Crisis in the halfshell

Rob Tryon set out to revolutionize BC’s shellfish industry using social media, science and showmanship. A decade later, the tide turned — and he walked away.

BY QUINN BENDER

IT STARTED WITH A TWEET.

For 13 years, Rob Tryon worked the quiet rhythms of his father’s oyster farm at NW Aquaculture, tucked into Effingham Inlet on Vancouver Island’s remote west coast. One day, standing in the aluminum harvester, he towed a processing hut across the cove to one of the many rickety wooden rafts that marked his floating tenure. A thin plume of smoke curled from a blue chimney mounted to an old house on a rusting barge moored just offshore. There were no roads here. Boat visits from distant neighbours were rare and delightfully unexpected. The only noise was the clatter of a few farmhands sorting the harvest.

He missed his family.

Tryon always missed his family. And he wondered whether taking over the farm was worth the sacrifice.

"A little while ago I realized I needed to get people to ask for my oysters by name, and then I thought of this,” he says, throwing his arms toward the water. “Effingham Inlet! I got this vision of a guy sitting at a cocktail bar and shouting out to the waitress: 'Hey, gimme’ another effin’ oyster!"'

So he climbed a mountain, aims a cellular repeater toward a distant signal, and typed: #geteffed.

It was time to shake things up.

At 33, one of the youngest in his field, Tryon decided to connect directly with consumers through social media. If he could build a following, raise awareness and ride out the ongoing oyster seed shortage, maybe he could scale the farm and finally modernize. Maybe it would all be worth it.

He balances himself on a raft and winches up a stack of oyster trays from 20 feet below. These oysters have been in his care for three years, nurtured from seedlings no bigger than a grain of sand. Now they’re bound for restaurant tables in Vancouver, Montreal, Chicago and Hawaii.

"The response to social media was incredible," he says. “People want to know their farmers now. They want to see your face.”

Within a year of launching his campaign, orders increased 30 per cent. Tryon befriended chefs, bloggers and diners with hundreds of posts about oyster life — flavour profiles, health benefits, sustainability. He designed T-shirts with his tongue-in-cheek slogans and ran trivia contests on Facebook. Eventually he organized tastings with other independent growers, turning personal success into collective momentum.

Tryon wears his commitment literally: a tattoo of Crassostrea gigas, the Pacific oyster, is inked on his forearm, crossed with two shucking knives like a pirate’s Jolly Roger. He sees oyster farming as a revolution in progress — a sustainable, high-protein food source for a crowded planet, and an economic lifeline for BC’s coastal communities.

The confidence behind his campaign is grounded in technique — and taste.

“It’s a major opportunity for this province,” he says, guiding the harvest into the processing hut and selecting a large specimen from the top tray. Every three months he’s moved this oyster from its cool depths to a metal tumbler, giving the adductor muscle a good workout to encourage growth of a deeper cup — a fatter oyster. Each tumble is evident on the shell like rings on a tree. It quickly meets Tryon’s shucking knife — the words “Effing ’ster popper” engraved in the handle — before it’s consumed whole. He pauses with the briny start, that pure, seawater liquor. Then, with a vigorous chew, he punctures the stomach, releasing the algae for that sweet, melony aftertaste.

But just below the surface of this renewed interest in oysters, a deeper crisis is brewing — and it’s one Tryon can’t hashtag away.

The trouble started eight years earlier in Washington State, when millions of Pacific oyster larvae failed to develop healthy shells and died. Scientists eventually traced the cause to ocean acidification. For BC farmers dependent on Washington hatcheries, the consequences were immediate and severe.

"Everyone's calling each other asking if they've found seed,” Tryon says. “It’s kind of the routine now. If I don't find any this year, I don't know what I'm going to do. Well, I do — I'll be looking for a new career."

Previous efforts to launch a Canadian-owned hatchery have stalled. The industry, too small and fragmented, can’t justify the investment. A new initiative is underway, led by the BC Shellfish Growers Association, but it will be at least six months before a funding proposal can even be submitted. Until then, local production remains stalled in the world’s largest seafood trade.

Tryon loves oysters. He loves eating them as much as farming them. But this harvest, he fears, may be his last.

***

The Pacific oyster isn’t native to British Columbia. It was imported from Japan in the 1920s, after local harvesters nearly wiped out native species. Food producers favoured its hard shell and ability to withstand temperature fluctuations. Over the decades, it spread around the world. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Pacific oyster farms now produce 4.5 million of the 31 million tonnes of seafood consumed globally each year. It’s the highest production volume of any single sea species on the planet, with a market value of roughly $4 billion annually.

While the species is widespread, its flavour is local. Each region’s oysters reflect the plankton and algae in surrounding waters. BC’s nutrient-rich coastline produces some of the tastiest. Yet in 2011, the province harvested just 7,500 tonnes of oysters, valued at $9.2 million, according to the BC Ministry of Environment. Roughly 280 small farms, employing between 700 and 1,000 people, operated on just 500 hectares — equivalent to the runway footprint at Vancouver International Airport. That amounts to a mere one per cent of BC’s 47,000-kilometre island-studded coastline.

The gap between what’s possible and what’s being produced continues to frustrate those trying to grow the industry.

At Vancouver Island University, the Centre for Shellfish Research envisions a BC shellfish sector easily reaching $100 million, while still maintaining the “social licence” needed to share the coastline with other users. The centre’s director, Don Tillapaugh, says he believes the growth will come — but he isn’t sure today’s farmers will survive long enough to see it.

"It's been a relatively small-scale industry, and because of that... there's a lot of foreign investment money that's investigating, and being invested in the industry currently.”

Farmers don’t have the capital. Consolidators do. Equity is needed not only to secure seed supply, but to shoulder increasingly complex regulations imposed by both federal and provincial governments.

When the seed crisis was at its worst, a BC Supreme Court ruling transferred aquaculture regulation from the province to the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans. The case was brought forward by marine biologist Alexandra Morton, who argued the province had no jurisdiction over aquaculture in federally controlled waters — particularly open-net salmon farms. Her victory, while a major win for anti-salmon-farm activists, was an unfortunate setback for shellfish farmers, now overseen by a department built to manage wild finfish.

"We're farmers. We don't pluck a public resource,” says Matthew Wright, communications manager for the BC Shellfish Growers Association. “We buy our seeds, we put them in the water and then we harvest them two or three years later. Fisheries management practices don't translate."

BC is now the only province in Canada whose aquaculture industry falls under the Fisheries Act. The result has been predictably chaotic.

The transfer created confusion within both government and industry. But the DFO is just one of 17 federal and provincial agencies that shellfish farmers are now required to navigate — and it's burning farmers out with the simple act of paperwork.

Last December, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency added to that load with new regulations requiring veterinarian certification on each shipment of seed into Canada, rather than the batch from which each shipment derived. The industry called the rule needlessly redundant but was forced to absorb the cost.

"There are [17] different federal and provincial agencies we have to deal with,” says Wright. “It's no wonder the farmers get confused. We are the most heavily regulated food industry in Canada."

At the Shellfish Research Centre, Tillapaugh points to an identical scenario that drove the independent salmon-farm industry into foreign consolidation. “The cost of meeting the environmental regulatory compliance required people to hire consultants to fill out all the forms. And that requires larger companies to be able to afford those costs... there's a lot of investors right now, mostly Asian, who are looking to buy into the BC aquaculture industry.

"It's ironic, everyone likes small and beautiful when it comes to farming, but when you add this kind of regulation it drives it to a whole different level of industry."

Few know more about that shift than Dr. Rohana Subasinghe. The senior aquaculture officer of the Fisheries and Aquaculture Department at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome recently visited the University of Victoria as part of his mission to push aquaculture into the 21st century. By 2050, the world’s projected population of nine billion will require 70 per cent more protein supply than what we’re currently producing. Subasinghe holds up aquaculture as the solution. Oysters encourage healthy ecosystems, as they clean the water with their filter-feeding action, and they don’t deplete other species for food. While best-practices research is ongoing into some of the more problematic farmed species, particularly feed-dependent finfish, the farmed oyster is a kind of rock star in the aquaculture kingdom, ready to take the stage.

Subasinghe is equally attentive to the role it is playing in global poverty reduction. “There are 12 million people employed by independent farmers, the backbone of the industry,” he says. But he warns a corporate level of aquaculture is on the rise worldwide where government regulation isn’t in line with industry needs. As small-farm owners are pushed out of business, their communities are relieved of the profits and incentives for entrepreneurism.

If BC’s independent farmers are to survive the next 15 years, with the current regulatory procedures in place, Subasinghe says it’s unlikely they will take a share of the exploding international demand.

“Remember, in [15 years] more than 50 per cent of the world’s middle class will be in Asia. There will be a lot of demand for fish there... but because of the regulatory framework [in Canada], your prices are quite high so you probably won’t be able to export.

“You have to reduce the costs and provide more incentives to farmers. I think there is a political will, but the administrative procedures have become too cumbersome.”

Like many in BC, Subasinghe suspects that political will is undermined by the negative branding open-net salmon farms have cast over the entire aquaculture industry.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, through its Seafood Watch program, publishes the food world’s de facto list of sustainable food choices. Since 1999, the Aquarium has given the farmed oyster its highest rank, “Best Choice.” (Farmed salmon, it’s lowest: “Avoid.”)

The Vancouver Aquarium offers a similar endorsement on its website.

On the ecological front, it’s difficult to find detractors of suspended oyster farming. The Centre for Shellfish Research conducted two impact studies on intensive oyster farming practices in 2003 and 2005. Oysters loosed from trays did alter the immediate seafloor from a soft-bottom to hard-bottom community habitat, but from a scientific perspective this was good news. The amount of species diversity hadn’t changed. It just changed in its complexion.

The David Suzuki Foundation, when pressed for criticism of BC oyster farming, came back with nothing.

***

Tryon’s two employees are hard workers, but this is their first harvest. Neither can drive a harvester, nor expedite operations. Nonetheless, at week’s end when they board the boat for a two-hour trip back to Port Alberni, Tryon raises his fist and smiles upon finding their sleeping bags still in their beds. It means they plan to return next week. So few do.

Tryon has enough work for four people, but not enough money to hold their interest.

"Just stay with me, and I promise things will get better," he tells the two. "Just stick with it and we'll all be making more money soon. I promise." Tryon then announces a $10 raise: a $110 daily total.

"They need to know there’s a future for them here. I see it very often when young, able-bodied men and women are leaving BC for Alberta to make a living, to support their families. The thought has crossed my mind too over the years, but I've grown up on the coast. I've spent my life on the water. I can't leave this beauty. To go from a super-sustainable industry to, you know, working in the oil sands is something I don't think I could do."

Tryon steers the harvester away from the raft for a brief shore excursion. It's the first time he's stepped on solid ground in two days. On a narrow coastline, he upturns boulders and prods crevices for a myriad of sea life. He has catalogued more than 100 species piggybacking habitats on his trays, but he values the coastline for its natural biodiversity, an index of his farm’s health.

He finds a wild sea cucumber and lays it in his palm. Deep red and horned with a water-balloon-like consistency, it measures a foot in length. This, says Tryon, could end the crisis. If he could farm a small number of sea cucumber and other native species, on the side — like the prized geoduck clam (worth up to $50 each on the Asian markets) — it would provide equity to retain workers, see him past seed shortages and maybe bankroll upgrades to his farm.

DFO is researching the impacts of diversifying aquaculture, but is making no visible move to lift the barriers to these lucrative markets. Last year, BC’s geoduck harvest, from both wild stocks and a few experimental farms, totalled just 1,600 tonnes, but raked in $41 million. This is compared to 7,500 tonnes of oyster worth only $9.2 million.

The expansion of independent farming is limited not by a lack of homegrown entrepreneurship, but by policies that appear favourable to corporate-level consolidation.

That still doesn’t sit well with Tryon, but in the space between the writing of this story and seeing it to print, Rob Tryon quit oyster farming for good. In the end, his idealist’s passion was overcome by a mundane mountain of debt. Along with the many side effects of a personal financial crisis, it was all proving unsustainable to his homelife.

He packed his truck and moved to Alberta.

Allying himself with the public through social media and live events, Tryon found an upswell of support for shellfish farming by the simple act of showing his face and starting a dialogue. But securing the support of the masses will be an ongoing challenge for other farmers if they don’t address the misplaced yet notorious branding of aquaculture. It’s worth noting Alexandra Morton, whose legal action put aquaculture in the headlines to begin with, never actually took issue with the shellfish industry. She says her focus was farmed salmon only — that shellfish farms were simply caught in the legal definition of aquaculture.

"I really don't know much about it [shellfish farming],” Morton told me, “but it seems a much more benign form of aquaculture."

Despite this lukewarm endorsement, public stigma persists. "Because salmon farming is in the news so often, people just hear 'aquaculture' and think it's all negative," Tryon says by telephone from Alberta. "Then you have the DFO; they look at us like we're a bunch of cowboys.

“The voices of the shellfish farmers have not been heard."