More than 40 years of pulling lobster traps ruined John Cotton’s shoulders.
The pain he feels from decades in Maine’s most iconic fishery now limits the amount of time he can spend on his latest endeavor, running a small oyster farm in Port Clyde.
One of the reasons Cotton, 64, started Ice House Oysters in 2016 was to stay working on the water without hiring any staff, after he found it difficult to find reliable help on his lobster boat. Lately, he’s had to hire extra sets of hands anyway, unable to spend more than four hours a day pulling and tumbling the black mesh bags in which the shellfish grow.
Until recently, he had a plan to solve that problem. Cotton was working with a federally funded program at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension called AgrAbility, which helps blue-collar workers overcome disabilities so they can remain on the job.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the program was helping him with the process of purchasing a boat with a mechanical arm to help lift and flip the floating bags, sparing the tax on his shoulders, as well as a conveyor belt to load the oysters into a tumbling machine that helps their shells develop deeper cups. None of that help has cost him.
Now that may not happen. The state’s AgrAbility program was one of the dozens of federal grants that President Donald Trump’s administration has terminated, paused, or put on hold to the University of Maine in recent months, imperiling nearly $50 million in federal awards.
“We are going to have to make some major decisions about the farm,” Cotton said. “I can’t continue to pay people. We don’t have enough money.”
Since Trump took office, his administration has been on a campaign to slash federal spending, including to research that supports a range of programming and studies at universities like UMaine. Maine has been a target ever since Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, stood up to the president over the state’s transgender athlete policies during a White House event in February.
Cotton’s situation shows how the impact of these cuts has trickled down across the state, including to the ordinary people who make up the state’s heritage industries like fishing, farming and logging.
He learned about AgrAbility, which is called FishAbility in the waterfront context, from his wife, Toni Small, who works for the program. Her colleagues spent time with him out of the farm to better understand his injuries and come up with accommodations to help him stay working.
He can’t afford the adapted boat on his own, and he had been relying on the program to help him find grants to cover the purchase, he said. He is opposed to the surgery that might ease his shoulder pain but would require him not to move his arms for six weeks. Yet he can’t afford to keep hiring staff on his tiny farm because the profit margins on oysters are too thin.
Other fishermen have mechanical arms for their boats, Cotton said. Chronic injuries to the shoulders, wrists, elbows and lower back are common among fishermen, who spend so much time lifting heavy traps and equipment over the sides of their boats, said Monique Coombs, director of community programs for the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association.
She recently worked with FishAbility on a campaign to teach fishermen stretches they can do to alleviate the strain on their muscles, just one example of the kind of prevention work that the program also pays for. Earlier this spring, the program trained loggers to avoid falling on the job, said Dana Doran, executive director of the Professional Logging Contractors of the Northeast.
That was around the time that university officials went to draw down funds for the program on April 3 and learned they were unavailable, according to Samantha Warren, a system spokesperson.
When they reached out to the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the sub-agency that administers the program, they received a vague reply. “We appreciate your patience. As we await further guidance, we have been asked to pause issuance of grant funding during the transition of government,” the response read, according to Warren.
University officials followed up twice more in May. They have yet to hear back, Warren said. A spokesperson for the USDA did not respond to a request for comment on the program.
Of the 21 states with AgrAbility programs, it is unclear if Maine’s was the only one paused. A program official in another state said she was aware of other states that were worried about the continuation of their funding. Nearly $188,000 of Maine’s original $551,520 award remained on grant, Warren said. It was last renewed in September 2022 to be disbursed over a four-year period.
Cotton assumed his business had become collateral damage in the fallout from the governor’s standoff with Trump, much like freezes to school nutrition funding and the Maine Sea Grant, a longstanding marine research award when it was abruptly terminated and prompted U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, to intervene to get it reversed.
Cotton is hoping the same might be true about the AgrAbility program, he said. But it has been weeks, and he is beginning to worry.
Many of his fellow fishermen carried the president to victory in November, even in more Democratic-leaning communities along the coast where Cotton lives. The town of St. George, which includes his oyster farm in Port Clyde, voted against the Republican president, but it is adjacent to towns that supported Trump.
“I believe there is a lot of waste in the government,” said Cotton, who said he is not a fan of the president but not exactly a Democrat either, calling himself a political moderate. “But this is not a waste in government. This is a great program.”
Callie Ferguson is the deputy investigations editor for Maine Focus, the BDN’s investigations team. She can be reached at [email protected].
