Raising Shellfish On The Beach

Raising Shellfish On The Beach

I have a friend who raises shellfish on the beach. He owns several acres of oceanfront property with a house on it, and he's decided to go into the shellfish business.

His land is not suitable for farming or raising cattle. There are no trees. I asked him how he came to raise shellfish instead of doing something else, and he said, "I like to eat clams."

That's what happens when you let people do whatever they want. If you give someone a few acres of land and let them use it as they please, they'll often find the most valuable thing they can do with it is grow shellfish. Or ostrich leather jackets. Or internet companies.

You can raise oysters, clams, and mussels right in your own backyard--no boat needed.

It's a quiet Saturday night for my husband, Jeremy, and me at the end of an unusually warm March. We've collected our ingredients for homemade pizza: mushrooms from the farmers' market and a ball of mozzarella from a local dairy; we've pulled a bottle of wine from our cellar. The only thing we lack is the oysters we'd planned to top one of the pizzas with. I'll have to run back to our spot on the beach to collect them before it gets dark.

I find a mesh bag hanging off the end of one of our dock pilings, which we use as an oyster reef. Inside I discover 20 or so beautiful, plump oysters waiting to be brought home and shucked.

The sun sets behind the breakwater, and I watch the water fade from pink to purple to dark blue. I'm sitting on a ten-foot boat in the middle of Morro Bay, an estuary on California's central coast. The boat is floating in a sea of oysters. That is, it's bobbing on a three-acre cage filled with five million Pacific oysters we've been growing for two years.