Farmed abalone is a sustainable option.
Farms may soon be the best way to enjoy NorCal’s treasured shellfish.
Tiny green specks swim through clear seawater in dozens of white buckets. They look like algae but they’re actually 2-dayold red abalone larvae, which Tom Ebert breeds by the millions at American Abalone Farms. The portion that survive will reach a market size of 3 inches in about three years.
All of the abalone potential bursting forth in Ebert’s farm in Davenport, just north of Santa Cruz, is the opposite of what’s happening along the Northern California coast. Without enough kelp to eat, wild red abalone (Haliotis rufescens) populations are dwindling, causing state agencies to shorten this year’s recreational abalone season by two months and reduce the catch limit.
With its low environmental footprint and relatively high productivity, farmed abalone is emerging as a sustainable local seafood option in Bay Area markets and restaurants — especially as popular choices like wild salmon and Dungeness crab have become so limited, and since wild abalone is available only to recreational divers. And while Ebert has been farming abalone in the area since the late 1980s — you might have driven past his farm on Highway 1 without realizing it — he only recently started a heavy marketing push to Bay Area residents, many of whom are hungry for an elusive taste of their childhood.
“I’m just happy to see abalone again,” says Jessica Ryan, who sells Ebert’s abalone through her company, FreshCatch, which delivers local seafood to customers’ homes. “I hadn’t had ab since I was a kid.”
There are four abalone farms in California, but Ebert’s is the closest to the Bay Area, making it a popular option for San Francisco restaurants like Tadich Grill, the Progress and Cala. Whereas many other types of wild seafood have limited seasons, the farmed product is available yearround. Ebert’s abalone is sold at the farm on weekends, at a few Bay Area stores, and through companies like FreshCatch that make weekly deliveries to members.
Ebert’s farm sells live abalone ($3.75 each at the farm) as well as pre-pounded steaks, each consisting of a whole abalone (four for $20). He says high-end restaurants tend to request the live kind, although some younger chefs order the steaks, which he recommends for beginners. Farmed abalone, about 3 inches wide when ready to harvest, is much smaller than the wild kind, which must be a minimum of 7 inches wide to catch. It is also more tender and easier to clean than wild abalone, although it is more mild in flavor.
“We just drop it on a rack into the fire,” says Jason Ryczek, executive chef of Farallon restaurant in San Francisco. “When you grill it to just that tender point it has the firmness of a scallop.”
Ryczek was raised in Morro Bay (San Luis Obispo County) and grew up eating wild abalone caught by family friends and cooked on the grill. At the restaurant he serves the product of Abalone Farm in Cayucos, near his hometown, cooked over a cherrywood fire.
Ebert used to send 90 percent of his abalone to Japan, but he has seen his weekly farm-stand sales triple over the past few months since he began doing local outreach and added other options, including oysters, sea urchin and halibut. He just expanded his farm-stand hours to Sundays, and he plans to open a new store and seafood bar over Labor Day weekend. It will have a deck overlooking the beach behind the farm, where seawater that circulates through the tanks rushes in and out via underground aqueducts.
Abalone farming in California got its start around the time the state outlawed the sale of wild-caught abalone in 1997, turning it into a sport-only pursuit for recreational divers. Ebert learned the trade in childhood, as his father ran a shellfish aquaculture lab south of Carmel for the California Department of Fish and Game (as it was then called) for 30 years.
Ebert went on to get a master’s degree in marine biology at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (affiliated with the Cal State University system), and then surveyed wild abalone populations for San Mateo County. He began experimenting with abalone farming techniques, first in UC Santa Cruz’s marine lab and later when he helped launch Monterey Abalone Co., which is still located under a city wharf in Monterey.
Ebert’s farm was originally built in the 1970s for an experiment in salmon and steelhead trout ranching, with a fish ladder that still leads down to the beach. The plan was to release young salmon from the nursery into the ocean, where they would fatten up and then return to their spawning grounds back in the farm. It wasn’t a success.
“They couldn’t get enough of the fish to come back,” Ebert says.
When Ebert first opened American Abalone Farms in 1994 (it was then called U.S. Abalone Farm) he had 50 tanks. He now has 3,400. Not all California abalone farms do their own breeding, but Ebert and his staff start a new batch of babies four times a year.
The process begins in the farm’s lab, where they induce male and female abalone to spawn in separate tanks and then basically combine the sperm and egg in a bucket of seawater kept at 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit). A lot of buckets go into this operation.
When the eggs hatch 24 hours later, the tiny larvae emerge with hairs, called celia, that allow them to swim through the water. Ebert keeps the water at 15 degrees Celsius for about six days, until the larvae lose their celia and fall to the bottom of the buckets. Then they’re ready to graduate to an abalone nursery for six months, where they eat diatoms, tiny dots of algae.
Only 5 to 10 percent of the abalone will make it through the nursery stage, but after that there is a 90 percent survival rate. The larger abalone live in big tanks in another farm building where the lights are out all of the time.
“Abalones want to be a nocturnal spe- cies. They grow much better in the dark,” Ebert says.
For fairly immobile and slow-growing creatures, the abalone seem to eat an awful lot. The farm’s crew heads out into the ocean to collect 4,000 to 5,000 pounds of kelp six days a week. They cut off the tops of the seaweed to allow it to grow back, which Ebert likens to mowing the lawn.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program puts abalone farmed in systems like this one in the “best choice” category for seafood sustainability. The farm is located in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Although it releases wastewater, or effluent, into the ocean, Seafood Watch states that “effluent from abalone farms is not considered to negatively impact the surrounding environment.”
The abalone farm’s unexpected comeback is something Ebert still seems a bit surprised by.
“Younger (chefs) are into this whole thing about sustainable seafood,” he says. “People are much more conscious now than they were in the ’90s.”
American Abalone Farms, 245 Davenport Landing Road, Davenport. Farm stand open 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Also sold at Lucky Seafood in Oakland, Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco and H Mart in San Jose; through seafood delivery companies Sea Forager Seafood, Real Good Fish and FreshCatch; and at many Bay Area restaurants.