women on the water

Oysters – From Delicacy to Staple?

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EMILY SELINGER USES THE COMMUNITY-SUPPORTED MODEL TO BUILD HER MARKET

This story first appeared in the Island Institute’s The Working Waterfront newspaper, and is reproduced here with permission. Click here. 

August 30, 2019

Story and Photos By Kelli Park

Emily Selinger has made it her mission to change the way we look at oysters, one farm-share at a time.

Selinger spent her childhood on the Harraseeket River in Freeport, where she fell in love with working on the water. She taught sailing classes at a young age, and pursued her interest in boats by getting her captain’s license and working on schooners up and down the East Coast.

She studied art history in college in Washington and, for six years, on and off, worked on a 140-foot schooner that cruised between Boston and St. Croix.

“I learned a lot on the water in that boat, mostly about myself,” Selinger says. She eventually returned to Maine and work on a lobster boat. She also befriended Amanda Moeser, owner of Lanes Island Oyster Co. in Yarmouth, which inspired her to start a similar business.

“I was totally captivated with oyster farming from the start,” Selinger remembers. “It’s a perfect marriage of all my favorite things about working on the water—hands-on problem solving, physical maintenance, and I can always be improving and reinventing.”

Selinger began working with Moeser in 2017 and quickly decided to take the plunge, buying a small batch of oyster seed, which she grew on Moeser’s farm that fall, and began the process of establishing her own oyster farm.

“I can’t imagine going out and finding a place to grow oysters without the local knowledge from growing up here. Messing around in little boats, running aground, wandering around in the mud,” she says. “I knew, pretty much instantly, where I wanted to site my farm.”

She then acquired three limited purpose aquaculture licenses for her farm in Freeport, and so began what she calls “the most perfect self-employment opportunity on the water that I ever could have dreamed of.”

CLEAN AND SIMPLE

Selinger’s approach is clean and simple. She operates on 1,600 square feet in the Harraseeket River (with a pending application for expansion) using her 19-foot flat-bottomed, center console skiff, Mignonette. She prefers to work at low tide, when the water is about 2-feet deep, so she can get out and walk in her waders to do routine maintenance.

“I have everything rigged pretty simply right now because it’s just me, and it works well. I’m trying to keep things as minimal as I can,” she says.

After receiving a start-up business grant from the Libra Future Fund, she built a facility in her garage for safe handling and product storage in order to get her enhanced retail license, which is required to sell at farmers’ markets. Selling there is one of her goals for next year.

“I’m trying to approach oyster farming like a vegetable farmer,” she explains.

Selinger spent the past winter developing her strategy, channeling her creativity, and thinking like an entrepreneur.

“It just hit me one day. I was thinking about food and how people sell food and where people sell food,” she says, growing animated. “Where do you think of when you think of eating oysters? Portland. The restaurant scene. Fine dining.”

Oysters have been seen as a delicacy, but Selinger argues that with ideal growing conditions statewide, they can be produced “by the hundreds of thousands.” So why not work to have oysters understood by consumers as “an everyday, eat-at-home item?”

Selinger uses the traditional community-supported agriculture as her model, striving to eliminate the barriers between farmed food and delicacies. Instead of implementing a weekly CSA schedule, which always results in “rotting kale in the fridge,” as she says, this farm-share is individualized: customers purchase allotments of oysters and select year-round delivery dates that fit within their schedule.

Selinger also hopes to increase accessibility through face-to-face connections. She offers personal shucking lessons for first-time customers, and starter kits, which include an insulated cooler bag, shucking knives, and how-to instructions. She also plans to educate customers about different cooking methods (she recommends grilling) to push beyond the raw stereotype and appeal to a wider audience.

Since she launched the CSA earlier this year, Selinger already has 20 customers and has booked shucking gigs for weddings, corporate parties, fundraising events, and festivals in the coming months.

She looks forward to diversifying the local oyster industry while “running her own little experiments” to develop her oyster flavor profile—sweet, salty, and flowery, with a hint of citrus .

And she has strong feelings about the marine economy.

“If we want our working waterfront to continue to grow and be the vibrant community it is now, making some space for people in other ventures, such as aquaculture, is really important. It takes cooperation from everyone, on all sides. The more people we have working on the water here, the better it will be for keeping Maine the way it is. I wholly believe that.”

For more information, visit emilysoysters.com.

A Woman’s Place on the Working Waterfront

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JENNIE BICHREST BEGAN HAULING TRAPS BY HAND, AND NOW RUNS A LARGE BAIT BUSINESS
 

This story first appeared in the Island Institute’s The Working Waterfront newspaper, and is reproduced here with permission. Click here. 

(Personal photos courtesy of Jennie Bichrest)

August 2019

Story and Photos by Kelli Park

From hand-hauling lobster traps to selling more than 10 million pounds of bait annually, Jennie Bichrest knows the working waterfront inside out. This summer, as the lobster industry faces a shortage of herring, the bait of choice, her business—Purse Line Bait—is playing a critical role in keeping that waterfront working.

Bichrest was growing up in Illinois until a vacation brought her family to the Maine coast in the early 1970s. Her father was hooked, and family vacations were then spent on a commercial fishing boat. Later, her father bought a 46-foot sailboat with a vision of educating his children as they sailed around the world. The family moved to Cundy’s Harbor in Harpswell, and though the children did learn to sail, the around-the-world voyage never happened.

Instead, Bichrest stumbled upon old wooden lobster traps in her neighbor’s barn, which inspired her, with the help of her grandfather, to build her own by steaming and bending wooden bows using a steam-box she found in the barn.

While her father found work on fishing boats in and around Cundy’s Harbor, Bichrest hauled traps by hand with her own skiff and spent time with her friends working on the water, where she was the only woman.

“I was never a ‘girly’ girl,” she says. The group she hung out with was into fishing, so that became her focus as well. She eventually married Mark Bichrest, whose family has been fishing for five generations.

The two worked independently on the water—she lobstering, he dragging—until pogies arrived on the coast in the late 1980s. Mark was fishing for a Russian ship, Riga, which anchored offshore and processed fish into fishmeal. “They all wanted jeans, Levi jeans from Goodwill,” she remembers. “Jeans and cigarettes.”

Jennie and Mark soon started their bait business with a boatload of pogies at a time, delivering to local wharves and individual boats, until word spread and demand grew.

“When we first got in business, we knew you had to have storage,” she remembers. “The herring were only around so long. We survived more on fresh fish coming in. We had dump trucks, and we loaded the fresh fish every day and we would go to the wharves.”

But if there was no catch, her customers had no bait.

“That’s when we started barreling bait,” she explains. “Once they started with the quotas, there was more need for freezers and storage.”

Within a few short years, the business had evolved from boatloads of pogies, to truckloads of fish, to the widespread distribution of salted, barreled bait with the need for storage facilities.

Demand continued to grow and in 1996, the couple bought a facility in Sebasco once used to make ice for fishing boats, and it became home for Purse Line Bait. After their divorce in 2003, Jennie Bichrest expanded the business with the purchase of additional freezer facilities in Harpswell to meet the demand created by quotas placed upon commercial fishing—more freezer space was needed to store fish, ensuring its availability throughout the year after quotas had been met.

Bichrest currently relies on five suppliers for a steady stream of herring, pogies, and redfish from as far away as New Jersey and Canada. She stores three million pounds in each of her Phippsburg and Harpswell facilities, and another three million pounds in rented space south of Portland.

The vagaries of fish populations impact the business, she said.

“The first year pogies hit it was devastating,” because when that fish was available for bait, the demand for other bait, like that which Purse Line sold, can decrease rapidly. If her freezers are full because fishermen are buying bait from different sources, her largest supplier will find other markets for his product.
“People don’t understand that you have to keep it all going, or they’re not going to be there. That’s what frightens me,” she confesses. “They don’t think about all the other people the business supports—the carriers, the other boats.”

In February, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cut the 2019 herring quota by about 70 percent, from 110 million pounds to 33 million pounds. Herring is the most commonly used bait in the lobster industry. Bichrest believes that the cut will hit the island communities the hardest, where lobstermen rely on the carriers for bait.

“There’s not enough freezers in the state of Maine with this latest herring cut,” she says. “And really, more importantly, we’re going to lose the infrastructure.”

Bichrest has advocated for conservation measures that would ensure sustainable fisheries, including encouraging closures during spawning on Georges Banks, popular fishing grounds between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia, to promote the growth of young fish.

“You can’t continue to kill babies and expect to have a healthy fishery,” she says.