Blog #1 Setting up the Oyster Farm
Welcome to the Blog! We will be posting regular news from the farm and related articles as our oysters grow.
Setting up an oyster farm takes time, patience, and a lot of investment in hard work and inevitably, money. We started planning our farm about 5 years ago with the with the aim of producing the highest quality oysters to the highest sustainability standards. Having scoped out a few potential locations around stunning West Wales we settled on our site in Angle Bay.
You can’t grow high quality oysters just anywhere, there are some fundamentals that you have to consider:
- Oysters must like it: oysters are not that fussy, but they do need to have plenty of food in the water and a good current flow
- Pristine water: this was our top priority and we found a site so clean that we can sell oysters straight from the beach
- Avoiding impacts: we avoided sensitive habitats and mapped out access routes to avoid others like seagrass beds
- Be a good neighbour: we avoided busy areas or where we may get in the way of other water users
Trial and error or as someone recently said, “failing forwards”, probably sums up our experience so far. We have carried out growth trials on different species like our Native oysters and now our Rock oysters, along with trials on different equipment and growing methods. To call it a learning experience would be an understatement, but we now know what works and what doesn’t. You really can’t learn this stuff from a book.
The good news is that we got there in the end and the oysters for 2021 are growing really well and taste fantastic.
The events of 2020 have thrown everyone’s plans into the air us included – we should have been selling oysters to local restaurants and customers by now. We made some tough decisions in March and changed our production plan so that our oysters will now be ready for sale in spring and summer 2021. We hope that you can wait that long!
In the meantime, check out our range of teeshirts in the shop – we donate a native oyster to restoration efforts for each one we sell.