Beleaguered Fishermen Learn to Run Floating Farm

With wild stocks diminishing, program turns them toward fish farming

August 23, 2011

On a recent foggy morning, a fishing boat motors away from the public dock in the picturesque seaside community of Sorrento, but the fishermen on board are going farming, not fishing.

“Today we're probably going to be moving cages and sorting codfish so the students will get experience doing that,” says Sebastian Belle, director of the Maine Aquaculture Association, which is running America's first Cod Academy, in partnership with the University of Maine and others.

More than a kilometer out to sea, eight large circular pens emerge from the mist, each enclosed by a rubber tube and covered over with netting to keep out seabirds. Inside each 50-meter-wide pen are up to 50,000 cod. Most of them will end up on dinner plates around the world.

Cod Academy

This is Maine's only commercial cod farm. It's run by Great Bay Aquaculture, a New Hampshire-based fish-farming company and one of the partners in the Cod Academy.

Eight large circular pens, covered with netting to keep out seabirds, make up the Cod farm off the coast of Sorrento, Maine.

Over the course of a year, the students are taught every aspect of managing a floating farm.

“One of the things we've been teaching the students is how to feed the fish and not overfeed the fish," Belle says. "So you want to give them enough feed and not waste any feed and make it as efficient as possible.”