Look likes that Jonesport is harvesting rockweed. “Washington County is a fading area,” he said. “No jobs. No work.” He went on, “Jonesport and the crew up here, we need this. We need the fishing industry. This is our livelihood.”
Look started working with rockweed almost forty years ago, back in the days when lobster shippers put seaweed in the bottom of boxes to keep the lobster cool and wet. “I was buying seaweed off of the local fishermen and hauling it into New York and Massachusetts and selling it,” he explained. Then five years ago, his friend’s company, Acadian Seaplants, Ltd. (ASL), began harvesting in Jonesport.
Harvesters tend to be young because, as Dennis Bryant, Acadian’s director of Maine rockweed operations, explained, Maine’s harvesting season runs from May to September, which appeals to college-age workers. The harvesters work with the tide when the rockweed is floating. Standing in boats designed by the company, they use specially designed metal rakes with a cutter bar in the center and runners on either end to cut the rockweed. The runners are designed to make it impossible to cut the seaweed closer than 16 inches from the holdfast, where the seaweed’s roots attach it to a rock. The boats, 21 feet long and nine feet wide, can hold five or six tons of rockweed. Their one-foot draft permits harvesters to work right up to the shoreline.
Acadian Seaplants, Ltd., harvests rockweed primarily for specialty fertilizers used in addition to NPK fertilizer (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) for agricultural and horticultural products, and for animal feed. Smaller amounts are used in toothpaste, chocolate milk, fillers in milkshakes, jams and jellies, salad dressings, and nutraceuticals.
Because rockweed is a marine organism, it comes under the jurisdiction of the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR). Each year, Acadian presents the DMR with its plan for the year’s harvest, and each year the DMR sets the amount to be harvested.
When Acadian first started harvesting in Jonesport five years ago, the company harvested 500 short tons, according to public relations representative Linda Thériault. Last year, the company harvested 2,000 short tons. According to Rex Hunter, Acadian’s resource vice-president, a short ton is 2,000 pounds verses a metric tonne that weighs in at 2,200 pounds. This year, Thériault said Acadian expects to harvest 3,000 short tons of rockweed from Jonesport.
The company has spent $3.5 million U.S. dollars on salaries, purchases of seaweed from harvesters, boats, motors, trucking, wharf construction, establishing an office in Pembroke, costs of training harvesters, equipment, etc. Acadian also pays the state a royalty fee of $1.50 per ton for research, according to Bryant. For now, ASL has 22 employees, all from Maine: two managers, two clerical workers, two truck drivers, two scale operators, and 14 harvesters.
Most of those employed by the company have experience in other fisheries. Jeffrey Copp, 28, from Cutler, has been resource manager for three years. He’s done wrinkling, urchining, and lobstering and said, “I like harvesting. I really enjoy it. I like this resource, too: we don’t kill anything.” He stated, “I’ve seen harvesting here, and this year, I’m seeing the seaweed coming back. It makes me pretty confident that if we manage it correctly, the resource will remain sustainable.”
Forrest Dale, 25, from Steuben, has raked for two years and also enjoys it. “It’s a good thing to get into,” he said, explaining that he had been quahoging, but was shut down because of red tide. For the last three weeks, he’s been raking along with his girlfriend, Audrey Labbe, 23, from Aroostook County. “I fell right in love with it,” Dale said. “You can’t beat it: I’m on the water, the weather’s beautiful, and I’m with my girlfriend.
Sandra Dinsmore is a freelance writer who lives in Penobscot. She writes the Lobster Market Report for Commercial Fisheries News.