Open-ocean Blue Mussel Farming Goes Commercial
UNH Cooperative Extension specialist played key role in development of offshore aquaculture
Professional cooks and diners who’ve sampled the blue mussels
New Castle fisherman Andy Lang will soon begin marketing proclaim them
the best they’ve seen or tasted: huge, tender and flavorful.
Lang, a commercial fisherman for more than 20 years, has expanded into
aquaculture—seafood farming—with his first-in-the-nation
offshore blue mussel farm. His business emerged from more than a decade
of research, collaboration, innovation, and experiment by a team of UNH
marine biologists, engineers, Extension staff, and local fishermen. It’s
part of UNH’s Open Ocean Aquaculture Project to research, develop, and transfer to commercial operators the technology
for farming various species of finfish and shellfish in offshore waters.
Meeting demand for seafood, expanding economic opportunities for fishermen
“The U.S. currently imports 70 percent of its seafood, and 40 percent
of that comes from aquaculture. Global demand for seafood continues to grow,
and harvests from wild fish stocks can’t keep up,” says Rollie
Barnaby, a Sea Grant and Extension marine resources educator and a former commercial
fisherman himself. “Expanding aquaculture in the U.S. could help meet
consumer demand, while improving the economic situation for the region’s
fishermen.”
Barnaby spent years looking at aquaculture operations in other parts
of the U.S and world. He discovered that “most aquaculture takes
place in protected fjords, harbors, and bays. But most of our inshore
and near-shore waters are already overcrowded with other users. I realized
that to make commercial aquaculture viable in New Hampshire, we’d
either have to grow fish in warehouses on land, or take to the open ocean.”
“But the problem was that we didn’t have models in the U.S. for
aquaculture in the extreme conditions of the open ocean, with its winds and
12-foot waves,” says Barnaby. “We had a long list of engineering
and biological questions.”
Moving aquaculture to the open ocean
So, in 1996, Barnaby found grant funding to organize the nation’s
first open-ocean aquaculture conference. The Portland, Maine, event attracted
more than 200 people from 13 countries. “We focused on these questions:
What do we know? What do we not know? What do we need to know to move
off-shore?” says Barnaby.
The meeting fired up a group of UNH faculty and researchers that included
marine biologists, ecologists, ocean engineers and others, who set to
work on tackling the engineering, ecological and economic challenges
of seafood farming in the open ocean.
Founded in 1998, funded by grants from the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and strong support from U.S. Senator Judd Gregg,
the UNH Open Ocean Aquaculture Demonstration Project has piloted techniques
for offshore culture of finfish and shellfish. The shellfish component
of the project, led by Dr. Richard Langan and Forbes Horton, focused
on developing techniques for mussel culture.
Why blue mussels?
“The blue mussel is a native species that’s hardy, readily seeds
itself in the wild, requires no feeding, and provides nutritious and tasty
human food,” says Barnaby. “Submerging the lines offshore, with
its deeper water, stronger currents, colder water and superior water quality
apparently produces a superior mussel of unparalleled taste, size and quality.”
The mussel larvae, or “spat,” seed themselves by attaching
to “collector ropes” that are set out in the spring and
fall Crews later strip the ropes and run the baby mussels through a machine
that stuffs them into a tubular cotton mesh that holds the seed mussels
to specialized grow-out ropes. . After a few weeks, the cotton mesh biodegrades,
leaving the mussels attached to the grow-out ropes. More than 2,000 feet
of growout rope can be suspended from each 600 ft. longline, eventually
yielding 12,000 to 15,000 lbs of market-size mussels. Secured by 4,000-lb
granite anchor blocks, the longlines sit three to five miles offshore,
about 35 feet below the surface—far enough down that other boats
won’t interfere with the lines and out of reach by starfish and
other predators who live closer to the bottom.
Bringing open-ocean aquaculture research to commercial fishermen
Barnaby says he saw in open-ocean aquaculture “an opportunity
for the region’s commercial fishermen, who had the boats, the boat-handling
skills and the knowledge of the ocean environment and conditions.” In
addition to the ongoing research, he says, “We also hosted meetings,
wrote fact sheets, produced a video, and talked to commercial fishermen about
the opportunities.”
Andy Lang “came to one of those meetings about three years ago
and picked up a fact sheet about blue mussels. It seemed like a sound
idea, although I knew it was a heavy investment in terms of equipment,” he
says.
Before he’s finished, Lang says he’ll have invested about
$100,000 of his own money into the project. He plans to continue his
other fishing operations, filling in with sustainable 5000- to 6000-lb.
monthly harvests of mussels.
“My own decision to make the heavy investment in equipment [for
blue-mussel aquaculture] was predicated on the fact that the people involved
were smart, skilled, knowledgeable, and committed,” says Lang. “If
I had a problem, I’d know the people I’d be dealing with
to help me solve it. UNH is a world leader in open-ocean aquaculture
research. Cooperative Extension is the lifeblood of the University, always
there for the general public when you need them.”
“Offshore mussel farming is an up-and-coming industry,” Lang says. “A
lot of other fishermen are looking at it to see if it’s going to be reliable.” And
as for consumers, “You don’t know what you’re missing ‘til
you’ve tried these mussels.”
By Peg Boyles, UNH Cooperative Extension writer/editor
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