Nordic Aquafarms’ seven-year quest to build a major recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) salmon farm in Belfast, Maine, came to an end in January 2025, when the company announced it was cancelling its plans after Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled the firm did not legally own a parcel of intertidal land through which it needed to run pipes for the project.
The case was brought before the court by Belfast residents Jeffrey Mabee and Judith Grace, who argued that they were the rightful owners of the disputed land, which the company had previously attempted to purchase and then sought to claim through eminent domain.
Though the project has been abandoned, tensions continue to run high in Belfast, according to Jacki Cassida, former public relations manager and community liaison for the Nordic project, and Jill Howell, executive director of Upstream Watch, one of the advocacy groups which led the push to stop the project.
Cassida said from the company's perspective, the project’s failure is a missed opportunity for the town.
“The majority of people in Belfast were supportive,” she said. “They were looking forward to the jobs that would be available. I know that learning institutions locally and throughout Maine were looking forward to having an opportunity to learn about land-based recirculating aquaculture by seeing it in action. [There is also] the tax revenue that Belfast would have been able to enjoy. It’s a big loss.”
Howell characterized the community’s response to the proposed project as more divided.
“The community was split over this in a way that’s really unfortunate,” she said. “This is a case of an industry coming in and really dividing a community. Now that Nordic’s gone, there’s still some healing that needs to happen as a result.”
For Howell and others opposed to the project, the issue with Nordic’s proposal mainly had to do with its scale.
“In general, there is a place for aquaculture and meeting the needs for food for humans," Howell said. "Large-scale industrial aquaculture, like what Nordic proposed, is more [part of] an industrial food system that is only harming people and the environment. There’s nothing like what Nordic has proposed [for Belfast] anywhere in the world of this size and scale.”
The initial Nordic proposal outlined a USD 500 million (EUR 485 million), 850,000-square-foot salmon farm to produce 33,000 metric tons of salmon in the town, which has just around 7,000 residents.
When the project was first announced in 2018, it was projected to create 60 jobs within two years and 140 jobs once the operation was fully up and running.
Then-CEO Erik Heim said that Nordic chose the location for its “pristine environment, coldwater conditions, long history as a leader in the seafood industry, and proximity to major consumer markets in the Northeast United States.”
Cassida described the project as mission-driven toward providing a practical and environmentally sustainable solution to the world’s food needs.
In its 17 January 2025 statement announcing the end of the project, Nordic U.S. CEO Brenda Chandler echoed this sentiment.
“Solutions like land-based aquaculture are not just innovative; they are essential," she said. "By cultivating finfish in a controlled, environmentally responsible manner, land-based aquaculture addresses several critical challenges: a reduction of the overall [carbon] footprint; minimizing water usage; reducing reliance on imported seafood; and protecting wild fish populations. At a time when global food security is a pressing issue, projects like this represent a small but impactful step toward a more sustainable future.”
Cassida also said the opposition to aquaculture may have also been masking issues related to small town politics, such as residents worrying their view of the water may be obscured – or loyalty some in the community felt toward the plaintiffs.
“I don’t think [the town] really wanted to acknowledge the science and … the high standards we would be operating by,” Cassida said. “I think they wanted to lump us in with all the things that were bad in the world in terms of aquaculture because those are the things that are shared most.”
Cassida also said that one of her key frustrations about the failure of the Nordic project was that in her role as community liaison, she had taken the community’s concerns about environmental impact seriously and worked to address them.
Cassida said that Nordic had hired a qualified hydrology expert – Tyler Parent, a fisheries scientist with environmental consulting firm Normandeau Associates – to ease community concerns by demonstrating “the [Belfast] Bay is not in danger of being polluted by wastewater discharge.” The subsequent report Parent filed to the Maine Board of Environmental Protection on behalf of Nordic said that “the discharge of the proposed facility is not expected to significantly impact the water quality of the receiving water” in the bay or the “finfish, shellfish, or benthic organisms in the vicinity.”
Howell said that Upstream Watch hired its own external expert – Maine resident Richard Harris Podolsky, an ecologist and environmental consultant – to review the findings, who determined that insufficient research had been done on the site by Nordic’s experts. In his report, Podolsky wrote that “this failure opens doors for there to be unintended consequences and the potential for harm to come to important and protected natural resources both on land and in the water.”
Howell also said a main point of contention was the fact that Nordic refused to disclose the type of fish feed it would use for the farm, which Cassida attributed to the ever-changing feed market.
More generally, Howell also challenged the depiction of the Nordic project as an environmental necessity.
"The way to address some of the biggest [global] issues, including a failing food system and climate change, is not to try to engineer our way out of it with more big industrial systems and operations that are not addressing the root of the problem and only creating new ones,” she said.
Howell did agree with Cassida, however, that some small town politics played a part, saying that Belfast is “a really small place where people know one another.”
She, instead, said that she was optimistic by this fact and hopes that Nordic’s withdrawal “emboldens people to engage more locally because they can see that [though] an individual action by itself may not do anything, combined with your neighbors, [you] can be successful and actually make a difference.”
Despite her frustrations, Cassida said that Nordic held on to its ambitions to build in Belfast for so long not in spite of the community, but because of it.
“Honestly, the community being supportive was the reason why we held on because we wanted to be here. We wanted to be able to fulfill all the things that we hoped to do with the community. We sponsored a lot of events because we wanted to be part of the community. We donated a lot of money. We just wanted to be a good neighbor,” Cassida told SeafoodSource. “I’m a direct neighbor to the project. I was among the neighbors who were totally fine with [the farm] literally being in my backyard.”
Howell said that any similar project put forth in the future is also likely to face pushback, as Maine greatly values its waters and its unfettered access to them.
“Maine’s waters are incredibly important to the people who live here – whether that be from an economic perspective of the fishing industry that relies on clean water, from a tourism perspective of drawing people here, or that people value the environment in Maine generally,” Howell said. “I don’t think the industry should underestimate how communities value these places and what they’re willing to do to protect the places that they love.”
