Cooke made reforms. The video remains a key reference point for Maine’s environmental activists in organizing against these projects.
The activists’ concerns have been bolstered in recent years by environmental groups investigating Cooke. Heather Govern, vice president of the Conservation Law Foundation’s (CLF) clean air and water program, spent two years looking into whether the company was violating the federal Clean Water Act by allowing waste to build up around their net pens. CLF has also filed public comments against leases when Cooke sites come up for renewal.
Govern said the state’s permitting process for finfish aquaculture does not have clear restrictions on the amount of discharge Cooke sites can create, noting that the state has announced a new permit with clearer discharge limits. She said it was crucial to address this waste, referencing testimonials her organization collected from lobster fishermen stating that waste from Cooke sites kills the local ecosystem and food sources, driving lobster away.
“In the grand scheme of things, DMR is the one that allowed the leases, and DMR is happy to continue allowing as many sites as Cooke wants along the Maine coast,” Govern said.
The July 2024 die-off in Jonesport and Beals Island wasn’t the first at a Cooke site. In 2021, 116,000 salmon at Cooke’s Black Island facility suddenly died. Cooke officials at the time blamed low oxygen levels in the pens.
Emails obtained by Protect Maine’s Fishing Heritage Foundation (PMFHF) showed that the company didn’t notify DEP for 11 days about the problem. The state later cleared the company of any wrongdoing.
Crystal Canney, executive director of PMFHF, said she headed to Black Island in 2021 when she got the tip about what had happened there. The lease site was up for renewal at the time of the die-off.
“Our issue with that entire process was that DMR didn’t even dive on the site to see what the issue was until several months later,” Canney said. “Frankly, I think people deserve to know what kind of things happened. The state is not a good guardian of the ocean.”
DMR later renewed Cooke’s lease at the site. DMR Commissioner Patrick Kelliher ruled in 2022 that the renewal would be in “the best interest of the state.” Reflecting on this outcome in the wake of the 2024 die-off, Canney said she anticipated a “rinse and repeat play” by both Cooke and the state.
Companies Targeting Activists
Richard Aishton started to pay attention to finfish farming in a roundabout way: A controversial $1 billion energy corridor galvanized him to get involved in Maine’s environmental scene, and he later heard about foreign investment plans along the coast.
Aishton served as an environmental resource manager abroad for groups like the Ford Foundation and USAID for nearly 20 years. He got a job as a science teacher at Jonesport High School in 2020 and became active in the opposition to a different aquaculture proposal, from Kingfish Maine.
He realized there was a whole network of people sharing information. They were going to town hall meetings, trading emails with scientific reports, and connecting with locals who could bring their expertise to analyzing the environmental impact of large aquaculture projects.
“It just looked like a disaster waiting to happen,” Aishton said of finfish farming.
Kathleen Rybarz, a Lamoine resident and a board member of Frenchman Bay United who participated in the effort to block American Aquafarms’s proposal, said their group has been advising other communities that are facing similar proposals.
At the state level, she said, there’s “no political will” for barring large finfish farming projects. She noted that other communities in Maine began reaching out and requesting advice on how to organize.
“That community activism piece is so important,” Rybarz said. “I think there are different clusters of core groups of people that have understood the power of organizing and defeating things.”
These NGOs and citizen investigators have made an impact. PMFHF requested emails showing that the state declined to investigate allegations of wrongdoing by Cooke in the past and leaked them to the blog The Quietside Journal. PMFHF also drafted the moratoria being considered in coastal communities.
The loose network of activists has caught the attention of aquaculture companies. Kingfish Maine filed a Freedom of Access Act request into Aishton’s emails after he began to speak out at Jonesport town meetings. As a public high school teacher, his emails could be requested.
“It’s this huge mixture of divisiveness and politics and it’s just a bloody mess,” Aishton said. He ended up changing his name in digital communications so that his emails could not be requested again.
Pushing for Tighter Regulation
In 2023, Maine issued a piece of legislation aimed at the environmental concerns around aquaculture. A bipartisan bill sponsored by Sen. Nicole Grohoski (D-Hancock County) limited the stocking density of future aquaculture leases to 30kg/m3.
Originally, the bill called for a stocking limit of 22kg/m3. John Burrows, the U.S. director of the Atlantic Salmon Federation, testified in favor of the original bill, arguing that 30kg/m3 was an amount already being observed by Cooke, as it was a limit imposed in DMR lease applications. He pointed out that Maine’s 30kg/m3 limit was among the highest in the world. Canada, Chile, Australia, and Scotland have more stringent restrictions, ranging from 10 to 25kg/m3.
DMR’s Keliher testified against the bill, proposing changes that raised the law’s regulation to 30kg/m3. “There is no evidence that this limitation has been problematic,” Keliher testified.
That change was made, and Gov. Janet Mills signed the bill into law. Mills’s spokesperson, Ben Goodman, pointed to her support for that law as proof of her desire to address the problems aquaculture can pose.
“The governor believes that aquaculture represents a promising opportunity to create new jobs, to strengthen and diversify our economy, and to expand Maine’s reputation as a premier destination for seafood,” Goodman wrote in an email.
In addition, municipalities along the coast have been considering moratoriums on finfish farming like Cooke’s operations. The towns of Winter Harbor, Waldoboro, and Penobscot have all passed ordinances in recent years to outright ban finfish aquaculture. Cutler allows proposals less than half an acre in size.
Other towns, however, have rejected this type of regulation. Jonesport, for example, opted against a ban on finfish aquaculture in 2022. The vote came in the midst of ongoing proposals from Kingfish to open a project in the area.
Nothing to Say
On July 23, 2024, Beals Island held a vote on a proposed moratorium on finfish aquaculture in their town. It passed unanimously, 11-0, leading the town to establish an aquaculture ordinance committee.
“Cooke reps were present at the meeting but had nothing to say,” Beal said.
After the vote, she checked her email, which she hadn’t done in a few days, and found a note from Cooke that had been meant for the meeting. The letter asked the town to reject the moratorium on the basis that towns don’t have jurisdiction over the waters. It further said that Cooke had been a good neighbor.
“I do not believe the majority of our townspeople feel that way,” Beal said, “and replied that there is a considerable amount of distrust in the whole Cooke company, particularly after the lack of communication following the recent die-off, plus the absence of clear information concerning it.”
Beal said she wasn’t sure how the ordinance will interact with the Cooke sites that already exist, explaining that they’re grandfathered in with what they already have. But she wants to see regulation that requires them to notify the town when there is an event that harms the ecosystem.
“I also repeated my request to know exactly how many fish died and where they were dumped,” Beal said of her email to Cooke after the vote. “As yet, I have had no reply.”