Op-ed: Maine’s working waterfront is not for sale

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. 

Push to ‘supersize’ aquaculture is not right for Maine | Opinion

President Trump’s calls to “supersize” the American aquaculture industry, outlined in a May 14 Guardian article, are increasingly framed as a path toward seafood independence and domestic food security. But in places like Maine, where industrial salmon farming already operates, the reality is far more complicated.

After a 2017 net-pen collapse in Washington state released hundreds of thousands of farmed salmon into public waters, that state moved to phase out non-native salmon farming.

Maine is now the last place in the United States where Atlantic salmon are raised in open ocean pens, in the same coastal waters where endangered wild Atlantic salmon migrate and persist. As a result, Maine has become a primary foothold for Cooke Aquaculture, a Canadian multinational and one of the world’s largest producers of farmed salmon.

The environmental concerns surrounding industrial salmon farming are not theoretical. In the context of ocean farming, they include nutrient pollution from fish waste and excess feed, the spread of parasites and disease in densely stocked pens and the risk of farmed fish escaping and interacting with wild populations that have evolved over thousands of years.

Maine should crack down on Cooke Aquaculture | Letter

This letter was originally published in The Portland Press Herald.

Maine, like Washington, was built by people who respect the sea. That legacy is being desecrated — and our elected officials are letting it happen.

A new undercover investigation has, again, exposed brutal conditions at Cooke Aquaculture’s salmon hatchery in Bingham — animals slammed into concrete, unchecked disease, filthy overcrowded tanks. This is not new. The same facility was exposed in 2019. Maine authorities investigated and took no action. Nothing changed. This is Cooke company culture. Washington state recognized it and kicked Cooke out after a cascade of abuses.

Now the Trump administration is gutting aquaculture oversight and fast-tracking industrial “floating factory farms” in open ocean waters — prioritizing corporate profit over clean water and working people.

Mainers deserve leaders who will fight for our coastlines, our fishermen and our right to know what’s in our food. Mainers should be outraged. It’s time to act like it.

Genevieve Murphy
Bellingham, Wash.

Salmon farm faces new cruelty claims as Trump seeks to supersize fish farming

The Trump administration is keen to do to fish what has been done to chickens – mass-produce them on an industrial scale to accelerate the US’s output of seafood.

But this “chickenification” of fish may come at a hefty cost to the environment and to the fish themselves, as a new undercover video at one of the country’s leading fish farms has highlighted.

A major seafood company is again under investigation over allegations of animal abuse after a second undercover video taken at a salmon breeding farm in Maine appeared to show cruel treatment of fish and environmentally harmful practices.

The covert video taken by the Animal Outlook activist group, which it sent to the Guardian, shows staff at the Cooke Aquaculture salmon hatchery in Bingham, Maine, clubbing fish with metal poles, aiming kicks at them as they writhe on the ground and in one instance cutting into a living fish. Deformities and fungal infections were also prevalent in the fish, according to Animal Outlook.

Cooke Aquaculture: The Cruelty Continues

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 polluting fjords with waste likened to ‘raw sewage of millions of people’

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.

Who Carries The Risk?

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.

Whiting Resident Wants Serious Look At Aquaculture

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.

Tasmanian salmon farms blocked from using antibiotic florfenicol after detection in wild fish 10km away

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.

Aquaculture’s role in the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance

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.