In a modest building on the Knapps Narrows of the Eastern Shore, eight workers with Tilghman Island Seafood hoisted hefty blue catfish onto a counter, sliced off fillets and slapped them onto a conveyor belt, swept down the line to be processed into low-cost, high-protein food for tables around the country.

Each day, the Tilghman Island facility moves around 20,000 pounds of wild-caught blue catfish, a species invasive to the Chesapeake Bay that grows big, multiplies prolifically and eats just about whatever it can find — including struggling blue crab and rockfish populations.

Tilghman Island Seafood does its part to cull the blue catfish, but the region lost control of the population years ago.

“Little old me down here, I’m not going to solve this whole problem‚” said Nick Hargrove, Tilghman Island Seafood’s owner. “I need more fish to grow my business, but I can’t say that we’re winning the war.”

That fight is what brought U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, U.S. Rep. Andy Harris and Maryland Department of Agriculture officials to Hargrove’s processing plant Wednesday.

Rollins announced that her department is making $6 million in grants available to expand capacity for processing the Chesapeake’s wild-caught blue catfish, a step officials touted as the initial seed for a new commercial industry. For now, the national blue cat market largely revolves around farm-raised fish in Deep South states such as Mississippi and Alabama.

Rollins, tapped by President Donald Trump for agriculture secretary after his election last year, billed the grants as an opportunity to support jobs in rural communities, invest in the domestic seafood industry and help tackle the Chesapeake’s invasive species challenge.

Grants, through the USDA’s Meat and Poultry Processing Expansion Program, could range from $250,000 to $1 million, with applications due Oct. 6. The grants are available to processors in Maryland and Virginia, according to a USDA spokesperson.

In addition, officials announced that the USDA would purchase up to $2 million worth of Maryland blue catfish, which the federal agency uses for a program that supplies food banks and feeds low-income families.

Harris, the lone Republican in the Maryland delegation and head of Capitol Hill’s right-wing Freedom Caucus, said that to tackle blue catfish officials need to focus first on expanding and automating processing infrastructure in the Chesapeake region.

“The bottom line is, we have to do something,” Harris said. “I hope it’s not too late. I think it’s not — if we can get this going.”

There are hundreds of millions of pounds of blue catfish in the bay and its tributaries waiting to be caught, the congressman said. Once watermen have a place to land their catches, he believes blue catfish could “explode the Maryland seafood industry.”

Still, these grants are a drop in the bucket of the Chesapeake blue catfish problem: In some bay tributaries, blue catfish account for as much as 70% of the fish biomass.

Although blue catfish are popular eating in the Deep South, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources has waged a yearslong marketing campaign to convince people to eat these fish, posting recipes online and producing a “Jaws”-style spoof to explain the fish’s super predator status in the bay.

This summer, Democratic Rep. Sarah Elfreth introduced legislation on Capitol Hill to encourage a market for blue catfish in pet food. Maryland senators visited Tilghman Island last spring to tout an initial $3 million investment in the USDA program for catfish processing capacity, which is now rolling out.

In a statement Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen pointed to work he did “on a bipartisan basis” to secure funding for this initiative during the 2024 fiscal year.

Bolstering processing is one step toward addressing the catfish invasion, Van Hollen said, “which is why I’m glad to see the USDA is finally getting these resources out the door.”

Maryland’s commercial fishing industry reels in more and more catfish, landing 4.8 million pounds of blue catfish in 2024, up from 4.2 million the year before. Scientists expect it could take pulling out close to 30 million pounds per year to drive the population down.

Hargrove hopes to land money through the USDA program to automate processes at Tilghman Island Seafood. With another $1 million, he estimated he could double or even triple capacity at his facility, which last year processed around 2.6 million pounds of blue catfish.

Still, Hargrove said, officials can only be reactionary for now.

He described a recent outing that used electric shock to take stock of fish in a tributary. The method surfaced a “brilliant” number of little blue catfish, he said, a picture of the next generation that will soon command the bay.