Oyster Farming in the Southern United States Using the OysterGro System

these handcrafted horses that we grow take on the flavor of their environment for us it's hundreds of thousands of acres of Spartina grass ocean water in and that's unique to your Beaufort our rivers don't have any freshwater influence you can actually smell the ocean in the oyster when you put it up to your palate and then you need to put it in your mouth and you start chewing it you're releasing those those phytoplankton is that this moisture has been eating on just like a good fresh salad one company has had a chef describe theirs is more like a cashew sort of flavor to them so you start to get into that whole spectrum of the mer water as they call it when Donnie first told me about this I told him he was crazy I never once thought I'd tell people I was an oyster farmer this is our spawning system each adult oyster gets its own spawning container each container has its own water source we manipulate temperature on the system and that's what causes the oysters to spawn once the spawning process is done we collect all the eggs we take a sample of sperm from all the males and then put that in a bucket of seawater with the eggs to fertilize the eggs then we take the eggs to the microscope we'll make sure that the eggs are developing properly and we'll get an estimation of how many of the eggs are fertilized from that point then they go into our larval tanks that is approximately 8 million oyster larvae it's just where the baby oysters live for about the first 14 to 21 days their life depending on water temperature their development is very much temperature dependent the air that's going through the tank is helping to keep the food distributed after about 14 to 21 days they develop a little eye spot and that eye spot indicates that the oyster is ready to settle this on a hard substrate this is really finely ground moister shell it looks just like sand the technical term for it is micro Cultch but it's been ground to a size that there's physically only room for one little baby oyster to settle on each of those grains of sand when the oyster larvae are setting they like a dark environment to set in so the tank behind me see is covered so we have oyster larvae in here and there they're setting once they go through that process and start growing their own shell that's when we move them from a static system to nursery and that's where we pump unfiltered seawater over them and that's when they grow rapidly and once they get to five millimeters in size that's when we'll move them out into the wild even though we're pushing water over them that's still not as good as what Mother Nature provides and that's when they really have rapid growth they can get to the raw bar quick [Music] the oyster growth system has has several different size bags this is one of the smaller ones and one of the larger size mesh bags and depending on when the farmer gets his seed you could put put a half inch to 3/4 inch oyster seed in here and as it got bigger you would want to progress to maybe the middle size and then it becomes a one and a half to two inch oyster better the farmer would want to go to this size mesh to maximize the water flow through the system the bag itself retains the oysters and the cage gives us additional floating ability easy to turn because if you think about it in one turn you can desiccate 1200 or 1300 oysters in one time we have a six pack system something we can put six bags in some of our clients like that some of the clients also like a four pack solution to their oyster grow in the farm and then some of the folks even like the smaller to pack solution each bag holds the same amount in two hundred two hundred and twenty or so voice terse per bag the four and the six pack and more generally used by the by the larger commercial farms simply because of the quantity of oysters that you can get in each cage you can put a bag in each slot again they can have six bags simply pull the bungees up so when the farmers are out on the boat there's no tools or anything they have to keep track of its just utilizing the bungees and snapping them on and then you're all set to go this part of the experiment where we've been comparing the flipping frequency of these cages we sort of figured that different sites are going to need different flipping frequencies what we might do here might not be what you might do in Louisiana or maybe the North Carolina and so the idea was to get these gauges out at multiple sites in different states and see what kind of differences we saw we've learned with the help of Sea Grant and other farmers in the area a relatively regular drying frequency if you wait and dry every 2 or 3 weeks all year long they get way too and crusted the oysters stop moving the cages get heavy and the quality goes down we've learned to flip here roughly once a week and the winter time you left the clay is freaking because the water is cold and things don't grow as fast and there's not as many settling organisms and drying tends to be 24 hours in the wintertime maybe a little bit less in the summertime because you don't want to stress the oysters too much what triggers that change you said like you know if it gets wintertime maybe not get back but is that is that temperature based is it something that you're seeing on the bag what are you deciding it's experience you're looking for you can see on this cage there's been a recent barnacle settlement feels like sandpaper when you touch it and so you can still kill barnacles at this size because you can rub them off with your fingers but if they get much bigger you can't so why once a month why not every two months or why not every two weeks like what I just what are you looking at I look at how warm this water gets right in here about seeing the amount of growth that occurs tomorrow listen roads worms barnacles if I can keep mine cleaner it takes me to desiccate a more I'm gonna do change seasonally at all we're most worried about fouling where we're actually getting you know fouling only oysters themselves part of that is your whole time how long do you have the oysters on the farm before you sell them all because the longer they sit out here the longer they've got an opportunity to have biofouling take place also really worried about weight in the cages if you have a cage that you're not desiccating on the good schedule which for us in the warm months is about once a week your bag itself exclusive oysters might end up weighing like 20 pounds and so you know if you have a cage full of oysters that are maybe on the big side for the cage your densities may be a little high but then you're carrying an extra 40 pounds for the fouling on your bags you know that starts breaking your cages with a fast and as they grow this is this leading edge of the oyster which is called the lip will begin to fan out your objective particularly in floating cages like this is that they bounce into one another gently and prune that growing tip off and our goal is to have a clean oyster that's deep cup nice and flat like that which is desirable for market and this will be market sized in about two months so when we're looking for this ratio it's this three to two to one it's going to end up with an oyster that I think everybody's gonna look at and say oh it's a beautiful cup and it's got that it's got that gorgeous fan I do know that sometimes people look at these smaller oysters and the especially if people used to buying really large oysters they they think they're maybe getting gypped with this but let's see what we got inside this is too much because I think one of the things that we see with the farm raised oysters is because of all this extra handling I think that you tend to see and we'll see if this is true with this oyster you tend to see over there you go a really plump oyster that really fills that shell and so I have yet to hand an oyster like that to anyone and find that they're disappointed with what they got you want to just drop it into your hand as a consumer and an engineer I really appreciate the technical aspects of aquaculture and oyster farming it's a very rewarding business I was using a floating system for about 14 years but it wasn't until I started using the oyster grill that I saw that I could really get a premium product for the minimum amount of labor it's good shape good cup as long as you're managing your densities in your bags that's what you're gonna get and the chefs are gonna love it this is the day of the concert table movement and people want to know where the food is coming from and there's no better way than an oyster that tells its story they want to know who's growing it where they're going it from and doesn't taste any different from the certain areas of the bay and so yeah we have a story plant it's just a different type of oyster it's a different appreciation of mother nature it's a different way to grow them the two of them together if you wake up every day and you're miserable and you don't like what you do for a living you probably shouldn't be doing it you know I come out here daily in I love it [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Oyster South

Views: 33,042

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Id: S0OpUeovaLQ

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 11 2020