Transcription of Abigail Carroll for the show Making a Living on Maine Waters #198
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 198, “Making a Living on Maine Waters.” Many Mainers make their living on the water. Today we speak with two individuals who are doing so in quite unique ways. Abigail Carroll is the founding farmer of Nonesuch Oysters which is located in a nature conservancy in Scarborough. John Keller is a writer whose latest book “Of Sea and Cloud” was inspired by years of experience working in the secluded lobstering culture of rural Maine. We hope you enjoy our conversations with Abigail and John. Thank you for joining us.
As someone who has lived most of her life basically on the coast I’m fascinated by other individuals who are doing interesting things with the coastline and maybe in ways that I hadn’t necessarily thought of before. Today we have with us Abigail Abi Carroll who is the founding farmer of Nonesuch Oysters which is located in a nature conservancy in Scarborough. Abi is also a third generation Maine entrepreneur. Pretty interesting background you have here Abi. Thanks for coming in.
Abigail: Thank you for having me Lisa. I’m really delighted to be here.
Lisa: You have a wonderful, wonderful background. I’m loving that you have undergraduate degrees in French and Spanish Literature from Barnard, you have a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia and you spent a decade in Paris. You’re back.
Abigail: I am.
Lisa: And you’re doing oysters.
Abigail: I am.
Lisa: Tell me a little bit about that path. It’s quite varied but I bet there’s a story behind that.
Abigail: Well I have to admit I did not expect to become an oyster farmer. It was probably the farthest thing from my mind. I was living in Paris and I had a personal disruption in my life. I broke up with a long-term boyfriend and came back to Maine for the summer and wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do. Was I going to go back to Paris, was I going to go back to New York where I lived before I went to Paris.
I stumbled into somebody who wanted to start an oyster farm. As I was feeling a little bit purposeless I thought, “Well, I can get my head around in a business plan and write a business plan for this person.” Unfortunately that got a little complicated and I wound up owning the farm. What was originally intended to be a consulting project wounded up and my earning was a four acre farm in Scarborough. I wasn’t quite sure what to do because when I engaged to consult for this person the last words out of my mouth were, “Okay, I will write you a business plan, but I’m not getting on the water.” Of course these were famous last words.
I dried my tears, went to Cabela’s, bought a pair of waders and just got my hands dirty. It’s been five years since then. It’s been rocky, turbulent road. Farming’s really hard. You got to figure things out. It’s very hard to ask somebody else how to run a farm in a certain area because farming is really site dependent, so there are nuances on every different field I imagine, just like there are in every little different co for you might do oysters.
While there’s certain standard procedures that everybody follows you always have to tweak them, when do you bring the seed in every year, when do you plant the oysters, how do you configure your gear, what are your predators, all of these things make farming oysters in different locations very particular. We’ve been learning as we go.
Lisa: I want to talk to you about the oyster farming process, but I also want to talk to you about the impact of an entrepreneurial family on you and your decision to say, “Sure, I can do this.”
Abigail: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely owe a lot of this to my dad. I mean I think there’s a spirit in the family in general, but my father really is somebody who’s reinvented himself many times in life. I always grew up with this belief. I just never even questioned it that you could launch yourself into something and learn it and become successful at it.
Sometimes also I found that it’s often your shortcomings in life that actually turn out to be your big gift, the thing that makes you actually a little special or different. In farming it’s been really … Learning to farm has been really hard, it’s been really challenging. Actually some of the most important hardships have been things like keeping motors running, keeping pumps running, a lot of the sort of like just mechanical stuff is actually what’s holding us back. It’s not actually the farming.
Struggling through a few seasons that weren’t as productive as they might have been, because I’m trying to learn it, learn how to be a boss, learn how to be … Teach other people how to help me build this farm. I’ve had to reach out in some other different directions, which have been new and exciting and fun for the oyster community I think in general which is last year for example we started an oyster tour program.
Now had my farm been humming along like it’s supposed to have been by now maybe I wouldn’t have done that. The oyster farm tour was a good way for me to work some of the assets that I have, which is I actually really love talking about what I’ve learned and sharing that with people. People seem to like to hear about it. People want to know right now how their food is grown. They want to know what it’s like to live on a farm. They also want to know how hard is it to change your life and still a new one in a new way, like you’ve done, like I’ve done.
I think people are drawn to the farm for a variety of reasons. By doing the tours we’ve really been able to create a new revenue stream for the farm which has helped us get through some tough seasons. It’s built our brand a little bit more. It’s built a real loyal clientele. People have come from all over the nation to Maine for vacation, they come on our farm and then they go home and they want oysters. I think in certain respects the farm not just being super productive right away has been an asset. We spent some time building the farm in different ways which have been really fun.
Lisa: You mentioned that sometimes the things that are your difficulties can end up being your greatest asset. Tell me about that. For you what does that mean?
Abigail: I think the fact that I had no experience in this sector made every day special and new and exciting for me in a way that it might not have been for a lobsterman who becomes an oyster farmer or for a scientist to become an oyster farmer. For me every day, one, it was a miracle that I got through it, and two, it was this adventure.
I started sharing this adventure online with people and telling the story. The beautiful thing about having no experience and really very shallow expectations for myself was that I was never afraid to share the bad things. The day I clipped the snow bank with the trailer and the boat slipped off and fell into the middle of the Route nine, that wasn’t an ideal thing to happen. But you know what? It ended up on Facebook and it’s ended up in almost all of my slide presentations when I do a public talk.
People laugh. They get it. I’ve done other things in life where I had more some personal stake, personal investment, or I felt like I trained in something and something needed to work because I thought I knew something about it, and I wasn’t as free. It’s been incredibly liberating doing something and throwing myself into something that I never expected to be in, or I never thought about and I didn’t really know anything about.
I’m not afraid to ask questions. I go to UNE all the time. Can you help me with this? I call the scientist. I’m just not afraid of looking stupid or acting stupid and it’s so liberating and it’s been really helpful. It’s been fun because I get to share more with the people who are listening, the Facebook fans and things like that, people following the journey. It’s been liberating because you can’t do anything in life without falling. If you don’t fall it’s like growing up skiing in Maine. I always said, “If not you’re falling, you’re not skiing hard enough.” It’s the same thing. If you’re not stumbling, if you’re not tripping, you’re really just not making big enough effort.
I know it became a big enough effort because we trip up all the time, but things smooth out. It’s been really incredibly eye-opening on a lot of levels. Of course the stakes are high too sometimes. I mean I’ve put a lot of personal investment in this farm and I really need it to work. Let it be clear, it’s not a game. But figuring it out and rolling with the punches and just accepting the hurdles and the failures along the way has been just really eye-opening and I think we’ll be stronger for it.
Lisa: Has it helped that oysters seem to have become more popular? Eventide moved in a few years ago, just down the street. They are just huge and more and more people are doing raw bars. What has that done for your business?
Abigail: Well it’s great. I mean the joke is that I kind of landed accidentally in one of the hottest markets in America. It’s been fun to be part of that process. I would never have chosen to be in aquaculture, I would never have chosen to be in the food industry. I’ve always been a big fan of food. I spent so much time in France that of course all the food culture there wore off on me. But it’s just been incredible to be part of this really pressing, important movement.
It’s important to Maine. It’s important to the country. In America we import 91% of our sea food. We need more of these local producers. It’s really hard. Small farms are not working. In 2013 the average farm operated at a net loss of $1400. Big agriculture is filled with problems. Small agriculture is filled with problems. Everybody is struggling. We need a new model in farming. That’s clear. But we also need to bring it home.
We are a net importer of the New England scallop from China. Come on. It’s not just patriotism. This is about the environment. This is about the carbon footprint. In the early 20s if you’ve read Mark Kurlansky’s book “The Big Oyster” he writes on the early 20s the average American ate about 600 oysters a year. Then we polluted all the waters and all the oysters died off and then we became a nation of Thai shrimp eaters.
It’s really wonderful that the oyster is coming back because it’s symbolic of so many things in the country right now. It’s sort of a new twist on the back to land, back to the ocean movement. It really reflects a much more thoughtful approach to how we’re living our lives, and how we’re eating, and how we’re thinking about our food and the environment in general.
The crazy thing about oysters I was never particularly an environmentalist. My carbon footprint was terrible flying back and forth from France. I spent my whole life traveling around the planet. That’s a terrible carbon outlay for a single person. But what I’ve learned being an oyster farmer is just how sensitive the earthly creatures are to our impact.
On my farm I grow one type of oyster, the Crassostrea Virginica, which is the oyster that everybody along the eastern seaboard grows with very few exceptions. What makes these oysters different from Florida to the northern Maine is the environment they’re growing in. You can call that terroir, you can call that meroir, because the oyster farmers created their own word, their own French word actually which is even better. But what that really refers to is the huge impact that the environment has on that one single creature.
When I give these oysters towards at our farm we start at the nursery and I show them the little baby spat, everybody cooes and caws because they’re adorable. Then we go out to the farm and I show them that we have oysters growing in bags and some that are growing on the bottom. Now we are pretty a shallow site, so the difference between the bag grown oysters is and where the bottom dwelling oysters is, it’s a matter of a few feet. But the bag oysters are pure white. They’re white as now. The bottom oysters are this deep lush green. That is just a small shift in where they’re lying in the water column.
What I always tell people on my tours well think about the impact of when we put overboard discharge, think of the impact of our septics, think about the impact of the carbon we’re all putting into the air that’s coming down as acid rain and changing acid levels in the ocean. Just these little impacts have such a big consequence for our sea life, marine life that it’s incredible.
You never live too far away from the ocean to care about your impact on the water because the Watershed for the Gulf of Maine extends all the way into Canada. You can’t. You’re never too far away from the ocean to have this concern you.
That’s been another big part of my becoming a farmer. It’s like, “Oh wow, this really matters.” Before global warming, well, it was kind of convenient because it meant I could come home in September from Paris and would still be beautiful, you could catch a swim. But now I’m like, “Wow,” the acidification of the ocean doesn’t really affect us so much, but it really affects the clammers.
The green crabs that have migrated north from warming temperatures in the water, on the one hand I’m like, “Warming temperatures are great because they’ll make my oysters grow faster.” On the other hand they’re bringing all these diseases in Maine that we’ve never had before. The green crabs are here and the green crabs are going and they’re eating up all the little crab spat in the sand. Spat is the babies. So we’re really seeing a real shift in our coastline that it’s of concern to a lot of people. It should be a concern to all of us because it’s going to impact all of our lives. If we can’t have clams what’s a lobster dinner in Maine. There’s lots of people making their livelihoods from clam digging. These things matter. They really matter.
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Lisa: I had noticed recently where I live in Yarmouth that the clam diggers are back, and it made me think where do they go. I mean I guess there was the winter but I know that we have problems with Red Tide in this part of the world. As a non-meroir person, I’m not a farmer, I’m not an agriculturist, I really don’t spend a lot of time wondering about this sort of thing until something appears that wasn’t there before, or something disappears.
Abigail: Right. I think that’s the problem where we’re always reacting to natural disasters. I mean there’s oil spills. We need to do more to think about how we can prevent them. But I think I don’t know where the clammers went. It was very cold this winter so many people probably weren’t out digging. I know that we weren’t out much for the oyster farm, and I know that the lobstermen really had a hard time getting out.
But what did really shock me when I was first writing this business plan and looking along the Maine coast for a site I was shocked, absolutely shocked to see how much of the Maine coast is not open to shell fish harvesting because of fecal contamination. It is shocking.
I think that was just the beginning of this huge shift in my own thinking. Just all these maps are public information. You can go to the Department of Marine Resources and you can look up pollution closure maps and you can go check out your neighborhood.
Now where we harvest shellfish the waters are very, very clean. The state does an incredibly thorough job making sure that nothing is pulled out of sites that have a potential to be contaminated. It’s really thought provoking to go and look at those maps and think here we are in Maine which is supposed to be this wonderful clean pristine state and we really have just a huge amount of coastal waters that we can’t use for certain types of aquaculture, notably shellfish, because the water quality is not good enough.
Lisa: Just to be very clear fecal contamination that’s poop?
Abigail: Yep that’s poop.
Lisa: So we’ve got that kind of contamination. I’m also interested because my father’s family grew up in Biddeford, Saco River and in fact two of my father’s uncles drowned in the Saco River. That was at a time when it was massively contaminated. There was mill run off, there was actually feces poop in the water, there was just all kinds of disgustingness. We’re now on a time where thank goodness we’ve cleaned all this stuff up. But does that also make you wonder, the industrial background of the state, does that also make you wonder like in the long term what kind of an impact it’s had on the habitat that maybe you’re farming oysters in or other sea creatures being …
Abigail: Well in Scarborough we are lucky because we’re in one of the few great A classified rivers in water classification rivers in Maine. But the Saco River is closed for shellfish contamination. I can’t really speak to the past pollution that’s happened and the impact today from the mills in the early part of the century, but I can speak to a new generation of young people that are much more contentious about how we treat our waterways and how we think about our own waste.
I think we need to just keep bedding on the future and keep proselytizing and keep getting the message out that everything we do has an impact. Hopefully there’ll be positive change moving forward. I think a lot of people are interested in renewable energy, I think a lot of people are interested in composting and being much more efficient about the way they buy things so they don’t have as much waste. Everybody complains about buying electronic products because you get so much plastic. I think there’s going to be a whole new generation of thinking about all of this stuff that’s going to be really helpful.
Generations before just didn’t have the information I think that we have now, and they didn’t think about it. I think people were so excited to get things going, the Industrial Revolution, wow we can send trains to places, we have cars now, that was so exciting and we got such benefit from that. But like everything there’s a new invention that needs to be refined a little bit.
What’s really interesting about Biddeford though was that those Biddeford mills were all hydro powered. It wasn’t hydroelectric, it was hydro mechanical power. If you go to the basement of those mills, there are all these tunnels and the river used to run right through the basement of those tunnels, and the pressure of the water would move these mechanical rods and they would be upstairs moving more rods and those would all power soy machines.
Then we replaced it all with electricity and now we’re like, “Gosh, how could we harness that hydro power in the river to produce electricity, to now produce to help power the mills?” It’s funny, because we’re coming full circle. We’re looking at hydro in a different way.
All of it it’s just so interesting. I think a lot of what’s going on today is actually that we’re looking kind of backward and saying, “Okay, well what worked back then?” Hydro power actually worked. Having your own farm or your own garden worked. After World War Two it’s my understanding that everybody planted a victory garden, and that was just part of the popular culture. My grandparents had a victory garden. He was a lawyer, my grandmother was a professional. But it was part of what you did as an American, you planted food in your back yard and you had some self-sufficiency. That’s just what America was about.
We’ve kind of lost that, the 80s, globalization. Trust me, all I ever wanted to do as a kid was travel the world, and I did a lot of that, I’m all about getting out and going elsewhere and travelling the world and world markets and things like that. But I do think there was something special about this American spirit which is we are self-sufficient, not totally self-sufficient but we still have a responsibility to ourselves and to our communities to be somewhat self-sufficient. I think it’s a good lesson.
I think our grandparents knew it and I think my parents … My parents grew all sorts of animals, but that was not something I enjoyed. My sister was into forage, my father was a gardener, I was the urban rat in the family. It’s the great irony of my family that I’m actually the farmer now. I love pavement but I still love cities. I have to say if I were making carrots it just wouldn’t be the same.
I am making oysters, and oysters are a luxury product, and they’re elegant and it’s fun to shuck them. I love going to events and shucking them for people. I love the sort of culture around the oyster. When people come out in our tours we can take up to six people under my coast guard license. I have this beautiful porcelain plate that my brother and sister in law gave me and I shuck the oysters on it, I make up a little mignonette sauce on the boat. There’s a little pump. We’re on a dirty work boat but there’s still a little pumping circumstance. I have to say that makes it a little bit more fun for me because it feels a little elegant and kind of not too far from home.
Lisa: I know that I now am intrigued and would like to go out on the boat and have some oysters on some mignonette. How can people learn more about Nonesuch and the tours that you do? I’m imagining you have a website.
Abigail: We do, nonesuchoysters.com. I think it’s also important to note that I am perhaps the precursor in Maine, but what we’re hoping will happen is that this will inspire other farms to start doing tours as well. The big idea is to support a Maine oyster trail, much like you’d have a Napa Valley trail, like a wine map. The hope is that we’re going to establish lots of little farms up and down the coat were you can either have oysters at their location or actually get on the water with them like we do, and people can … So it’ll be a whole new tourism avenue for Maine. People think of Maine as a lobster state but oyster connoisseurs think of Maine as oyster state. Maine has really good shellfish so cold waters.
Lisa: Thank you very much for doing the work that you do and for jumping in and taking a chance and becoming the founding farmer of Nonesuch Oysters. We’ve been speaking with Abigail Carroll who has been farming Nonesuch Oysters out of a nature conservancy in Scarborough. Enjoy.
Abigail: Thank you so much for having me.