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ELLSWORTH — Fjord
Seafood U.S.A. sold Atlantic Salmon of Maine to
New Brunswick-based Cooke Aquaculture last week.
Fjord, a Norwegian aquaculture company with salmon
farms in Maine and Chile, had been trying to sell
its Atlantic Salmon of Maine division since the
parent company’s October board of directors
meeting.
Nearly six months
later Atlantic Salmon of Maine, along with its 14
lease sites, two hatcheries and Machiasport
processing facility, has been sold to a
family-owned aquaculture company that has been
growing steadily in Canada since the mid-1980s.
Cooke Aquaculture is based in St. George, New Brunswick, maintains six
hatcheries and 19 lease sites in the Maritime
Provinces, employs 450 workers and sustained sales
in the neighborhood of $100 million in recent
years, according to company Vice President Ross
Butler.
He said Cooke
operates a processing plant in St. George, a
seafood smoking operation in Prince Edward Island,
trucking interests, an aquaculture gear
fabrication company, and sales offices throughout
Canada and in Chicago and New York.
Butler said the
Canadian company has been expanding when it came
through the 1990s. What it saw in Atlantic Salmon
of Maine was a collection of compatible assets
geared to producing the same product and allowing
Cooke to spread some of the risk of fish farming
over a wider geographical area.
Atlantic Salmon of
Maine’s 14 lease sites are spread from Cobscook
Bay to Swan’s Island.
Butler said his
company will be assessing the “strengths and
weaknesses of ASM” before any specific decisions
are made about management. However, he said Cook
is engaged in cod and halibut farming in Canada
and some of the colder ASM sites that have been
problematic for salmon growth might be well suited
to alternative species.
Sebastian Belle,
executive director of the Maine Aquaculture
Association said lease sites outside of Cobscook
Bay are attractive to salmon
farmers because they are free of any history of
the destructive infectious salmon anemia (ISA).
Butler said he
thinks ISA risk in the Bay of Fundy is well
under control. However, he conceded that the more
leases are spread geographically, the better.
Until specific
decisions about future operations can be made,
Butler said ASM employees should assume the
harvest and processing of fish will be business as
usual.
“Cooke initially
looked at purchasing ASM back in October of last
year,” said Steve Page, general manager of
Atlantic Salmon of Maine. However, there were
other interested buyers who looked at the company
as well. That included a group of employees that
made several offers to Fjord, according to Page.
He pointed to U.S.
District Court Judge Gene Carter’s decision that
found ASM to have been operating in violation of
the federal Clean Water Act, as a reason for
Fjord’s sale of the company.
The decision,
which was delivered last summer, found ASM and
Stolt Sea Farm Inc. in violation for not having
the required pollution discharge elimination
permits in place. Carter also berated the federal
Environmental Protection Agency and the Maine
Department of Environmental Protection for not
having designed the permits necessary for the
salmon farmers.
While only minimal
fines were imposed, Carter placed restrictions on
the two companies for future farming operations.
He banned the stocking of non-North American
salmon smolts and imposed some 24-month fallowing
periods on farm sites before they could be stocked
with new fish.
Atlantic Salmon of
Maine experienced another setback last spring when
a fire at its Embden hatchery destroyed millions
of salmon smolt and fry being reared there. In the
fall, the company couldn’t find salmon smolts that
would meet the genetic standard the federal
fisheries services had provided to eliminate
non-North American strains of the fish. By the
time a redefinition could be agreed to, allowing
the purchase of Canadian smolts, it was too late
for ASM to purchase them.
Although
harvesting has continued, no new fish have gone
into the leases. Page said only three ASM farm
sites contain fish right now. He estimated that
those would all be harvested by November if the
current rate of processing were maintained.
“The reality is
ASM today doesn’t have a lot of fish in the
water,” Butler said. However, Cooke is in a
position to change that. Butler said the salmon
from its hatcheries meet the federal genetic
standards. He said Cooke will comply with all the
provisions of the court order. He said those
provisions, coupled with the management protocol
to help control ISA, means the new operations are
likely to seem “scaled down” from ASM’s earlier
peak operations under Fjord.
Belle said the
sale is a good sign. He was heartened to see a
neighboring company with a history of savvy
business decisions decide to buy an ailing Maine
farming operation.
“Of all the
companies in New Brunswick, they have clearly been
the most able to slowly but steadily build their
business, and they have done that without the
investment of a multinational,” Belle said of
Cooke.
Fjord may be out
of the water, but it hasn’t left the state. The
company is holding onto the Ducktrap brand of
smoked fish and its facility in Belfast. Fjord
salmon grown outside of Maine can be smoked there. |
