Signs promising for oyster market

HOMEGROWN: Oyster farmer Nick Papa packs his oysters at the Ocean State Shellfish Cooperative. Papa’s oysters are grown on his farm in Ninigret Pond in Charlestown. / PBN PHOTO/JOHN LEE
HOMEGROWN: Oyster farmer Nick Papa packs his oysters at the Ocean State Shellfish Cooperative. Papa’s oysters are grown on his farm in Ninigret Pond in Charlestown. / PBN PHOTO/JOHN LEE

Rhode Island has two groups of shellfishermen. One group digs clams off the bottom of Narragansett Bay. These are the wild harvesters. Many Rhode Islanders call them quahoggers.
The other group grows oysters on small farms, both in the bay and in the salt ponds.
And as Robert Rheault, executive director of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association said, “The clam market and the oyster market are totally different. For one thing the clam market is flat and the oyster market is growing.”
The future of those markets was among the hot topics discussed by Rheault and others Nov. 14 during a Baird Sea Grant Symposium in Warwick on the shellfish industry. About 150 people attended. Fifteen presenters spoke, covering topics from harvesting and growing Rhode Island shellfish to shellfish management and water quality.
The upward trend with oysters has created a bit of a boom in raw bars across the country. More than 500 different brands of oysters can be found in these businesses. The oysters grown on Rhode Island farms can be found on menus as far away as Colorado.
With clams the tenor is a little different. Rhode Island in the 1970s and 1980s set the tone for the East Coast clam market. Now clam farms in Virginia and Florida do. This shift happened in the 1990s. The price per clam has dropped and never been the same since.
“Once the guys in Virginia and Florida figured out how to grow clams our price has nose-dived,” said Jeff Grant, vice president of the Rhode Island Shellfishermen’s Association. “The big farms controlled the market.”
According to Rheault, the price of a Narragansett Bay quahog in 1990 was about 25 cents per clam. Now it’s about 14 cents. Rhode Island commercial clammers in 2012 harvested $5.15 million in clams. Virginia clam farms sold $26 million worth during the same period, he said. To complicate matters, there are cheap clams coming in from Vietnam going for approximately 9 cents. “It’s hard to market quahogs. Our clams leave the state and enter into the clam market,” said Grant. “We’ve tried to brand our clams as quahogs, thinking that would help by making it local, but the consumer never seems to see that, all they see is clam.”
The Rhode Island oyster-farm industry is showing more promise. There is still worry over price. The price per oyster is about 50 cents apiece. Sellers want it to stay in that neighborhood. In 2012 about 50 farms sold $2.85 million worth of oysters. With a 20 percent growth per year in the industry, more oyster farms are expected to pop up each year in the Ocean State.
This growth, according to Rheault, should double in the next five years, which would mean about 350 acres of oyster farms in Rhode Island inland waters, which total about 80,000 acres. In the 19th century, one-third of Narragansett Bay was farms. The 1938 hurricane destroyed them and the industry with it.
“What we are seeing now,” said Graham Brawley, managing partner of the Ocean State Shellfish Cooperative, “is a rekindling of the passion for oysters this country once had a hundred years ago.”
Brawley sells about 40,000 oysters a week. The oysters go to Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston and New York. Brawley has been working with buyers in those cities for a decade. But he said he is seeing the potential for new markets in the Midwest and West Coast. The Ocean State Shellfish Coop sells 11 different brands of oysters.
“It’s competitive,” Brawley said. “There are a lot of people in all these states who are trying to brand and sell small-farm, premium oysters.”
Rheault is a big believer in opportunity overseas, mainly in China.
“The imported seafood trade in China is exploding,” he said. “China is now a net importer of seafood. The middle class there is getting larger and larger.
“They don’t trust the shellfish grown in their own waters,” he said. “This is a huge opportunity.” •

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