Reimagining Aquaculture

All photos by Greta Rybus 

Abby Barrows remembers being scared but excited the day she and her husband, Ben Jackson, bought their neighbor’s oyster farm. But as soon as she saw the equipment that came with the farm, Barrows knew something had to give. She had spent the last decade documenting microplastics in fresh and marine waters across the globe and was one of the first scientists to analyze coastal waters for microplastics. The pile of gear comprising her new aquaculture enterprise—all plastic. “We’re putting thousands of pounds of plastic gear, if not millions of pounds of plastic gear, into the Gulf of Maine,” Barrows remembers thinking. “We need to change how we are growing our food.”

Barrows began her career in marine science in Australia and the South Pacific, where she first observed the incongruity of marine plastic pollution. While working in Papua New Guinea, she watched as people hand-lined for fish out of dugout canoes, while plastic pollution floated nearby. Returning to her childhood home of Deer Isle, Maine, and learning more about microplastics, Barrows and her husband wanted to find a niche in the local economy that contributed to, rather than detracted from, the health of the ocean. “The fisheries here are dramatically changing and so are the generations of knowledge of the ways of the water,” she says. “Oyster farming hit a bunch of bases—working out on the water, growing food, cleaning and filtering water, and modeling what a sustainable fishery could look like for this community.”

Barrows and Jackson launched their oyster farm, Deer Isle Oyster Company, in 2015. Their 3-acre farm also grows 2,000 feet of sugar kelp, and in 2021, they began beta-testing plastic-free aquaculture gear. Whereas most oysters are grown in plastic mesh bags, on plastic floats, held in place with plastic buoys, their new gear is made of aluminum, cedar and rubber with biodegradable MycoBuoys made of mushroom mycelium and plant byproducts. It is already comparable to plastic gear in price. Eventually, they hope to make the designs for the plastic-free gear open-source and accessible to all.

Beyond gear, the couple are reimagining oyster farming in other ways, too. In 2018, they had a daughter, Io. When Io was a baby, she slept in a pack-and-play on the bow of the boat while Barrows and Jackson worked sorting and harvesting oysters, Barrows pausing to breastfeed every two hours. As Io grew into a toddler, they put baby crabs, sea squirts and other marine creatures into buckets as entertainment. Still, farming oysters as a family was a challenge. “As a new mom, you are working more than two full-time jobs,” says Barrows. “Being a parent and trying to run a business and be a good partner, these things all take time, and most of that is not valued. I would love to see more women on the water. Having Io on the boat softens the hammer on the work ethic that comes with the territory, forcing you to pause and slow down sometimes.”

Working as a family on the water helps them reimagine possibilities for sustainable fisheries where profit is not the primary goal. “Doing better doesn’t always mean more, it might even mean less,” says Barrows. “For the business it’s the economy of scale, throwing that on its head, what works for us, what works for this island, for this community. I know this is a drop in the ocean, but it takes a lot of drops to change things.”