Seven years after promising reforms, Cooke Aquaculture's Maine salmon hatchery continues to brutalize fish while workers openly mock previous investigation and ignore food safety protocols

In 2019, Animal Outlook released the first-ever undercover investigation of a U.S. fish farm, exposing shocking cruelty at Cooke Aquaculture's salmon hatchery in Bingham, Maine. Years later, we returned to the same facility — and found that little had changed. 

For several months in late 2025, an Animal Outlook investigator working as a Hatchery Technician documented conditions at the vertically integrated aquaculture operation that houses millions of Atlantic salmon. The footage reveals that previously documented problems persist alongside new potential violations of food safety and environmental protocols. 

Norwegian fish farms are filling fjords and other coastal waters with nutrient pollution equivalent to the raw sewage of tens of millions of people each year, a report has found.

Norway is the largest farmed salmon producer in the world, and nutrients in fish feed are excreted directly into coastal waters. Analysis from the Sunstone Institute found that Norwegian aquaculture released 75,000 tonnes of nitrogen, 13,000 tonnes of phosphorus and 360,000 tonnes of organic carbon in 2025.

The nutrients are equivalent to those contained in the untreated sewage of 17.2 million people for nitrogen, 20 million people for phosphorus, and 30 million people for organic carbon, the report found, raising fears of destructive algal blooms.

With everything that’s been threatening the commercial fishing industry lately, I’ve been reading and listening to a book called Salmon Wars, and I keep coming back to the same thing. It’s not just about salmon. It’s about a pattern. These ocean industries get introduced as innovation or progress, but the full impact isn’t really understood at the time decisions are made. By the time people start seeing the consequences, it’s already in place and hard to walk back.

That feels very relevant right here in Eastport, Maine. We’re starting to hear more about underwater data and AI infrastructure, and even if it’s being described as small, that’s usually how it starts. The bigger concern isn’t just one project, it’s what comes next once that door is opened.

Protect Maine has several news updates and some initiatives we will be rolling out through the remainder of the year.

The recent letter [in The Ouoddy Tides] in support of industrial-scale aquaculture presents only part of the picture. It emphasizes jobs but leaves out important questions about scale, risk and long-term impact.

No one is dismissing the value of steady employment or the role companies can play in a community. Those matter. But Eastport is not being asked to consider a small, local operation. It is being asked to consider the long-term presence of indus-trial-scale aquaculture in waters that have supported Maine's heritage fisheries for generations. That distinction matters.

As someone from a neighboring coastal community, I am paying close attention, because decisions made in Eastport do not stay in Eastport. They affect surrounding waters, working waterfronts and regional fisheries.

We can support jobs and still ask whether this is the right scale and the right place.

We can value economic opportunity while also protecting the working waterfront that already exists. Those are jobs, too.

The letter suggests that larger companies step in when smaller operations fail.

That should give us pause. If failures are common enough to require cleanup, then the real issue is not who fixes the problem, but why the system allows those failures in the first place and who ultimately bears the risk when they occur.

Regulator suspends permit due to ‘unacceptable risk’ antibiotic poses to other species in move welcomed by environmental campaigners

Regulator suspends permit due to ‘unacceptable risk’ antibiotic poses to other species in move welcomed by environmental campaigners

 Australia’s veterinary medicines regulator has suspended the use of florfenicol in salmon in Tasmania because of the “unacceptable risk” the antibiotic poses to other species.

The Bob Brown Foundation said the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority’s (APVMA) decision was an “indictment of the industrial fish farm companies and their complete disregard for the marine environment”.

The APVMA granted an emergency permit in November 2025 to allow the industry to use florfenicol to treat outbreaks of the bacterial disease piscirickettsiosis in fish farms in southern Tasmania, which had caused mass salmon deaths.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is often described as a “silent pandemic”. Unlike a fast-moving viral outbreak, AMR spreads gradually with bacteria evolving and adapting until the medicines we rely on no longer work. The consequences are profound. AMR contributed to an estimated 4.95 million deaths in 2019. These numbers are expected to increase to 8-10 million deaths by 2050. AMR now threatens routine surgery, cancer treatment, and infection control.  

Human activities, including the widespread use and misuse of antibiotics in human medicine, livestock production, and aquaculture, have dramatically accelerated AMR. In response, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has established the One Health initiative — linking human health, animal production and environmental systems. Aquaculture sits squarely within that nexus. 

For some, Maine’s dedication to home rule may defy logic, especially for those who have moved to the state. It may seem like a foreign concept that each organized municipality in the state, all 482 of them, has its own government, ordinances, procedures, and schedules, but we think it’s makes perfect sense.

Here individual voters form the legislative body and annually approve what the elected and appointed officials can spend money on and what level of decision making they can do without a further vote. Some native New Englanders might not know it, but in much of the rest of the country, municipal decisions are made at different levels of government and not directly by the people.

For decades, industrial aquaculture has been framed as a win-win: farm fish to spare wild fisheries, reduce environmental harm, and meet global demand with a healthy, efficient protein. This narrative—popularized as the industry’s “Blue Revolution”—has profoundly shaped policy, conservation strategies, and institutional purchasing decisions. 

This report examines what that story leaves out: that, through greenwashing, aquaculture has brought factory farming from land to sea. Across five central claims that anchor “sustainable seafood” messaging, it shows how industrial fish farming has expanded at a scale that inherently drives ecological harm by intensifying pressure on wild fisheries, spreading disease and drug dependence, worsening climate impacts, and leaning on labels and certifications that often substitute for real accountability.

LUBEC — Early Tuesday, Cooke Aquaculture’s Ocean Provider collided with Lubec’s newly rebuilt commercial pier, damaging three of the recently installed pilings.

A 14‑inch piling buckled under the impact, and two 12‑inch pilings cracked, according to Ralph Dennison, the harbormaster.

Dennison said Cooke Aquaculture has already agreed to pay for the repairs. The company did not respond to inquiries in time to appear in this article.

The Ocean Provider is a steel‑hulled boat about 80 feet long and owned by Cooke Aquaculture, which uses it to serve fish farms on both sides of the border in Cobscook Bay.

The pilings were damaged when the boat attempted to dock at the commercial pier at about 5:30 a.m. Tuesday.