We grow our oysters in big cages that we make out of lobster pot wire. The cages are 7' long, 4' high by 2' wide--their big and heavy. We use hydraulic cranes to lift the cages off the bottom. Inside the cages are shelves. The oysters are in fancy plastic bags in the shelves. The lease is 2.5 acres, and on the lease we have 550 of these cages. IN the spring of every year we get about 2 million seed oysters. Their tiny things, a million in the plam of your hand. We grow oysters the hard way and the expensive way--labor intensive; but when we sell to New York, Boston, we get a high price. The reason we spend so much time doing this is that our oysters tend to be round-- perfect for the raw bar trade. We don't let them attach to anything so they grow round, instead of all funny looking.
Down south most of the farms are much bigger, and they harvest them by towing dredges across the oyster beds. That's why they toss the shells back over. The word is cultch, the baby oysters called spat spend their first few weeks swimming around looking for a suitable spot to anchor on, thus attaching and spending the rest of their lives totally sedentary. They settle on the cultch.
Its pretty cool that at first oysters swim, tiny larval things that go off looking for a home. They are attracted to the lime that dissolves from the cultch, so, generally, they settle there.
Anyway we don't really see shells because we ship whole oyster for the half-shell market. Oyster that don't grow fast enough we sort out and then dump on the lease. We dive on these with tanks, make a little money. We don't have enough space, so if one oysters is growing slower than the rest, that oyster is dumped overboard where we give it all the time it wants to grow.
From spat oyster to market oyster--18 months of growing time, that is really fast, and that is how we make money. Get in, get out, don't linger.
If you need shells I can get them for you. A pretty mosaic on your shower wall
