Cooke Aquaculture expands
Cooke Aquaculture Inc. has grown from a single family farm with some 5,000 fish in 1985 to a fully integrated and independent family company with operations in all four Atlantic Canadian provinces, in the US State of Maine and in Chile. The company provides year-round employment for more than 2,000 people, and creates sales of approximately CAD$300 million (~€213 million) each year from its 10 salmon hatcheries, one hundred plus marine farm sites, and four in-house and one leased processing plants.
The regular suspects objected to the approval of the two new farms, including many of the few hundred residents of Westport on the 7km by 3km Brier Island in the Bay of Fundy, as Jonathan Riley of the Digby County Courier writes;
Nova Scotia’s aquaculture and fisheries minister has approved two new salmon farms for St. Mary’s Bay. Sterling Belliveau says the projects were reviewed extensively by scientists from the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans. “They have reassured us there will be no adverse effects on the environment and I believe in the science,” Belliveau said late last week. Cooke Aquaculture of Blacks Harbour, N.B., plans to set up the salmon farms just north of Dartmouth Point on the St. Mary’s Bay side of Long Island.
Company spokesperson Nell Halse said the pens are just the first step in an expansion program that will see Cooke Aquaculture build a modern hatchery, possibly on Digby Neck, and a processing facility in Shelburne employing 300 people. In all, their website promises 417 new jobs throughout the province. Halse said there could be as many as 58 new jobs in the Digby area. The salmon farm leases cover 84 hectares (209 acres) in St. Mary’s Bay and could hold as many as a million fish each but will probably only be stocked with 700,000 fish each, Halse said.
Cooke Aquaculture calls itself the largest fully integrated and independent salmon farming company in North America with more than 2,000 employees in Atlantic Canada and Maine. They also run salmon farm operations in Chile. The company has a storefront office in Digby, which is open sporadically, and already runs one salmon farm in Grand Passage just off Westport.
Halse said one reason for the two new sites is to allow the company to fallow (allow to rest) the Westport site. Residents in Westport complain the site has never been fallowed for more than a matter of days in the past 10 years. That is only the beginning of a long list of public relations challenges Cooke Aquaculture faces on the islands where more than 80 per cent of the population signed a petition against the new salmon farm leases. “The last thing we want is for people in the communities to be pitted against one another,” Halse said. “We’ve been operating in Nova Scotia for 25 years. We’re here for the long haul. “Obviously there have been some areas we haven’t done as a good a job as we could have and we’re trying to fix it. “Anyone who has concerns, we want to sit down with you and talk about them.”
