Jersey Shore Oyster Industry Growing Again

CAPE MAY – Lying 50 yards off the shore of a remote cove along a stretch of mud flats on the Delaware Bay – where prehistoric man once cultivated oysters with a kind of primitive aquaculture – modern-day researchers and aqua-farmers have been working hand in hand for more than a decade to seed and grow New Jersey's beleaguered oyster industry.

And the results are paying off in a farm-to-table Cinderella story that has taken oysters out of the depths of blight- and disease-decimated shellfish populations, through the thorny trial and error of scientific research, and into a recovery phase that is producing a marketable product fit for gourmands.

Though the numbers still may not be what they were before a blight in the 1950s, when the Delaware Bay alone produced more than a million bushels a year of oysters, things are definitely looking better. Up from lows of yielding almost nothing some years in the 1960s and 1970s, over the last decade state waters have produced an average of 72,000 bushels of the oysters annually, according to the New Jersey Department of Agriculture.

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