[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find now temperate zones and tropic climbs and true currents and thriving seas and winds blowing through breathing trees and strongholds on safe sunshine, good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hello, K squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again, and you're listening to sustainability now, a bi weekly K squid radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. The Monterey Bay is the crown jewel of central California. For well over a century, the bay has been exploited for a myriad of purposes. Today, it needs protection and conservation. This is especially the case with its fish and fisheries, which provide a vital source of food but are vulnerable to tastes and markets. My guest today on sustainability now is Melissa Mahoney, executive director of the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust. Prior to taking on the job in 2022, Melissa was a conservation practitioner, working across state federal policy forums, helping to apply digital technologies and fisheries, and building partnerships for experimental fisheries such as rockfish, hook and Line, and Monterey Bay. Melissa Mahoney, thank you for being my guest on sustainability now.
[00:01:37] Speaker C: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Maybe you could tell us about the Monterey Bay Fishery Trust and what is its mission and what does it do?
[00:01:44] Speaker C: So the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust is a local nonprofit. We're just ten years old this year, and we are about putting more local seafood on more local plates. And we accomplish that by doing sort of three things ish. We are about growing a local seafood movement. So that's about consumer awareness and helping people source where they can buy local seafood, which can be hard sometimes. Secondly, we want to empower fishermen and women to be more successful in the management process, to really have a voice. And so we do. We help them get education and trainings and get connected to the right people to share their knowledge, because they really are the stewards of the resource. Number three is we have some community programs, our biggest being our community seafood program that started during COVID and that's where we purchase seafood from local fishermen and businesses. And we have that donated to six local food bank and food relief groups in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. And so that takes up the bulk of our work, is those three areas of supporting the local seafood movement, supporting fishermen and businesses, and helping to get equitable seafood access going in our region.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Do you actually, someone on the staff actually goes and buys the fish and then trucks it?
[00:03:11] Speaker C: Yeah, no, we don't do that. We work with seafood partners. So they might be individual fishermen or they are fishing businesses that aggregate, that buy seafood from local fishermen and sort of aggregate it and send it out. So we work with four local. They're called community supported fisheries. They aggregate the seafood that's landed here, and then they actually will process it however it needs to be. Usually, it's individual frozen fillets that most food banks want, and so they will process and package those, and then they. They will distribute to the food banks in the course of their delivery. So they do all that for us, and they give us a fair market rate, and we help create that additional sort of market, local market channel for them. And then they feel really good about being able to deliver to local food banks, and they really. They really like being part of the program, even though it's not a profitable to them, but it's just part about being a community that helps each other out.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: Let's get back to the basics. Okay. What's your background, and how did you get into the fisheries conservation business?
[00:04:18] Speaker C: Well, my background is kind of funny in that I grew up in Colorado, so I grew up in a landlocked state between the desert and the mountains and the rivers. But I've always had this deep love for the ocean. So even as a kid, the first time I saw the ocean and was around it, there was just something about it that drew me in. And so, you know, my whole academic career, I aimed my path to. To eventually live on the coast. And I did come out here about 25 years ago to go to graduate school at Moss landing marine labs. I have a master's degree in marine science. I had every intention of being a fisheries biologist. I was very concerned about the conservation of our oceans and protecting them. But my career path took some very interesting turns. Actually, when I started talking with fishermen, I definitely had a bias at the beginning, just because of the, you know, the stories that you hear and the narrative you hear kind of in the media about how there's overfishing and fishermen are the ones doing it. And so I had a bias against them. But in the course of my studies and some of my early work, I needed to talk with them about the fisheries that they were involved in to better understand how they worked. And in the process of that, became aware that, number one, they cared just as much about the ocean as I did, and that impressed me. And, number two, they knew things about the fish and the ecosystem and the way that the ocean and the tides work. That just really blew me away. You know, I had been in grad school for three and a half years, and I thought I knew a lot, and they knew more than I did. They just had a different way of articulating it. But it really changed the way that I saw myself being a conservation practitioner was not someone to go be it battle and try to cut these guys out of the equation. It was really, I really wanted to see, well, how can fishermen still harvest seafood and be contributing members of our coastal economy and also be the stewards of the resource? And therefore we have conservation and we have profitable fisheries economy. That's really, really where I've been trying to work the last 20 years, whether it's policy or projects like the Fisheries Trust, helping to stand that up, that's really my sweet spot.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: When we talk about Monterey bay, I mean, how far out into the Pacific does the space extend?
[00:06:46] Speaker C: You mean the fishing activity or management?
[00:06:49] Speaker B: Yeah, fishing activity. Because when you talked about, you mentioned the accusation of depletion of fisheries. And my sense has always been that this is largely the work of large fishing operation kinds of things. Do you work with any really large fishing operations?
[00:07:06] Speaker C: Not anymore and not really ever. So I guess the way that you can think about fishing activity in our oceans is that the bigger the boat, the further it can go. And so we have a lot of small, we have a small scale fishing fleet, 20 to 20 to 30 foot sized boats, and they can do day trips. Maybe they could do an overnight at another port. And then you have the bigger fleet that can go out into federal waters, which is from 3 miles offshore to 200 miles. That's our exclusive economic zone. Those bigger boats are, they, they can stay out for a week, and then you have the tuna and the swordfish boats that they have to go chase the fish around. And they might be out for a couple weeks at a time and have enough fuel and enough crew and food to really go out far, we have boats that go between Hawaii and California chasing the tuna, and, you know, we'll deliver it to whichever port they happen to be closest to. And then you have the foreign fleet, which really was, you know, in, before we had our, our 200 miles limit in the seventies. You had russian fleet, chinese fleet. You had a lot of. We had a lot of fleets that were coming in and fishing our waters because they were plentiful. And that's where a lot of countries started creating these limits and pushing international fleets out into the high seas. So that's really where a lot of the trouble still is, because there isn't enough monitoring and enforcement and traceability of high seas fishing. But when you're talking about fishing off the coast of California and the coast of Monterey Bay, we have some of the most stringent regulations and the most enforcement and monitoring, really, I think, anywhere in the world. So I think our fisheries here are quite sustainable because they're well managed and the fishermen have to comply with the regulations or they won't be in business anymore.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: Well, the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust seems to me to be an unusual organization in the world of conservation. I mean, I'm reasonably familiar with what's out there, and it seems more hybrid. Most marine and fishery centered organizations focus on conservation alone. And you guys are committed. You call them sustainable fisheries. You know, you suggest that you have a commitment to both the fish and the fishers. And how did you arrive at that? Let's just say that compromise. How did that come about?
[00:09:36] Speaker C: Yes, I was actually there at the beginning, because ten years ago, eleven years ago, I was working for the Nature Conservancy. And part of my job when I first got hired, I was to help figure out how to establish an organization like this in Monterey, because the Nature Conservancy, due to some of their activities to help improve the west coast ground fish fishery, they ended up owning a whole lot of fishing quota or fishing rights. When the fishery transitioned into what we call a cat share system, it made that transition in 2011. And so trying to keep it top level for a moment, the Fisheries Trust was born out of the need to seed this quota back into the community where the nature conservancy had originally bought up some permits and some trawler vessels to reduce habitat damage and do some other things about ten years prior to this. So I was there at the beginning trying to think about what leaders in the community would pull together to do this. And it was really the city of Monterey and the harbor master, who at the time was very involved in trying to figure out how. How do we have fishing industry that is sustainable, that can sustain itself and also protect the resource and kind of strike that balance? And you also had groups like the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund who are conservation organizations, but they actually, their sweet spot is. And that's probably where I learned it, because I work for both of those, but where they really wanted to figure out, well, how can we align ocean health and sustainability with profitability? And that was bringing those people together and knowing that conservation of the resource was an important value and principle, but having a way to support and encourage sort of revitalizing our fishing communities and our fisheries that had collapsed in the year 2000, when the ground fish fishery collapsed and was actually declared a disaster and closed because you had nine stocks of rockfish and flatfish that were declared overfished. So it was really a comeback of that fishery, which has really been the backbone of the. Of the. Of fishing activity on the west coast, because that's a year round fishery. These are rockfish and flatfish that live on the bottom. They can be fished kind of any time as long as the weather is okay. It's not like crab or salmon or things that are very seasonal. It's. It was really the backbone of fishing activity that kept the ice house and the fuel dock and the processors there. And so when it collapsed, everything else kind of collapsed with it. So it was really the. The fisheries Trust came together to hold this quota, to bring this quota back into the community for the benefit of fishermen who we hoped would come back in as the fishery recovered and the infrastructure. The infrastructure came back in because the stocks were recovering and they could therefore go out and target these species again. That is still questionable, but that was the impetus for the trust to come together and for these groups to come together to say, okay, we need conservation, but we need to have production. We need a us seafood model that works and feeds people here, because that's part of the economy. It's always been. Part of our heritage here in Monterey Bay is to have some extraction from the ocean to support people.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz, and my guest today is Melissa Mahoney, executive director of the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust. And we've just been talking about the origins of the trust and the ways in which it tries to balance sustainability and fishing. And we were talking about quotas. Now, how did quotas get established in general and in the west coast fisheries?
[00:13:46] Speaker C: Yes. So kind of little fisheries 101. The kind of most simple, traditional way that fisheries have been managed in the US is the scientists figure out how many fish could be taken out in a fishing season. So that's your maximum sustainable yield. And then they take off a little chunk for uncertainty or to be precautionary, and then they set a catch limit. And then all the fishermen on day one go run out and catch as much as they can until it's done. And that has kind of been the traditional model. And in a lot of cases, that causes fishermen to race, you know, kind of race to the bottom. It's unsafe. It's caused Derby fisheries. It's caused overfishing, it's caused bycatch all kinds of problems. And so when the west coast ground fish fishery had collapsed, the. The federal managers who were charged to figure out, how do we, how do we make this a better fishery? It had, it had tons of unintended bycatch because it was a multi species fishery, and you had some species that had really low abundance and needed to be avoided, and they were mixed up with other highly abundant species. And so the fishery managers, excuse me, sort of took a play from the insurance industry, thinking about sort of risk pools and, and how to have individual ownership of these stocks to encourage more responsible management of each of the individual stocks. So the concept of a quota system where individual fishermen or permit holders own essentially a piece of the pie, instead of being, just saying, go out and get as much as you can until we close it. They actually own a share of the species for the fishery, and they can choose when and how to fish, that they can lease the quota if they're not going to use it. So it creates a marketplace for the resource. And the idea is that fishermen, then they take ownership of that resource and they're going to care for it in a better way. And because it's going to be more valuable. The more fish there are, the more their quota shares are valuable and the better off both they and the stocks are going to be. And so that is essentially the transition of this fishery into a cat share system in 2011 is how that quota share system came to be. And you had community quota funds that came into being to hold when the quota could not be owned by a single person for various reason. Maybe there weren't fishermen left in that community that. That were ground fish quota holders. That's what happened both in Morro Bay and in Monterey. There were very few fishermen left who could afford to buy quota or to even fish the quota. So community quota funds were a way for a community to come together and pool resources and secure those fishing rights in that place, because there was also a certain amount of consolidation going on at the time. And a lot of the bigger companies and the bigger boats up north in Oregon and Washington, mainly in Oregon, a lot of that quota was getting purchased and sort of, you know, taken, taken away because this is a West coast wide fishery. So that's how community quota funds, that's sort of the promise is that they keep the quota local. And then, like for the trust, we have a quota leasing policy where if you're a local fishermanden, we lease the quota at a discount. And then if you're not local but you want to land the fish locally, we also give a discount. And then anything that we can't lease or land locally, we will lease that on the open market, and that helps generate revenue for our organization's, our own sustainability.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: That's interesting. So let me see if I can understand it. So the quota is the right to catch a certain volume of fish or number of fish, right? It's not. It's not. And so you own the right quota, right. And not the fish specifically. And it's interesting that you lease the quota, right. So I hadn't thought about that as a, you know, as a way of using it, because I was, I was curious about what it meant when you said that the Nature conservancy somehow acquired these, these fishery quotas. I start to sort of see how were the number of shares, quotas in a fishery determined? And then how were those quota rights distributed among communities?
[00:18:34] Speaker C: Yes, relatively simple answer to that, but it can get complicated. So when the fishery transitioned to the cat share program, they looked at the fishing history of each fishing permit. So each fishermande has to have a permit that they then go and operate their fishing business with out on their vessel. And so the amount of quota share that each permit holder was given initially tied back to their fishing history. So you had some, some folks that, that fish really hard and caught a lot of stuff, and they were, they were given a lot of quota share was just relative to, to their fishing history. There was also when, when this started, they created a 10%, sort of off the top 10% of all of the different fisheries quotas for what they called an adaptive management program. And that quota was to be distributed to communities that needed quota. But that program never really got off the ground. It was just sort of too hard to run. And the community quota funds that were being established, they sort of filled the, they filled the role of that. So for the, both the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust and the Morro Bay Quota Fund, those organizations received quota from the Nature Conservancy. And I'll just tell you that the reason why the Nature Conservancy had all this quota is that years prior, they had done a really big transaction, and they had actually purchased 13 ground fish trawl permits. And so when the fishery transition into a cat share system, all of the quota assigned to those 13 permits became owned by the Nature Conservancy. And they never wanted to be in the fishing business. That wasn't their goal. So they had three years to get under. There were individual species limits and cumulative limits. So that's why these trusts, the Morro Bay Fund and the trust, and actually some other smaller trusts up north, the Nature Conservancy helped to get those groups standing up and incorporated so that they could divest the quota back in. They had sort of already completed their habitat protection goals through that previous transaction, and now these.
This quota being reinvested into the communities was sort of in their way, it was kind of coming full circle and giving that quota back in the hopes that as the ground fish fishery was revitalized and became sustainable, which it was designated, I think it was in 2014 or 2015, by the Marine Stewardship Council, which is an eco certification, they designated the West coast ground fish fishery as a sustainable fishery. And that was a huge milestone and success story for this fishery that had collapsed 15 years prior and had overfishing and massive bycatch and habitat damage and all kinds of things. To have 15 years later have it be deemed sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council and to have these quota funds and to have all of the stocks recovering. Two were recovering and the rest had been recovered, officially recovered. So it's really a conservation success story.
The troubling part that the Monterey Bay Fisheries trust and many others are still trying to work on, though, is that the economic performance, the economic recovery didn't come. The conservation recovery did, but the economic recovery, we're still trying to get that back on. On footing, and I can talk more about that, but I'll pause and see. Yeah, yeah, that all made sense.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: No, it did. Well, it's made sense to me. I mean, are the quotas designated for specific species or.
[00:22:42] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: So tell us a little bit about that.
[00:22:45] Speaker C: Yes. So the. The groundfish trawl fishery is. And I'm saying trawl, t r a w l. So those are the boats that tow the nets behind, and they fish just a little bit off the bottom. Sometimes they hit the bottom. We can talk about that in a moment. But they're fishing just off the bottom for the flatfish and the rockfish. There's somewhere around 90 species of different kinds of fish that are managed in this fishery under the fishery management plan. But there's a set of 30 question.
[00:23:21] Speaker B: How. How large is the fishery? Is it the west coast now or is it.
[00:23:26] Speaker C: Yes, it's central coast.
[00:23:27] Speaker B: Okay. Okay.
[00:23:28] Speaker C: California, Oregon and Washington. It's a federally managed fishery, and it has. It has four sectors for the quota system. I'm only talking about the trawl fishery. So you have a. You have a lit. Another hook in line, a long line fishery. You have a recreational fishery. You have an open access commercial fishery that's for small boats. And there's a tribal fishery. So the quota system is only was implemented for the trawl fishery, which was the largest by volume and effort of in the ground fish fishery.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:24:02] Speaker C: So the way that they divided it up is they. They looked at all these, you know, 90 species, and they said, okay, which of these are the most valuable and the most targeted and the most that we need to keep our eyes on. And then for the ones that didn't need to be in their own category, they grouped them. So, for example, we have sablefish. We have lots of different species of rockfish, and some are on their own because they're high volume and they are targeted. So boccaccio, rockfish, chili pepper widow, many others. And then you. And then you have a grouping of rockfish from the slope, rockfish, near shore rockfish, rockfish on the shelf. So it probably sounds strange. There's a lot of science behind it. And there are some great people at NOAA fisheries who could probably talk about this way more eloquently than me. But in short, there are 30 different categories of IFQ, individual fishing quota, species or species groups where ownership can take place.
[00:25:07] Speaker B: So the quotas that you have, that you lease and are they for specific species or are they for various different species?
[00:25:15] Speaker C: Both.
We own quota share across those 30 categories at various levels. Some species, we don't own any of. We sort of got what we got from the Nature Conservancy. And then we did one other deal with a local fisherman. So we don't have one of everything, but we have chunks of some species or species groups.
[00:25:36] Speaker B: Well, it sounds extraordinarily complicated.
[00:25:39] Speaker C: It kind of is.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: Run out and find me an artificial intelligence.
You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz, and my guest today is Melissa Mahoney, executive director of the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust. And Melissa has just been explaining what is a very, very complicated quota system for fisheries on the west coast, but which has basically led to the restoration of west coast fisheries because it limits. It puts limits on the catch. Now you. I got that right. Yeah.
[00:26:13] Speaker C: Well, I would just one small correction in that it is specifically for the ground fish trawl fishery. There's no other fishery on our west coast that is managed with quotas.
[00:26:26] Speaker B: I see. Okay, so basically, the guys who are pulling in a lot of fish and.
[00:26:33] Speaker C: Bycatch kind of thing, rockfish and flatfish are the main components of that fishery. And they used to have a lot of bycatch. They. Now the bycatch in that fishery was reduced by 90% between when it was closed in 99 and between when it was recovered in, let's say, 2013, I think is when I saw that that statistic. So the implementation of the cat shears fishery, which required the fishermen to be accountable for everything that they caught or even threw back, was basically like, they have a pig, a piggy bank account for every pound of fish that they catch, and there is a human observer on every trip they take. So they are accountable 100% for everything they catch. And that forced them to innovate and do something about the bycatch problem, the wasteful bycatch. And they did.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: I have actually sort of orthogonal question here. The recent, as I recall, the recent decision by the Supreme Court to overturn, you know, the chevron policy had to do with observers on boats off of Maine or something like that, right?
[00:27:53] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: The fishers have to pay the costs of the observers. I think that was the issue. So how might that impact this fishery?
[00:28:06] Speaker C: Yeah, I have yet to talk to one of the fishermen since that the chevron deference case was decided. And my understanding is that what was the crux of that was if a law gets made, Congress makes a law, and then they say, okay, agency x, who manages that area, you decide how to implement that law, you know best. We're not going to give you all the details. And so in us fisheries, the move is to have more monitoring because it also, because it does two things. It helps managers collect data on the species that they are trying to manage, and more data is better when you're trying to understand how many fish are out there.
And secondly, they. It's also a compliance issue. So if there is monitoring on a boat, whether it's a camera or a human observer, the fisherman has to be accountable for whatever they're catching or whatever they're throwing back. And so it just, it creates more efficiency and compliance in the fisheries. And the question about the burden of management of the observer coverage is a really interesting question, because on the east coast, there is also a cat share fishery for ground fish because they had a collapse in 94, you may remember when all the cod collapsed in the nineties, they also moved to a cat share program. It's different than ours, but it's a similar concept. And they also had to. Well, they didn't have as strict of an observer coverage requirement. They didn't have a 100% monitoring requirement requirement like we do in the west coast.
They also have some congressmen on. On the east coast who managed to get appropriations to cover any of the observer costs that they have whereas on the west coast, the fishermen out here were given, I think it was three years, where the government subsidized the cost of monitoring, and then they proportionally put the burden on fishermen. And since, I think it's since 2015, the west coast fishermen have been required to pay 100% of those observer costs, which, it's an average of 500 a day for a human observer.
It's probably more now with inflation, but that was kind of the average Washington, 500 a day, or they had to buy the cameras to install electronic monitoring. And so this case, this decision, I'm guessing it probably gives the fishermen some cover to go back to the government and say, look, this is, if management is requiring this amount of monitoring, then management needs to find a way to pay for it.
But I have not heard any, any conversations yet from west coast fishermen on what they might do with this information.
But I guess if I were them, I'd be thinking about it, thinking about how it pertained to me and the cost that I was having to incur to be able to go fish.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: Yeah, you mentioned earlier about that. The, the story is a conservation success, but not necessarily an economic one.
So can you explain for the audience why that is the case?
What's going wrong?
[00:32:05] Speaker C: Yes, well, I can point to some really key factors.
So when the ground fish fishery collapsed in the early two thousands or the late nineties? Early two thousands, another species of whitefish was coming on hot to the us market. Any guess what it was?
[00:32:26] Speaker B: No.
[00:32:27] Speaker C: Tilapia.
So tilapia and other whitefish that basically replaced the rockfish in sole that were no longer being caught in those first few years, they just simply got replaced by a different species. And you could say that the, you know, sort of the palate of the us consumer, you know, as long as it's a decent tasting or actually really not a very mild flavor, flaky whitefish. I think a lot of us consumers don't really care where it comes from, as long as it's the right price and it tastes pretty good and you can do whatever you want with it. So that was the first blow, is that when the fishery was closed, all these other white fish took its place in the market.
[00:33:18] Speaker B: And when were these tilapia from fish farms?
[00:33:24] Speaker C: Yes. Tilapia is a farm species. There's also catfish, bassa catfish.
You also had some of the really high volume fisheries up in Alaska, like for pollock and other Pacific cod and things, that there was just a lot of replacement. And so consumers didn't really miss this. It just got replaced and then when the fishery came back, and especially when it was MSc certified, like I had said, it got the certification in 2014 or 2015, there was really this hope in those that had bought it out and remained in the fishery and managed to transition to this cat share system.
The capacity in the fishery was reduced by at least 100 vessels. And so the vessels that remain thought, okay, we're going to come back in, we're going to get more. We're going to get paid more for our fish. We're going to get our markets back, all these great things, and they just couldn't compete with what was already there.
Also, especially in California, in that about ten years of time, the infrastructure in all of our ports and harbors in California just essentially went away. It wasn't supported because that fishery wasn't happening. So you had fuel docks and ice houses and processors and markets. They just kind of quietly went away and had to go do other things or leave that area. So the infrastructure went down, the competition for whitefish went up, and then you have operating costs going up, and basically fishermen getting the same price for their rockfish and sole as they've been getting in the eighties and nineties. And it's just been kind of upside down, and they haven't been able to get a foothold.
Especially in California, it's a little bit of a different story in Oregon.
There's just more. There's more boats, there's more infrastructure, there's more processing capacity and market capacity. And so the Oregon trawl fleet is doing better than we are down here. And so, especially in California, it just hasn't come back like many of us had hoped. And so that's part of why the fisheries trust, although we sort of started as a quota leasing organization to help revitalize this one fishery, we really evolved to look at and see how we could help all the fishermen and fishing businesses, whether they were salmon or crab or, you know, starting this community seafood program, just trying to evolve alongside the needs of fishermen, because these were bigger problems with the ground fish fishery than our little organization could really help with.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: I see. How do you then try to facilitate a larger consumer base, I guess, for these fisheries and fish? Right? I mean, because you want to get customers, consumers to buy more local, sustainable fish. So what sorts of things do you do to try and stimulate that market?
[00:36:49] Speaker C: Do as much as our small organization can, can handle. We are only three staff, but we have a strong social media presence, just like everybody does now. We're trying to get the word out on social media about whenever there's dock sales or about our local community supported fisheries, our fishing businesses that are sourcing and selling local fish, we also have a series of dinners that, where we partner with local restaurants and chefs to highlight certain species, and we have a dinner, and that is also a way that we fundraise for our community seafood program. And we invite a fisherman to come and people get to have a q and a and have a direct conversation with a real live fisherman, which is usually pretty be fun and lively.
We have a local catch guide on our webpage that we're updating as regularly as possible to highlight the markets and the restaurants and the places where you can find local seafood.
So we're doing, you know, all the kinds of communications and marketing and events that we. That we can do with our small team.
But I will honestly say that it's hard. There's a lot of noise out there, as you know, and there's so much more I wish we could do. I wish we could have an annual seafood festival here in Monterey Bay that really gets a lot of people coming to the harbors and celebrating our local seafood and really celebrating our fishermen. The men and women who go out and risk their lives to bring that fish back to us. They're really the bridge to this food source, and there's not very many of them left. So I wish there was more we could do to really impress upon those of us that have the privilege and the honor of living around Monterey Bay that it's so important to, for example, right now, choose California halibuthenne. Go wherever you can find California halibut, because that's most of what the fishermen are able to catch right now, because there's no salmon.
The rockfish fishery has some limits on it for a reason I'm not even going to go into, because it's almost done.
Yeah, I wish there was more that we could do, but we're doing everything we can to get the word out that just like your local farmers market and your local farmer supporting your local fishermen is what gives us the breadth and depth of the delicious food that we get to have around here.
[00:39:36] Speaker B: Sounds like you need an app.
[00:39:39] Speaker C: Well, yeah, I don't know. There's been a lot of apps in the fisheries world trying to connect people with where to find fish, and it's so dynamic, it's hard to pin it down.
But maybe. Maybe we could talk about that. If there's anybody out there that is hearing what our challenge is and wants to offer a solution or an idea, I would love to get the help and love to hear it.
[00:40:08] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz, your host. And my guest today is Melissa Mahoney, executive director of the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust. And we've just started to talk about, I guess, the problem of marketing local fish and informing consumers where to get them.
Question a supermarket or a market has a fish department.
How do they get their fish? Do they go out and look for local fish? Are there distributed? I think you mentioned aggregators at some point. Aggregators and distributors. What's the actual mechanism whereby local fish, you know, get out into the, besides these dockside sales, how else does the fish get out there?
[00:40:55] Speaker C: Well, the short answer is it depends. It depends on the size of the grocer business or the restaurant business.
If you're a whole foods or a safeway or a big retail chain, those corporations have central distribution points where I, everything that's going into, let's say, the California whole food stores or the West coast region, all that stuff is going to a central distribution site, and it's meeting all of their standards for quality and freshness, and maybe they have some sustainability criteria that they need to meet as well.
And then that product gets put on a truck and shipped every which way to every which store. There's no, there's no way for the local, like our local whole food store here in Santa. In Santa Cruz. I remember going to them when they opening, when they opened and said, oh, I'm so excited. Our salmon fishermen, like, they're going to be ready to bring you their catch in a month. And the guy was like, I can't just take fish. They can't just, like, pull up to the back and give me that fish. It's like a whole system.
And so maybe the other side of that is we have a small local grocer in Santa Cruz and Watsonville called staff of life, and they have just two stores, and they're family owned, and they work with all different kinds of seafood distributors. And I don't want to speak for them because I only know enough to be dangerous about their procurement. But I know they buy from some of the bigger distributors and also from, you know, smaller, smaller distributors who are really trying to get that local product straight to them because obviously that's the shortest distance and that's the freshest. If, say, it came from Santa Cruz harbor and it got driven right over to staff of life, I'm not sure how much of that is happening, but it really just depends on the size of the business, how many steps in the chain they need to go.
And that's why the business that we really try and promote, because not as many people know, they think, okay, I'm going to go to Costco or Safeway or new leaf to get my fish. And on all those groups do great job and they try and have their information.
But there are these businesses called community supported fisheries, and we have three of them in Santa Cruz, probably the most of most places.
And those businesses buy directly from local fishermen. Sometimes they buy further afield in California if they can't fill all their orders by what's caught locally.
And then if you're an individual consumer household like myself or you, you can become a member of one of those csFs. And it's just like a farm box, but it's your fish share and they either deliver it to your door or you go to a neighborhood distribution site and there's a cooler there. And once a week or every other week, you go and you pick up your bag of fresh, locally caught fish and it's got the name of the fisherman and the name of the vessel that it came off. And it's a way to guarantee that you are actually getting local fish.
[00:44:31] Speaker B: Does this arrangement, you know, generate any significant income for the, for the fishers?
[00:44:38] Speaker C: Well, they, this is sort of what, what I hear around the, on the edges. I mean, it's still, it's still transactional between the CSF trying to run its business and, and generate some profit. But what I understand is that the kind of customer that they get is willing to pay more for that fish because they know it's local. And so they are able to give a higher price to the fishermen because that can get captured in the, because there's basically only two or maybe three steps in that supply chain versus your kind of typical supply chain. Wherever the fisherman gets paid very little because you have ten middleman going up the chain and it gets to us and we're still paying $30 a pound for that salmon or that, whatever that is when it gets to our grocery store. But the fisherman got very little of that. So in this model where you're having one aggregator buy from the fisherman, that fisherman is getting more. He's capturing more value for his catch than if it were going up and up and up the chain.
[00:45:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I see. I got it. How many boats are there going out of the Monterey Bay at this point?
[00:46:02] Speaker C: Well, I get asked this a lot, and I try and keep tabs on this a lot because it really is one of the most important measures of the well being of the fishing community.
And I would say there's, you know, there's less than 100 commercial vessels left in the bay that are, that are really going out with any consistency. And since we lost that, you know, this is the second year where there's been no salmon fishery, I would say that the number of active vessels, the active fishermen is, and I'm not going to include the pursein fleet. They're actually not. They're not active right now either, because there's very little anchovy or squid in Monterey Bay. So that that could change, really, anytime when the squid decide to show up here. But for our small boat fleet, that target ground fish, salmon, crab, I would say right now, because of the salmon closure, there's probably less than 30 boats that are active on a weekly basis.
It's very small.
[00:47:15] Speaker B: So it's very small. And does that mean that the quotas don't get filled?
[00:47:22] Speaker C: Yes.
We at the trust and a lot of other quota funds, we do not lease.
Well, there's not a. Well, we never lease all of our quota. There's a lot of quota. That is, people are not fishing it because there's not a market for it.
But in terms of other fisheries that don't have cat shares quotas but just have orders to fill or trip limits to fill, I think halibut is being, California halibut is being targeted heavily right now. So I'm guessing that the trip limits for that are pretty full. But I know in the other sector for ground fish called the open access fleet, they target sablefish and some other species, but I know that they're not fully utilizing their sablefish.
They have bi weekly or bi monthly. I'm sorry, there's so many regulations I can't even keep up. But it's, I think it's bi monthly trip limits, and they are not, I think they have not been fully meeting their trip limits either, for various reasons.
[00:48:44] Speaker B: So, I mean, it's really the same problem that affects everyone in the food system. If you're a small operation, it's easy to get trampled by the big ones. How can our listeners learn more about and participate in your activities? You mentioned a dinner.
[00:49:01] Speaker C: Yes. So we have several dinners a year, usually about once a month, and we have a couple more coming up. In fact, next Wednesday night, August 7, we are having a dinner at Saltwood restaurant, which is in Marina, right off Reservation Road near the Sanctuary beach resort. They're a fairly new restaurant, and so we're having a great dinner there with them. On Wednesday, August 7. Please join us. And we have information on our website for how you can buy tickets.
And then in September, we are having our ten year anniversary seafood celebration in Monterey at the memory garden.
It's a Sunday afternoon and it's going to be a ball. We're going to have lots of different types of local seafood to taste and a silent auction and music. And if you've never been to the memory garden in Monterey, it's this beautiful old historic adobe. It's part of the state park system, and we hope that anyone and everyone is invited to attend. We have tickets online that can be purchased on our website, and we have early bird pricing through August 15. And then the other thing I want to encourage people to do is even if you, if you can't make it to one of our events, just look for local seafood where you can get it. If you live near Monterey, you can often get this time of year in the summer. You can get fresh halibut off the boat on Fridays and Saturdays, and you can sign up with the Monterey harbor office to receive notification of when the fishermen are going to be delivering.
Same thing in Santa Cruz. There are some boats that sell off the boat in Santa Cruz harbor, and if you follow us on social media, we repost when those fishermen are doing their thing. And so if you follow us, you'll be able to get in the flow of when certain fishermen are bringing back. Albacore will start happening pretty soon here in the fall. There's still halibut, there's rock crab in Santa Cruz harbor.
So make it a fun challenge. If you have never tried anything local or you've never been to one of our local harbors, they also sell fish consistently in moss Landing harbor, the boat Battisha sells fish.
So there's lots of opportunities. They're just a little hard to find, especially right now because we don't have a salmon season.
The fisheries are down in terms of the volume of what they're catching, but it is still out there and they do need our support more than ever.
[00:51:44] Speaker B: Well, I'm afraid we're out of time, but this has been a very interesting conversation, and I want to thank you for being my guest on sustainability now.
[00:51:53] Speaker C: Thanks, Ronnie. It's been great to talk with you.
[00:51:56] Speaker B: You've been listening to a sustainability now interview with Melissa Mahoney, executive director of the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] sustainabilitynow, as well as Spotify, YouTube and Pocketcasts among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make Ksquid your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next, every other Sunday sustainability now.
[00:52:34] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out. Temperate zones and tropic climbs are not. Through currents and thriving seas, winds blowing through breathing trees, strongholds on safe sunshine, good planets are hard to find. Yeah, good.
