How we farm: Single Oysters!

Key Takeaways:

• From a Birdeye’s View, Oyster Farming Looks Easy: Oyster farming requires clean water, no feed, and zero chemicals, so what’s so difficult? The reality is farming demands carefully timed, hands-on sorting, rinsing, and agitating to match how fast the oysters are growing. Growth rates shift by site, season, and year, so there's no set-it-and-forget-it here. Our farm interns figure this out quickly.
• Seed Sourcing: We catch wild oysters from the Hood Canal, and also buy seed. Most of what we sell starts as purchased seed rather than wild-caught spat, but both methods put oysters on the same beach.
• Everything on Our Farm Runs on the Tide: The tide sets our schedule. When it goes out, the beach crew follows it, harvesting clams, picking oysters, and handling maintenance. When it comes back in, the barge crew takes over by tracking the buoys to collect what the beach crew left behind. This two-shift rhythm, driven entirely by the moon, shapes nearly every part of how we work. 

 

As we talk about our farm operations, you'll notice that much of the language we use makes it sound like we're growing plants. We buy oyster "seed" and we "plant it" on the beach.

Rest assured: we don't actually grow vegetables. Oysters and clams are definitely animals, but shellfish farming is unlike any other form of protein production in that it consumes no fresh water, uses no chemicals or added feed, and requires little daily intervention.

This is not to say that we don't handle the oysters a lot. We do. Our farm interns often say that their main takeaway from their internship is that oyster farming is a ton of work. Part of art of growing oysters lies in timing your interventions to match their growth rate... the faster your oysters grow, the more you'll need to handle them. Growth rates are site specific, vary seasonally, and change year to year. So you gotta stay on your toes.

And by 'handle oysters,' we mainly mean: rinse them, agitate them to strengthen their shells, and sort them by size. We call that last bit "sorting the grunts from the runts." Oysters grow at different rates - sometimes this is related to genetics, but most often it's simply a matter of food availability. The oyster at the top of a pile has more access to current (and therefore food) than an oyster in the midst of the pile. If you get too many grunts in the bunch, they take up more and more of the food. So every day, our farmers bring oysters in from the beach, spread them out on a table, and sort them into different size classes, including the "market ready" oysters - or those big enough to ship to restaurants.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. How do we farm oysters??? Two ways.

1) We make our beach as hospitable as possible for wild oyster reproduction. Usually, when oysters reproduce in the wild, they grow into oyster clusters, you can read about that process here. However, sometimes wild oysters turn into pebble sets - which we can sell as singles. If you've ever found a Hama Hama with a rock attached to it - it was likely born in the wild.

2) We grow oysters from seed. We don't have a hatchery at Hama Hama - instead we buy oyster seed from other companies, usually Taylor Shellfish, Hog Island, Coast Seafoods, or Goose Point Oyster Company. We have a nursery system, so we're able to buy very very small seed... sometimes it's as small as sand. The nursery system, aka FLUPSY, lets us keep oysters in tanks with water flowing continuously through them... this means they have more food, so they grow faster. Read more about work in the flupsy here.

(Usually when we buy oyster seed we're buying single seed. Sometimes we buy cluster oyster seed - this is called "spat on shell" - keep that in your back pocket for our next oyster trivia competition!)

We graduate oysters from the nursery to the farms when they're about 1/2 inch big. Some of the oysters we plant on the tumble farm (where they grow into Blue Pools), some we put into bags that lie directly on the beach, and some we scatter directly onto the tideflats. Planting methods vary by farm site. For instance, in areas with lots of wind and wave action, or maybe lots of predators, we'd use a bag on beach method to protect the oysters.

Sometimes, we'll grow oysters in a bag for a year, and then, when the bags get crowded, we'll dump the oysters on the beach for a few months before harvest. This helps strengthen the shell and ensure it has room to feed.

Final thing to know about our farm: we work around the tide.

When the tide goes out, our harvest crew heads out to dig clams, pick oysters, and do beach maintenance. At the end of the tide, the crew ties a buoy to the crates and bags of clams and oysters. All that rinsing, tumbling, sorting, and beach time is partly about building a strong oyster shell.

When the tide comes in, the barge crew heads out and uses the buoys to pull the oysters and clams up on deck to take to shore, where they'll be rinsed, sorted, bagged, boxed, and shipped out to your door!

Here are a few more pictures of that process, taken by Navid Baraty. In the first, Neil works on the tumble farm at low tide. Later that same day, the barge crew comes along and uses the buoys to locate the bags, or cages, of oysters and clams. We grow several species of oyster, and kumamoto oysters are one of the pickier members of the bunch.

A Note on What Can Go Wrong

Oyster farming is low-input compared to most agriculture, but that doesn't mean it's without risk. Here are a few things that can go wrong. 

Algae blooms: Harmful algal blooms, what most people call red tide, though the water isn't always red, can shut down harvest for days or weeks at a time. Toxic algae is closely monitored by the Washington State Department of Health, and we work closely with the regulators to keep everybody safe. 

Random mortality: Sometimes, the oysters and clams die, and nobody knows why. Oyster veterinarians have attributed mass mortality events to “toxic insults” – a good reminder to all of us to be as kind as possible, even when 80% of the seed you planted dies after a few months on the beach. 

Predators: despite the doom and gloom of the previous bullet, there are a lot of oysters on the beach, so there’s usually enough for everyone, but drill snails and sea stars all love oysters as much as we do, and occasionally eat up all our seed. Ducks are voracious clam predators, and can goggle up all the clam seed,

Additionally, biofouling on our oyster farming equipment from barnacles and mussels can slow growth and create extra work. 

And then there's weather: wind, extreme heat, and heavy rain can all affect water quality and oyster health in hard-to-predict ways. 

This is just the reality of farming something that lives in the ocean, at the mercy of conditions we don't control. 

Final Thoughts

At its core, oyster farming is a negotiation between what we do and what the water does. We plant, we sort, we rinse, we time our harvests to the tide, we time our interventions to the growth rate, but the environment sets the terms. 

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to grow an oyster from seed to market size?

It depends on the species and the growing site, but for our Pacific oysters at Hama Hama, we're generally looking at two to three years from the time we plant seed until an oyster is big enough to ship. Growth is faster in warmer months when there's more algae in the water, and slower in winter when the water cools down. Slow growing species like Kumamotos and Olympia can take 3 to 4 years to reach market size. 

Do you harvest oysters year-round, or is there an off-season?

We harvest all year long, but there are periods when certain products aren't available, either due to inventory, oyster condition, or growing area closures. 

Can I visit the farm and watch the harvest happen?

You can visit the Farm Store, which is open daily. We don't run formal harvest tours, and our tideflats are closed to the public, but they’re visible from the Store and the Saloon, so you can sometimes see the barge operating at high tide, or the crews walking out at low tides. 

Why do some of your oysters have rocks or shells attached to them?

Those are the wild-born ones. When oysters reproduce naturally on our beach, the larvae swim around in the water column for a couple of weeks looking for something to attach to, and sometimes that something is a rock.