Salmon plant operating sooner, adding more jobs than expected

Cooke Aquaculture Inc. opened its Machiasport salmon processing plant earlier than expected and is adding more jobs than previously announced. Operating as True North Maine Inc., the facility now has 53 employees, including management and a harvest team, and will be hiring about 50 more workers in late January. The plant began processing salmon raised at Cooke Aquaculture's sites in Maine on November 12.

The plant has been working 40 to 50 hours a week, processing approximately 20,000 pounds of salmon a day. With the additional workers in January the production week will increase to six days. A formal ribbon-cutting will be held sometime in January.

The approximately 100 employees will be working year-round, notes Nell Halse, director of communications for Cooke Aquaculture. The plant is focused on salmon fillets and portions that are sold to customers in the U.S. Since the plant is set up for processing value-added products, it should be able to move into making other salmon products, too, Halse says.

In July, the company had announced it would reopen the Machiasport plant early in 2009 and would eventually employ 80 workers there. Halse says that the company felt it would need about 3 million salmon going into Maine waters every year to justify opening the processing plant in the state. "We're not quite there yet," she says, noting that there are about 2.5 million fish in Cooke Aquaculture's salmon cages in Maine now. "We need more sites for crop rotation and bay management," she says. To control infectious salmon anemia (ISA) outbreaks, requirements for fallowing of sites and three-year stocking cycles for fish farms were implemented. The new bay management system, which leaves areas without any fish for a year, means that the company needs more lease sites to raise as many fish and to balance its production from year to year.

Cooke Aquaculture had previously stated its commitment to reopen either the Machiasport or Eastport salmon processing plant. In July the decision to go with the Machiasport plant was announced, and it was noted that the Eastport plant would have needed significant updates and a wastewater line to connect to the city's sewer system. The newer Machiasport plant, which was built in the 1990s and was operated by Atlantic Salmon of Maine until 2004, has a treatment system built into it.

At present, Cooke Aquaculture, which is based is Charlotte County, N.B., and has operations in Atlantic Canada, Maine and Chile, has approximately 90 employees working in Maine, which includes workers at its fish farm sites and its three hatcheries in the state.