To put out a main line you drill holes in the rocks on shore and put in anchor bolts and cement those in, and then the main line attaches to these bolts from shore to shore. Attached on that rope is a collector rope, and the mussel spawn attaches to that. When a year is up, the collectors are ready to strip. And there are always new collectors ready to go back in the water. It's an ongoing cycle.

When you strip the seeds off the collectors, you put them through a socking table. This table is water-fed, and the mussels are forced down a tube into a "grow out" sock. That's like a long sock made of plastic web. For every foot of sock, I believe, it's 250 mussels. The grow out sock is reattached to a main line that is strung from shore to shore. And they're on this line for another year, maybe a year and a half, depending on the growth rate. Then we harvest them. The mussels that are too small for the processing plant, we resock them and put them back in the water, give them maybe about a year and reharvest them. So actually there's very little waste coming out of the plant.