Community Supported Fisheries Get Underway in New Hampshire

Customers of most any seafood restaurant near New Hampshire’s coast will likely find a wide variety of fish on the menu.
But the chance that the fish was caught by a New Hampshire fisherman is slim, says Ken LaValley, a fisheries specialist with UNH Cooperative Extension.
343 :06 “A lot of what they’re eating is coming off factory trawlers from other countries that have come frozen, or its typically from Canada or it might even be coming from the west coast.”
LaValley says about 80-percent of all landings in New Hampshire- including species like cod and haddock- is shipped out of state.
But the local fishing industry wants to change that.
At Eastman’s Fish Market in Seabrook, co-owner Carolyn Eastman opens her fish display case.
333 1:41 (opening display case) so today we have haddock, I have cod, we also carry bluefish, that’s local, I have Pollack.
A lot of the fish she offers here is local, that’s rare.
But offering local fresh fish is just what she and her husband Ed wanted to do when they started the business just three months ago.
331 3:11 the question I find that was kind of hounding us a bit before we opened the market was how come it’s so hard to get local fish?
The question was particularly ironic since her husband has been a commercial fisherman for 25 years.
Part of the problem is that the state lacks fish processors who can handle large quantities of fish and meet the demand of local retailers and wholesalers.
So a lot of fish is trucked to auction houses in Boston, Gloucester, and Portland.
New Hampshire fisherman can’t just scale and fillet fish right on the dock and sell it to customers.
In order to prevent overfishing, each fish has to be counted and reported.
So Carolyn Eastman decided to become a federally permitted seafood dealer in order to buy fish off her husband’s boat.
331 6:18 what we do here, is we buy off local boats and put it in our market, and we fillet it here in our market and we offer it to locals, my hope is that consumers start asking, instead of assuming they’re eating local fish because they’re at the seacoast, they start asking, where did my fish come from
That’s why Eastman also became the first in the state to begin a community supported fishery.
Like community supported agriculture, customers agree to pay a fee at the beginning of the season.
She says it started out a grassroots movement– sending out emails to friends asking if they might be interested in buying shares of fresh local fish every week.
The response was much bigger than expected.
Sixty families signed up to pick up between two to four pounds of fish every week for the 12-week summer season.
Frank Patterson of Exeter was one of them.
:40 we were instantly attracted to being able to get fresh fish within 24 or 48 hours of when it was harvested, and we want to support the local fisherman”
For Patterson, it’s important to know who is handling his food.
And he says since trying Eastman’s local catch, he can’t go back to buying fish the old way.
10:10 We’ve been so accustomed to opening our fish from the grocery store and having that fishy smell, I’ve always known it wasn’t fresh but I’d eat it anyway, now you open the bag from her and there is no fish odor, which is the way it’s supposed to be.
Eastman’s community supported fishery has pick-up locations at farmer’s markets in Hampton, Newmarket, Rye, Exeter and Durham.
And this winter, the Yankee Fisherman’s cooperative will be starting another community supported fishery offering locally caught northern shrimp.
Cooperative president Bob Campbell says the New Hampshire shrimp industry has been hit hard over the years.
Bob1 3:25 What’s happened is that over the past few years the market for our native shrimp has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk, part of it had to do with the regulators regulating the processors out of business.
In fact, there are no shrimp processors in the state anymore, most New Hampshire shrimp are sent to Maine to be processed.
And Maine gives priority to its own fisherman.
5:07 so now we’ve got these shrimp that are in such good shape stock-wise, and most of them are going to die of old age before they hit a table anywhere because there’s nowhere to market them.
UNH’s Ken LaValley, who’s collaborating with Yankee Fisherman’s Cooperative to start up the C-S-F, says consumers growing demand for local food may help turn the industry around.
The Yankee Fisherman’s Cooperative tested the theory at a couple of farmer’s markets last year.
5:44 they had no idea what to expect they brought 500 pounds of shrimp with them, which might sound like a lot, they sold it in 20 minutes, it was amazing.
The next month they brought 1000 pounds of shrimp and it was gone in two hours.
Community supported fisheries also allows fisherman to get a higher price for their shrimp because there’s no middle man in a different state.
Again, Ken LaValley.
5:03 Right now they’d get about 35 cents a pound which is really difficult to even pay for your fuel when you go out, but at the farmers market they might sell if for 1.40 or 1.60 a pound.
That’s still less than customers would pay at the supermarket.
And many customers are willing to pay even more for fish that’s caught locally and sustainably.
The northern shrimp CSF plan to start in January and offer customers between five to ten pounds of whole shrimp a week.
The Yankee fisherman’s cooperative is still trying to determine the locations where shareholders can pick up their shrimp.
But they’re hoping eventually to offer it anywhere there’s a market, including inland.
For NHPR news, I’m Amy Quinton.