Embattled Texas coast rallies for its oysters
Farming could bring a year-round supply
FULTON — After harvesting oysters for nearly 60 years, Alby Godinich figures he knows the ins and outs of the business as well as anyone. “I know every oyster man from here to the end of the world, and if I didn’t deal with them, I dealt with their daddies,” he said, leaning back in his chair in the small office behind his family-run seafood store.
So he knows that when the hot weather approaches and the harvesting season — Nov. 1 to April 30 — ends, the trade changes.
The warm Gulf Coast waters trigger spawning, and local oysters become mushy and inedible. The oyster boats either don’t leave the bay park for the next seven months or switch to trawling for small shrimp to sell as bait for sports fishing.
Sellers from Louisiana, Alabama and other oyster states — which have a couple of advantages that Texas oyster farmers don’t — know they can get top dollar keeping all the Coastal Bend seafood restaurants stocked with oysters for the high summer season. Godinich calls it “grease time.” A bill awaiting Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature could change that by opening the Texas coast to oyster farming, erasing Texas’ status as the only coastal state in the nation without maritime oyster cultivation and providing a year-round supply of local oysters.
“After many of the storms in the last several years, your oyster industry has been decimated,” state Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, said during a hearing of the Texas House of Representatives’ Culture, Recreation and Tourism Committee. “What this bill does is create oyster mariculture in Texas.”
Hurricane Ike in 2008 wiped out more than half the oyster populations in Galveston Bay, traditionally the state’s most profitable oyster fishery. That was followed by years of drought, disrupting the flow of nutrients to the oysters. Then came too much rain, flooding the bays
with too much fresh water.
According to Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi’s Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, Hurricane Harvey disrupted just about every oyster-producing region in Texas — and with it an industry that contributes $54 billion to restaurant sales nationwide.
Since the reefs in the Rockport-Fulton area’s Copano and Aransas bays were relatively unscathed, recent years have seen the docks crowded with about 150 boats returning each day with up to 30 sacks of oysters. At the dock, they’ll sell for $40 a sack. By the time they reach markets such as Houston, those sacks will go for $85 to $100.
The May 10 collision of an outbound tanker with two barges and subsequent spill of some 11,000 gallons of gasoline product into the Houston Ship Channel halted Galveston’s year-round oyster harvesting.
That means even more reliance on oysters from places like Louisiana, Alabama and Virginia, which have farm-raised varieties that don’t spawn. In the case of Louisiana, the nation’s leading oyster producer, about 400,000 acres of sea bottom are leased to private entities that can harvest before and after the public season. Oysters in higher latitude also hold quality longer.
“From a restaurant perspective, especially a large restaurant company that uses a large amount of oysters, we’d like to be spending more money here in Texas instead of having to import oysters,” John Brock, the seafood buyer for the Houston-based Pappas Restaurants chain, told the committee. “These things are rocks, literally, and it costs a lot of money to haul them.”
Oyster farming is a simple and inexpensive process that uses structures to grow oysters in the same water as wild oysters. Since each oyster filters 40 to 50 gallons of water a day and there’s no need to disrupt estuaries, it’s considered good for the environment.
Oyster aquaculturists often use a fast-growing variety of oyster called triploids, which are basically sterile oysters. They grow to a uniform plumpness because they’re not losing protein to reproduction or battling it out on the reef.
“They’re not arguing with the other oysters, constantly getting tossed around, spreading their elbows,” said Tommy Moore, an ecotourism boat captain and commissioner-at-large for the Aransas County Navigation District.
“From a navigation district standpoint, I look forward to leasing submerged ground to aquaculture,” he said. “I just don’t see it being a detriment to the environment. I don’t see how it can be, because they’re oysters. They’re eating the water, man — you’re not putting anything in them.”
The challenge will be locating places for the cages that won’t become navigation hazards.
The legislation authorizes the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to identify areas suitable for cultivation and then establish a permitting system for commercial oyster farms.
“We’ll basically be doing a spatial analysis of our bay system. We’ll be working with (the Texas General Land Office) determining where there are pipelines, where there are navigation channels,” Robin Riechers, TPW’s director of coastal fisheries, told the lawmakers. “We wouldn’t want to sight these on top of a public oyster reef where other people are already harvesting.
“Yet to be determined is how that permit would exactly work, but we would basically issue a permit and then those people would be in the business of raising cultivated oysters,” Riechers said.
Joe Fox, the Harte Research Institute’s chair for marine resource development, said funding is expected for a research site in Matagorda Bay to study different types of oyster aquaculture.
“It is meant to apprise the state regarding environmental impacts, biological performance of oysters, and economic cost analysis,” Fox said in an email. “It will be run in a similar manner to that of commercial farms.”
Nasir Kureshy, managing partner of Turtle Creek Aquaculture, a farm for a fish variety known as red drum on Matagorda Bay, said he envisions using existing infrastructure for an oyster hatchery and adding oysters to his operations.
“We, along with a few other fish farming operations in the area along Matagorda Bay, are well-poised to supplement our operations with oyster mariculture,” Kureshy said.
Brad Lomax, owner and operator of Corpus Christi’s Water Street Oyster Bar, is ready to plunge into farming, too.
“My oyster sales are growing every year, and oyster availability is down to near historic lows,” he said.
“I went and visited some oyster farms in the South in Alabama and South Carolina, and it made me a convert,” he added. “I hear anywhere from $40,000 to $50,000 per acre of farm is about what the investment is. And you can make about that much money per acre by the time you’re in your second year.”
For some 34 years, Rockport’s Boiling Pot restaurant has been shucking oysters by the order and in front of customers.
A supply of local farmraised oysters could be a big boost, owner Ramona LeBlanc said.
“It would make a huge difference, because sometimes we struggle to find the oysters and we won’t have them,” she said.
Not only does the off-season force LeBlanc to charge more for the oysters she can get, but she’s convinced the oysters aren’t quite as tasty as the local ones.
“It’s because of the water, the difference in the water from one area to another,” she said. “I think our oysters taste much better.”
Locally farmed oysters would live in the same waters as the reef oysters, which she expects will result in that same Rockport-Fulton taste.
“Because they’ll be farming out here instead of out there,” she said.