How we farm: shucked oysters!

Key Takeaways:

• Wild Setting Is Never a Sure Thing: Wild oyster setting is unpredictable. We expect to get at least one excellent natural set every decade, which is why we’ve built out our seed operations.
• Free-wheeling youth: Oysters are only mobile for the first two to three weeks of their lives, during which they swim and float around the water column as zooplankton. Once they metamorphose into sedentary shelled animals, they’re attracted to shell, an evolutionary instinct that drives the juvenile oyster toward a habitat where others of its kind have already proven they can survive.
• Clusters are for Shucking: Usually when an oyster reproduces in the wild, it ends up in a cluster, which we shuck and pack into jars.

Here are the oysters spawning earlier this summer:

And now here are their babies!

The black specks on this shell are miniature oysters, called spat. In 3 to 5 years they'll be big enough to shuck and eat.

Oyster farmers in the Hood Canal are lucky to be able to farm wild oysters. A "farmed but still wild" operation challenges a bunch of assumptions that we don't need to explore in this post... just know that it's a really beautiful way to grow food. We basically work to make our beach more habitable for the things we want to eat, like some kind of aquatic food forest.

During the metamorphosis from zooplankton to sedentary animal an oyster is attracted to oyster shell... this means baby oysters are most likely to attach to oyster shell. From an evolutionary standpoint this makes sense... the juvenile oysters want to live where other oysters have successfully lived. But anything out on the beach during setting season is potential oyster habitat... we've seen oysters growing on leather, metal, wood, and even a plastic snake.

Through the ages and across the world, farmers have used various materials to entice oysters to their beach. On a recent vacation in Vietnam, we found oyster farmers growing oysters on slate roofing tiles. From the mid-50s to early 60s, when our oyster farm was first getting established, oyster shell was scarce, so we used concrete covered lath to mimic the chemical composition of oyster shell. The oysters would attach to the wood, eventually the wood would break apart, and we could spread the oysters on the beach to continue growing.

As soon as we had enough shells (starting in the the late 60s and throughout the 70s, 80s, and early 90s) we suspended bags of oyster shell (called cultch) from floating racks out in the middle of the Canal. Deploying the "seed racks" was a pretty big undertaking, one that took the whole family. It was a fun (albeit dangerous!) job on sunny August afternoons. Here are the racks up on shore:

And here they are floating out in the water:

In the late 90s, the permitting for the seed racks got pretty complicated and we decided we'd rather not use so much styrofoam. Since then we've gone back to basics: in the springtime we bag shell up into cultch bags (we try to get this done before the Oyster Rama, and then we use the cultch bags for our Rama fence) and when the oysters spawn in July or August, we put pallets of cultch bags out on the beach in hopes they'll attract larvae at high tide. A jar of shucked oysters doesn't tell you much about the shell they came from; our guide to types of oysters fills in some of that backstory.

Sometimes this works. But nothing's a given! Sometimes the wind picks up during the larval period, drops the water temperature, and everything dies. Here are year old oysters growing on cultch bags:

And here's a 5 to 7 year old oyster cluster, the end result of this process:

Since Hood Canal has such a prolific wild oyster population, Canal farmers were a little slow to embrace hatchery seed. Why pay for something you get for free? Of course, using seed produces a much higher quality product for the half shell market, more reliable in shape, size, and appearance. And for the past 6 years or so the wild oysters really haven't reproduced in the Canal, so we've had to scramble to get our seed operations up and running. The lack of a natural set may be normal (we did have a big set in 2012) or it may be related to ocean acidification... the Canal has seen some of the lowest pH ever recorded on earth. To learn more about how to grow oysters from seed, read this post.

Final Thoughts

Oyster farming is, at its core, a collaboration with something you can’t fully control, especially when you’re trying to catch natural sets. You can bag the shell, time the deployment, watch the weather, and cross your fingers, but the larvae decide where they go, the temperature decides whether they survive, and the tides and predators decide what’s left by the time you check on them. 

The shift toward hatchery seed has given us more consistency and a better half-shell product, and we walk through all of that in Growing Method. But we haven’t given up on the wild set, which is where we produce the clusters that we shuck and pack into jars. Shucked oysters were all the rage in the 1950s and 1960s. Nowadays, most folks prefer to eat oysters on the half shell. But we’re here for the comeback, and encourage you to snag a jar of shucked oysters and experiment with the many hundreds of years of culinary history, from all across the world, surrounding cooked oysters.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is spat, and how small are we talking?

“Spat” is one of those loosey-goosey farmer terms that can mean either the sperm or egg the oyster releases, the resulting fertilized larvae, or, more commonly, the teeny tiny oyster that has just completed its metamorphosis from free-swimming larvae into sedentary shelled animal. We’re talking black specks, roughly the size of a grain of sand or a small sesame seed. 

Why do oysters prefer to attach to oyster shell specifically?

It's an evolutionary instinct more than a preference. Oyster larvae are chemically attracted to the calcium carbonate in oyster shells, and that chemistry signals a place where oysters have successfully lived, which is about as good a real estate tip as a microscopic animal can get. In the absence of shell, they’ll attach to almost anything hard that’s been in the water. Over the years, we’ve found oysters growing on leather, metal, and a plastic snake. 

What's the difference between wild-caught and hatchery seed oysters, in terms of what ends up on my plate?

Wild-caught oysters are far more likely to be shucked and sold in a jar. Oysters grown from seed have a more uniform shape, and are growing specifically to eat raw on the half shell.