Oyster farming is coming to Texas!
B y E m m a C l a r k s o n | H a b i t a t a n d A s s e s s m e n t Te a m
FIELD NOTES
OYSTER FARMING COMES TO TEXAS Oysters in Texas It’s humbling to see how a small bivalve that fits in the palm of your hand has a disproportionately large influence on the culture, community, economy, and ecological resilience of our coast. Oysters are engrained in Texas culinary culture; there are festivals in their honor, and they make an appearance at coastal backyard barbeques, either baked, fried, or on the half shell. In the bays, these bivalves band together to create complex reefs teeming with life that provide shelter and food for the fish that Texas anglers love to chase. This living habitat supports not only recreational angling, but also the largest wild oyster fishery in the Gulf of Mexico; over 3.5 million pounds of meat was harvested in 2019 from public and private reefs in Texas, with an ex-vessel value of over $33 million. Some consider Texas the “last frontier” of wild oyster harvest as our oyster fishery is the last in the Gulf of Mexico to be supported almost entirely by wild natural reefs (only ~10% of oyster landings come from private reefs), but our wild oyster frontier is about to be settled by a new industry – oyster farming is coming to Texas! This past year, Texas became the last state in the Gulf of Mexico to develop a Cultivated Oyster Mariculture (COM) industry. This legislative effort is anticipated to vitalize the coastal economy by creating business opportunities for both oyster farmers and restaurants. Because oyster 48 | July 2021
farmers have more control over oysters in cages than those on a wild reef, farmed oysters are often considered “boutique” for the half-shell market due to their carefullycultivated taste, shape, size and appearance…and they’re sustainable! There is no way to know for certain if oyster farms will reduce harvest pressure on wild reefs or simply supplement it (that all depends on the demand), but either way, there will now be more options for Texas oyster lovers. Designing the Texas Cultivated Oyster Mariculture Program Luckily, being the last state to develop an oyster mariculture industry meant that Texas could lean on the lessons learned by the other coastal states. We started by looking at what had already been successful (or not) across the country. Texas is also unique in many ways, which has required deviating from the status quo to create our own unique program. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) worked with a task force comprised of local industry members, academics, and conservation groups to design a program that is informed by the best available science as well as public input. There was a lot to figure out in just one year, from minutia such as creating the necessary paperwork trail of forms, to major considerations such as ensuring natural resources like habitats and nesting birds will not be
