When Whole Oceans announced plans to build a land-based Atlantic salmon farm on the site of a former paper mill in Bucksport in 2018, the town embraced the project. This diverged from the reception of a similar proposal in nearby Belfast, which was announced just a month earlier and continues to face strong opposition and legal challenges.
Both projects were pitched as better for the environment than fish farms that use net pens in the ocean, which abound in Washington County but have been banned in all states on the West Coast due to their environmental impacts.
Yet six years later there is nothing to see at the Bucksport site, and its local permits have expired.
Court documents suggest that the project could cost far more than the estimated $250 million price tag.
Whole Oceans isn’t commenting on the holdup, but Bucksport Town Manager Susan Lessard is still hoping the plans will come to fruition.
Lessard said the project seems ideal for the 120-acre lot Whole Oceans bought at the site of the former Verso paper mill.
“It’s got power, it’s got freshwater, it’s got saltwater, it’s got a waste-discharge license, it has a supportive community. It’s a good site. But for whatever reason, it hasn’t moved forward,” Lesssard said. “I can honestly say that the reason they haven’t proceeded here has nothing to do with the town of Bucksport. We’ve done everything we could to support it.”
Lessard last spoke with a company representative in June, who told her the project would likely go ahead but at a smaller size than first planned. The company had hoped to produce 20,000 metric tons of salmon a year.
Whole Oceans is mum on its plans. In a late November text message, spokesperson Mark Rooney said only, “We will be making comments in the near future, but not at this time.”
Whole Oceans was expected to create 40 jobs, and pay an estimated $900,000 to $1 million annually in local taxes. By contrast, the taxes on the bare land total just $112,147 in this tax year.
The project is important to the town, which lost 40 percent of its tax base when the Verso mill closed in 2014. Lessard has been working to diversify the site, which includes a gas-fired power plant and a Maine Maritime Academy training facility.
Whole Oceans owner Dale Reicks is a fifth-generation pig farmer, whose Reicks View Farms employs more than 300 people in Jerico, Iowa. Reicks has other aquaculture interests through his company Emergent Holdings.
The Bucksport fish farm was to be designed by aquaculture company PR Aqua, which Reicks bought in 2019 from Nicholas and Gabriel Pranger. But the Prangers sued Reicks in 2021, claiming he owed them $2.5 million. Reicks settled with the Prangers in 2022.
The Prangers also had a consulting deal with Whole Oceans, and a 2021 letter from Reicks to Nick Pranger in the court docket hints at the financial challenges for the Bucksport farm: “Similarly egregious planning deficiencies, poor project management, total lack of communication and massive cost overruns occurred on the Whole Oceans transaction in Maine, where your projection of $250M now stands to cost the Company over $400M.”
In 2019, Reicks signed a 15-year lease for Kuterra, a land-based Atlantic salmon farm on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, also designed by the Prangers. The Namgis First Nation had launched the project in 2013 as an alternative to net-pen salmon farming, but it was losing money quickly by 2017.
The Kuterra farm has shifted from growing Atlantic salmon to growing steelhead trout. Its website suggests the company plans to do the same in Bucksport, where it erroneously states that construction is underway: “Our successes on Vancouver Island have led parent company Whole Oceans to apply our approach to a new farm venture in Bucksport, Maine. With construction ongoing, folks on the East Coast will soon be able to enjoy fresh, delicious, sustainable steelhead right in their own backyard.”
Chris Chase, executive editor of the trade publication SeafoodSource, said land-based aquaculture has been facing pressure from increasing construction costs in recent years, like other industries. Eventually, Chase believes, the economics could turn in favor of such projects.
“Land-based, I think, is going to be inevitable,” Chase said, “just because there is still going to be demand for salmon, and if there is less wild salmon and less farmed salmon from net-pens to go around, the price will go up and make the land-based equation more viable.” He said some companies are having success with smaller projects in Japan and in Scandinavia.
For large projects, like the Bucksport proposal, the economics are proving challenging. The pioneer of land-based Atlantic salmon farming in the United States — Atlantic Sapphire in Homestead, Florida — saw declining production and growing losses last year. The Norwegian-owned plant produced 1,545 tons of Atlantic salmon in 2023, and lost $134 million.
In Maine, a land-based fish farm proposed for Jonesport has been hung up by legal challenges, as has the Nordic Aquaculture proposal in Belfast.
“I’ve had people call and ask why isn’t Nordic coming to Bucksport instead of fighting in Belfast,” Lessard said.
Lessard said she fields calls from people who are interested in buying Whole Oceans’ Bucksport property, and she refers them to the company. Despite the delay, she remains bullish on the project.
“We wish it had started up and was up and running, and successful,” Lessard said. “I am not calling done on it at this point.”
This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from the Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.
