Cooke Aquaculture USA is sued over salmon-farming practices in Maine
N.B. company's U.S. operation is alleged to be violating clean water law with its salmon pens
A conservation group is suing Cooke Aquaculture USA for alleged ocean pollution from its salmon-farming sites along the Maine coast.
Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation filed a lawsuit in the District Court of Maine against the company, part of Saint John-based Cooke Inc.'s wordwide operations.
The 44-page lawsuit focuses on 13 active cage sites in Maine. The sites consist of net pens anchored to the sea floor and to floatation devices on the ocean's surface. They hover in the water and hold the salmon as they grow.
The lawsuit claims that Cooke's net pens are violating the U.S. Clean Water Act by allowing salmon feces, excess food and carcasses to fall to the sea floor.
"Those salmon are stacked into cages," Heather Govern, vice-president of the clean air and water program at the foundation, said in an interview.
"And we're really concerned about the pollution that is coming from those cages, falls to the sea floor, creates a toxic sediment, which then really kills the food source for lobster and bottom-feeding fish."
Cooke's net-pen sites are near Swans Island, which is near the famed Acadia National Park, Beals Island, Machias Bay, and Cobscook Bay on the U.S.-Canada border.
"Within each lease area, Cooke operates between six and 30 cages," the lawsuit said.
Cooke denies all allegations
Steven Hedlund, a Cooke Aquaculture USA spokesperson, did not respond to several interview requests but denied all allegations in a statement posted on Cooke's website in November when the suit was first threatened by the conservation group.
The claims are "false, misleading and lack substantive evidence," Hedlund said.
"Cooke's Maine Atlantic salmon farms are routinely inspected by state regulators and subject to regular monitoring reports. These laws are designed to protect Maine waters as well as Maine's heritage fisheries."
Cooke was recently sued by two conservationists for its involvement in a Virginia fishery, but earlier this month, a judge dismissed the case in Cooke's favour.
Foundation has requested public records
Govern said the Conservation Law Foundation has been investigating Cooke for two years. The work has involved visiting the sites, interviewing locals and fishermen who have been impacted, and using freedom of information requests to get monitoring data that Cooke submits to the state as part of its permit requirements.
"The company has to report diseases, escaped fish, instances where there are holes in the nets," Govern said, adding that the foundation is concerned about the caged salmon are spreading diseases and breeding with wild Atlantic salmon, which were listed as endangered in Maine in 2000.
"When caged salmon breed with wild salmon, their undesirable traits are passed on, and the genetic fitness of the wild salmon population is diminished," the lawsuit said. Escaped farm salmon have also been a concern in New Brunswick.
In 2023, the lawsuit said approximately 50,000 salmon escaped two broken Cooke net pens in Maine.
It also says that Cooke has released large amounts of dead fish from cages following mass-mortality events at its Black Island site in 2021 and Eastern Bay site in 2024.
The foundation also said Cooke sites "experience regular outbreaks" of diseases such as Infectious salmon amenia and bacterial kidney disease, and that caged salmon experience more frequent outbreaks of sea lice, a parasite.
The group alleges that Cooke uses "undisclosed chemicals" to treat for sea lice and dissects fish to remove organs for testing and then discards blood from the carcasses into the ocean.
Maine is not the only place to see controversy with net pens. The practice was banned in Washington state in 2022 after it was found that Cooke vastly under-reported numbers of escaped salmon.
But in Cooke's native New Brunswick, the province said last year that it would continue to allow net pens, despite Ottawa banning it in British Columbia by 2029.
Govern said the industry grew in Maine about 20 years ago when there was an interest in creating jobs with the new industry.
"What I think was not so clear though was the science regarding what could actually happen when you expose these small harbours and these coastlines to so much waste," she said.
"So I think Maine right now is starting to realize that there are some negative repercussions to so many net pen farms with millions of fish that are being grown," she said.
Govern said the Conservation Law Foundation is not trying to run Cooke out of Maine but simply wants the company to comply with its permit and protect the marine environment.
"And so that just means hiring more employees, more experts to actually increase the monitoring and do the monitoring and sampling correctly, which our complaint outlines that they have not been doing that correctly," she said.
"I think that's doable, but we need the company to really step up and demonstrate that they can make changes at all these sites up and down the Maine Coast."
A part of the foundation's lawsuit said the group has spoken to lobster fishers who have moved their traps away from Cooke sites because of the sludge on the sea floor.
A spokesperson for the Maine Lobstermen's Association, which represents about 5,000 lobster fishers in the state, said the association has not received any reports of the issue.
The lawsuit said the foundation not only reached out to Cooke when it first threatened litigation in November, but also to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.
Spokespeople for both departments told CBC News that they do not comment on pending litigation when asked for comment about the foundation's allegations that they had not held Cooke responsible for their alleged violations.
Industry group says Cooke has good reputation in state
Sebastian Belle, the executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association, said he was surprised to hear about the lawsuit, describing net-pen farming as tightly regulated and saying Cooke has a good reputation within the Maine industry.
"I think I've farmed personally in seven different countries, and I can, with an absolute straight face, say that the environmental regulations and the leasing regulations that we have here in Maine are probably the strictest in the world," Belle said.
He said he's known the Cooke family personally and considered them instrumental in helping develop progressive best-management practices in the industry.
He also said that it was confusing to see the law foundation launch a lawsuit since he said the group was collaboratively involved with crafting laws around the industry over the years.
He said that the Clean Water Act presents a financial incentive for lawyers to launch suits and that the U.S. is a much more litigious society than Canada.
The EPA oversees the implementation of the Clean Water Act, and Belle said the federal agency has full authority to pull permits and ban an aquaculture company from operating if it feels they are breaking regulations.
Belle said the public perception of net-pen farming has been a challenge at times, with large numbers of new residents along the coast who moved to Maine during the pandemic.
"And so when you have many new entrants into a community that don't understand that the ocean is something you can make a living from instead of something that you can just look at or recreate on, then social licence becomes more challenging," Belle said.
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