TYBEE ISLAND ― The tide is in, and Laura Solomon’s morning rush hour is a commuter’s dream. She pilots the 21-foot motorboat rapidly along the still waters of the Bull River, the craft rocking gently as she adjusts course to meet the coils of the snaking waterway and to dodge the floating pots that mark the presence of submerged crab traps.
What Solomon can’t see — but knows sit beneath her boat’s hull — are acres upon acres of wild oyster beds. The mollusks line much of the marshy shore along this ocean-adjacent section of the river and its many tributaries. The salinity of the water and the flush of the tides, which empty the marshes twice a day, produce oyster reefs so robust the Savannah area was once the world’s busiest oyster harvesting locale.
Solomon herself is an oysterman, along with her husband, Perry, and her first mate on this autumn workday, Chris Hathcock. But they aren’t waiting for an ebb tide to unveil the shell-laden bounty. The Tybee Oyster Co. is a farming operation, the first of its kind in Georgia, and their oysters don’t cluster on muddy flats and aren’t harvested using hammers and chisels and aching muscles.
The Solomons’ oysters grow in floating plastic baskets clipped to heavy ropes anchored to the riverbed near the river’s mouth. Their farm, which they call Bull River Ranch, measures 7.5 acres and is neighbored on two sides by similar plots leased to the Savannah Oyster Co., which owns popular Savannah oyster bar, Sorry Charlie’s, and a Savannah foods wholesaler, Ambos Seafoods.
Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC
Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC
Savannah Oyster Co. just harvested its first crop in October. Ambos, acquired by a national wholesaler in late 2022 after getting a lease, has yet to launch its operation.
Down the coast near Harris Neck, three more operators hold leases for farms in the Mud River, including famed wild oyster harvester and pioneering oyster farmer Earnest McIntosh of E.L McIntosh and Son Oyster Co.
A third oyster farming locale, known as a mariculture zone, is proposed farther south in Jointer Creek near Jekyll Island.
Being first to market has made the Solomons’ “Salt Bombs” a must-try delicacy. The debut crop hit the tables of 10 Savannah restaurants late last year. The local oysters disappeared during a summer moratorium on harvesting only to return in October when water temperatures dipped below 82 degrees.
The Salt Bombs are currently on the menus of 15 Savannah and Tybee eateries and sold at BG’s Seafood Co-op on the Lazaretto Creek docks just west of Tybee. The Solomons could scale the operation over time to produce as many as 1.5 million oysters a year and they plan to open a retail operation. But for now, the Tybee Oyster Co. has what Laura calls an “inventory” issue.
“Every oyster we harvest is already sold,” she said. “It’s a good problem to have.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Rebirth of an industry
For the Solomons, pioneering floating oyster farming in Georgia came down to a decision to “shuck around and find out,” which today stands as the company motto.
They came to oystering with no background in commercial fishing. Both hold Georgia Tech engineering degrees but have spent their careers in other pursuits. Perry flew fighter jets for the U.S. Navy for 20 years and now pilots for Gulfstream, the Savannah-based business jet manufacturer. Laura worked as a project analyst for consulting firms before moving into the education field.
In the mid-2010s, with Perry nearing the end of his military career and prepping to move back home from Virginia Beach, Georgia officials established an oyster hatchery near Savannah to study the potential for oyster farming in the state. Intrigued by the idea, the Solomons began visiting floating farms, a widely used practice in Virginia and other states, along the Chesapeake Bay to learn the methodology.
Oysters were a source of sustenance for centuries before the Georgia colony’s founding. A century ago, when canned oysters were a staple, the state’s annual oyster crop topped 8 million pounds a year. Commercial shucking houses and canneries dotted the state’s shoreline.
But as consumer tastes changed, shifting toward beef and poultry in the 1930s, the industry collapsed. The oyster beds were suffering from overharvesting anyway, and the canneries closed and commercial fishermen sought other catches. By the 1960s, oystering was a dormant business in Georgia.
The drop in demand increased concerns by regulators about oyster-borne illness, as wild oysters went unharvested and were exposed to air and sun for longer periods. River levels on Georgia’s coast regularly swing by 8 feet in a tide cycle, meaning oysters are out of the water for hours at a time. That’s less of an issue in places like the Gulf Coast and the Chesapeake Bay, where tides are measured in inches, not feet.
The concerns in Georgia led to hesitancy about oyster farming for decades, even as innovators developed techniques to keep cages submerged in floating farms. Then in 2015, the University of Georgia established an oyster hatchery at its Shellfish Research Laboratory on Skidaway Island, located a short boat ride from where the Solomons’ farm now sits.
The hatchery was meant to seed, literally, the start of Georgia’s oyster farming industry. In 2018, the McIntoshes used larvae from the hatchery in cages placed on the river bottom near Harris Neck. In 2019, state lawmakers passed a law to revitalize the oyster industry via floating farms, an increasingly popular method that is safer from a foodborne illness perspective and less labor intensive than harvesting wild oysters or farming with cages on the river bottom.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Going all in on oysters
The Solomons take pride in being first when it comes to oystering’s new era in Georgia.
Even more so because of the barriers to entry they’ve overcome.
Creating an industry from nothing was quite the challenge for state officials. The legislators who wrote the 2019 legalization law, such as Rep. Jesse Petrea (R-Savannah), wanted Georgia-based entrepreneurs, not national seafood distributors, to start the farms. This meant the implementation of a controversial lottery system to award leases.
Lease award winners would pay rent right away, forcing would-be farmers like the Solomons to either invest in equipment before knowing if they’d won a lease or wait until the lease had been approved to buy the gear, delaying the start of operations.
The Solomons ordered their supplies and crossed their fingers. So when they won a lease, they became the first to encounter the regulatory maze one would expect for pioneers of a nascent industry under the jurisdiction of four agencies. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources was tasked with developing the leases; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Coast Guard with permitting for the farms because they are in public waterways; and the Georgia Department of Agriculture with product storage and handling.
The Solomons have positive feelings about the experience and what it will mean for the oyster farmers who follow them.
“We often feel like we’re building a plane while we fly it,” Laura Solomon said. “We took off with one wing and no landing gear, but we’re still airborne.”
Not-so-hard labor
The Solomons are flying high in part because oyster farming on this scale and in this not-yet-competitive business environment can be treated as a “passion project,” almost like a hobby farm for a retiree.
Oyster farming is not as labor intensive as other forms of aquaculture and agriculture. Operators have local access to the UGA shellfish lab’s oyster seeds. With one female oyster laying 5 million to 10 million eggs with each spawn — and the hatchery capable of 15 to 20 spawns a year — supply is plentiful. Once the farmers have the 2-millimeter-long baby oysters in the water, they don’t have to feed them. Oysters eat phytoplankton already present in the water, and no fertilizer is needed.
And floating farms don’t require oystermen to constantly clean mud, algae and other contaminants from the shells as those who grow oysters in cages on the river bottom do.
The hardest Bull River Ranch chore involves sorting the oysters by size and redistributing them so they have more room to grow. The other regular task is to flip the cages out of the water to limit barnacle growth and encourage a uniform shape, but that is accomplished using semiautomated equipment that attaches to the Solomons’ work boat and can be operated by as few as one farmer.
Harvesting is done with the same gear. Laura Solomon and Hathcock worked together to bring in thousands of oysters in less than 90 minutes during a trip in October.
As the Tybee Oyster Co. gains more experience and the size of the Bull River Ranch grows — they’ve installed the infrastructure to grow capacity by 38% and the space to boost production by 200% — the Solomons will devote more time to farming. Laura already has cut back to a part-time role at the Tybee charter school where she works.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Taste of the coast
The Solomons keep a shucking knife on the work boat to sample their crop fresh from the water.
The purple-hued shells gleam in the sunlight. The Salt Bombs are small in size compared to varieties sourced from Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay or along the coast of New England and Canada’s Maritime Provinces, and they aren’t the craggy, difficult-to-open clusters of wild oysters that Savannahians are familiar with from wintertime oyster roasts.
Flavor is what sets the Bull River Ranch oysters truly apart from others, said Hathcock as he popped open a few and passed them around the boat. Oysters are one of nature’s great water filters and with Savannah’s tidal movement, the Salt Bombs live up to their name.
“They taste like this part of the coast,” he said while waving his hand at the surroundings. “Salty like the air and briny like the water.”
Hathcock is an accomplished chef as well as a ranch hand for the Solomons. Formerly the executive chef at Husk, the restaurantco-founded by James Beard Award winner Sean Brock, Hathcock now does restaurant pop-ups at eateries such as Fleeting in Savannah’s Thompson Hotel.
Salt Bombs top his menus, and he typically serves them raw on the half shell with Prik Nam Pla, a Thai chile sauce, and limes. The spicy sauce and tart citrus accentuate the salty sweetness of the oyster meat.
Hathcock advises against “ruining” these oysters by eating them in a way familiar along the Georgia coast: removing them from the shell, placing them on a saltine and slathering them in cocktail sauce and lemon juice.
Oysters are the taste of Perry Solomon’s childhood. He grew up on Tybee and fondly remembers attending church oyster roasts with his family. His grandfather would collect shucked oysters and freeze them in water-filled milk carton pints in order to make oyster stew in the summer months.
He associates those food memories with his sense of what’s special about Tybee and Savannah. He said the seafood that is so vital to the area’s identity — like shrimp, crabs and oysters — are the “final frontier” in connecting to the community.
“In many ways, food defines a sense of place,” Laura Solomon said. “Oysters are that link here along the coast.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Oyster harvesting (wild and farmed) in 2022 by state, in pounds:
LA: 7.1 million
VA: 4.44M
MD: 1.7M
TX: 1.6M
NC: 1.1M
MA: 645,162
FL: 308,000*
SC: 292,513
AL: 283,550
ME: 239,056
R.I.: 149,850
DE: 134,666
NY: 56,545
GA: 13,311
Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
*Florida’s Apalachicola Bay shut down for oyster fishing in 2020 and won’t reopen until January 2026 after drought contributed to collapse; the area once produced 3 million pounds of oysters annually.
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