Greenhead Lobster, one of Maine’s biggest lobster dealers, wants to add aquaculture into its operations at its home base in the state’s busiest lobster port.
The Stonington-based company applied almost two years ago for an experimental lease from the state to raise American oysters in two unused former lobster pounds. A public hearing on the proposal is scheduled next month.
Owner Hugh Reynolds hopes the project will demonstrate a way to reuse abandoned lobster infrastructure and diversify working waterfronts around Hancock County while providing work in the slow season, he said Wednesday. While lobstermen and aquaculture operations have butted heads in Maine at times, growing within lobster pounds near the shore avoids the space conflicts that can arise on open water.
If the application is approved, the company will use two of its three pounds north of Moose Island near downtown Stonington to start raising oysters, then transfer them to other sites to finish growing. The oysters — around 1 million each year — would be processed at the company’s Bucksport facility and sold to its existing wholesale clients.
Lobster pounds are long enclosures in tidal areas that were traditionally the major form of storage for the live shellfish. For decades, they were used to provide consistent supplies of lobster, but the early 2000s saw die-offs as warming water in the Gulf of Maine lowered saturated oxygen levels.
New distribution and tank storage opportunities, plus a longer fishing season, also provided other options.
Greenhead used its three pounds “as long as anybody,” Reynolds said, but they’re no longer as profitable.
Reynolds remembers about a hundred of them in use when he got into the business in the 1990s; now, he knows of five or six. If the oyster project is successful, it could be a model for others to reuse old pounds and diversify.
“These properties are all over the place,” he said of unused pounds.
The Downeast Institute in Beals and the University of Maine several years ago studied their potential for reuse in aquaculture, and some other pound owners around the state have dabbled in oyster growing.
In Stonington, Reynolds’ facility is still slowly recovering from winter storms that hit it hard in January 2024, and is in the engineering phase for a project to raise the height of its working pier on Ocean Street to better weather future storm surge.
It won’t require much investment to try aquaculture, and the company already has staff and infrastructure. Because they already own the land, the location won’t interfere with lobstering, according to Reynolds.
Greenhead is still focused on lobster processing, Reynolds said, and would use the oyster growing to supplement its operations.
“We’re just excited to add, hopefully, to the shellfish industry in Stonington,” he said.
