May 2, 2012 – This week, commercial fishermen began trawling the seafloor off New Hampshire for cod and other signature New England catches. But Ed Eastman, who has been groundfishing off the coast for 31 years, was not among them. Regulations governing groundfishing became too burdensome, he says, and he could no longer earn a living wage. Last year, Eastman sold his groundfishing permit and moved on to other fisheries, like shrimping.
It was a decision years in the making.
EXPLORING AN ALTERNATIVE ECONOMY
In 2009, when Eastman was still groundfishing, his wife Carolyn pushed the family into a community-supported fishery. CSF’s are modeled after community-supported agriculture. That’s a system in which farmers sell local customers a farm “share” at the beginning of the growing season, and in return, they get weekly batches of fresh produce. Fishermen in Port Clyde, Maine, borrowed the idea in 2007, and since then about a dozen CSF’s have popped up in New England.
This system inverts traditional fishery economics. Instead of selling his catch to the local cooperative for a non-negotiable price, Eastman says, he was charging a premium to 500 shareholders. The couple’s income tripled–but so did their expenses and workload. They could no longer rely on the market to process, distribute, advertise and sell the catch.
“We had to go to a bigger scale or stop,” Eastman says. “We couldn’t do it anymore.”
Nowadays, Carolyn Eastman does her best to ensure that her husband squeezes every penny he can from every pound of seafood he catches. “My wife can sell anything,” he says of the woman he named his boat, Sweet Carolyn, for. Though they quit the CSF last year, Carolyn kept the contact information of the 1,000 shareholders and customers she met at farmers markets. So while Ed is out on the ocean, Carolyn lures customers to meet him at the dock after sunset and sells the catch directly to the public for a higher price than they could get wholesale.