SARDINES : Hardy Maine Canners Cling to an Imperiled Industry, Life Style

Robert Peacock, 62, president of the R. J. Peacock Canning Co., stood in front of the cannery that bears his grandfather’s name and held a rectangular, 3 3/4-ounce can of his firm’s Admiral-brand sardines.

“This town was built on sardines, lives on sardines. Sardines are a way of life with me and the rest of the Lubecers. And we want to keep it that way,” Peacock said.

But sardine canneries are close to being an endangered species in Maine, the only state in the nation with a sardine industry.

In 1952, Maine’s peak year for sardines--and around the time overfishing killed the industry in California--there were 52 sardine canneries in the state, nine of them in Lubec. Foreign competition and other problems, however, have left Maine with only nine sardine canneries, including two in Lubec, America’s easternmost town. Two of the state’s canneries went belly up just last year.

Health Benefits

Not that people have stopped eating sardines.

“Sardine consumption shot up dramatically in America last year because of the public’s awareness of the health benefits from the fish, a terrific source of calcium,” said Robert Vogelsberg, 56, supervisor of sardine inspection for Maine’s Department of Agriculture.

“We should be opening new sardine canneries, not closing them. We should be modernizing the ones we have left to compete effectively with imports,” Vogelsberg insisted.

He said imports were up 29% last year, and that the nation’s sardine consumption now is 3.5 million cases annually.

The sardine catch fluctuates greatly one year to the next. Last year, Maine produced 660,000 cases--100 of the 3 3/4-ounce cans to a case. At $40 a case to the cannery, the value of the pack was $26.4 million. That was down from 1985, when Maine sardine canneries packed 885,000 cases worth $34.2 million.

Back in bustling 1952, the 52 canneries packed 3.2 million cases, although they sold for only $6.66 a case.

Vogelsberg, standing on a wharf outside the Booth fisheries sardine cannery in Lubec across from a closed can factory, pointed out to sea, to New Brunswick’s Grand Manan Island.

“While Maine shuts down sardine factories, Canada builds new ones. On Grand Manan, 14 miles from here as the crow flies, Connors Brothers Ltd. is erecting a new, $2.7-million sardine cannery,” the sardine expert said.

Canadian Subsidies

“The Canadian government is subsidizing the construction of that plant, providing the company with an interest-free loan. The Canadian government subsidizes fishing boats. It builds docks for the canneries,” Vogelsberg said.

“Portugal, Japan, Spain, Taiwan and other countries are flooding our market with cheap sardines. That’s why it’s tough to compete.”

Sardines are caught by Canadian and American fishermen along the coast of Maine and New Brunswick. It is done by fishermen who use purse seines, nets resembling an upside-down tobacco pouch, or weirs. Those are huge pilings staked to the bottom of the sea and wrapped in nylon netting with an entrance gate--a trap set up near shore into which fish swim during high tide.

Canneries on both sides of the international line buy from fishermen in both countries. The fish know no boundaries. Sometimes more are caught on the Canadian side, sometimes more on the American side. It’s long been that way.

In the Booth Fisheries plant, 99 women and one man on the production line work feverishly with flashing scissors, snipping off heads and tails of sardines and stuffing them into the traditional rectangular sardine cans. In an eight-hour day, said plant manager Peter Boyce, 43, the packers can do about 1,000 cases.

At the R. J. Peacock plant, Robert Peacock had a production line with 135 women. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I couldn’t hire another 15 or 20 women but the workers are not available. A woman on welfare gets $20 a week less than women working here. It really doesn’t pay for her to work. By the time she pays a baby-sitter she loses money by working,” he lamented.

“You ask why don’t I pay them more. No way can I compete with Canada and other foreigners if I do. The margin is that close. That’s one reason why the canneries are dying,” Peacock said.

Jeff Kaelin, 36, executive director the the Maine Sardine Council, a state agency, agreed that the industry is having problems hiring sardine packers when more attractive job opportunities than working in a fish plant are available.

“But there are bright spots in the industry as well as problems,” said Kaelin. “Sardines are small or half-grown herring canned in soybean oil. The sardine canneries are developing a new market, herring steaks, the same fish but a larger fish packed in the same type cans.”

He noted that in 1980, Maine sardine canneries produced only 2,000 cans of herring steak. Last year, the canneries produced 286,000 cases, bringing $16 million in sales to the canneries on top of the $26.4 million for the sardines.

“We’re hanging in there, our industry is leveling off and stabilizing.