Written by Crystal Canney. This op-ed originally appeared in The Rising Tide.
Maine’s coastal waters are among the last truly shared public resources left in New England. These scenic waters are the backbone of a working waterfront built over generations by lobstermen, clammers, and independent aquaculturists.
But Maine’s coastal waters are increasingly being carved up, leased out, monetized, and consolidated into the hands of large, often foreign-owned, vertically integrated corporations. State regulations are not keeping up with these realities. Under state law, lease holders of Maine’s waters can be (and are) foreign corporations. These lease holders are allowed to exclusively control up to 1,000 acres of Maine’s coastal waters, in 100-acre increments, for a term of up to 20 years, with minimal governmental oversight.
Companies like Cooke Aquaculture—a multinational salmon farming behemoth with a 640-acre footprint in Maine—is the largest example of industrial-scale ocean farming and corporatization. Cooke’s open-net pen systems have sparked environmental and legal scrutiny worldwide, including here in Maine where they are being sued by the Conservation Law Foundation for discharging pollutants into Maine waters in violation of the Clean Water Act. Indeed, Washington State banned net pen salmon farming following a massive fish escape catastrophe at one of Cooke’s West Coast facilities several years ago.
At the same time, we are now watching in real time a corporate power-grab happening in Maine’s tidal rivers and estuaries.
On the Damariscotta River, Encore Consumer Capital, a U.S.-based private equity firm, acquired Atlantic Aqua Farms and then flipped it to a multi-billion-dollar Canadian pension fund. Private equity has invested heavily in shellfish production in Maine recent years: in 2025, the fund added Mook Sea Farm to its portfolio.
Mook Sea Farm, founded in the early days of oyster farming on the Damariscotta, is known for its branded oysters like Pemaquid Point and Wiley Point. But Mook is now an “operating entity” of Atlantic Aqua Farms. In other words, it is a subsidiary that exists on paper to maintain local brand identity but is controlled in nearly all respects by Atlantic Aqua Farms and the pension fund— strategic players in what investors call the “global food basket,” where ocean space becomes a commodity and loyalties are owed only to shareholders.
So, what happens when public waters transfer hands to private interests?
The industrialization of aquaculture in Maine is changing the character of Maine’s coastal economy. Growth is the name of the game. Leases that were once measured in small acreage are expanding in size, duration, and intensity. Increasingly, leases are controlled by entities far removed from the resources they extract and the communities they impact.
For Maine’s remaining independent aquaculturists, this trend creates an uneven playing field. Consolidation puts public waters in the hands of companies with a single motive: profit. And those profits quickly leave Maine. For instance, in 2024, Glenn Cooke, the owner of Cooke Aquaculture, bragged that his companies were worth $4 billion. Yet, Cooke leases Maine’s waters for a mere $100 per acre.
Maine’s coastal communities are at a crossroads. We need to decide whether Maine’s coastal waters will remain a shared public trust or become a long-term asset class for distant investors.
We need a recalibration of who benefits from Maine’s “blue economy.” State policies must prevent the commodification of our coastal water and instead prioritize local control by limiting consolidation of lease holdings, strengthening local ownership requirements, and ensuring that decisions of how our waters are allocated and used are made by the communities that bear the costs. It is high time for the State to invest in a sustainable blue economy—one that values our working waterfront heritage, ecological resilience, transparent governance, and long-term community stewardship over short-term financial extraction and reckless growth.
By keeping aquaculture local, we can embrace economic and environmental strategy that preserves competition, protects working waterfronts, and ensures that Maine’s coastal future is shaped by the communities who depend on it, not by financial institutions whose interests end at the edge of a balance sheet.