Off-bottom oyster farming, focused on the premium, half-shell market by raising oysters off the bottom in baskets or bags, is relatively new on the Gulf Coast, with a boom in interest, investment and production.
With funding from Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant and the National Sea Grant College Program, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida have developed nascent industries, with permits pending in Texas. Oysters raised in our coastal waters are now available in fine restaurants and raw bars around the southern United States and even distant markets.
To consumers, these oysters often cost more than they are used to (though many would argue worth every penny), and that’s led many to think that oyster farmers are making a financial killing.
In fact, the margins are relatively small for oyster farmers.
The labor and gear required to produce off-bottom oysters create high production costs. Throw in losses to natural causes (such as the opening of spillways to relieve spring floods, leading to oyster-killing drops in salinity) and the risks associated with farming in coastal waters (including the ever present threat of tropical storms), and oyster farmers are often looking for ways to get the most profit out of each oyster that goes to market.
While farmers cannot control the weather or change the salinity of our coastal waters, they do make a series of decisions about how to raise oysters.
What type of gear do they use to hold the oysters?
To keep the oysters and the baskets they live in clean, do they set their baskets where they are exposed every day, or do they manually raise them out of the water for a day once a week?
Do they run them through a size grader every month or every quarter?
Farmers routinely make these decisions and typically look at the effect of those decisions on oyster growth and survival – what a farmer might think of as “yield.”
In a study led by Sarah Hensey, a graduate student in the Auburn University School of Fisheries, Aquaculture & Aquatic Sciences, we are trying to go beyond the question of how those choices affect survival and tackle the practical question of what effect those choices have on costs (labor, gear, etc.).
In addition, we are looking not only at how those choices affect yield but how they also affect quality and, in turn, what commercial buyers are willing to pay for them.
To get at the willing-to-pay question, in a blind study, we’ve been sending varieties of oysters raised by a combination of different techniques out to commercial buyers, including distributors and chefs across the United States. We ask our buyers to rate the oysters and provide us what they would be willing to pay for each variety.
We are in the middle of that part of the study now, but we are already seeing some clear differences in the varieties. We will be able to take those data, crunch the numbers on costs and potential earnings to provide oyster farmers some numbers they can use – the profit per oyster grown by each different combination.
Importantly, this work will help farmers see if buyers care about quality enough to improve the prices that they get. Additionally, while a farmer might have different absolute numbers, our hope is that the study will inform their decision-making and help farmers decide what combination of methods works best for their respective bottom lines.
We look forward to sharing our results with the region’s industry members.
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