National Public Radio published this story yesterday on the growth of the oyster industry in the Southeast.
“The oyster industry is now casting its eye down the Southeast coast and seeing paradise,” says Rowan Jacobsen, author of The Essential Oyster: A Salty Appreciation of Taste And Temptation to be published in October. “More than 6,000 miles of shoreline unmarred by a single metropolis and all ripe for growing oysters.”
Georgia has just launched its first oyster hatchery on Skidaway Island near Savannah, according to Thomas Bliss, director of theShellfish Research Laboratory at the University of Georgia. “The hatchery produced 200,000 seedlings in 2015,” which were handed out to 10 different oyster growers to raise in heavy mesh bags laid in the coastal waters, he says. “We hope to be producing five million a year by 2018.”
