sustainably farmed mussels may be the
perfect food
they're healthy delicious and they
filter the water around them as they
grow
meaning everyone wins the problem is
they're cheap
they're heavy and they require a lot of
labor so it's hard to sell them at a
profit
one of the ways it's done is by creating
muscle farms on giant
mussel rafts in the middle of the ocean
which protect the mussels from predators
and make harvesting more efficient
so today i'm out in portland maine to
find out how bang's island mussels uses
high-tech machinery and organization
to turn this highly sustainable protein
source into a legitimate business
the day starts at 5am when the morning
team gets in to load the boat up with
ice and mussels from the previous day's
harvest that need longer to grow
from there they set out to one of their
six sites in casco bay to start the long
process of getting mussels out of the
water and into the hands of chefs across
the country
so what is a mussel raft it's a 40 by 40
foot square
that floats in the water year round and
we actually hang muscle lines
from the raft into the water and the
muscles actually grow on those lines
that's these each one of these ropes is
full of muscles okay
so let's take a peek oh yeah that's
awesome
yeah they're kind of heavy here we go
these are almost market ready bangs on
muscles okay so obviously like one of
the things you guys have to do
is make new lines constantly
yeah first step in the process is
seating so we'll take one of these lines
cover it with muscle seed and put in the
water bangs island creates new lines of
mussels
in two ways they drop empty lines once a
year during spawning season
and more commonly they create lines out
of tiny seed muscles and muscles that
are too small to be sold
so this is the muscle cedar so
essentially you put
little guys in here and we make muscle
sausage it's pretty much that simple
so we've already got an empty line here
which we refer to as a
fuzzy rope because it's nice and fuzzy
has a lot of texture
yeah that's great stuff that the mussels
like to biss onto it gives them a lot of
surface area
now we'll load on our cotton sock which
is why this is referred to as a socking
machine
this will encompass the muscles around
the line
all right let's get them down there all
right that sounds great
that is so cool and over time this
cotton
will biodegrade it's basically just a
temporary
encasing so that the muscles have time
to send out their bissell thread their
beards their roots if you will
right adhere to that line cotton bar
degrades away
and the mussels take its place would you
use this for other shellfish as well
for mussels only because mussels only
grow the bissell threads
beards is that part of what makes
mussels so efficient to grow
absolutely the whole system is designed
to have the mussels hold themselves on
the line so it becomes very efficient
you can do
a lot of quantity in a small space in a
short time
pinch it off it really is sausage
absolutely
and then we let it go this is what takes
muscle farming to the next level
it's a way to control our density it's a
way to
create consistent sizing throughout the
year which is what
we try to strive for
all right so this is the moment we've
been waiting for we're gonna pull some
muscles out of the water
yes we are so we're taking our slide
right now off the boat
we're gonna set it up between the raft
and the boat so we have a nice
smooth platform to haul the muscle lines
from the raft onto the boat
so the first step is clip the hauling
line to the muscle line
so you don't lose a line and then you
untie it from the raft and let it all
fall
gets hauled up just like that
we got muscles yeah
this is almost exactly what we want to
see we want to see a lot of muscles that
are the same size
and big so this is our ideal muscle size
for bangs island muscles
so you can sort of see yeah the
difference here like big muscle little
muscle these ones are too small these
will go back in the water
right so this muscle will go back in the
cedar that we've already seen absolutely
and
it'll grow to be harvested another day
so what else is going on the ropes
each muscle line is like its own little
ecosystem so these have been hanging out
in the water these have been growing for
two years or over two years
so not only do we have some really
fantastic big ass muscles sorry big
muscles on here big ass muscles is fine
all right but we also have uh the other
organisms that have been growing along
with it so we have some obsidians
also known as sea squirts barnacles
there are some algae
there's a lot of things that grow in the
water so you never get like a perfectly
clean muscle
that's why all this gear is important it
makes it nice and clean and pretty and
ready for market
all right so i'm going to turn this on
the hauler's going to spin
the muscles are going to come up and if
you want you can help sort of push them
off the line
so you want to push even before they get
to the stripper gotcha
it just helps here we go okay
oh yeah
that was it you did a great job though
nice job
okay this is what we start with this is
the raw products
there's all kinds of mud yeah all kinds
of sea squirts
small mussels and then we have all this
fancy gear to help us make
nice clean market ready muscles at the
end of the day
all the weird stuff that's going on here
kind of makes me feel like there's more
earth than life in the muscles it's a
dynamic environment it's a
full of life exactly you know what i
mean if there was not a lot growing on
these muscles
they probably wouldn't be growing very
good muscles so it goes up the conveyor
belt all this stuff is
specifically built for our farm and then
it feeds into the clumper which is as
simple as it sounds
it's a machine that declumps muscles
breaks up the clumps
that's the result individual muscles and
the idea is they're all broken up and
clean
but the muscles themselves aren't broken
this is our vibrating
size grater so obviously vibrates
and moves the muscles along and grades
them by size so the small ones the seed
falls through
and the market size muscles we put into
these insulated bins so that whatever
falls through here we're putting back in
the water and our
in our sausage yep we're gonna sock them
back down in the sausage exactly
[Music]
so like a typical day on the boat is you
come out you say
i need 10 bins or i need 20 bins yeah
exactly yeah today we need probably 10
of these and another
10 totes it's a volume game with mussels
because they don't cost a lot you have
to do a lot of them
so we really need all this automation
and this crew
to be able to do the volume that that
works for our business
you know to make a business out of it
can you actually eat them in this stage
yeah
you want to eat some yeah that's good
okay so you basically
take it and
you slide it in you kind of have to cut
the muscle in half as you do it
and you can open it up
kind of messy there we go
yeah it's kind of like a richer more
briny oyster
exactly like fattier creamier right yeah
that's really good they're really good
probably a pain in the ass or a
restaurant to do that but i guess they
could
i guess they could do that because just
like when you cook them they open and
they're like
perfect this is not this isn't as
inviting exactly so we've still got a
lot to do today we're halfway we're
halfway there
it's time to go back inside and process
these muscles to get them out of here
absolutely from here the team brings the
day's hall back to the processing
facility where they have to take the
beards off
polish and pack the muscles for
distribution using another
line of super high-tech machinery
[Music]
okay so this is the final processing
where we take the beards off
inspect pack bag weigh and ship let's
clean some muscles yeah load it in
all the way nice well done that's really
satisfying
let's go
okay so from here the muscles are just
being loaded through this hopper
this is just transfer right this isn't
actually doing anything exactly yep
just transfer onto the conveyor and the
first step in this process
is de-bissing it's actually conceptually
pretty simple there's a series of rods
that have teeth
and they spin against each other and
they grab the bissell threads
and clip it off it makes all the
difference in the world i mean we could
not do this by hand
at all it does not work this is the
beard separated from the muscle
it's just all kinds of fibrous stuff in
there the beards of a thousand wizards
that's right
so once they've been debased or bearded
they flow down
onto the inspection conveyor where we
have several people standing on either
side
taking through all the muscles to make
sure only the best get through to our
customers
it takes a lot of work to do this step
that'd be really diligent and focused
so we're looking for a few things we're
looking for anything that's cracked
broken anything that's dead or open
and then anything that's too ugly right
i love conveyor belts so much i mean it
makes all the difference in the world
can you imagine doing all these steps
without any conveyors in between them
the beginning of the company we did that
and uh we took the place of conveyor by
shoveling
we would shovel all the muscles in
between the machines so you're much
slower yeah way slower
the muscles after they've been inspected
fall on the table
we'll do a final hand grade to weed out
any sub market size
they'll fall through the grates and be
reseeded later
and it can't take too long because we
have several thousand pounds to get
through
all right you're saying i was being slow
yeah too slow too slow
so this is a pretty fancy looking piece
of machinery here yeah
so this is the automatic bagger wear
conveyor
okay muscles go into the hopper then
they come up the belt
two belts on this conveyor one for the
big one for the little
so this is the gross weight so it feels
a lot fast and then this is the fine
adjustment
which you know fine-tunes the actual
weight to load up the bag right here and
then release it with this bar
and the appropriate amount of muscles
falls in the bag
thank you should we go cook up some
muffles yeah let's do it
wine butter plenty of butter shallots
garlic simple classic so yeah we have
some beautiful bangs island mussels
right here
you'll notice they're larger than
average size
what you don't see right now and you
will see soon is the huge
meat yield and that's a tribute to the
way we grow the mussels but also
um the sights that we have they're just
very special
oh look at that these babies
okay so this is what you're looking for
you want you want the meat pulled away
from the shell like this
absolutely these are aliens
these are monsters cheers cheers all
right
yeah i think that's just the best muscle
i've ever had that's amazing that's
sweet
yeah it's just i can't imagine how you
would eat something like this
especially coming from you guys and not
see that you're that it's just such like
a good
thing for the world and it's delicious i
couldn't agree more
why thank you so much for
for having us today touring us around
it's my pleasure thanks for joining us
so these muscles have been your pump i
can't tell you how much deep
sounds like yiddish
i love it