Over the summer, Brandon Hoeckel, a Unity College senior double majoring in Sustainable Agriculture and Environmental Writing, became a jack of all trades while interning at Wright鈥檚 Cove Farm and Glidden Point Oyster Farms. His internship melded three very different areas of focus: Aquaculture, agriculture, and media.
鈥淚t was a lot of new things for me,鈥� Hoeckel said. 鈥淚 hadn鈥檛 worked in aquaculture, I hadn鈥檛 managed a garden, and I was working with a website that was actively being used by a company.鈥�
In his role, Hoeckel planted, tilled the land, and oversaw where everything was going in a new garden at Glidden Point. He also managed Glidden Point鈥檚 website and took photos for the organization, and helped raise oysters at the organization鈥檚 small-scale nursery site at Wright鈥檚 Cove Farm in Northport. Oysters, Hoeckel explains, take about three years to get to normal production size, and when he left his internship in September, the oysters were only the size of a nickel or a dime.
Right now it鈥檚 a small-scale nursery site, oysters take about three years to get to normal production size, and so they鈥檙e very small at this point.
For Hoeckel, the summer internship helped him take a lot of the foundation he has learned at Unity College, and build on those to better understand how to manage the logistics of a sustainable business. Except for the aquaculture part, which was completely new to him, but he absorbed the information like a sponge.
鈥淚 know a ton about oysters on the Damariscotta River now,鈥� Hoeckel added.
*Photos by Brandon Hoeckel.
