The Maine Department of Marine Resources on Thursday killed a proposal by a Norwegian-backed company to build two massive salmon farms in the middle of pristine Frenchman Bay, next to Acadia National Park. The decision ended a long-running saga that had generated considerable opposition in the community over fears that the farms would foul the water and ruin the local fishing and shellfish industries.
The DMR said that American Aquafarms had “failed to find a state-approved hatchery for salmon eggs for the operation,” according to the Associated Press. “The company also failed to prove the hatchery met requirements of state law for fish health and genetics, officials said.”
Frenchman Bay is home to dozens of small and family-owned oyster and mussel farms, kelp farms, lobstermen and fishermen. The fight over the salmon farms was emblematic of the national debate over how to expand aquaculture in the United States.
American Aquafarms’ plan was to “establish a hatchery, fish farm facilities, and a state-of-the-art processing plant in coastal Maine,” according to its website. The farms would have been 60 acres each, producing an estimated 66 million pounds of salmon annually.
The company’s selling point was so-called closed pens, the underwater pools where the salmon would be raised. This would be an improvement over more common open-net aquafarms, which use porous nets that allow bacterial and parasitic diseases, such as sea lice, to escape and potentially infect wild species, and that often lead to a buildup of fish waste on the ocean floor.
In the American Aquafarms system, ocean water would have been cycled through the pens, excrement and excess fish food filtered out, and the solid waste used to make biofuel, according to Thomas Brennan, the company’s director of project development.
Opponents said there would still be problems with liquid waste. Fish urine, for example, which is rich in nitrogen, can cause toxic algae blooms that suck oxygen from the water and suffocate wild creatures living there. The risk of algae blooms is exacerbated by rising ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Maine.
The AP said that “the company could submit a new application, but that would add several years to the permitting process.”