From our landlocked Farm at the top of Science Hill, you might forget that New Haven is a coastal city. Not so for Emily Farr YC ’14 YSE ’17. After getting degrees in Geology and Environmental Management, Farr embarked on a career in aquatic food systems. Previously, she was a Fishery Management Specialist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She now works as Senior Fisheries Program Manager at Manomet, a nonprofit that uses science and collaboration to protect coastal ecosystems. She spoke with YSFP communications manager Sadie Bograd ’25 about the challenges and opportunities facing Maine’s fisheries.
This conversation is part of a Voices series about the exciting work YSFP alumni are doing in the worlds of food and agriculture. The transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
What does it mean to be a senior fisheries program manager? What does your day-to-day job look like?
At Manomet, we're focused on building resilience in the fishing community in the Gulf of Maine. The area is changing rapidly due to climate change, gentrification, and other pressures that are happening along the coast. I support the fishing community and coastal communities in responding and adapting to that change. I work with shellfish harvesters out on the mudflats, I work with river herring harvesters. I do a lot of convening, bringing people together to share what they're learning and hearing and seeing, and then figuring out how we can collaboratively address the challenges they're facing.
Could you describe the landscape that you're working in?
There are fisheries that take place far out in the ocean, but the fisheries that I work in are mainly coastal. I primarily work with the shellfish fishery, which is mostly wild clams, both soft shell and hard shell. Those clams live in the mudflats, which are in the intertidal zone, between the high tide and the low tide line. Harvesters often walk out onto the flat; sometimes they take a boat. They often use a clam rake to get the clams out of the mud at low tide, while the mudflats are exposed.
And the river herring fishery — Maine is actually the only state that has a commercial fishery for river herring. The species spends most of its life in the ocean, then comes up into lakes and ponds to spawn in the spring. Some harvesters use nets, some of them have traps. In all of those cases, they're harvesting just a portion of the run and letting much of it continue upriver to spawn. It's a really cool fishery, because the harvesters are the stewards of that resource. They're responsible for monitoring it, for sending data to the state to help manage it, and so they play a critical role in making sure that it's a healthy species.
Why are fisheries so important and what challenges are they facing?
Fisheries, like all food production systems, are an important livelihood for thousands of people. Maine coastal communities are culturally and economically dependent on fisheries. Like people who farm, people who fish are always coming up with new ways to adapt to the pressures that they're facing. But that's not always easy to do, and it often requires support and collaboration.
One of the biggest changes to ocean ecosystems today is that the water is warming quickly and species are shifting their ranges. Many of the species that people have long harvested in the Northeast are either moving North or moving further offshore, and new species are coming in. For example, lobsters are the most important fishery in Maine, and their range has started to shift. They are fished using pots — traps at the bottom with vertical lines in the water column. There have been increasing entanglements with right whales, not necessarily from the lobster fishery, but entanglement is a big risk, and it's a very endangered whale. The whale populations are also shifting, in part because their food source, plankton, is changing in its relative abundance. So climate change is creating all of these shifts in the places where species are and where their food is and where people are fishing, and it's creating these new conflicts with no easy solutions.
I also mentioned gentrification along the coast. I work with shellfish harvesters who have to cross private property to access the intertidal mudflats where they work. They rely on informal agreements with landowners, but there's been a lot of turnover. Many of the new landowners don't understand that traditional use of the coast, so these harvesters are losing access.
How are you responding to that coastline development and privatization?
In Maine, shellfish are managed collaboratively between the state and municipalities. Each town is responsible for stewarding its own shellfish resource. We've been sitting down with the shellfish committees of the towns that we work closely with and mapping out where they currently access the coast to harvest. That hadn't been captured for a variety of reasons, partly because some of that information is sensitive and confidential: as a harvester, I might have a relationship with this landowner, and they allow me to cross their property to get to the flats, but they might not allow every other harvester in town to do that. But everyone agreed that change is happening so rapidly that we need to sit down and document where access is, and then figure out creative ways to preserve it. That looks like working with land trusts and thinking about easements on private property, or acquiring land that the town can use to allow access. The harvesters are doing landowner appreciation days, where they bring landowners together and share, “This is why clams are important. Let's all eat clams together, talk about the resource, build some relationships and trust.”
And what are some of the adaptations that you're investigating on the climate change side?
Another species that's been increasing in abundance in the Gulf of Maine is the invasive green crab. It's originally from Europe, and it's been in the Gulf of Maine for 200 years — it came over mostly in ballast water from ships. But it's really exploded in abundance as the water has warmed because it's a super resilient species. The green crab is an extremely voracious predator of shellfish, clams in particular, and it's creating a real pressure on that important resource. One of the things that we've been working on is developing a commercial fishery for green crabs, to help relieve that pressure on the ecosystem and create a new fishing opportunity for harvesters.
Are there difficulties that arise in trying to convene people from so many different groups? Or unexpected partnerships?
It's always challenging when people are speaking different languages and are coming from different backgrounds. Fishers, scientists, managers — their day-to-day lives look really different. But I think there's great success that comes out of bringing all those groups together on a regular basis. It really requires trust, and it requires true relationships.
I facilitate a network of people working on river herring. There are harvesters, there are communities that volunteer to count the river herring as they're coming back into ponds, there are tons of scientists, there are managers at the state and federal and local level. We have this network that brings people together to share information and talk about what questions they want to answer and how they can partner. It’s been really gratifying to see how, as that network has continued, new relationships have formed. People are meeting outside of it to collaborate on projects. It’s slowly building trust, and that’s really great to see.
What have been the barriers to building trust in the past?
Both fishermen and the management community are under different pressures and different mandates, and it's hard to be in someone else's shoes. There have also been regulatory decisions that people didn't agree with, and that has eroded trust. There wasn't necessarily a ton of listening from the management side in the past, and I think we've gotten better in that department. But trust is something that you have to earn, and it takes time. And it's harder to build back when it's lost.
One of the biggest examples in New England is the groundfish fishery, which includes cod. There was a population collapse in the 1990s, which led to new regulations, including the institution of a ‘catch shares’ system that allocated the right to fish based on your historic participation in the fishery. This was a problem for some of the smaller-scale fishers who had relied on the fishery but didn't have a huge amount of harvest, or who didn't fish for a few years, and so didn't end up getting access when the regulation changed. That created real conflict.
Our work at Manomet is pretty much completely driven by what the fishing communities want to see. We're guided by their ideas and perspectives and knowledge. I think that's really important, because they've historically been excluded from decision-making arenas.
Could you tell me more about your roles at the YSFP?
Oh, man. What roles didn't I have? I started as a farm intern the summer after my sophomore year, after volunteering every now and again. Then I was a farm manager for the next few years. I took notes at staff meetings for a semester. And then I spent the summer before grad school helping to support the summer internship work. When I was at YSE, I helped to manage the berms and the perennial beds.
Did your work on the Farm influence your choice of career or teach you any skills that you use now?
Definitely. My undergraduate geology degree was focused on climate science. Working at the Yale Sustainable Food Program, I was interested in the connection between food systems and climate change. I thought that fisheries and the ocean were an interesting place where those two things meet. When I did the summer internship, we visited the farm that Bren Smith was starting at the time. He now runs GreenWave, but he was growing and still grows kelp and oysters. We went out on his boat to see the farm and learn about that operation. That was one of my first real introductions to growing and harvesting seafood from the sea.
He talked about how he was using seaweed and oysters as both carbon cycling and buffering from storm surge. To me, that really clicked as, “We're growing food, and we're thinking about climate resilience at the same time. What does that look like in other parts of the ocean and in other seafood systems?” It was a really formative experience for me.