Moran has made this trip in his 19-foot skiff hundreds of times during the four years he has cultivated seaweed and oysters in the plot near Negro Island, but since he tends the farm from mid-April through December, the weather has not always been benign. To be here on this day, it is easy to understand why he has devoted as much time as he can spare from his regular job as a carpenter to nurse along this project. But imagining the difficulties involved in stormy or wintry weather, it is also easy to see why he describes his entire aquaculture venture as both “wonderful and horrible.”
Moran, 52, served in the Peace Corps in El Salvador from 1977 to 1980, working to quantify fishermen’s by-catch as part of a project to develop uses for it. After that, he was partner in a trout farm venture in Costa Rica until a landslide wiped out the water source. He stayed on in Costa Rica, teaching high school science in an American school until he and his wife decided to move back to the states in 1992 before their children entered school. They chose Maine because he wanted to develop some sort of aquaculture venture.
At first he worked with Coastal Plantations International, a seaweed aquaculture operation run by Steve Crawford and Ira (Ike) Levine. He raised nori for them and at other times dove for scallops and urchins. He says his present polyculture experiment, which includes pioneer work in domesticating a native strain of nori, Porphyra amplissima, is yet another attempt to utilize the masters degree in marine biology he earned at C.W. Post College on Long Island, N.Y. “I’m still trying to be a biologist,” he says. “I’d like to show what can work on a small scale here, something that doesn’t require a large amount of money and could be beneficial to the local economy. Maybe part-time fishermen could combine it with their fishing activities.”
Sebastian Belle, director of Maine Aquaculture Association (MAA), says Moran’s experiment could be extremely important as a way to maximize the potential of hard-won lease sites. “The MAA believes very strongly polyculture is the way to go,” he said, adding that a couple of growers have experimented with raising shellfish and finfish at the same site.
Nori is most commonly known in the United States in the form of nori sheets, which are used to make Japanese sushi. Those sheets are created with a Japanese strain of Nori, Porphyra yezoensis, grown by both Japanese and Chinese aquaculturists. Crawford and Levine were raising the Japanese strain in Cobscook Bay in the early 1990s, trying to develop strains that would grow well in cold Maine waters. When Levine and another partner took over the business and changed the name to Phycogen, they planned to move their farm to sites further south, but Moran says something happened to their seed nets in the process and all were lost, including the ones that had been promised to him for his new venture.
By this time, Moran had won a grant from Maine Technology Institute, which was matched with a supporting grant from National Fish and Wildlife Foundation obtained by the Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center. Through Levine, he learned about Charles Yarish, a researcher at the University of Connecticut who had been working to domesticate strains of seaweed collected in Long Island Sound. Moran asked Yarish also to include Gulf of Maine nori in his research, and contributed some of his grant money to the project. Now, he is waiting for nets which will be seeded with Porphyra amplissima, a native strain of nori. He hopes this strain, accustomed to chilly Maine waters, will grow more quickly than the Japanese nori and thus be more productive and a better candidate to build a nori industry.
While waiting for the nori nets, Moran has used his site to raise a native kelp, Laminaria longicruris, also known as oarweed, or kombu, from wild seed he obtains by hanging lines from buoys he uses to mark the site anchors.
In June, 2001, he added 50,000 oyster seed he obtained through the Island Institute. Suspended in ADPI bags from lines crossing the site, they are developing nicely. He hopes they will provide income to sustain the operation until the day when he is able to establish a local nori culture and turn it into a money-making operation.
Because Moran stipulated in his lease that he would remove all gear except marker buoys for the scallop and urchin seasons, he spends considerable time taking it out by the end of December and reinstalling it in the spring. But that is a mere drop in his maintenance program. As Gavin Hood, President of Maine Seaweed Council, which Moran helped establish, says, “You’ve got to have the right frame of mind to want to get into seaweed. There’s a lot involved.”
On this day, the piles of rockweed and other seaweed nestled against the lines attest to Moran’s ongoing battle to keep the plot clear of weed and debris. He first relocates a lobster buoy that has drifted into the plot, and then carefully navigates his small fiberglass barge between the lines of ADPI bags to clear some of the seaweed and driftwood, also pulling out a large tree branch. “My son and I have taken out tons of seaweed,” he says, adding that he’d like to look into selling it for compost. Recently the debris has been extreme due to seasonal high tides. It is a constant problem at his location, which he chose because its strong currents bring a high amount of nutrients to the seaweed and oysters, promoting faster growth.
Moran’s latest challenge has been to set up a nursery for the nori seed nets which he hopes will be ready in October. Originally, he had arranged for someone at another local farm to complete the approximately one-month nursery phase of growth, when nets must be lifted out of the water every day for several hours to prevent competing organisms from displacing the baby seaweed. “Nori is an intertidal species that can tolerate a period out of the water,” he explains, “whereas other organisms will die.”
Because the original growout plan fell through, he and a consultant have used a local boatbuilder’s field to set up the mechanism he needs to have in place to raise and lower the nursery nets. Standing in the meadow beside the complex arrangement of PVC pipe and netting, he explains how the pipe keeps the net taunt, and he demonstrates the process of raising and lowering. It is daunting to imagine setting this 80-foot long structure up in the river, raising it each day with the weight of nets, plants and who knows what else that has come in with the tide.
“It was with great reluctance that I got into this,” he admits, pointing out that the high current at his site will put tremendous strain on the equipment. “But if I want to help develop a local species, I have to do the nursery phase.” After this year, though, he says someone else will need to complete it, at a site with less current.
Once the nori reaches growout size of one-half to one inch, it will no longer need to be raised each day. Then he will transfer some of the nets to another section of the plot and take the rest home, spin them in a centrifuge and store them in his freezer to use the following season.
Last year, Moran raised about 300 pounds of kelp, which he dried in his back yard to produce about 35 pounds. His present crop is just enough to keep the Blue Hill Co-op supplied with ounce-and-a-half bags bearing the name Blue Hill Algae Co. Because he harvests his kelp at a younger stage than wild harvesters, it is extremely light and tender. People use it in dishes like soups or casseroles. Kelp and other seaweeds are renowned for their beneficial micronutrients and are used in numerous plant and food products and by the biotechnology industry.
If Moran is successful with nori culture, he could sell it to be used whole as food or in processed food products. He could spin it down and freeze dry it to send to biotech companies like FMC in Rockland, which utilizes the red pigment from some seaweeds (nori contains it) as tracers in a medical process, electropheresis.
The market for edible nori sheets (for sushi) has expanded rapidly in the United States, but to tap into that revenue, Moran says he or someone else will have to develop a suitable process for pressing native nori into sheets, because, he explains, “It’s been tried, and the sheets were more like brillo pads.”
In the living room at his East Blue Hill home, Moran holds up a piece of dried kelp taken from a black garbage bag filled to the brim. The kelp is thin, like fine paper, greenish, with ruffled edges. Its aroma brings sweet salt air into the room. Moran leans over the edge of the bag and inhales. Clearly, he is pleased with this product from the entire “wonderful and horrible” process. “Generally, I feel good about it,” he says.