Rising Tides: The Hidden Work Behind Maine’s Coastal Economy – with Dana Morse

Maine’s coastal economy is being quietly reshaped by new industries, new pressures, and the people working to connect them. In this episode of Rising Tides, Bill Perna speaks with Dana Morse about what it really takes to support a changing working waterfront.

With decades of experience at Maine Sea Grant and the University of Maine’s Marine Extension program, Dana reflects on his role at the intersection of science, industry, and community. From helping shellfish farmers get started to advising on policy and innovation, he shares how aquaculture has evolved alongside Maine’s traditional fisheries and what that means for those making a living on the water.

Their conversation explores the realities behind diversification, the challenges of access and infrastructure, and how climate and market forces are shaping decisions on the ground. Grounded in long-term perspective and hands-on experience, this episode looks at how collaboration, adaptation, and practical support systems will define the future of Maine’s working waterfronts.

Perna Content's Rising Tides explores how coastal Maine is adapting to environmental, economic, and cultural change through long-form conversations with people working on and alongside the water. New episodes are released fortnightly.

The podcast accompanies the book Rising Tides: Adapting to Maine’s Coastal Future, available at www.pernacontent.com/publishing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 2:15

And we also talk about why more people are beginning to look at oysters, cells, muscles, and scallops, what it takes to build markets for those products, and how Maine can grow this economy in a way that still supports independent working waterfront communities. Here's my conversation with Dana Morris.

SPEAKER_02 2:38

Good morning, Dana. How are you? I'm all right today.

SPEAKER_03 2:41

Thanks. What's happening?

SPEAKER_02 2:42

How are you? I'm good. Thank you so much for making the time for me this morning. I really appreciate it. And Dana, before we get started, I wanted to mention to you how many times in conversations I have with people, your name comes up as a person who was a great deal of help to them in the beginning. And maybe you know that, but if you don't, I want you to know how much many people in this business appreciate what you do. That makes me feel really good. Thank you. Well, it's really nice to hear all the time. I'd really love to have a conversation with you that focuses on challenges that we are confronting and the prognostication. Nobody has a crystal ball, but people do have a lot of information, and you being one of those people. Why don't you tell me a little bit about your background and what you do, your responsibilities, and why it is that you come to the perspectives that you have?

SPEAKER_03 3:40

Let's see, I started with Maine Sea Grant in 1998. Prior to that, I had gotten a master's in fisheries technology. My work was in fishing gear, mostly trawl nets and fish behavior, and I had an undergraduate in wildlife management before that. And in between graduate school and starting this job, I did a bunch of different things. I was kind of looking for like my forever home. And I had worked for the state of Massachusetts doing fisheries work and more trawl gear and bycatch. I had worked on an oyster farm. I had fished commercially. I was a salesman for an aquaculture gear company. I worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service, essentially doing extension work in New Bedford. And I worked in a fish cutting operation on Monday nights to make some extra money. Did a bunch of different things. And even though those were kind of hard times because they didn't have a set future at all, things were very uncertain. I built a pretty good network and got a chance to walk in the shoes of all these different roles, scientist and industry person and regulator, that kind of stuff. And so I've been on this job since 98, almost 27 years now, I guess. And my job, which didn't exist before I got here, they created this job and I was hired into it. It's a a weird mix. Education, tech transfer, and applied research for me. But extension is definitely a jack of all trades kind of a job. You get asked by all kinds of different people about all kinds of different things, and I do enjoy that part of it because there's always a a new thing to learn, and I definitely like to learn. So a lot of what I do over the past 10, 15 years has been technical assistance to growers, either beginning or established growers. There are plenty of people who just do not need my services. I want to say that at the output. People who know a lot more than I do and who just don't require the kinds of things that an extension person typically does. But there are people who need some help, some technical assistance. I've done a lot of work in collaborative research, mostly on shellfish production, and that's been really enjoyable. And I've spent a lot of time working with sea scalps in particular. Oh, that's fantastic information.

SPEAKER_02 5:56

If you could give me an overview of, say, the lobster story vis-a-vis oyster aquaculture. For example, I just had a really interesting conversation with Clay Gilbert. He had basically spent a lot of time in lobstering and then decided he wanted to make a transition into oyster aquaculture. And I found that fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 6:18

So it's kind of causative, where in our commercial fisheries in Maine, access is highly restrictive and it has only gotten more restricted over time. You can't just go and get a groundfish permit nowadays or a scala permit. Certainly you can't just go and enter the lobster industry anymore. And then the resources themselves have mostly become more scarce, and there is increasing uncertainty in our state's enormous lobster industry. So the concern and unease about what the future of lobsters looks like is one of those prime drivers for why people are interested at all in aquaculture. So the need to diversify and the need to cobble together a whole year's pay is a prime driver in all of this. And a lot of people have jumped into oysters, and a lot of people have jumped into kelp for a couple of reasons. Principally ease of production, I think. Kelp is easy to grow, and oysters are relatively easy to grow, so the bar to entry is pretty low. And in the case of oysters, there's an established market, so now you're kind of guaranteed that if you can grow it, you can sell it. And with seaweed, it didn't start off that way, but it is becoming a little bit more that way as we have more buyers of the product. And so ease of operations, ease of borrow of entry, access to the market, and in the case of seaweed, the fact that it's counter-cyclical to the lobster industry, that that really helps. And so those combinations of factors means that over time there's been migration into these industries, oysters and seaweed. And that that's not all 100% great. I do have this sneaky undercurrent of feeling, and it's more than feeling, too. There's some evidence of overheating oysters, for example, or overheating kelp production. That means that like everybody under the sun is now interested in oysters, and there are some unreasonable expectations about how oysters and kelp are going to save the planet and all that kind of stuff. That kind of attention can be good, but it can also, I don't know, it can be a little unreasonable. And in the case of oysters, there is some evidence about current levels of production versus what can be taken into supply. So it's supply-demand thing. For example, the fall market for oysters up in the Northeast always drops off after Labor Day. And it's that fall drop-off seems to be getting worse and kind of bleeping into the regular market season for oysters. And so it kind of begs the question of are we starting to overproduce oysters for what we can absorb? And so there are ways to address that with marketing and value added and trying to export and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, those are issues that need to be attended to.

SPEAKER_02 9:13

Yeah. Clay Gilbert gave me one of the reasons why he wanted to make the transition was the oyster farming took out so many of the variables that he had to deal with. He says he doesn't regret that decision one bit. While he certainly enjoyed lobstering, he doesn't miss the stress at all. So you've brought up some really interesting points, things that I had never even considered, but maybe speak to some of the challenges confronting the industries right now.

SPEAKER_03 9:44

Oh boy, challenges. Well, I guess industry-wide for all species, climate is definitely an issue. Changing climate and what that's going to mean for shellfish, seaweed, finfish, all of the above. Marketing and value-added products, I think, are going to be both the opportunity and challenge in there. Working waterfront is a huge industry-wide challenge, as is skilled labor and housing, affordable housing here in the expensive coastal zone of Maine. So those are some broad-scale issues. When I think about oysters, climate is definitely an issue because that has something to do with outbreaks of vibriobacteria or harmful algal blooms that can outright shut things down or have more potential to make people sick. There's definitely opportunities there for value-added products and export markets. What would be examples of that? Oh, like a canned oyster or a smoked oyster, some other product made out of oysters, even the shells. Not all of it now, but 99 plus percent of the oysters that Maine grows and probably all the way down to Connecticut, most of those are for the half-sell market. So that's one specific thing. But could we look to other markets and other products? So for example, the oyster industry in Japan, none is targeted at the half shell market. They do a shucked product because they fry them, they grill them, they pickle them, they smoke them, they just eat their oysters in an entirely different way than we do here in the United States. And so maybe we can explore that. And there's a cool opportunity. There's so much information here. Well, I'll keep going a little bit. Yes, please. Uh, because I'm a gearhead. I'm always thinking about a different or a better mousetrap to grow a thing better or differently or to grow a different thing. And when I think about trying to take advantage of markets for the oyster meats, to me, that means that there are other ways that we could be growing oysters from the ones that we currently are now. Because our growing methods are designed to produce a pretty oyster. Well, there are other methods that are not designed to produce a pretty oyster, and those are things that I am really interested in trying out here in Maine.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

Let me ask you, and I don't know specifically, but is that what Tap Pryor has in mind, do you think?

SPEAKER_03 12:17

I had concerns about the viability of Tap Pryor's approach.

SPEAKER_02 12:23

Right.

SPEAKER_03 12:23

I always thought that it was going to have a significant financial hurdle to become profitable.

SPEAKER_02 12:28

Okay. So, but he wasn't looking at the oyster as opposed to like a pretty oyster. It's more that this is good protein, you know, like whether or not someday we might be eating oyster burgers, do you know?

SPEAKER_03 12:39

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. On the concern side for oysters, and this bleeds into industry-wide concerns. We have a clear pathway for scale right now. And companies can enter, can scale up, and we need that because companies can provide health and benefits and all that kind of stuff, and hopefully produce their products more affordably because seafood is expensive, but seafood's good protein. So we could stand to use the benefits of larger farms if those are the outcomes. The blind spot that I see and the danger is that Maine has always been a place where you could go to the woods or you could go to the ocean and you could make a living. Even if you didn't have an education, you could develop the expertise and you could work really hard and you could develop a good life for yourself. And that still can happen right now with aquaculture. But I my anticipation is that that door is already closing. There's going to be a limited number of really good sites for oysters in the state. And it might be a big number, but it's going to be finite. And as companies scale and occupy those sites and maybe buy up smaller companies and that kind of stuff, which is already happening, the opportunity for access into the world of aquaculture and the opportunity to compete for future generations, I think, is going to become constrained. And there are some really interesting models to address that. And some of it's happening right here in Maine, which is cool. But I do think it's a great big blind spot and a weak spot in Maine and in other states that I would desperately like to see people pay attention to.

SPEAKER_02 14:22

Are you speaking about things like Atlantic aquafarms?

SPEAKER_03 14:25

Yeah, partly.

SPEAKER_02 14:26

And I had a conversation with Jeff the other day, and you touched upon it earlier, creating businesses that can offer health benefits and other benefits to people who can actually make a living for their lives as opposed to just like one-off, catch some work here, catch some work there.

SPEAKER_03 14:43

Yeah, and that's true. On the other hand, a lot of what main people want to do is to be their own boss and to not be an employee and to direct their own futures. Right. And so the forces and the structures that are currently in place mean that the former has the upper hand, the employee model, even if it's got good benefits and stuff like that. And the latter, the owner-operator, is a very much weaker hand to play into the future. And if Maine becomes a place where we said there was opportunity, but that window of opportunity only lasted for a little while. And then after that, the opportunity is just being an employee, even if it's if it's good, then I think we've lost something.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

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SPEAKER_03 15:50

With muscles, we've got just a big opportunity because as far as I can tell, the market's big and we grow good quality products here. And so all those other dynamics about needing to scale up to become profitable, that issue still applies. We can still do some good value added work with mussels if we could grow them cheaply enough to afford to smoke them or can them or something like that. Is anybody exploring the idea of tennis oysters or mussels or any foods? I would direct you to Jacqueline Clark, the Briny Babe, and Sean Corcoran, her significant other. Their company is the Nor'easter Oyster Company, and they're pursuing just that, being able to explore value-added products, mostly focusing on oysters. They may have other plans, but I just know about the oyster parts.

SPEAKER_02 16:43

Great.

SPEAKER_03 16:43

Yeah, they're great. I'm really excited about their work. I will change directions, though, into scallops because there's a bunch of us been working with scallops for a long time now, and we have two pretty good going concerns for scallop production here in Maine, with a small constellation of smaller farms getting started and building. And it's been the application of a lot of technology transfer and sharing, acquiring equipment, learning how to grow them. And so we now have a really cool opportunity to produce farmed scallops both as shucked meats and as a whole or a roon or some kind of value-added product. The difficulty is that the meat of the scallop doesn't really retain biotoxins like cytoxin and demoic acid, but a little bit with the roe, the mantle, the digestive gland, those other tissues in a scallop can retain those toxins and they can become dangerous. Growers who are selling whole scallops need to engage in some pretty expensive testing. And the tests are being subsidized right now. But if the grower had to bear the full cost of those tests, we would not have any live market anymore because it's just too much expense to try to sell into that market. But it's relevant because nobody knows how big the market in the United States or export markets could be for things like whole scallops or value added or anything like that. But in Japan, it's enormous. So there's a clear economic opportunity there, but we need more affordable methods to do this biotoxin testing, or we need some public support to pay to help share the costs of those tests with the producer, or we need both. So there's a clear opportunity, but there is just as clearly a bottleneck that a bunch of us are trying to address.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

I think we need to follow up at another point in time, specifically just on scallops.

SPEAKER_03 18:52

Oh, good, yeah. I would love someone to write the main scallop story.

SPEAKER_02 18:57

It's a really big, important possibility and potential that you're right, it doesn't get the recognition. It's a big story and it needs to be told.

SPEAKER_03 19:06

Just as a FYI, in the current issue of Yankee magazine, Rowan Jacobson put together an article of a trip that we had earlier this year to France because a limited number of chefs and certainly very few consumers know what to do with a whole scallops. And so we need to do some culinary technology transfer and education so that our chefs know about our whole scallops and can work their magic with them.

SPEAKER_02 19:36

So have you been collaborating with some chefs?

SPEAKER_03 19:39

Yes, very much so. Principally Rob Doomas up at the University of Maine and his network. And that story that Rowan did summarizes it a little bit. But just a couple of weeks ago, yeah, yeah, Rob Doomis and Tog Braun and I were presenting to about 130 students at Johnson Wales Culinary University in Rhode Island. And so we are doing outreach to chefs and their students to try to beat the drum that, hey, there are these products that didn't exist before, and you can do cool things with them. We just want to educate you about what they are and how you can get them so that you can apply your creativity as a culinary professional, as a chef, and go and do some cool stuff.

SPEAKER_02 20:20

Danet, you've got my head spinning here. So you've touched upon a lot of ideas in terms of the future of Maine coastal fisheries with a focus to aquaculture, and aquaculture certainly means things other than just oysters that includes scallops and even seaweed. I've had some really interesting conversations with folks who are looking into creating a viability of products and marketability for green crabs, which I found absolutely amazing. Like that guy, Liam Fisher, who's creating Garum. But there are other people coming up with broth ideas and fish sauce ideas. And these are all bits like what you had mentioned earlier, rather than being a person whose livelihood is focused on one species, they really create a portfolio of species that they work with.

SPEAKER_03 21:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:16

So anyway, what do you see as the future for what we've got coming down the road?

SPEAKER_03 21:22

Yeah, there's gonna be great opportunities for public engagement education, tying aquaculture into all kinds of different either school programs or community programs. There's gonna continue to be just a huge amount of opportunity and need for both basic and applied research. I live in the applied world, so it's mostly that kind of stuff that I think about. Everything from biotoxins and genetics to engineering and equipment, production practices, ergonomics, gathering data from farms and using that to understand our. Oceans better. I think we're going to continue to get a lot of interest from prospective producers, and they're going to be all the way from the person who just wants to learn how to grow an oyster or a sea urchin or a razor clam all the way up to investment firms who want to start or buy farms and get into this in a big way. I really do hope that there's more emphasis placed on product development and international trade because we've got really good protections on clean water and clean air. And not everybody around the planet has that. And so we have a strong reputation for quality seafood in the United States and very much so in Maine. And so that's going to mean something in the marketplace. So I would just love to see more attention paid to try to get that message out and to facilitate Maine products out in the global marketplace.

SPEAKER_02 22:55

In my other life, I spent my life in advertising and marketing in New York and Los Angeles. So I'm always intrigued by the marketing aspect of things. I do always think Maine doesn't take advantage of the huge opportunity. I think a lot of the reason for that is budgetary, but you can do so much with not a lot nowadays, which is just amazing to me. How would you see a way of marketing and making Maine products beyond selling oysters on a half shelf, primarily in Maine or Massachusetts? I hate to use the cliche. The world is your oyster. People want and value the products and recognize why they're valuable and why they're good. So how do you bridge that? Do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_03 23:43

I don't know that I've got much expertise here, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But the way to go about that, and this is as far as I can take it, is if the grower is also the distributor and the seller. So that leads me to think about like employee-owned companies or cooperatives, where the you kind of work together to do the advertising and the marketing and the distribution. So you capture those dollars all the way along the path, but let's not forget where this all starts and make sure that the producer down there at the beginning gets a fair shake. A lot of companies like MOOCsy Farm or Atlantic, they're vertically integrated. They've got their own hatchery, so they grow their own seeds. They can kind of rationalize that, and then they're growing their product, and they do work with distributors, but at least they are now controlling more of the whole growing and distribution chain than just someone who's buying seed and growing it and then handing it off to somebody else. So I kind of see the way to solve that nut is working cooperatively and trying to get the growers deeper into the distribution chain.

SPEAKER_02 24:55

That's kind of what Bo speaks to as well, trying to make it work for the guy who's at the head of the chain, as letting him capture some of the benefit of the end of the chain. All right, Dana, thank you so much. This has really been really spectacular. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_03 25:13

Oh, good, yeah. I'm almost guaranteed to like think, oh man, I should have brought that up. I do that all the day time. All right.

SPEAKER_02 25:20

Talk soon and have a great weekend.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

If you're enjoying these stories, visit pronocontent.com or main oysterbook.com, where you can pre-order our new book, Rising Tides, Adapting to Coastal Main's Future. And while you're there, you can grab a copy of Main Oyster Stories of Resilience.