Latest / REAP/SOW / The future of Louisiana oysters is farmed
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- This transcript was exported on 12/17/2025 - view latest version here Teresa: You're listening to REAP/SOW, dispatches from the frontlines of food, farming, and the environment. I'm your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Offshore fish farms are slowly on the rise in the US, and they can also be pretty controversial. At their worst, they can be terrible for the environment, not to mention local communities. If the seafood industry wants to meet global demand, these farms are also necessary, because if we attempt to meet demand with wild-caught fisheries, that'll wreak havoc on our oceans, too. Longtime FERN contributor Boyce Upholt has spent months investigating what these offshore farms could look like along the Gulf Coast. In Part 1, he went deep on all kinds of problems that can pop up when you farm seafood. In Part 2 of his series, he narrows the focus to the oyster, the iconic bivalve of the Gulf Coast, to explore what the future might look like as we move away from wild-caught seafood to farming the ocean. He recently published Part 2 with our partners over at WWNO's Sea Change. I'll let their host, Carlyle Calhoun, take it from here. [music] Carlyle: Today, we bring you a story about oysters. We're going to start with a guy named Rowan Jacobsen. He's a food writer who's written not one, not two, but three books about oysters. Back in the late 1980s, Rowan was in college in Sarasota, Florida. In those days, he and his buddies developed a special tradition. Whenever they got a little cash together, they'd buy up sacks of oysters. It felt like a way of connecting with their local place, sitting in the yard, shucking one raw oyster after another. Rowan: You didn't even have to think about what your oysters cost, so you would just be drinking beer, and it was like the backbeat for your beer. Carlyle: This used to be the case on every coast. People everywhere would toss back cheap oysters. Rowan: Then they killed the golden goose, and they fished out those oyster populations. First, the West Coast went down very quickly. Then the East Coast went down quite quickly. New York Harbor used to be full of oysters, ate them all. Chesapeake, we ate nearly all of them. Carlyle: As the oysters disappeared, people had to figure out some other way to get their oyster fix. Rowan: They did what you do once you've killed all your wild animals. They started farming them. Carlyle: Farming oysters took off on the West Coast and the Northeast. When you farm an oyster, it winds up looking and even tasting very different from a wild oyster. Wild oysters grow in these big reefs. They're all kinds of funky shapes because they attach to whatever they can, rocks, each other. Farmed oysters, they're more refined. Farmers grow them in bags or cages that they rotate, tumbling them. The farmers can place them where they want, like in super salty water where oyster reefs would naturally form. Rowan: They were getting these beautiful, perfectly shaped oysters that were super duper salty. Carlyle: This new kind of oyster became the norm in most places. Small, pretty, salty, inexpensive. Guess what? That shift to farmed oysters never happened in the Gulf. It didn't need to. Oysters grow bigger, faster here in the warm, nutrient-rich water. Fishermen could still go offshore and pull oysters right out of the ocean. That shaped our food culture. It's why Gulf menus still feature things like oyster stews, po' boys overflowing with oysters, and that abundance of wild oysters is why Rowan and his friends could afford them by the sack back in the '80s. Rowan: What we didn't realize is that we were the only place on earth where you could do that. Carlyle: The Gulf is one of the last places in the world where there's still a major wild oyster harvest. Lately, though, that harvest is in trouble. Now the Gulf is getting on board with farming oysters. It's a way to keep an important connection alive because, whether they're farmed or wild, the reason why those college oysters meant so much to Rowan is because oysters offer us all a link to the ocean. Rowan: I think the romantic feeling that a lot of people get and associate with oysters is because it's all about the sea. Oysters is just this transparent membrane between the sea and food. Carlyle: I'm Carlyle Calhoun, and you're listening to Sea Change. [music] Carlyle: This is the second episode in a two-part series exploring the future of farming seafood in the Gulf. It's a partnership with the nonprofit, the Food and Environment Reporting Network. We know this, demand for seafood is soaring. We can't sustainably meet that demand from wild-caught fisheries, and there's a growing global movement to farm more and more of our seafood. In this episode, we ask, what can the downfall and resurrection of the oyster tell us about a future of farming the ocean? To tell the story, I'm going to hand the mic over to reporter Boyce Upholt. Coming up, Boyce takes us down the bayou. [music] Boyce: Even thousands of years ago, indigenous people on the Gulf ate a lot of oysters. We know this because they piled the empty shells up into massive mounds. One of these mounds in Florida stands over 20 feet tall and covers as much space as three or four city blocks. These weren't just oyster trash heaps. Jason: Some acted as a shelter for storms, and then others were sacred mounds that contained artifacts and burials and stuff like that. Boyce: That is Jason Pitre, a member of the United Houma Nation, which means his family history connects him to those sacred mounds of oyster shells. I met with Jason this summer on his family's land down in Golden Meadow, Louisiana, two hours south of New Orleans. It's along a little waterway known as Bayou Lafourche. It's a beautiful place. Big sky, a lot of water, swishing marsh grass. Jason: Being native on those bayous, you do it all. You work the seasons, you trap in the winter, you oyster in the winter, you'll shrimp. You just have to be well-rounded to survive. Boyce: Jason is 41. He's a big guy. His skin is tan from all the sunshine he gets. Always wears a baseball cap. Gentle, soft-spoken. He took me out to what he calls Bayou Rosa Oysters. It's his oyster farm. Basically, it's just a dozen or so stiff, black mesh bags filled with oysters that float in a lagoon. While we were out there, he sorts through his oysters, tossing out the bad ones, putting the good ones back in the bags. I'd come to talk to Jason because I think he's unique among the oyster farmers planting flags throughout the Gulf. Some are young guys coming out of the restaurant industry. Some are retirees looking for continued income. Jason's oyster traditions, they're deep. Jason grew up watching his grandfather harvest wild oysters. They'd go out together in a boat he calls a pirogue. Jason: You go in two or three feet of water in a little pirogue, and you'll pull up a paquet, which is what they called a cluster of oysters. You would get your hatchet, break them up individually. Boyce: Then he would take those and sell them around town, sell them to restaurants. What happened to the oysters that he harvested? Jason: He didn't do restaurants. He would chuck oysters in a shed, just very small-scale, just very relaxing, easy life, never really stressed. Boyce: Jason's grandpa was named Antoine Dardar, but everyone called him Whitney. Whitney offers a particular portrait of the oyster culture on the Gulf. It's intimate with nature, which isn't to say that harvesting oysters was entirely a choice for Whitney. Jason: He grew up in a time of segregation where the Indian school they were allowed to go to only went to the 7th grade. Just with lack of educational opportunities, a lot of our people turned to the fisheries. Boyce: You make that almost sound like you're saying part of it was this lack of educational opportunities, but I get the sense that he really liked what he did. Jason: Yes, he loved what he did. He would say he never worked a day in his life, but at the same time, he loved school. He would have went on and done something else, but he didn't have that opportunity. Boyce: Jason's grandfather built this life on the bayou, fishing along with the seasons. Wild oysters were a crucial part of his income, but through the years, the oysters were slowly declining. Then came the BP Oil Spill in 2010, a big headline-grabbing disaster. It turned out to be a one-two punch. The oil itself was bad enough, but then officials unleashed freshwater from the Mississippi River, which helped push oil away from the shore. Oysters need saltwater, so a lot of oysters drowned. The spill, the response, it all meant Jason's grandfather had to stop harvesting oysters for a couple of years. Once the coast was finally recovering from the spill and his grandfather was ready to try again, Jason went out with him in his boat. His grandfather's knowledge of the coast was encyclopedic. He knew every twisting waterway, but on that day? Jason: I noticed him scratch his head, and he's looking out the window. Then he walks to the other side of the boat. He looks out that window. [laughs] Then just the look of confusion because landmarks he had known were completely gone. Boyce: There wasn't anything wrong with his memory. It was another big disaster facing this coast. Louisiana's marshes are sinking. The ocean is rising. In just a few years, some little bayous where Jason's grandpa used to harvest oysters, they become big, open waterways. Louisiana's coast is disappearing, and so seems to be a way of life that was so important to Jason's grandfather, Whitney. Jason's parents made sure that, unlike his grandfather, Jason went to college, and he picked up a different family tradition. Jason: My great-grandfather was a traiteur, which is an Indian medicine man. I decided to be a nurse just to try to follow in that footstep. Boyce: In his late 20s, Jason began to take short-term nursing jobs in California. He'd be out there for months at a time, and on one of these trips, oysters came back into his life in a totally unexpected way. Jason: I work night shifts, so it's probably 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. I'm exhausted, fighting sleep, and charting at a computer, which is very boring work. Boyce: In the middle of the night, Jason overhears some colleagues in the hospital say the word "oyster." He sticks his nose into that conversation, and he finds out they're talking about an oyster farm. He's never heard of an oyster farm, but Jason winds up being curious and goes to visit this oyster farm in California. Jason: It's just bags and cages and oysters that come out in singles and pretty smooth shell, not a cluster of funky-shaped oysters. Boyce: By the 2010s, when Jason visited this farm, oyster farming was firmly established in California and pretty much everywhere along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Wild stocks on these coasts were so far gone that farming was the only way to keep restaurants supplied. Back on the Gulf, though, wild oyster reefs had been surviving. Not thriving, but surviving. There was little incentive to start oyster farms until that BP oil spill. After visiting the farm in California, Jason did some googling. He learned that Louisiana had recently passed legislation paving the way for oyster farms. Jason now faced a choice. Should his family stick to the old ways or embrace this new approach? Jason: I was like, "Man, this could be a reality." I was so excited to tell my grandpa. Boyce: Oyster farms don't tend to be controversial. That's because they're really good ecologically. They're not quite as good as actual reefs, which can protect shorelines against erosion but oysters are filter-feeders. If they're out there, even in cages, they make the water cleaner. Despite that, Jason's grandpa, he was skeptical. You can imagine. He was an old man with deep traditions. Jason: It was something new to him. You've been doing something one way your whole life. Your ancestors have done it one way. It's like, "Yes, I'm interested, but I'm going to take it with a grain of salt." Boyce: What convinced him ultimately? Jason: I sent an email to Sea Grant at the time. Then I remember they put me in contact with Jules. After hearing it from him, my grandpa was all on board. Boyce: Jules. That's Jules Melancon. He is a big deal when it comes to Gulf oysters. A legend. We'll meet him after the break. [music] Boyce: When Jules Melancon died in 2023, he received a pretty rare honor for anyone, let alone a fisherman. His obituary appeared in the New York Times. Jules's story captures the massive changes for oystermen that swept across the Gulf. Everyone always called Jules a bear of a man, and he was a little portly. He had a wild mess of gray hair. In almost every photo I've found, he's wearing waders. Obviously, I couldn't interview him. I have a recording of Jules from an oral history taken in 2015 by Baylor University. Takas: What are some of the best parts of being an oyster farmer? Jules: About being free. The peace and the tranquility. Boyce: Oystering was a tradition that went back generations for Jules. The Melancons weren't shucking in sheds. This was a big business. Back in the 1920s, Jules's great-grandfather had seven boats, and employees would go out and drag metal rakes across oyster reefs. Every week, a steamship took thousands of sacks of his oysters up to New Orleans. A day-long voyage each way. Jules: They would load the whole boat down with oysters until it couldn't float hardly float anymore. Boyce: It's a stunning image, but also, that's a lot of oysters. Sounds to me like the over-harvesting problem that doomed wild oyster reefs on other coastlines. Louisiana seemed to be doing fine. Following in the family tradition, Jules got his start in the industry in the 1980s. Jules: 1984, it was like a oyster boom. They had a lot of oysters back then. It was good for about 10 years. Then, in the late '90s, the business started decreasing. Boyce: In these years, Jules noticed Louisiana's reefs producing fewer oysters. There were outside pressures, too. Imported canned oysters from Vietnam and Korea were cutting into the business. Then, Hurricane Katrina destroyed some of Jules's reefs. A couple of years later, that apocalyptic BP oil spill. Jules: We could smell chemical at night. We'd wake up in the middle of the night, and we had our eyes burning. Boyce: Here's where we see what makes Jules tick, what makes him different. All along, he'd been curious about these oyster farms that existed elsewhere. Just casual. He'd chat with fishery scientists about it sometimes. Now, after the spill, his urgency jumped way up. He turned to a friend who he thought might know something about oyster farming. Jim: He said, "What do you know about this?" I said, "I really know nothing." Boyce: This is Jim Gossen. He's not a fisherman, just this strikingly jolly guy who's always grinning. Jim was a good guy for Jules to turn to because Jim knew a lot about seafood and seafood markets. His business was food distribution. Jim Gossen got his start buying seafood from Louisiana fishermen, which he then sold to restaurants. When imports started flooding the US market, Jim figured, "Let me sell those too." Jim: We started selling all these different items. I was one of the first people to bring Norwegian salmon into Texas, I remember. It was mostly going to farm-raised products. Boyce: By the early 2000s, Jim noticed some of his customers didn't want wild Gulf oysters anymore. Fancy steakhouses in Houston, they only wanted those pretty little East Coast oysters, which Jim personally had never been a fan of. Jim: I like a chew to the oyster, but I'm not growing them for me. I'm growing them for the public. I said, "If they want red shoes, I'll bring my red light. If they want blue shoes, I'll bring my blue light, whatever they want." Boyce: Jim tried to help his wild oyster fisherman friends stay in the business. Jim: I said, "You handle every oyster on the boat, you put it in your hand, throw a pile of the prettiest ones, and I'll pay you more money." Boyce: In other words, he told fishermen to pick out the wild Gulf oysters that looked farmed. Apparently, the oystermen really didn't like this idea. Jim told me he accidentally raised hell at a meeting when he brought it up. Then the oil spill. That's when Jim heard from his friend, the oysterman Jules Melancon. Jules couldn't find enough wild oysters in the Gulf to pay the cost to run a boat. Jim and Jules took a trip together. They visited an oyster farm in Alabama, a place that had recently begun testing farming techniques, seeing if they'd work on the Gulf. On the drive home-- Jim: Jules asked me, he said, "Jimmy, can you sell them?" I said, "Well, if you can grow them, I'll sell them." Boyce: Jim invested half the money in Jules's oyster farm, which in 2014 became the first licensed farm in the state of Louisiana. Oyster farming is a lot of work, and all those cages that hold the oysters are expensive. Jules found he wasn't making the big money that his family used to make with the wild oysters. Jules: My grandfather, he retired a millionaire from the oyster industry. Boyce: There were interesting upsides, too. He sold fewer oysters, but at a higher price and straight to restaurants instead of working through a middleman. He'd label the oyster depending on where exactly they'd been grown on his farm. Oysters farmed elsewhere had long been branded in this way. You could get Prince Edward Islands or Wellfleets from Cape Cod. Now Jules was selling Beauregard Islands, Champagnes, Queen Besses. In the end, what mattered to Jules was this looked to him like the only viable path to keep him out there on the water. That foresight seemed to set him apart from other fishermen. Jules: They don't see what I see. They see something coming back where I don't. Then I see more of them unemployed and not making money than me, I'm making a little bit of money enough to get by. Boyce: The reason why the New York Times called Jules a pioneer, it's because where Jules led, eventually more and more people followed. Like Whitney, the indigenous oysterman who at first had been skeptical about oyster farms. Jason: My grandpa and I went to Jules's spot in Grand Isle. Then they had the nursery where you could see baby oysters. After a former fisherman or a former oysterman that converted to this new method, after hearing it from him, my grandpa was all on board. Boyce: By 2021, every state on the Gulf had implemented a law that legalized oyster farming. New farms seemed to pop up every month. Still, though, farmers are a small minority. If you put together the acreage of all the farms in the Gulf, you'd only get a tiny fraction of the wild reefs that are still harvested. Slurping oysters down here, like so many of us do, you might not know. Things remain precarious for the wild oyster. A big flood in 2019 drowned Mississippi's oysters in fresh water. The next year, 2020, oysters in Florida's Apalachicola Bay had precariously low levels. The whole bay was shut to harvesting. Texas temporarily closed all its wild oyster beds in 2022. We need to build more reefs for conservation reasons. If you're after oysters to eat, these days it's a lot easier to start a farm. That doesn't mean they're totally safe, though. Jason's farm was hit by Hurricane Ida in 2021 and then last year by Hurricane Francine. Jason: It took away a lot of our baby oysters. With every storm that passes, you figure out, "Okay, this didn't work, this worked, this didn't work." Boyce: Jason's oysters are not cheap. Your average beer drinker probably can't afford whole sacks at a time. That high price is a challenge. Studies commissioned by the state of Louisiana suggest small farms like Jason's might have trouble surviving. A lot of customers will still opt for those cheap wild oysters while they last. Jason: There's an economic model that says, "You need to sell your oyster for this price if you have this many oysters in the water to be profitable," but that's so far down on the list of why we're here and why we exist. Boyce: Of course, Jason is in this to make some money, but he's got other big motivations. He wants to stay connected to ancestral tradition and to stay connected to one ancestor in particular, his grandfather. Jason: He was with me through the daunting permit process, and so he put the first seed out. Unfortunately, he passed before we got in restaurants, and it's still his product that we put out. Boyce: What do you think he's thinking now, seeing what you've built? Jason: I really don't know. During these interviews, sometimes I get caught up, it hits me, and then I just need a second. Boyce: Yes, take your time. Jason: I lost my grandpa, my grandma, and my dad in three years. Sometimes it hits me, and then I just get scattered. I just hope he's proud because his oysters are still making it to market. Boyce: Jason just trailed off there, but I think it's a good place to end. When I look at a platter of wild raw oysters, I think, "You're wild animals that someone has pulled from the wild ocean." That membrane between my plate and the sea feels thin. Farming the ocean, it can seem so technological, so managed, almost invasive, but the oyster story complicates that farmed versus wild dichotomy. Jason's Bayou Rosa oysters may not be the Gulf oyster of yore, wild and funky, but they're Jason's grandpa's oysters. The process has changed, but the tradition continues. Jason is out there with his hands in the water. [music] Carlyle: Thanks for listening to Sea Change. This series is produced in partnership with the Food and Environment Reporting Network. This episode was hosted by me, Carlyle Calhoun, and Boyce Upholt. Boyce also reported this episode. Editing by Jack Rodolico. I'm the executive producer. This episode was fact-checked by Garrett Hazelwood. Our theme music is by John Batiste, and our sound designer is Emily Jankowski. Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We're part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. To help others find our podcast, please share this episode with a friend. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sea Change is also supported by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. WWNO's Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation. We'll be back in two weeks. [music] Teresa: Special thanks to Sea Change for producing this episode. Before we roll the credits, there's something else we need to tell you this week. Here's the Food and Environment Reporting Network's Editor-in-Chief, Theodore Ross. Theodore: This episode of REAP/SOW is dedicated to the memory of Katie Gardner, a cherished colleague and friend to all of us at FERN. She will be deeply and truly missed. Teresa: Thanks so much for that, Ted. Katie, we miss you every day. WWNO's Sea Change is hosted by Carlyle Calhoun, who's also its executive producer. This episode was edited by Jack Rodolico and fact-checked by Garrett Hazelwood. Their theme music is by John Batiste, and their sound designer is Emily Jankowski. Sea Change is a WWNO and a WRKF production. They're part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. REAP/SOW is a production of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are Theodore Ross, Tom Laskawy, and Brent Cunningham. Our sound engineer is Lauren Newson. Our audio and video producer is Maya Okindo. I'm your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. FERNnews is our home on YouTube. Find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent nonprofit reporting at www.thefern.org. [00:26:18] [END OF AUDIO] Reap Sow_Ep 29_20251215_Oysters_mixdown.mp3 (Completed: 12/16/2025) Transcript by GoTranscript.com