Off the Hook: Community Supported Fisheries

It’s difficult navigating the overwhelming world of industrial food production. It looks like an innocent tomato, but what did they do to it? It’s organic? Awesome. But where was it grown?

These questions plague our grocery shopping hours. The good news: there are people and programs out there working to simplify and get back to basics.

Five fishermen from the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia are doing just that with the support of the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax. Off the Hook is Nova Scotia’s first community supported fishery. They use the community supported agriculture model, which has been gaining much ground in the local food movement.

The key is they cut out the middleman between fishermen and their customers, allowing workers to set their own fair price.

How do the fish get from boat to table?

“There are two ways to harvest ground fish,” says Dave Adler of the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax – hook or net. “Trawler fleets dragging big nets damage the ocean floor. What our fishermen do is hook and line, so they lay a string of baited hooks, wait, and bring up the hooks.”

A lot of Atlantic fish you buy in the grocery store “might have been processed as far away as China,” says Adler. Small-scale fishing boats allow for quality processing. Instead of leaving a huge pile of crushed fish on deck for days, fishermen like Off the Hook’s Beau Gillis bleed the fish at sea and float it in a slush of ice and water to keep it fresh. You pick it up the very next day. No trip to China necessary.

The catch is divided into weekly shares of haddock, cod and hake. Sign up at beginning of season and every Saturday stop in at the old brewery market downtown to pick up your share.

These community-based operations are catching on. Skipper Otto’s community supported fishery has been bringing in wild-caught salmon in British Columbia since 2009, while the United States boasts around 30 community fishery projects.

The program solves one big problem for fish harvesters: price. Industrial fleets bring in so much fish that the price is driven down and fishermen are forced to accept whatever price the buyer gives them, running them out of business. A community-supported fishery flips it, making the fisherman the price setter. Prices are adjusted based on expenses like bait and transport.

Off the Hook’s fish sells for several dollars more per pound than a fillet you might pick up at Sobey’s. “We don’t make any apologies about it,” says Adler. “It’s more expensive than any fish you’ll find and the reason is because fish doesn’t cost enough.”

It’s a change of mindset you’ll have to get used to if you want to chase away the industrialized food beast. “Price and convenience,” those are the big things that steer people’s buying decisions, Adler laughs, “and we offer neither of those things.”

Check out Kevin Moynihan’s short video on Off the Hook’s homepage, which gives a peek onto Beau Gillis’ boat. The fisherman loves his job, he says, but “I just don’t like to pay to work.”

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