Saving Seafood

Mainer sees success in commercial clam farm, but not everyone loves the project

August 2, 2015 — GEORGETOWN, ME — Marching across the clam flats near the head of Heal Eddy, you notice two things.

First, both the seafloor and the sea grass meadows on the shoreline are cratered with holes – the work of green crabs, the voracious crustaceans blamed for the widespread destruction of the state’s soft-shell clams.

 Then you see Chris Warner’s response: five long rows of what appear to be net-covered garden beds, some 70 patches in all, spread across the exposed ocean bottom at the mouth of a 300-foot-wide cove. Beneath the netting, protected from the hungry crabs, the tiny seed clams Warner planted here in May 2014 have been growing toward harvestable size, grazing on the plankton-rich seawater that floods the area with each tide.

Behold Maine’s first commercial-scale soft-shell clam farm, an experimental project that aims to test whether a single owner-operated farm can earn a worthwhile return for clam diggers who heretofore relied exclusively on the whims of nature to earn a living from the seafloor. If it works, it could revolutionize Maine’s second most valuable fishery, enhance the livelihoods of diggers and stop the assault of the green crabs in their tracks.

But the project has been contentious here in Georgetown, a coastal community 6 miles south of Bath, where some clam diggers fear that self-employed clam diggers like Warner and themselves will eventually be pushed out by corporate growers if the succulent mollusks are farmed rather than gathered in the wild.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald