SOUTH ADDISON – Last year, 1.1 million wriggling, writhing pounds of marine worms were harvested in Maine and sold for more than $7.9 million.

That’s millions upon millions of bloodworms and sandworms, and each one was plucked from the mud by hand. Worm digging, the state’s fourth-most-lucrative fishery, is one of those traditional Maine jobs that combines backbreaking labor with independence.

It’s more than a job. It’s a way of life.

Now, worm diggers Down East are afraid that a worm aquaculture company, the first to locate in Maine, is going to take away their sandworm business.

“The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer,” said Vinnie McLean Jr., a part-time worm digger from Addison, who has been doing this since he was 5. “There will be guys from Eastport to Machias who will have to be fed [by the state].”

Maine has a worldwide reputation for the quality of its worms, which are sold primarily as bait for recreational fishermen. But the state’s worm industry peaked 30 years ago and has been in decline ever since. Fewer fishermen are buying bait because of the popularity of artificial lures. And a worldwide explosion in worm aquaculture and cheap imports from Southeast Asia have been flooding the bait marketplace and lowering prices.

Now, worm diggers and brokers can put a face on what had been an anonymous threat.

Peter Cowin, who grew up in Massachusetts, was one of the first to perfect worm aquaculture techniques. He runs a successful British company called Seabait. Last winter, he came back to the United States to set up shop in Franklin, and he plans to begin selling farmed Maine sandworms later this year.

Aquaculture is controversial enough when farms are growing rare species like Atlantic salmon, but this will be the first case in which a Maine fish farm is in direct competition with a viable wild fishery.

Depending on whom you ask, Cowin has come to kill the Maine worm industry, or he will be its savior.

Killer or savior

In five months, Cowin can grow worms from larvae, which are invisible to the naked eye, to market size, between 6 and 8 inches long. In the wild, where the worms have to contend with cold winters and scarce food, that can take three years.

America beckoned Cowin because of an untapped market for worms as aquaculture feed. About 60 percent of Seabait’s 50 tons of annual worm production in England is sold to fish and shrimp farmers, many of whom are located in Central and South America. With a home base in Maine, Seabait can take advantage of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement to avoid import tariffs, reduce shipping costs and market a species native to the continent.

Maine was ideal both because of the state’s business incubator program, which has provided Seabait Maine with its temporary home at the Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center in Franklin and because of the support of the Maine Technology Institute. Seabait has received $20,000 in seed grants from MTI and is now using a $485,000 no-interest, short-term development loan.

But as much as he appreciates the state’s support, Cowin said that Seabait is also investing millions of its own money into the Maine subsidiary.

Over the next two years, Seabait Maine will lose money as it develops new aquaculture methods unique to this coast. In England, the primary worm farm is located outside, and water is heated at a very low cost by effluent from a nearby power plant. In Franklin, the climate is much colder, and there’s no easy heat source, so Cowin has designed a closed system that uses recirculated seawater and is protected inside from the outside environment.

“We could produce these cold-water species in Saudi Arabia,” he said.

Seabait learned a lot during its first years in England, including strategies to avoid polluting the local environment. And after watching the salmon- farming industry’s battles with environmental groups, Cowin decided to use only Maine sandworms as broodstock in his new facility.

“We didn’t think it was a good idea to start off asking for trouble,” he said.

Superworms

But trouble has found Seabait nonetheless.

The company produces something that it calls “maturation diet,” a worm with a chemical composition that increases farmed fish’s fertility. As Seabait’s marketing brochure says, this is a “highly enhanced product too good to be called a worm.” Cowin won’t explain exactly what Seabait does to the worms, saying only that “husbandry practices” that are trade secrets affect the worm’s hormones, which in turn affect the fish.

He emphatically denies that genetic engineering is involved.

But the idea that a race of superworms is living just a few miles away is one of the worries that has Maine’s worm diggers up in arms.

“It’s not a product of Maine, but that’s what he’s putting on his boxes,” said Ed Hagan, a bait dealer from Jonesport. “If this worm he’s growing up there gets into the wild, what effect will it have?” he asked.

Since it’s Maine’s first worm farm, Seabait isn’t yet being regulated as an aquaculture operation. Cowin promises to act responsibly and cites his good reputation in England, but worm diggers want more assurance.

Hagan has collected signatures and sent petitions to the governor, state regulatory agencies and Maine’s congressional delegation.

The environmental concerns loom large, but what really frightens him is the possibility that these superworms will destroy his business. Already, shrimp farms in Venezuela have canceled orders, and Hagan blames Seabait for undercutting his prices.

“I’m fearful of the big corporation that comes in to squeeze out the little guy,” he said. “They play by a different set of rules.”

The wild fishery’s vulnerability to nature makes everything more difficult.

“It’s going to be very hard to compete because of the things that we’re subjected to – the weather, the tides,” Hagan said. “It clearly puts us at a disadvantage.”

Cowin believes that worm diggers and worm aquaculture can coexist, serving different niches within a broadening market.

“It will be a long time before worms can be farmed cheaper than digging,” he said.

Farmed worms are bigger and more reliably available, plus they are biosecure, meaning they can’t carry disease or pollution from the wild, Cowin said.

Seabait has done market research suggesting that fishermen and fish farmers are willing to pay 10 percent or even 20 percent higher than the going market price for these “premium worms.” Seabait aims for nothing less than the top 10 percent of the market worldwide, Cowin said.

“We’re in a race to grow and harvest worms to meet that premium market,” he said. “[Worm diggers] don’t realize what’s happening out there. They’ll be left behind by the world industry.”

Hagan was born into the bait business in Jonesport, and he,too, sees change coming.

“I know that aquaculture is coming. It’s here to stay. It’s just [a question of] who it’s going to benefit and how many jobs it’s going to cost.”

Butting heads

There are just over 1,000 licensed worm diggers in Maine, according to the Department of Marine Resources. Regulations are almost nonexistent, and there’s no worm association lobbying for the diggers in Augusta.

“Right now, we’re kind of all butting heads,” said Hagan, who’s working to start an association. “If we had come together 20 years ago, we would be the ones getting the research and development funding. It’s our own fault … we made it very easy for him to do.”

Hagan thinks that Seabait has a responsibility to share its knowledge and technology with local diggers, who could sorely use the boost that a new aquaculture business would create.

“There are not any multimillionaires in the bait business,” he said.

But that’s not how business works. Cowin is willing to work with local diggers on projects to boost the Maine worm industry as a whole, and he might even consider a worm hatchery, but he isn’t going to share trade secrets with potential competitors.

“It’s in my interest that the worm industry does well,” Cowin said. “In the U.K. in 17 years, we never put a worm digger out of business.”

With a joint effort, the lucrative bait market, which is being overtaken by cheap imports and artificial lures, can be won back, Cowin said, citing a market price of $30 per pound or more for good quality worms. The aquaculture market is growing all the time, and there’s room for wild and farmed stocks, he said.

The first Seabait Maine worms will begin to meet that demand when they go on sale later this year. A 50-ton annual harvest is scheduled to begin in 2005.

The short timeline just lights a fire under Ed Hagan, who isn’t convinced by Cowin’s talk of cooperation.

“We’re at the eleventh hour,” he said. “If we’re going to save this industry, it has to happen now.”