Oregon Fishing Communities Build Business by Getting Along Swimmingly

Farms running community supported agriculture businesses, or CSAs, have multiplied across the United States in recent years. Under this practice, farms are able to raise revenues for their plantings by selling subscriptions to consumers, who receive boxes of products from the farm over the course of the season.

Now the concept has spread to another food sector: sustainable seafood. Patty Cantrell, a frequent contributor to Good Food on Every Table, writes in the article below about Port Orford Sustainable Seafood, a community supported fishery in Oregon. And she explains how this region has also spawned the Southwestern Oregon Food Systems Collaborative, made up of businesses, nonprofits and institutions in six Oregon communities.

Patty Cantrell is principal of Regional Food Solutions, a Missouri-based consulting firm that provides organizations and businesses with expert project development, writing, research, and facilitation — with a focus on the community economic development power that comes from supporting family-scale, place-based farms in their work to produce food that is healthy for people and the planet.

Her column was originally published on the blog of Wallace Center at Winrock International, a nonprofit organization that supports entrepreneurs and communities as they build a new, 21st century food system that is healthier for people, the environment, and the economy. To learn more about the Wallace Center, click here.

by Patty Cantrell, Regional Food Solutions, guest contributor

Seven years ago, Aaron Longton and a few fellow commercial fishermen from the small community of Port Orford, on Oregon’s rocky southwestern coast, struck out on their own. They pushed off from the global commodity markets they had supplied for years, for less and less return. They set sail for new markets on the promise of an emerging direct-to-consumer business model called Community Supported Fisheries.

The move to offer consumers advance shares of their local catch was not just for economic survival. The founders of Port Orford Sustainable Seafood were also motivated by their belief that building a brighter future for their families and neighbors means finding more productive ways to live off their land and the sea beside it.

“This is what we have to work with,” Longton said of the rolling waves and abundant stocks of tuna, Dungeness crab, salmon, and more under his boat. “We’re adjacent to this great resource. We need to take that and make it work for us.”

His words are like a mission statement for a larger group of businesses, nonprofits, and institutions in the area that are taking a new and radical approach to this challenge. They aim to build more community wealth from the region’s rich natural resources. Their strategy is to build new locally owned, mutual-aid supply chains across great market gaps that have formed in the wake of the region’s near-total focus on global commodity exports.

The Southwestern Oregon Food Systems Collaborative unites six port communities across Oregon’s southernmost counties: Coos, Curry, and Douglas. The “value chain” approach it is taking to economic development is showing signs of success in a region still reeling from the collapse of its timber industry. The approach also shows real potential for transitioning so many other, mostly rural places now caught between past economies of resource extraction and future economies of resource conservation.

Capacity building
The Collaborative formed when Rural Development Initiatives, an Oregon-based nonprofit serving the Pacific Northwest, invited communities in the state to explore economic development opportunities using a new framework called WealthWorks.

It is a process for identifying specific market-driven opportunities, exploring the many supply chain links needed to meet them, and building the business-to-business relationships that can bring the benefits home. Historical commodity approaches basically converted the region’s timber, agriculture, and fisheries into financial capital, which mostly left the area. This approach values and targets other types of wealth-building capital as well, such as the natural capital of sustainable fish populations and the intellectual capital in new products and processes.

The group confirmed that a top-level value chain opportunity for coastal southwestern Oregon is surging demand for local, sustainably caught, and premium-processed seafood.

“We’re exploring a couple dozen different value chains within seafood,” said Michelle Martin. She is director of economic development at Neighborworks Umpqua, the Collaborative’s coordinating agency. It won a two-year “value chain construction” grant from Rural Development Initiatives.

“Each boat size, each species, etc. has a different value chain,” she said.

Each also faces big challenges given the current industry structure. The mid-size range of seafood businesses is gone. The next generation of entrepreneurs, innovation, and investment is stranded. Growing demand for food that comes with fresher taste and less damage goes unmet. Deliberate development of supply chains across this middle, which serve people and places better, is what’s new and radical about the value chain approach.

Oregon’s industry landed 292 million pounds of seafood in 2014 worth $158 million. More than 80 percent is exported, however, and most of that is sold to just a couple of large international buyers. The catch travels frozen to places like China for processing before working its way back to Oregon dinner plates.

Cold storage, processing, distribution and other infrastructure that locals need to serve different market channels is now oversized, far away, or falling apart. New opportunities that languish as a result range from sashimi grade tuna and salmon for Asian and domestic markets to local fish for tourism, an equally important regional industry. In the meantime, many essential facilities, like the public Port of Port Orford, from which Aaron Longton and crew operate, tread water.

“If we can’t keep this dock running, the collateral damage to fishermen here would be huge,” said office manager Katie Dougherty. As much as one third of the work force around Port Orford (pop. 1,200) is directly involved in commercial fishing, with a catch worth upwards of $3 million each year.

“It’s pretty dynamic how losing this dock would affect families and other businesses here,” Dougherty said.

Shifting mindsets
It looks now, however, that the Port of Port Orford will not only stay afloat but also expand its services. Projections include 40 new jobs along with more revenue needed to secure the dock for the local seafood economy. The shift came about in part after the Collaborative introduced port authorities to some new entrepreneurial uses that an earlier plan, designed around the current industry structure, had not contemplated.