Sherman is no stranger himself to the environmental and economic challenges of running an aquaculture business. Island Creek is a vertically integrated oyster operation, meaning it both farms and distributes its own oysters. But he’s still intent on turning the tides of the canning industry. In July, Sherman announced the launch of his latest venture, the Island Creek Cannery, the first ever single-origin canning facility of its kind in the US.

Long before the pandemic sent American appetites seaward, stoking our interest in convenient, high-end canned fish, Island Creek—a primarily fresh seafood business—had its eye on the tin. “We’ve always been interested in democratizing oysters and shellfish in general,” says Sherman. In 2016, Island Creek opened The Portland Oyster Shop—the company’s first full-service restaurant—in downtown Portland, Maine. But the raw bar-only concept was running lean, and Sherman quickly realized he needed another food option to bulk out the menu that wouldn’t require a setup to make hot food. Taking cues from already-established tin-centric restaurants such as NYC’s Maiden Lane and Boston’s haley.henry, Sherman opted for serving conservas, a culinary delicacy popular across the Mediterranean, whereby seafood is preserved in brines, olive oils, and other flavorful sauces. Conservas store indefinitely and require little back-of-house labor, an operational boon. But would the market find them satisfying? “I was convinced at that point that it was just not going to work, but people really responded to [the conservas],” says Sherman. “That gave us a pretty good indicator that this thing has some legs.”

To meet the newfound customer demand for tinned fish, Island Creek began importing, distributing, and co-branding its own line of conservas for Conservas Mariscadora, a collective of independent female shellfish harvesters—or mariscadoras—in Galicia, Spain who harvest fully traceable seafood from the waters of the Cantabrian Sea. While relatively new to the US market, in Spain, conservas are ubiquitous. “The Spanish eat a ton of seafood,” says Sherman, who began traveling the country researching sustainable fish farms on an Eisenhower Fellowship in 2018. “When we eat french fries, they’re eating shellfish.” Thus, canning became a necessary innovation, entrenching itself into Spanish culture. Sherman noticed this most starkly while shopping at El Corte Inglés, where tin after tin of conservas stocked four full aisles’ worth of grocery store shelves. “The octopus section was bigger than the soup section at most American grocery stores,” says Sherman.

That’s when things began to gel for Sherman. For Island Creek, a company familiar with the challenges of manufacturing a seasonal product, packing seafood in tins presented a shiny solution. By canning stateside, they could pack their seasonal product at peak quality while creating inventory that could be sold year-round at a good value. Additionally, the growing popularity of conservas in the US meant the demand for high-quality fish aligned with the company’s own standards.

Located in the historic fishing community of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the Island Creek Oyster Cannery is a small operation with big ambitions. Blending Island Creek Oysters’ already established brand of sustainable aquaculture with the American market’s newfound hunger for high-quality, shelf-stable seafood, Island Creek is resurrecting a dormant US tradition that’s existed since the 1800s—albeit repurposing it with Mediterranean ideals to meet the needs of the contemporary market.

While Island Creek has built an entire business out of fresh oysters, it hasn’t yet canned any. “Oyster supply has been pretty tight,” says Sherman, which drives the prices up. “They’re also the most difficult shellfish to can well.” Instead, the company is focused on farming clams, as well as sourcing from other New England seafood producers it’s met and vetted, such as Cherrystone Aqua-Farms in Virginia. “We’re definitely branching out, but we’re trying to keep everything single-origin, single-producer, and we’re trying to keep everything working with responsible harvesters and farmers that meet our standards,” says Sherman. The term “single-origin” is used broadly across the specialty food and beverage space (think chocolate, coffee, and whiskey) and refers to foods from a specific farm, location, or source. The same is true in aquaculture. It’s a strong marker of fish and seafood traceability—and thus, quality.

Having a cannery in the US that sources seafood exclusively from American shores presents a significant opportunity for American seafood producers. Island Creek is confident that this venture will support coastal communities across the United States by providing a stable, year-round supply of seafood. This steady inventory will benefit the numerous seafood-related businesses that are a major part of the East Coast’s fishing economy.

“Since we’ve publicized the cannery, I’ve had half the medium- to small-scale seafood producers in the Northeast reach out to me about handling their product,” says Sherman. “We just now need to connect the dots and make the demand there as well. I think we’re doing that, but it’s brick by brick.” To boost the lowbrow reputation of canned fish that still dominates much of the US market, Island Creek is choosing to can in European format tins—generally wider and shallower than a typical tuna or cat food tin—which he hopes will telegraph the quality of the product and justify the premium price point.

With little in the way of tradition in the United States, the tinned fish market is still finding its sea legs; Sherman notes there is “some chaos in the market” with tinned fish prices ranging anywhere from $4 to $30, but the company is making strides towards its goal of democratizing shellfish. “I didn’t think we would sell to 800 chefs around the country every week…but honestly, we sell a ton of tin fish to chefs and restaurants that aren’t tinned fish restaurants. They’re using them as an ingredient in a pasta dish, or on rice. And they’re using it because they don’t have the labor and the shucking and the steaming and the sauce making,” says Sherman. He is confident that other canneries like his will follow suit, especially along the East Coast where fish stocks and shellfish farms are abundant.

However, Sherman is candid about the challenges that lie ahead: In countries such as Spain and Portugal, where most canneries are run by generations of families, labor costs are a fraction of those in the United States. Nevertheless, canning has long been, and continues to be, a revolutionary process with a significant impact on ensuring sustainable aquaculture practices and preserving local fishing communities that rely on canning during the off-season. It also benefits consumers, who can enjoy high-quality seafood at a more reasonable price point than fresh seafood. Says Sherman, “We’re blazing the trail—for better or worse.”

The post Spotlight On a Cannery Trying to Revive A Dormant Fishing Tradition appeared first on Modern Farmer.

They are tulip snails, a mollusk found in the sandy bottoms of shallow pools along the south eastern coast of the US. And while they may not be the typical fare you expect at a swanky seafood restaurant in the US, at Seabird, they sit proudly alongside menu classics such as crab, yellowfin tuna and oysters. 

Seabird, in Wilmington, NC, is a sustainable seafood place that utilizes foraging to get many of its ingredients—and to act as an opportunity for education. Rather than rely only on farmed fish or wild caught fish that is shipped from ports across the world, Neff tries to work with local food, which can create a bit of uncertainty in the menu. Ordering 50 pounds of swordfish from a distributor is a fairly straightforward process. But with local fishing and foraging, you’re working with a wild population, and you’re not guaranteed to find what you set out for. You’re also limited by the seasonality of the food. 

 “I think everybody knows that tomatoes or okra or cabbages are seasonal,” says chef and owner Dean Neff. “But I don’t know that everyone knows the seasonality of oysters or speckled sea trout. Being able to have conversations about that and about sustainability with seafood was important to us.” 

Neff opened the restaurant in 2021 with his partner, and he started working with foragers to access local ingredients at sustainable levels. That’s when he met Ana Shellem of Shell’em Seafood, a coastal forager and sustainable fisher who works along the coastline of Masonboro Island. Shellem began foraging five years ago, after many years of harvesting wild shellfish. As a conservationist, Shellem is careful when and where she harvests, only bringing in what is in season and in small quantities. “When you eat wild and in season…I only eat oysters in season, even though with farmed oysters, you can eat them year round. But I think everything is at its finest when it’s in season. Eating a tomato in the winter is not as exciting as eating a tomato in the summer and appreciating the flavor profiles.”

Most shellfish seasons have to do with their cycle of breeding and molting, normally coinciding with water temperature. For instance, stone crabs along the east coast are out of season in the summer months, when the crabs will molt, shedding their shells and pumping the warm sea water in and out of their bodies to create new exoskeletons. It’s when the crabs have shed their shells that they can mate, creating nests for their egg sacs. That mating and molting will be done by October, and the season will pick up again then. It’s similar for lobsters. Over the summer, lobsters will migrate into warmer, shallower water to feed and molt, which makes them easier to catch. However, a lobster without its hard shell is trickier to transport, so the peak of lobster season is often earlier in the springtime or in December, before the waters get too cold. 

Each organism in the ocean, just like on land, has a season of rest, regrowth, or stasis, followed by a season of abundance. As consumers, we’re often used to eating strawberries in January or oysters in June. But to truly be aligned with seasonality, Shellem and Neff say, is to widen your palate and embrace other options. 

“It’s amazing to work with James Beard chefs that are educated and able to experiment with obscure things, like the tulip snails that Dean’s been working with, or North Carolina whelks. The seaweeds I get to bring him are really fun, like the sea bean or prickly pear cactus,” says Shellem. “I’ll even drop off samples so they can make a staff meal, just to educate their staff as well. It is so much fun to see so many people so passionate about the same thing with the same goal.”

But here’s where it gets tricky. Eating seasonally or prioritizing local foods is not just about trying new things. It’s also about learning what the limitations are and sometimes, living with disappointment. Foragers on land, for instance, will only take a certain number of mushrooms in a patch, to ensure sufficient regrowth. For Shellem, the same principle applies to seafood. She gathers what she needs for her restaurants and leaves the rest to flourish. That can make for an uncomfortable conversation at the dinner table. “When we were first opening, we explained to the servers that we’re going to run out of a particular fish tonight, and for some people that gives them anxiety,” says Neff. “But I think that should make you happy. Because that’s the nature of a sustainable restaurant; supplies are limited. We will be constantly changing.” For Neff, leaning into that change, and getting his customers used to it, is key. 

For Shellem, the lesson is more blunt but arguably more widely applicable. “I think if people could be more comfortable with being told ‘no’ sometimes, that would be awesome.” 

As for the tulip snails, Neff says they’ve been popular, and they’ve even had customers come in specifically looking for the snails. “We had people come all the way from France, not too long ago, and they said their main agenda was to eat at the restaurant,” which Neff concedes is a lot of pressure on one dinner order. However, it also means his message is spreading. “It meant so much to them to try [an ingredient] so unique that they’ve never had before.” 

The post Meet the Modern Chef and Forager Duo Bringing Snails to the Menu appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Buoys are a key component of aquaculture and fisheries—there are hundreds of thousands used in the United States alone. The buoy market, already a multi-billion-dollar industry, continues to expand by 5.5 percent each year thanks to increased interest in aquaculture farming. These buoyant orbs come in all shapes and sizes and help to moor lines, mark objects, and signal navigation. In the long history of ocean farming and exploration, we’ve used wooden buoys, cork ones, and iron ones. But today, the majority of buoys on the ocean are made from styrofoam or other polystyrene and polyethylene plastic compounds. There are thousands of buoys in use for weather and navigation alone, and every lobsterman and oyster farmer uses several dozen at a minimum.

Lost plastic buoys float on the currents and join the tonnes of plastics that now cover as much as 40 percent of the world’s seas. Bits and pieces of plastic buoys break off or disintegrate in the ocean sun, joining billions of pieces of microplastics that end up in our seafood.

You cannot have aquaculture without buoys—but you can have buoys without plastic. Sue Van Hook had a lifetime of expertise in fungi when she joined Ecovative Design as the mycologist in 2007. Ecovative Design is a technology company focused on using mycelium—the fine white vegetative filaments of fungus—to solve human needs. After discovering early on in her research that mycelium would float, Van Hook quickly realized the potential for creating buoys.

“My grandfather turned his lobster buoys on a lathe in the ‘50s and ‘60s on North Haven Island,” says Van Hook say, remembering her very first introduction to aquaculture’s wooden floatation devices. “I watched him do all that, all those years ago, and we helped paint the colors on and all of that stuff. And then I watched the whole ocean turn to Styrofoam, which at the time seemed fine, right? It was cheaper. They didn’t have to go through all of that labor of crafting this beautiful thing individually, and they lasted a long time.”

As an adult, Van Hook had become a professor of environmental studies and focused on mycology, which she taught at Skidmore College for 18 years. Now observing the buoyancy of mycelium, it didn’t take her long to remember her grandfather’s lobster buoys and their shift to Styrofoam—and to realize the environmental impact of an ocean full of Styrofoam buoys. She set to work designing and growing mycelium buoys.

Now the founder and CEO of her own company, Mycobuoys™, Van Hook has pioneered the fungus alternative to plastic buoys. To make her buoys, Van Hook will take a rope of pasteurized hemp and inoculate it with a low percentage of mycelium wood rot fungus. The fungus will then grow, spread and take up whatever space it is given to fill. Originally, she used empty soda bottles, and today, she has prototypes up to the size of mooring buoys more than two feet in diameter.

Van Hook has run into challenges finding the perfect fungus for the job, and she continues to work on the durability of the buoys. “We use wood rot fungus,” she says, explaining that the type of mycelium that creates sturdier, more perennial mushrooms like reishi is more suited to the job than the lawn fungus that grows many culinary mushrooms. She has tested dozens of strains of fungus, and she continues to work through varieties in buoy trials.

Currently, Van Hook’s Mycobuoys™ are being tested at 11 oyster farms, shellfish hatcheries, and ocean schools throughout New England and New York. Her goal is to be able to guarantee the buoys for a full season before offering them for retail sale.

Abigail Barrows was one of the first oyster farmers to trial Van Hook’s Mycobuoys™. Barrows has a background in marine biology and studies ocean microplastics. In 2015, she bought the lease on Deer Isle Oyster Company with a goal of turning it into a plastic-free oyster farm.

“We were blown away by the process,” Barrows says of her early experiences with mycelium buoys. “It was really exciting to grow something and then have this product which is so functional. And we were pretty excited about the potential application as we started our sea trials.”

The greatest challenge for Mycobuoys™ and those trialing the buoys is their durability. In addition to their hard plastic bodies, many of today’s buoys have thick toxic paint shells. To create a durable shell for a Mycobuoy™, both Van Hook and Barrows have experimented with natural paints that will protect the buoys from the sun, curious birds, and the hard use inherent in ocean farming.

“We are still looking for a more rugged coating,” explains Barrows, who has used pine tar and linseed coatings and linseed based paints on the buoys. “That would give them more robustness, because boats are going to bang into them, so we need to protect them for more than a season.”

“We are trying to find that beautifully environmentally friendly coating to prolong the life of the buoys,” says Van Hook. Today’s plastic lobster buoys do not last forever—at least not as functional aquaculture tools. Most lobstermen and oyster farmers will use a buoy for 20 or 25 years. Van Hook’s goal for Mycobuoy™ durability is a little bit shorter.

“My ideal business plan is that we grow the buoys every year,” she says. “You buy your buoys at a reasonable price, you have it out there floating your cages for a year, and at the end, we buy it back from you and dry it, grind it ourselves for fertilizer or you could compost them in your own garden.” Van Hook uses old mycelium buoy prototypes in her garden, where she never has to add fertilizer or composite thanks to the nutrition of the fungus. 

“You wouldn’t have to store [the buoys] in your driveway or your yard,” Van Hook continues, referring to the large piles of buoys that spring up on fishermen’s lawns during the off-season, “where all that UV light deteriorates the polyethylene plastic that they are currently using faster.” 

Recent legislation in South Korea will ban the use of styrofoam buoys by 2025, and Van Hook believes that other nations will soon follow. Van Hook hopes her buoys will retail around 10 percent to 20 percent above current plastic buoy prices and believes increasing restrictions on plastics will only make the mycelium option for buoys more appealing. Styrofoam and plastic buoys average between $20 and $50, depending on size, while the cost of Van Hook’s buoys will depend on the ability to scale up production and the solution to the problem of a durable coating. Those interested in helping Van Hook trial Mycobuoys™ can reach out to her via her website for 2025 buoys.

As oyster farmers such as Barrows continue to trial buoys and Van Hook expands to more shapes and sizes, the future of Mycobuoys™ is bright. On her quest to reduce ocean plastics, Van Hook may have stumbled on to an answer for more than just buoys.

“There is just so much potential here,” says Barrows. Plastics can be found in almost all fishing gear, from nets to floatation systems in boats. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is almost half what is called “ghost gear,” fishing plastics lost overboard or abandoned. In addition to Mycobuoys™, Barrows works on prototypes of wooden oyster cages, and she sells her oysters in compostable beechwood bags from a new company called Ocean Farm Supply. “We need to think outside of the box, in terms of using them for mooring balls, other kinds of floatation, other marine systems such as replacing styrofoam boat hulls and marine docks.”

The post Meet the Mycologist Stopping Ocean Plastics, One Mushroom Buoy at a Time appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Kieffer founded Shifting Tides in February 2023 to teach people about intertidal ecosystems—the unique space where the ocean meets the land, which transforms hour by hour as the tide flows in and out—and how they impact our day-to-day lives, especially when it comes to what we eat.

Kieffer leads visitors on tours of the Oregon coast, where she harvests and then prepares a meal with wild seaweed and shellfish right on the beach. I had previously obtained a state license for the right to harvest with her-/rather than merely watch—so, after she demonstrated the proper technique, I was handed a small knife and we worked side by side to carefully remove mussels and gooseneck barnacles from a massive triangular rock slick with saltwater. Enthusiasm radiated from Kieffer as she offered advice and information, but it was frilly neon green seaweed that caused her to truly light up. 

“In Oregon, the seaweed harvest season is from March to June 15th, with a limit of a one-gallon bag of seaweed per day and only three bags per year,” says Kieffer . “The regulations are such that you need to use a knife or scissors to remove seaweeds, and it is actually illegal to pull the holdfast, or root-like anchor, from the rock. This allows them to regrow year after year. It does regenerate quickly, but we should never be harvesting all of what a given area has and should be leaving plenty intact for wild species to utilize.”

Seaweed is a key component of what Kieffer considers to be “climate cuisine,” which includes foraged and farmed foods that positively impact our climate. A primary example is the wild bull kelp pickles that she makes and serves to those who join her with Shifting Tides, which have a pleasantly vinegary, spicy flavor and firm crunch. Participants also have a chance to try the dulse seaweed that she farms and pan fries in olive oil for a delightfully crispy, salty snack. During my tour, I sampled the dulse before and after Kieffer cooked it, and I liked it in its raw form, too—mildly briny in taste and slightly chewy; reminiscent of the sea, but not so different from terrestrial leafy greens. Given the versatility of this specific seaweed, she uses it in and on all kinds of foods, including homemade pasta, vegan Caesar salad dressing, and everything bagel seasoning. 

Seaweed is the primary focus of Kieffer’s work as an educator, forager, and farmer. When she is not leading Shifting Tides tours, Kieffer works as part of a small team at Oregon Seaweed, a local seaweed farm where she has been helping to grow a variety called Pacific Dulse since 2021. Much of their seaweed is sold fresh (about $15 per pound) or dried to nearby restaurants and home cooks, but it is also available for worldwide shipping. As plant-based and environmentally conscious food trends become more widespread, Oregon Seaweed is well poised to address the growing global market demand for seaweed, which was valued at more than $17 billion in 2023 and is expected to double in the next decade. 

“One of the things I love about both of my jobs is that there are not two days in a week that look the same,” says Kieffer. “With Oregon Seaweed, some days I’m outside on the farm all day, cleaning tanks, drying and packaging seaweeds; others, I’m at restaurants teaching chefs how to cook dulse, or at markets talking to customers about it; others, I’m on the computer all day answering emails or dealing with online sales. For Shifting Tides, it’s the same—there’s so much time outside at low tide teaching people and cooking with folks.” 

Kieffer’s schedule ebbs and flows depending on both the tides and the tourism season. In good weather, she may have tours scheduled 10 days in a row and a workshop every weekend. Each of her roles has its own particular responsibilities, but there are clear throughlines between them. 

“Being that seaweed is a less popular food in our culture, a lot of my work with seaweed is teaching people how and why to use it,” says Kieffer. “The topic of eating seaweed is a segway into so many other amazing conservation efforts around food. 

“Regenerative aquaculture is giving back to the environment, rather than just taking from or having a neutral effect on it, and requires no or very minimal inputs to grow food,” explains Kieffer. “Seaweeds, for instance, require sunlight and natural nutrients; no freshwater, herbicides, or pesticides. They are removing carbon dioxide from the water through the process of photosynthesis as well as excess nutrients like nitrogen, which can have positive effects on the local ecosystem.”

The dulse that Kieffer farms at Oregon Seaweed, for example, has the capacity to sequester one pound of carbon for every four pounds of seaweed grown. Out in the wild, Kieffer harvests about 10 different varieties of seaweed, including: nori, kombu, wakame, sugar kelp, pepper dulse, and sea spaghetti. Several of these will be well known to sushi lovers, but few people would know where to buy the seaweed on its own, let alone what it looks like in its natural form. 

Given her sense of perfect ease while navigating the hidden nooks and crannies of Cannon Beach, I was surprised to learn that it was not Kieffer’s native habitat. She was born in New York City and came to Oregon as a teenager. Soon after, she began working for an environmental education company in the intertidal ecosystems. She immediately fell in love.

“I grew up in a family of chefs, restaurant owners, cookbook editors, and overall food lovers, so I was born with a deep connection to food whether I realized it or not,” says Kieffer. “As soon as I moved to the beach, I got away from food service and began working alongside our oceans. I learned so much about food systems and ultimately what goes into getting food from the ocean to our plates.” 

On my visit to Cannon Beach, Kieffer pointed out starfish smaller than my thumbnail suctioned to shells latched to the rocks around tide pools. She told me about sculpin (a type of narrow fish with a wide mouth) that live among sea lettuce and camouflage themselves to match their green hue.

Since founding Shifting Tides over a year ago, Kieffer has explored the ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest with people of all ages from all over the country. “At the beginning, it was mostly people from Oregon. Now, by partnering with some hotels on the coast as well as destination management organizations, like Travel Oregon and Oregon Coast Visitors Association, I have been teaching many people who aren’t from the area at all—college students from Wyoming, executive groups from Tennessee, couples from Texas.” 

While visitors may not have access to the same exact wild seafoods when they return home, they come away with an understanding of regenerative food systems that is applicable anywhere. 

“There are so many people working hard to bring food from the sea to our table in a way that is sustainable and helps coastal communities,” says Kieffer. “Telling stories of the people, practices, science, and conservation along our coast over a meal of foraged and farmed seaweeds is truly a dream.”

Kieffer’s dream is the reality that we need. As I watched her sautee seaweed on a portable seafoam green grill just yards from where we had harvested it, I felt a kind of hope that is rarer than a blue-sky day in Oregon. There is no single, simple fix for our food system, but Shifting Tides shows the valuable work already being done and invites us to join in.

The post The Bounty Between the Tides appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“Trout need lots of clean, fresh oxygen to thrive,” says Walker, 34. Some grass is good, but too much can deplete dissolved oxygen, slow waterflow and clog drains, “which stresses the fish. And calm fish are healthy fish; healthy fish are delicious fish.” 

This is part of Walker’s annual maintenance routine at Smoke In Chimneys trout farm, which opened in 2019. He’ll spend the day weeding and cleaning, then harvest the remaining fish in the next week or so. The pond then gets a break from production to naturally incorporate or filter out excess nutrients from the ecosystem. In the fall, it will again be loaded with thousands of baby trout. They’ll start their lives here, then cycle through a dozen similar impoundments—that together hold more than 20,000 fish at various stages of maturation—for about two years until they’re ready for harvest. 

“It takes a stupid amount of labor to do it this way compared to big commercial aquaculture operations,” says Walker. “But this is the only way to raise trout that consistently taste like they’ve been pulled fresh out a mountain stream.” 

That’s because the pond is part of a restored, 1930s US Department of the Interior gravity-fed trout hatchery and research facility in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains that was abandoned in the early 1990s due to budget cuts and remoteness. Here, there are no electric pumps, plastic tanks, antibiotics, mechanical agitators, recirculated water, chemical additives or computer monitoring. Water comes from a pristine, 54-degree spring that gushes from the bedrock at 2,000 gallons a minute. It is carried to the ponds through a series of pipes and concrete raceways that mimic natural trout streams, then empties into an adjacent creek. The shale-bottom impoundments are lined with native plants, surrounded by pollinator gardens and selectively managed forest. They’re filled with naturally occurring microbes, insects, amphibians and crustaceans. Walker and two employees hand-survey populations monthly for signs of illness or stress. They harvest and process about 400 whole trout a week, then pack them in coolers for shipping to restaurants and individual customers.

“There are a lot of small-scale trout producers in the US, but this is truly a diamond-in-the-rough situation,” says freshwater aquaculture researcher and current US Trout Farmers Association president Jesse Trushenski. Most similar facilities either vanished during the big-ag-fueled Blue Revolution of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s or are still used to supplement native wild trout populations for fishing. Then there’s the production side: The nation’s largest commercial producer—Boise, Idaho-based Riverence—churns out more than 22 million pounds of trout a year compared to Smoke In Chimney’s give-or-take 120,000.

This is a small, extremely high-end facility operating on historic infrastructure, says Trushenski. “If other commercial facilities [like the Walker’s] exist, there can’t be more than one or two.”

Walker also touts Smoke In Chimney’s sustainability versus typical fish-focused commercial aquaculture farms. On one hand, he likens his farm’s production methods to the inland freshwater equivalency of regenerative livestock farming. 

“This approach is without a doubt going to affect a net positive environmental impact,” says Trushenski. The system acts like a natural waterway, using gravity and hydrostatic pressure to move perfectly balanced water from a limestone aquifer. It requires no electricity or additives to operate. It’s effectively a restored habitat for depleted natural fish populations where, like rotational grazing, trout cycle through different impoundments as they grow and mature, nurturing their needs while playing a supportive role in the overall ecosystem. A percentage of newly hatched fish escapes into the nearby stream, bolstering habitat and wild populations. 

Meanwhile, more farm-raised trout on the market means less extractionary pressure on local streams. It also helps balance the increasing gap in wild-caught seafood production due to overfishing, climate change and human population growth.

“This is an ecological win-win,” says Trushenski. “You’re boosting stream health and native fish populations while making inroads on a problem that is only going to get worse with time.” 

Walker appreciates sustainability and historic novelty—and leverages both to market and tell the story of his trout—but he’s more concerned with the quality of product the method yields. And testimonies back up his claims. 

“There’s this rich, nutty, buttery decadence. It tastes clean and refreshing, like spring water,” says Patrick Pervola, research and development chef at Michelin-starred Washington D.C. eatery, Albi. “This is some of the best fish I’ve tasted in my career. It rewrites what you think of as possible for farm-raised fish.”

But despite all the benefits—and roughly 2,900 miles of native wild trout streams—Smoke In Chimneys is one of about three other commercial trout farms in Virginia. And the others are tiny by comparison and sell almost exclusively to family friends or at local farmer’s markets. That means, by Trushenski’s estimate, about 95 percent of trout consumed in Virginia comes from production strongholds like Idaho, Washington or North Carolina. 

She says the problem stems from issues around education. 

First, most seafood consumers have never tasted wild-caught or truly healthy farm-raised trout, and that lack of exposure leads to decreased demand. Second, Virginia focuses aquatic agricultural resources on marine seafood, so there are no dedicated high school or collegiate-level educational programs for inland freshwater aquaculture. And would-be farmers can’t pursue opportunities they don’t know about.

“To put it into perspective: When I started out, I called around to agricultural extension offices at [the state’s leading universities] and there was literally nobody there that could tell me anything useful about farm-raised trout,” says Walker. “I had to rely on old books from the 1930s I dug up on eBay, rangers working at hatcheries, farmers in other states and trial-and-error to figure it out.”

But Walker remains undaunted. He and wife, Shannon, spent a year sifting through regulatory red tape and launched a small USDA-inspected processing plant near the farm. They work tirelessly on social media and with restaurateurs to educate eaters about the virtues of healthy, farm-raised trout. 

Walker has also joined the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Aquaculture Advisory Board and is in talks with administrators at the new Virginia Tech Aquaculture and Seafood Production Facility. He’s using the position and access to advocate for increased resources around gravity-fed inland freshwater aquaculture. He envisions a future where Smoke In Chimneys has expanded to include one to two dozen sister farms and helped dramatically increase trout consumption throughout the state and Mid-Atlantic. 

We have “the natural resources and the market potential is there,” says Walker, noting $67.5 million in USDA-reported 2018 sales at farms in the top two US trout-producing states alone. “All we need is the support to help us get the ball rolling and tap into that potential. And I don’t plan to quit until that happens. I want to remind Virginians why trout is our state fish.”

The post Meet the Modern Trout Farmer Using Gravity to His Advantage appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Last week, the FAO released its annual report on the state of aquaculture — which refers to the farming of both seafood and aquatic plants — and fisheries around the world. The organization found that global production from both aquaculture and fisheries reached a new high — 223.3 million metric tons of animals and plants — in 2022. Of that, 185.4 million metric tons were aquatic animals, and 37.8 million metric tons were algae. Aquaculture was responsible for 51 percent of aquatic animal production in 2022, or 94.4 metric tons.

The milestone was in many ways an expected one, given the world’s insatiable appetite for seafood. Since 1961, consumption of seafood has grown at twice the annual rate of the global population, according to the FAO. Because production levels from fisheries are not expected to change significantly in the future, meeting the growing global demand for seafood almost certainly necessitates an increase in aquaculture.

Though fishery production levels fluctuate from year to year, “it’s not like there’s new fisheries out there waiting to be discovered,” said Dave Martin, program director for Sustainable Fisheries Partnerships, an international organization that works to reduce the environmental impact of seafood supply chains. “So any growth in consumption of seafood is going to come from aquaculture.”

But the rise of aquaculture underscores the need to transform seafood systems to minimize their impact on the planet. Both aquaculture and fisheries — sometimes referred to as capture fisheries, as they involve the capture of wild seafood — come with significant environmental and climate considerations. What’s more, the two systems often depend on each other, making it difficult to isolate their climate impacts.

“There’s a lot of overlap between fisheries and aquaculture that the average consumer may not see,” said Dave Love, a research professor at the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University.

Studies have shown that the best diet for the planet is one free of animal protein. Still, seafood generally has much lower greenhouse gas emissions than other forms of protein from land-based animals. And given many people’s unwillingness or inability to go vegan, the FAO recommends transforming, adapting, and expanding sustainable seafood production to feed the world’s growing population and improve food security.

But “there’s a lot of ways to do aquaculture well, and there’s a lot of ways to do it poorly,” said Martin. Aquaculture can result in nitrogen and phosphorus being released into the natural environment, damaging aquatic ecosystems. Farmed fish can also spread disease to wild populations, or escape from their confines and breed with other species, resulting in genetic pollution that can disrupt the fitness of a wild population. Martin points to the diesel fuel used to power equipment on certain fish farms as a major source of aquaculture’s environmental impact. According to an analysis from the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown, swapping out fossil fuel-based generators on fish farms for renewable-powered hybrids would prevent 500 million to 780 million metric tons of carbon emissions by 2050.

Other areas for improvement will vary depending on the specific species being farmed. In 2012, a U.N. study found that mangrove forests — a major carbon sink — have suffered greatly due to the development of shrimp and fish farming. Today, industry stakeholders have been exploring how new approaches and techniques from shrimp farmers can help restore mangroves.

Meanwhile, wild fishing operations present their own environmental problems. For example, poorly managed fisheries can harvest fish more quickly than wild populations can breed, a phenomenon known as overfishing. Certain destructive wild fishing techniques also kill a lot of non-targeted species, known as bycatch, threatening marine biodiversity.

But the line between aquaculture and fish harvested from the wild isn’t as clear as it may seem. For example, pink salmon that are raised in hatcheries and then released into the wild to feed, mature, and ultimately be caught again are often marketed as “wild caught.” Lobsters, caught wild in Maine, are often fed bait by fisherman to help them put on weight. “It’s a wild fishery,” said Love — but the lobster fishermen’s practice of fattening up their catch shows how human intervention is present even in wild-caught operations.

On the flipside, in a majority of aquaculture systems, farmers provide their fish with feed. That feed sometimes includes fish meal, says Love, a powder that comes from two sources: seafood processing waste (think: fish guts and tails) and wild-caught fish.

All of this can result in a confusing landscape for climate- or environmentally-conscientious consumers who eat fish. But Love recommends a few ways in which consumers can navigate choice when shopping for seafood. Buying fresh fish locally helps shorten supply chains, which can lower the carbon impact of eating aquatic animals. “In our work, we’ve found that the big impact from transport is shipping fresh seafood internationally by air,” he said. Most farmed salmon, for example, sold in the U.S. is flown in.

From both a climate and a nutritional standpoint, smaller fish and sea vegetables are also both good options. “Mussels, clams, oysters, seaweed — they’re all loaded with macronutrients and minerals in different ways” compared to fin fish, said Love.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post The World is Farming More Seafood Than it Catches. Is That a Good Thing? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In 2009, Maine lobster fishers were required to replace more than 27,000 miles of floating ground line (underwater ropes that float above the ocean floor and connect trawls) with whale-safe sinking line (which rests on or near the ocean floor, preventing whale entanglements). Then, in 2015, they were mandated to put more traps on each buoy to reduce the number of end lines, or individual points of harvest, in the water. By 2020, Maine lobsterers had to ensure their gear was labeled in case of a whale entanglement. The next year, regulators instituted a closure of a 1,000-square-mile area during a particularly lucrative time of year for lobsterers, and in 2022, regulations enforcing the use of weak links, which allow whales to more easily break free of entanglements, went into effect. Making these changes was costly and time-consuming for lobster harvesters.

But since right whales are so endangered—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that there are only about 360 North Atlantic right whales remaining, with only around 70 reproductively active females—advocates say it’s important to address threats to their continued existence now, before it’s too late. After all, large whales are important to their marine environments. “They are vital to the balance of marine ecosystems, play an important role in the food web and are key indicators of the overall health of the ocean,” says Jennifer Goebel, NOAA’s Marine Mammal Policy Analyst.

According to NOAA, regulating fishing equipment is key to protecting vulnerable right whales. “Vessel strike and entanglement are the leading threats to whales,” says Goebel. Until the required marking of lobster gear went into effect in 2020, it was difficult to attribute whale deaths and injuries to specific pieces of equipment. Since the regulation went into effect, other large whale species have been found entangled in Maine lobstering gear, demonstrating, says Goebel, that the equipment can, in fact, pose a threat to right whales as well.

Curt Brown, lobsterman and marine biologist for Ready Seafood, says that Maine’s lobstering industry has been proactive in complying with these new regulations. “We’re certainly not opposed to protecting right whales, quite to the contrary.” But many lobstermen and women question the necessity of these seemingly ever-more-restrictive right whale regulations, particularly because they maintain that there has been no documented entanglement of a right whale in Maine lobstering equipment since 2004, and there has never been a recorded right whale death associated with Maine’s lobstering industry. “Ultimately, we’re not in favor of being put out of business for rules and regulations that aren’t going to save any right whales,” explains Brown.

However, NOAA says that right whales do appear to be getting entangled in fishing rope off the coast of Maine, but the incidents can be difficult to document officially. “Most, over 85 percent, of all North Atlantic right whales show scars caused by entanglement, and about 100 new scars are detected each year, says Goebel. “Of the 1,600 entanglement scars and incidents evaluated by New England Aquarium researchers, only about 16 have been traced back to a fishing location—that is one percent. In most entanglement cases, no gear is observed. When gear is observed, it can rarely be retrieved.” Tracing these injuries back to the equipment that caused them is, therefore, quite complicated.

Ultimately, Maine lobsterers say that these regulations still pose significant risks to the financial viability of the industry. Maine’s lobster industry is composed of thousands of individuals, effectively all small business owners. Brown estimates that, conservatively, harvesters along the coast of Maine spent a collective $100 million adhering to regulations designed to protect right whales over the last 20 years, in addition to the hours of labor required to implement these changes. Although some state and federal subsidies are available for lobsterers, they say that the money doesn’t come close to covering the costs they’ve invested in making these changes.

In fact, some lobstermen, like Bruce Fernald, say that they very rarely even see whales out on the water. “We’re doing all this just because we’re supposed to, but there are no real issues with whales in our area,” says Fernald, who’s been fishing for more than 50 years. “We do it because we have to or you’ll lose your license.”

Some are feeling anxiety as the industry changes. “Within the last two years, there’s a lot of guys riding on the border of red,” says fourth-generation lobsterman Mike Sargent, who started fishing full-time in 2016. Rising costs of equipment and labor, plus supply chain shortages and a growing list of regulations, are making some lobsterers question their long-term prospects in the industry. A year ago, says Brown, “There were more boats for sale than I think I’ve ever seen, more traps for sale than I think I’ve ever seen.”

Sargent lives in Steuben, a town of 1,129 residents, and says that lobstering is really the only viable industry in town. “If fishing were to go south, this place would close up. There’s nothing here for me to do that I could support myself with the cost of living here. It just doesn’t exist.” 

Many of Maine’s lobsterers come from families that have done this work for generations, but it’s become more difficult for younger people to enter the industry. “Think, if you’re going to put your roots down here, you’re a young person wanting to start a family, the realization is it might not be here for you,” says Sargent. “There’s a good chance it won’t be here for your kids. So, do you want to put roots down here and not give your kid the same opportunities you had? You know, it’s a risk.”

The collapse of the lobster fishing industry could absolutely change the face of coastal Maine’s culture. Without a healthy, sustainable lobster fishery “many of these island communities would very quickly just turn into vacation homes for people from out of state, and that would be very different from what we have now,” says Brown.

Maine’s lobster fishers are hoping that things are starting to look up. In December of 2022, they won a six-year break from new regulations, which they hope will provide some stability for the industry and, in turn, for their communities. But regulators whose aim is to protect right whales still want to see changes in the industry, including wider use of ropeless fishing gear. Some environmentalists say that without the ability to enact new regulations, whales will die.

Brown underscored that the industry is well equipped to contend with the inevitable changes to come and that the six-year pause gives them some breathing room to adjust at a slower pace. But it’s still unclear how the industry will take shape after the conclusion of the six-year pause. What is clear, though, is that Maine’s lobsterers are committed to preserving their way of life. “The thought of losing this fishery to regulations that aren’t warranted is, in my mind, unacceptable,” says Brown. “People know Maine for its lobster resource. People don’t come to Maine to eat chicken.”

The post The Uncertain Future of Lobstering in Maine appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“I was always seeing these little segments of yellow rope,” says Shaw. “We would see thousands of them across the season.”

After asking around, Shaw realized that these little yellow ropes came from longline oyster aquaculture, an off-bottom growing technique that is particularly useful in areas where the bottom can’t support bottom-grown oysters due to the prevalence of burrowing shrimp. After the oysters are harvested, pieces of these ropes can end up back in the water, contributing to the issues of marine debris and microplastics pollution.

In 2019, Shaw called a meeting with the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association and the Willapa-Grays Harbor Oyster Growers Association. He presented the issue, and a discussion ensued about how to solve the problem. Oyster growers such as  Pacific Seafood began introducing processes to address these rope fragments. The industry response had an immediate effect.

In September of this year, Shaw went for a walk down a 2.5-mile stretch of beach that he visits frequently. 

“Prior to [2018 or 2019], I would pick up 500 to 600 pieces of yellow rope in a walk and bring in multiple bags,” says Shaw. On this walk, he found only three or four individual pieces.

“We just saw this immediate decline in the material that was coming out of Willapa Harbor,” says Shaw. “It was stunning.”

The Cluster Buster

Beach clean-ups in Washington state resulted in the collection of tens of thousands of pieces of yellow rope. Yellow rope affects beaches in the Pacific Northwest and is one part of a larger issue of marine debris pollution. But unlike things such as water bottles and glass fragments, this yellow rope comes from one specific source.

Longline aquaculture uses yellow polypropylene rope. To grow oysters this way, you have to splice an oyster shell with seed on it into the rope. As the seeds grow, they form a cluster.

“You get this big, almost flower of oysters,” says Kyle Deerkop, Washington Shellfish Farm manager for Pacific Seafood. “One shell can turn into 10 to 15 oysters.”

When harvesting, you cut between the clusters. After the oysters have been harvested, you’re left with softball- or cantaloupe-sized balls of shells. The industry recycles these shells—either new oysters will be set on them in the hatchery or the shells will be spread on oyster beds to catch natural set oysters. The problem has been that these clusters dispersed for natural catch production still held onto their yellow rope segments. That rope would eventually end up floating in the water and washed up on the beach.

After the 2019 meeting, nonprofits such as the Surfrider Foundation and Twin Harbors Waterkeeper also got involved in trying to address the issue. 

“There’s two things when you have a challenge like that. The first is to stop the flow of it to the environment,” says Deerkop. “And then the second is to clean up what’s out there.”

The industry and nonprofit groups worked to approach the issue from multiple angles—beach clean-ups, education and figuring out what interventions could intercept the yellow rope before it makes it back into the water. Pacific Seafood, with help from college interns from surrounding universities, got to work developing what they would end up calling the “Cluster Buster”—a machine that could take these shell clusters and break them apart, so that the rope within could be removed and disposed of. The Cluster Buster breaks apart the clusters but without damaging the shells. This is important, since the shells are usable for future growing operations. It took some trial and error to get it right.

“You don’t realize how much force it actually takes,” says Deerkop. “So, we were bending shafts, we were having to reconfigure the rollers.”

After they built their onsite Cluster Buster, they received funding from the Washington State Conservation Commission to develop a mobile version that could be used at the shell piles—not just those belonging to Pacific Seafood but also those of other companies. Longline oyster growers in Oregon and Washington will be able to borrow the mobile Cluster Buster, once processes are established for maintenance and repairs. A chance to use it annually would be sufficient for most growers, says Deerkop. Continued effort will be necessary to keep yellow rope numbers down.

Shaw is satisfied with the industry reaction. “I think that the industry should get kudos for having responded.”

Shared resource

In addition to the Cluster Buster, community engagement has resulted in other alternative endings for yellow rope. In one project, yellow rope collected during beach clean-ups was processed and delivered to Western Washington University, where it was used to make crab gauges, an industry tool to determine if a crab is big enough for harvest. In that instance, the yellow rope was recycled right back into the industry.

For Deerkop’s part, he and his farm team continue to go to beach clean-ups. He says it’s important to have the mindset of being invested in the health of the estuary, as a seafood company. Without clean water, he says, you can’t have clean shellfish.

“It is a shared resource, right? It’s important for our company and it’s important for the community.”

The post Stopping Aquaculture Rope Pollution at the Source appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“They can be divided into two categories,” says Claudio DiBacco, a research scientist with Canada’s Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “Those that have been around since the latter part of the 19th century, they don’t harm the environment. It’s the newcomers that have arrived in the last few decades that are the troublemakers,” he says.

How sea squirts arrive and spread in a new area is no mystery. Often, they hitch rides in the ballast water used to weigh down ships without cargo. “The larvae are invisible and float with the ocean currents. They’re onboarded with a ship’s ballast water, and when it discharges in a new location, so does the tunicate,” says Boris Worm, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University’s Ocean Frontier Institute. “It is almost impossible to keep them from spreading.”

Sea squirts are tiny (species range from 6-10 inches long) and have cute nicknames such as Compound Sea Squirt, Golden Star and Pancake Batter. But, despite their small stature and fun names, these invaders sucker themselves like barnacles to any hard surface, natural or manmade, singularly or in massive colonies. And they are heavier than they look. Made up of organs, sea squirts are 95 percent water; an oyster cage weighing five pounds can easily exceed 75 lbs. when attacked by colonized tunicates. 

Colton D’Eon is a self-described sea farmer and chief operating officer for D’Eon Oyster Company in Yarmouth, NS.  He remembers the first time his oyster farm was hit with a tunicate infestation. “We weren’t prepared for how heavy they were, and lines snapped and we lost equipment. Now, we’re diligent. Our oysters are grown on the surface of the water in cages that can hold up to six bags of 300-1,200 oysters. We have learned to regularly take the bag and cage out of the water and let the sun and wind dry it out. This kills the tunicate but doesn’t solve the problem. They never go away,” he says.

It used to be that tunicates would die back in the cold winter water, and reemerge in the spring as the ocean warmed. “Now,” says DiBacco, “they’re finding thermal refuges, where the water stays warm enough for them to survive all year.”

Since the 1980s, there’s been an increase of more than two degrees Celsius (four degrees Fahrenheit) in the Gulf of Maine and surrounding waters. The average global ocean temperature has risen by only 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) during that time. “The rate of warming is more than twice as fast as the global average,” says Worm.

Where the Bay of Fundy converges with the Gulf of Maine, for example, the water has warmed from a low of -3 degrees Celsius in 1960 to a low of just above freezing in 2020.

In 2006, NASA scientists said warming sea surface temperatures were also causing a global decline in phytoplankton productivity, a main food source for tunicates and shellfish.

“This competition for resources has caused the growth rate of mussels in some areas with heavy tunicate populations to be reduced by 30 percent,” says DiBacco. In 2015, bio-fouling tunicates so severely affected mussel supply in Nova Scotia that there was a three-month shortage for shellfish consumers.  

Controlling bio-fouling organisms such as tunicates is expensive for fishermen, sometimes taking up to 10 percent of their profits in terms of manpower and equipment needed. These expenses can then be passed on to the consumer.

They are everywhere along the eastern coast of North America. The United States Department of Agriculture lists several species of sea squirts including clubbed and compound as invasive. In 2008, tunicates were found in Lake Tashmoo, a protected marine pond with shellfish aquaculture operations located on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. 

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts says oyster farmers along the US Eastern seaboard are continually finding cages and equipment covered with the brown-and-orange foam of the pancake batter tunicate. It takes months to clean it off and recoup the market loss of thousands of oysters suffocated by the invader. The institute is now studying the adaptive qualities of tunicates, wondering if there are any limits to their survival.

 “I don’t think there’s a way for humans to stop them,” says D’Eon.

Aside from manually flipping and drying cages, pressure washing to rinse off the fouling tunicates has also been effective, along with adding a chemical lime solution to infested mussel stocks. And starting in 2024, the Canadian government will implement new ballast water regulations that require ships to scrub the water of organisms before dumping it. But, ultimately, it may be climate change that solves the problem. 

In July 2023, Nova Scotia experienced a massive rain event. A total of 200 millimetres  of rain fell within 12 hours, adding fresh water to Halifax harbor where the DFO had set up plates to track tunicate populations. “After the storm,” says DiBacco, “the invasive tunicates were gone and, as of mid-September 2023, hadn’t returned. It might be that the rainfall lowered the salinity in the water, changing oxygen and PH levels and affecting reproduction. We’re still collecting data.”   

It’s a small flicker of hope for D’Eon, especially as more fresh water is coming. As polar ice caps melt, volumes will spill into the Atlantic. This, along with a warmer atmosphere and its ability to hold more moisture, increasing the frequency and velocity of rain events, could be the sea squirt’s kryptonite—an outcome for which fishermen and shellfish farmers have been hoping.

The post What Will Stop Troublemaking Sea Squirts Along North America’s Atlantic Coast? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

When you harvest oysters, you have to make sure you aren’t crossing over into restricted territory. To help, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources developed a web app for commercial and recreational shellfishers called iShellfish, that depicts state waters with demarcations for several categories including seaweed protection zones, oyster sanctuaries, aquaculture leases and more. Users can see where they are in relation to these boundaries, many of them hard to see in person.

“I can hold it in my hand and look at it and know exactly where I am without having to get the binoculars out to look,” says Harrison. The app helps him stay on the right side of the different boundaries. Crossing them could have serious consequences. “I could actually lose my license.” 

Harrison uses iShellfish regularly. When it comes to knowing where he can go, it takes all of the guesswork out of the process, he says. Harrison, also the president of the Talbot Watermen Association and chair of the County Oyster Committee for Talbot County, used to try to find individual boundary charts online, but the app compiles all of the information into one place.

Shellfish are both culturally and economically significant in coastal communities across the continent, but knowing which waters are legal and safe to harvest can present a significant obstacle. Behind these issues are wicked problems without simple solutions. But when it comes to figuring out where and when you can harvest shellfish, the answer may be as easy as downloading an app.

Helping farmers adapt

Some call North Carolina’s estuaries the “Napa Valley of oysters,” a nod to the abundance of perfect shellfishing conditions in the area. But being an oyster grower in this area also comes with its fair share of financial risk and unpredictability.

Heavy rainfall can flush pollutants and chemicals from roadways into the water. This is when pollutant concentrations in a waterbody can hit dangerous levels, and in North Carolina, the Division of Marine Fisheries enforces temporary closures for affected shellfish leases as a way to address the health risks associated with eating oysters from contaminated waters. 

These closures are critical for public health. But they also create a very inconvenient interruption for growers.

Before Natalie Nelson started working on the ShellCast app, there wasn’t an accessible tool in North Carolina that could help oyster farmers predict potential closures to their leases. Nelson is an associate professor in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department at North Carolina State University. ShellCast, which was piloted in 2021 and released to the public in 2022, was recently updated and expanded this year. It sources data from the National Weather Service’s probabilistic quantitative precipitation forecast, which shows the future precipitation possibilities.

“We’re essentially contextualizing [the forecast],” says Nelson. “So we provide that information in the context of the management criteria that are used to determine when the temporary harvest closures should occur.”

The app features a map of all the oyster waters in the state, and users can see whether the risk of closure is very low, low, moderate, high or very high. The forecast presents the risk level for the present day, one day out and two days out. 

Now, the team has expanded the app to include South Carolina and is working on expanding to Florida. Nelson says the farmers who benefit the most are the ones who are most vulnerable to low influxes of rain—that is, are more likely to experience a closure due to less rain.

“If they have a temporary closure that occurs, they are then suddenly in limbo, and they might not be able to harvest their products as planned,” says Nelson. “By having information, they’re at least able to assess whether or not they should potentially harvest early.” 

Mapping toxin risk

Toxin-producing algae and pollution present multiple obstacles to shellfish consumption. In coastal areas of Canada, a new app is mapping toxin risk to enable safe, local harvesting. 

The idea for Can U Dig It was developed by Q’ul-lhanumutsun Aquatic Resources Society (QARS), a coalition of Hul’q’umi’num’ communities. Intertidal shellfish are a traditional food source for these First Nations, and safe access to these foods is important to maintain. Trailmark Systems, a cultural and environmental consulting firm, took on the project.

“Folks do get sick by harvesting shellfish in these areas, and we really wanted to develop something that they felt was trustworthy and that they could use while they’re out in the field,” says Beth Keats, partner at Trailmark Systems. “QARS wanted to make sure that people would know when there is a partial opening so that they can go and exercise their rights to harvest and be safe to do it.”

Can U Dig It harvests open-access government data from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, including which beaches are currently open or closed to shellfishing, as well as whether the closure is caused by biotoxins or sanitation issues. The openings can sometimes be short and easy to miss, says Keats, so it’s important to be able to identify harvest windows when they occur. Can U Dig It is also available in more languages besides English, including Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese. The app is usable on both Canadian coasts.

Harvesting shellfish contributes to a greater sense of well-being, says Keats, and is an especially important right for First Nations.

“It is so essential…to maintain that practice as they have for millennia.”

The post Harvesting Shellfish? Get the App appeared first on Modern Farmer.