Customer Corner : Cooke Aquaculture – Cummins-Powered Shit-Factories Churning Out Escapes, Poison And Dead Lobsters While The Seabed Pays The Price

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Welcome to another instalment of TCAP’s Customer Corner, where we drag into the spotlight the corporate clients happily fuelling their dirty operations with Cummins gear. Cooke Aquaculture, the Canadian family empire that grew fat on open-net salmon pens from New Brunswick to Chile, is one more stain in the ecosystem TCAP has been exposing. Cummins keeps the boats moving. Cooke keeps the pollution flowing. Business as usual in the race to the bottom.

These are not charming little fish farms. These are floating feedlots crammed with Atlantic salmon, shitting, dying and leaking waste straight into coastal waters that once supported wild runs, lobsters and actual marine life.

Cooke sells the usual polished line: sustainable, responsible, community-minded, family-owned. The record says something filthier. Mass escapes. Toxic discharges. Illegal pesticides. Dead lobsters. Regulatory fines. Lawsuits. Seabed sludge. The whole glossy salmon racket with a corporate brochure stapled over the smell.

And in the background, the engines keep turning.

Cummins has proudly featured Cooke’s custom power barges, fitted with Cummins QSL9 engines, as useful bits of marine muscle for fish-farm operations. That is the Customer Corner point. The scandal is not just what Cooke does. It is the ecosystem that helps keep the machinery running while everyone else gets the bill.

The Escape Artists – When “Secure” Pens Become Open Prisons

Take the 2017 Cypress Island clusterfuck in Washington state.

A net-pen failure released about 250,000 Atlantic salmon into Puget Sound. Non-native farmed salmon flooding waters already struggling with wild salmon decline. Investigators pointed to poor maintenance, excessive biofouling and nets weighed down by marine growth because cleaning them properly was apparently too much like work.

Cooke initially low-balled the scale, blamed unusual tides and even pointed towards the solar eclipse timing. Then the facts got inconvenient.

Washington fined the company, cancelled leases, and the whole sorry episode helped drive the state’s move away from non-native finfish farming in public waters. Eventually, the state went further and banned commercial finfish net-pen farming in state-owned waters altogether.

That is what happens when a “secure” fish pen becomes an open prison with the door blown off.

It was not just a bad day with a broken net. Smaller escapes have peppered Cooke’s wider operations too. In Maine’s Cobscook Bay in 2023, around 50,000 juvenile salmon escaped after seals tore through netting.

Every breakout carries the same ugly risk: disease spread, competition with wild stocks, genetic pressure, and another round of corporate shrugging dressed up as operational regret.

Shit happens, apparently.

Especially when preventing it costs more than apologising for it.

Pollution Paradise – Open-Net Pens And The Seabed Bill

Open-net pens are basically giant marine toilets with no flush.

Fish faeces, uneaten feed, dead carcasses, sea lice, treatment residues and whatever else gets pumped into the operation all sink, drift and spread into public waters. The fish stay boxed in. The waste does not.

In Maine, the Conservation Law Foundation has had enough. In January 2025, CLF filed a Clean Water Act lawsuit against Cooke Aquaculture USA, alleging years of continuing permit violations across 13 active cage sites.

The complaint alleges discharges of fish waste, uneaten feed, blood, dead fish, sea lice, disease, warm water and undisclosed delousing chemicals into waters that support lobster grounds and coastal ecosystems.

Cooke calls the claims false and misleading.

Of course it does.

But the wider pattern is not exactly a mystery. Maine regulators have already fined Cooke over biomass exceedances and permit breaches. Newfoundland has seen its own grim show, with mass mortalities, warm-water events, sea lice problems, plastic waste complaints and abandoned gear adding to the industry’s usual floating rubbish heap.

The business model is beautifully simple.

Privatise the salmon. Socialise the filth.

The Pesticide Slaughter – When Sea Lice Control Means Lobster Death

Back in 2009 and 2010, Cooke subsidiary Kelly Cove Salmon decided approved sea lice treatments were not doing the job.

So it used cypermethrin.

That is an agricultural pesticide. It was not permitted for marine use in Canada. It is toxic to crustaceans. Which is a problem when you are operating in lobster waters and not on some spreadsheet where dead animals can be converted into a line item.

Hundreds of lobsters turned up dead around Deer Island and Grand Manan. Environment Canada charged the company and three executives, including CEO Glenn Cooke.

In 2013, Kelly Cove pleaded guilty to two Fisheries Act offences and paid a $500,000 penalty. The executive charges disappeared. The company got to call it an isolated incident. Locals got dead lobsters and another lesson in how corporate accountability usually works.

The salmon kept swimming.

The lawyers did their bit.

The sea floor took the hit.

Chile Calling – When Even Flexible Regulation Snaps Back

Cooke’s record does not stop at the Canadian border.

In Chile, the Superintendencia del Medio Ambiente confirmed eight infractions at three Cooke-linked farms in the Aysén region, including sites near Laguna San Rafael National Park.

The findings included overproduction, structures outside concession boundaries, missing contingency plans and wildlife-related failures. The regulator ordered temporary closures at two farms and fines reportedly topping roughly USD $1.4 million.

Cooke appealed. Courts have gone back and forth. The legal machinery keeps grinding.

But the message remains the same: even in a jurisdiction often accused of letting industrial aquaculture run hot, Cooke still managed to leave a regulatory stink strong enough to trigger enforcement.

Different coastline.

Same stench.

Death, Damage And The Marketing Gloss

Worker safety has not escaped the mess either.

In 2022, in New Brunswick, Cooke employee Zachary Dobbin died after falling from a ladder at a wharf. Kelly Cove pleaded guilty to a workplace safety violation and paid a modest $6,000.

That is the human side of the machinery. Barges, feed systems, engines, hydraulics, wharves, boats, weather, time pressure and corporate production targets all wrapped in the same industrial aquaculture package.

Then there is the animal side.

Undercover footage from a 2019 Maine hatchery showed rough handling of deformed and diseased fish, including workers bashing fish against posts. Cooke blamed inadequate training. The images stuck anyway.

That is always the problem with glossy sustainability theatre.

Eventually someone sees behind the curtain.

And behind this one, the fish were not exactly enjoying the performance.

Cummins Connection – Keeping The Floating Sewage Fleet Running

Here is where TCAP comes in.

None of this operation happens without hardware.

Cooke uses marine equipment to service its salmon farms. Cummins has publicly showcased Cooke’s custom 40-by-20-foot power barges in Atlantic Canada, fitted with Cummins QSL9 engines delivering 280 hp. Those barges move supplies, gear and workers between farms and shore. They are practical. They are sturdy. They are exactly the kind of machinery that keeps industrial aquaculture moving.

Cummins presented the design as a functional success story.

TCAP sees the other half of the picture.

A functional power barge is still functional when it serves a filthy business model. An engine does not stop being reliable because the operation it supports leaves pollution, dead lobsters, escaped fish and regulatory files in its wake.

That is the Customer Corner point.

Cummins does not need to own the fish pens to profit from the machinery around them. It does not need to write Cooke’s sustainability copy to sit inside the supply chain that helps keep the system running.

Cooke gets the salmon.

Cummins gets the engine sale.

The seabed gets the bill.

Another Customer, Same Dirty Engine Room

This is industrial aquaculture stripped bare.

Cram the fish. Cut the corners. Deny the allegations. Pay the occasional fine. Appeal the regulator. Sponsor the local good-news story. Repeat until the seabed looks like a corporate ashtray.

Cooke will keep talking about sustainability, family values and responsible seafood. Fine. Every filthy industry has a brochure department.

But the record is there in black and white: escapes, enforcement, lawsuits, dead lobsters, pesticide abuse, mass mortalities and coastal communities expected to swallow the smell.

And somewhere in the background, a Cummins engine is ready for the next feed run, the next service trip, the next clean-up job, the next “isolated incident” in an industry that seems to produce an awful lot of isolated incidents.

Another Cummins customer.

Another dirty machine.

Another chapter in the same grubby story TCAP refuses to let die.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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