For the past year, the Maine Aquaculture Association (MAA) has been working with finfish growers to develop a Fin Fish Bay Management Agreement that will govern all finfish farming operations in the state. The purpose of the agreement is to promote sustainable aquaculture, which has been defined by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”
Sebastian Belle, director of MAA, said the agreement was initiated by the fish farmers, who came to the association and said they needed to be more coordinated in how they were working. “The formalized, legally binding agreement they signed last year can stand up to any other bay management plan in the world,” Belle said. “I think ours is the most complete and prescriptive in its detail and specific protocols.”
The first draft of this agreement was issued last January. It establishes specific guidelines and protocols that cover Fish Health and Biosecurity, Integrated Pest Management, Waste Management and Disinfection.
The guidelines address all aspects of management, including raising and stocking broodstock, single year class stocking, dead fish collection, storage and disposal; requirements for divers and diving gear, boat traffic, monitoring and treating for sea lice, minimizing and recycling waste such as feed bags, fish mortalities and packaging materials; and types of disinfectants and disinfection procedures. They specify policies for something as small as prohibiting sneakers at farm sites (they cannot be adequately disinfected) to matters as large as prohibiting boat traffic between bay management areas.
The next step will be the creation of area bay management plans by eight local bay management groups, such as Cobscook Bay One and Two. These plans will be specific to the needs of their bay area and will give details of how the farmers in the local bay plan to meet the requirements set forth in the general Bay Management Agreement. Local management groups will submit their plans to the entire group who will assess if they comply with the minimum standards set forth in the agreement.
In some cases, Belle said, a local bay management group may not be able to comply with the minimum standards immediately. An example is a requirement that for maximum biosecurity, each company should use separate wharves, but that the requisite number of wharves may not exist. In such a case, Belle said, the local group will develop a transitional plan until a new wharf is built or another made available.
Steve Ellis, ISA program veterinarian with the Maine sector of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said he believes the agreement is a “very positive step for the industry.” Ellis said the portion of the agreement that deals with biosecurity, developed by the fish health committee of MAA and the Maine Department of Marine Resources, was available a year ago when the USDA was writing an ISA program for Maine waters. “We adopted their biosecurity standards in toto,” he said. “We thought they had done better than we could have done, and that is the set of standards we are living up to.” He added that since the standards have been in place and Cobscook Bay partially restocked after lying fallow for several months – 2.5 million fish were harvested last winter because ISA was found in the bay – there has so far been no indication of a recurrence of the disease. “Any company will tell you the fish in the water now are the best fish ever grown,” he said. “Having stringent management has made farming safer.”
Andrew Fisk, Aquaculture Coordinator for the DMR, expressed support for the Bay Management Program and the effort it took for growers to work “through a myriad of details to meet broad regulatory controls enacted by the DMR. “It is helpful,” he said, “that companies got together and worked out a lot of the details so that the state doesn’t have to be micromanaging.”
The next challenge for Maine growers and regulators is to work with their Canadian counterparts to develop joint agreements that ensure the same guidelines and protocols are being used on both sides of the border. Belle said this task is complicated by the fact that there are two Canadian aquaculture associations and that some Canadian growers do not belong to either one, but it is helpful that two Maine growers also have facilities across the border. Fiske says the DMR and USDA have been working with the provincial authority.
Jeff Kaelin, governmental and environmental affairs consultant for Heritage Salmon, Inc., says although all new regulations and protocols come with some added cost, the cost of living up to the agreement is far less than the millions of dollars lost by having to remove all the fish. “The important thing,” he says, “is that everybody is operating under the same set of strict guidelines that are designed to reduce the incidence of and spread of disease. Our company could have been implementing all of the standards of the plan, but if a neighbor is not doing the same thing, our efforts are to no avail. I’m encouraged we’ve been able to embrace these standards and continue to operate.”