A three-year experimental lease has been bestowed upon two full-time Maine shellfish farmers, permitting them to develop an acre of watershed in the state’s New Meadows to accommodate the area’s first purely intertidal commercial clam farm.
Approved on 17 July, the lease will allow Chris Green and his partner Peter Holman to harvest and sell soft- and hard-shell clams from an acre of mud off of 323 Princes Point Road, according to a recent report from the Forecaster. The approval of local and state authorities was needed for the project to be greenlighted, as the town of Brunswick, Maine has jurisdiction over the intertidal zone.
Green said he will continue to work with scientists from sustainability-focused firm Manomet, which is currently studying the survival rates and shellfish growth of clams already seeded by the harvester. Green has already seeded a half-acre of clams in the New Meadows location, which has been devastated by invasive clam predators, including green crabs and milky ribbon worms, over the last few years. However, Green has started using fine netting to protect his stock from predators, and the presence of green crabs and milky ribbon worms in his farmed area seems to be on the decline. Green said he hopes aquaculture methods will be able to level out his income, which was previously subject to ups and downs, depending on clam populations and growing conditions.
“We’re on a peak now,” Green told the Forecaster regarding the slowing predator growth, “but we do remember that the valleys are pretty low."
Conservation scientists from Manomet have been tasked with ensuring the farm’s financial viability, and exploring if the aquaculture project is technologically sound, Mamomet’s Ethel Wilkerson told the Forecaster.
“Manomet’s goals is to understand if this method of farming is financially viable, not just technically possible,” she said.
“We know how many seed clams went under each net, we are measuring how fast they are growing, and when the clams reach legal size we will sample the size and total weight of clams from each net," Wilkerson said. "From this information we can get an idea of how much money was earned by the harvester from each net and then compare that with the initial investment of seed clams and nets, the time the harvester worked on the farm.”
Green, Manomet and the town of Brunswick hope that if the farm is successful, it can both revitalize the flats and provide a new working model for the rest of the state.
“To my knowledge there are three or four intertidal leases in the state,” but none so far that are exclusively intertidal, Wilkerson said to the Forecaster. “What makes Chris Green’s project unique is that his lease is solely intertidal for the purpose of raising clams (an emerging aquaculture strategy), and he had to get permissions from both the town and the adjacent landowners.”
Green expects the state to come back with its answer regarding his lease sometime in August 2017.
