$15 million federal grant will fund fishing tech projects
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- U.S. National Science Foundation awarded a $15 million grant in late July to a coalition of New England fishing advocates, oceanographic researchers, and tech companies to develop tools for commercial fishermen and bolster the regional seafood industry from harvest to processing.
- UMass Dartmouth's School for Marine Science and Technology will develop a 'third eye' camera system that lets captains see what's flowing into their nets in real time, reducing bycatch that can push boats over their regulated species quotas.
- Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen's Alliance will develop autonomous robots to detect underwater hazards like high temperatures and low-oxygen 'hypoxia' pockets — conditions that can leave traps coming up full of dead lobsters.
- New Bedford has lost at least 150 seafood processing jobs since 2023, with Blue Harvest Fisheries shutting its processing center in 2023 (64 jobs) and True North Seafood closing in 2024 (up to 94 layoffs).
- $500,000 of the federal funds is earmarked for 'supply chain roadmapping' to assess how deeply the region's seafood processing industry has declined after jobs moved overseas to cheaper, higher-volume operations.
- Jake Kritzer, executive director of the lead recipient organization, described the industry as 'fairly risk-adverse' due to economic struggles, noting the NSF is now absorbing the risk of innovation that fishermen cannot afford to test.
- Northeastern Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems is leading the coalition, with Kritzer calling the cross-supply-chain push 'a little bit uncharted territory' for the research group.
Why it matters: With at least 150 New Bedford processing jobs lost since 2023 and nobody having done a comprehensive analysis of the decline, the $500,000 earmarked just for supply-chain roadmapping shows how little baseline data exists about how badly the sector has hollowed out. Kritzer's acknowledgment that the NSF is now 'incurring that risk' for a cash-strapped industry reframes the grant as a public bailout of innovation the private sector can no longer fund.
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