To start farming oysters, you should know two things. First, oyster farming has tremendous upsides, and you’ll love your job. Your commute to work will be a boat ride, your office the great outdoors. It can be lucrative. You can buy an oyster seed for about a nickel, and perhaps 18 months later, sell that same mollusk for 60 cents. And the business is beneficial to the environment. Oysters are filter feeders, and as they eat plankton, they remove damaging nitrogen in the water. Put a lot of oysters in a concentrated area, and they’ll keep the waters there clean.
Second, oyster farming also has downsides, and you’ll hate your job. Boats will break down, and your bivalves will be subject to disease, storms, and predators. Unforeseen circumstances will arise, such as COVID-19, which shut down restaurants, the primary users of cultivated oysters. The work is repetitive and physically hard, the water gets cold, and you’ll damn the December day you have to shovel snow from your boat. And oyster shells are razor-sharp. Sometimes you’ll bleed.
Historically, oyster lovers everywhere ate from the wild. Aficionados had ready access to teeming beds of this shellfish. Now, almost all oysters eaten by consumers have been farm-raised. The reality is bleak: More than 85% of the world’s wild
