Seeds of change

Some commercial fishermen whose livelihoods were turned upside down by a fishing net ban years ago have found success in clam farming. And Florida has become one of the nation's largest clam producers.

[Times photo: Maurice Rivenbark] Lerry Lee, a former commercial fisherman and brother-in-law of clam farmer Barry Clayton, carries plastic wire and carpet of clams to Clayton's 2-acre lease off Cedar Key.

By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 23, 2000

CEDAR KEY -- About the time the morning's first order of grits and mullet hits a plate at Annie's Cafe, Barry Clayton turns his wheezing pickup truck into a lot down the street and prepares to bury $3,300 at the bottom of the sea.

Stuffed in mesh bags in the back of the pickup, Clayton's investment sits not in packs of $5s and $20s, but in 300,000 dime-size shells.

Inside the shells lie baby clams, slimy little treasures for the hundreds of fishermen such as Clayton whose livelihoods were turned upside down five years ago when the state banned large commercial fishing nets in certain areas to protect depleted fish stocks.

Former commercial fisherman Barry Clayton shows off seed clams before planting them in the waters off Cedar Key.

After gulf waters wash over his shells for a year, Clayton expects an eightfold return from his load of seedlings.

"I'll make $25,000 off these clams here," says 45-year-old Clayton, clad in a black wet suit and a green hunting cap marked Buckmasters, a Marlboro Light at his lips.

Clayton drives the clams, in mesh bags, to a nearby ramp and gingerly places them into a flat-bottom "birddog" boat. He and two friends will steer it into what in the past 10 years have become the hottest waters for clam farming in the country.

Numbers released this month show that Florida's production of clams shot up from 8.8-million in 1991 to 134-million in 1999, an increase of 1,423 percent.

Most of the increase in Florida's clam production came from Cedar Key, where the state stumbled onto a soupy recipe for success in 1991.

Several ingredients went into this fish tale come true: perfect waters, a growing market for clams and displaced workers looking for new jobs.

"Nobody realized, I don't think, how productive it would be," said Leslie Sturmer, the aquaculture extension agent in Cedar Key for the University of Florida.

Sturmer formerly was the Cedar Key project manager for job retraining for the non-profit Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution Inc., a research organization. It initially gave the fishermen clam seeds from its hatchery and job training through federal grants.

North of Cedar Key, oyster fishermen were put out of work in 1991. The natural oyster beds in the Suwannee River were closed because of changes in the river patterns and the discovery of salmonella in the water from land runoff upstream.

That year, Fort Pierce-based Harbor Branch began teaching about 170 fishermen how to farm not only oysters but clams. In 1995, Harbor Branch followed up with a second job-training program for another 100 commercial fishermen put out of work by the state's net ban.

Both projects were designed to farm-raise oysters and clams on 2-acre leases in the Cedar Key area of Dixie and Levy counties. But soon clams eclipsed oysters.

Clams drew a better price, and they took quickly to the perfect water temperature and the mixture of saltwater and freshwater from the Gulf of Mexico and the Suwannee River. And a bountiful tide washes algae and other foods out of the marshes of Cedar Key and over the clam beds at least twice a day.

Now Florida is one of the nation's largest clam producers. According to a 1998 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service, Florida was third in dollar sales of clams, behind Washington and Virginia. But Florida was ahead of Virginia in the number of clams sold. Washington's quantity was not listed.

"I think we could double or quadruple and not hit a market ceiling, as long as people learn how to keep selling to other places," said David Vaughan, the aquaculture director for Harbor Branch. "We haven't even gotten to the point of exporting to other countries."

Vaughan is something of a local celebrity around here because he spearheaded the idea of growing clams on Florida's sea floors. The license plate on his blue GMC pickup truck bears his nickname: Dr. Clam.

A new way of life

The low morning sun burns as red-orange as an ember as Clayton and his crew of two motor past rows of white poles that poke out of the Gulf of Mexico like fence posts a few miles offshore.

These poles mark the borders of 2-acre clam leases: hundreds of acres of sea floor divided into a grid like a small city.

The poles are numbered, not that Clayton and his crew need any guidance. The two on board to help are friend Wesley Fine, known to everyone as Kid, and Clayton's brother-in-law, Jerry Lee.

Kid kills the motor while Clayton and Lee, in their wet suits, wrap weight belts around their waists.

"You ain't got a weight belt on, you float like a cork," Kid explains.

Clayton drops into chest-high water, another Marlboro Light hanging from his mouth, and Kid hands him an armful of plastic wire rolled up like a carpet with the bags of baby clams attached inside. Then Kid gives him a fistful of wire stakes.

Clayton, short and wiry as a firecracker, announces the water's condition in a deep voice that's scratchy as gravel: "Cold."

He moves slowly through the water about 50 feet. Then he disappears as he lowers himself to the sea floor, unrolling the carpet of clams and pinning them down with the wire stakes. Every 30 seconds or so his head pops back up to spit out water and take in air.

"Just about all the fishermen around here now are clammers," Kid says, resting against the side of the boat in his calf-high white fishing boots, faded dirty jeans and T-shirt, a hunting cap resting atop his long, knotty blond hair. "Mine's over there," he says, pointing toward the white poles marking his two 2-acre leases.

Kid, a fisherman in Cedar Key almost all his 42 years, went through the Harbor Branch retraining program with Clayton, who was his fishing partner for about eight years before the net ban. It's a subject that still can spark a heated argument around here.

"I fished all the way to the last day," he says.

The adjustment was bitter. "I almost starved to death. There were a lot of angry people." It wasn't until a year into the training program, at the first clam harvest, that the change began to pay off. Now Kid says he makes "a hundred times" more money clam farming than he did fishing.

"You can make anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000" a year, Kid says.

Gone are the 16- to 18-hour days as commercial fishermen, camping on the islands for months at a time chasing mullet.

"Now, by noon, you make $1,000 and you're back at home," Kid says. "I've seen the locals go from having nothing to having vehicles and new houses."

The money's still not enough for Kid and the other clam farmers to live in town. Chased out by skyrocketing real estate taxes as vacationers buy up increasingly expensive homes along this unspoiled coastline, Kid and his wife and daughter live several miles inland in Rosewood.

Clam farmers say their new profession was the only thing that kept them from being chased away from Cedar Key altogether after the net ban. Now, they are the ones doing the chasing.

"Hey, Buddy," Kid yells with a friendly wave to a boat speeding by, an alert-looking driver at the wheel, his dog at the helm. The man, a security guard of sorts for the clammers, waves back.

Clammers pay the guards $120 a month per lease to police the waters. The guards are armed with a cellular phone to call in the Marine Patrol at the first sight of strange characters.

Kid lost 160 bags of clams last year to thieves. "That's $15,000 they hit me for."

By now, Clayton and Lee climb back on board, done with the planting and ready to move the boat to another spot to harvest clams they put down last summer.

Their first job took 35 minutes. "Ain't bad for an old man," Clayton says.

Risks and rewards

Clamming yields high profits, but like any kind of farming, it depends on nature and is strewn with risks.

The change in water salinity in the Gulf of Mexico thanks to El Nino in June 1998 killed 200-million clams on productive leases in the Cedar Key area.

"I think people are more cautious after El Nino," said Roger Favreau, who lives in Morriston, about 30 miles from Cedar Key, where he raises clams. "People were putting 3- to 5-million seeds out there, mortgaging their houses."

Favreau and his partner, a former mullet fisherman, lost 2.5-million clams.

"I was putting seed out at the time in bags (and) when we came out there, I could tell. I pulled up a bag, and pardon the expression, it looked like it was full of snot," Favreau said.

Despite the risks, clam farming increasingly has attracted people such as Favreau, a retired computer systems analyst with a local phone company in Connecticut. Unlike former commercial fishermen, Favreau had his cattle farm to fall back on when bad times hit. Other clammers had to turn to crabbing and other types of fishing to get by.

Only in the past few months has Favreau been able to harvest and sell clams again. Within a year, he expects he and three partners will be harvesting up to 40,000 clams a week for $5,000, or about $65,000 a year each before deducting the expense of the clams and equipment.

"It pays pretty good, but you have to make the investment," he said. "It's also risky."

The upfront costs are tough for commercial fishermen.

"It's almost two years before you get money out of it," said Willie Spears, who went into clamming full time at the beginning of this year after he was let go by Energizer, where he worked as a maintenance supervisor at its Alachua County battery plant. He spoke while buying 1-million clam seedlings from the Harbor Branch office in Cedar Key with his partner, Larry Langston, a former commercial fisherman put out of work by the net ban.

Some clammers have lost clams and thousands of dollars by heedlessly pumping scorching water from the surface of the gulf over the seedlings before they are planted. Others lost their investment by failing to cover the seedlings en route to the boat on frosty winter mornings.

Then there are the "boogers," Clayton's term for predators such as stone crabs, stingrays and conchs that crawl or rip their way into the mesh bags on the sea floor and eat the clams before they are harvested.

Despite the risks, a host of investors are eager to grant loans or front the capital to the clam farmers.

"We are now dealing with clam farmers as businessmen with businesses," said Mark Berrigan, bureau chief with the division of aquaculture within the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Now there are about 400 lease holders in the Cedar Key area, though the leases continually are transferred, sometimes for about $20,000 a lease, farmers say. The state charges about $40 a year for the 10-year leases, but new ones are hard to find in Cedar Key. That's leading to the high prices for existing, more productive leases in good waters as new and eager farmers angle to replace those less committed.

"These leases are as much part of a real estate market as an aquaculture production market," Berrigan said.

Off to market

Clayton and his crew pull into the parking lot of Silverbeach Seafood on the main drag into Cedar Key and begin unloading their treasure: 10 bags of harvested palm-size clams ready for market.

Silverbeach is one of about three-dozen clam buyers and distributors in the area. Most moved in within the past five years to cater to the booming new clam business.

State officials have not tracked how many clams produced in Florida are sold here or out of state, but buyers talk about the growing in-state market as Northerners move to the state with a palate trained for shellfish. Florida growers also have the advantage over Northern ones because tepid waters allow clammers here to farm year-round.

Lee, Kid and Clayton, now in jeans and white fishing boots, put the clams through a tumbler to wash off sand and dirt and then into a grader -- a monstrous-looking machine that spins the clams through several pipes like dice -- to be counted, sized and bagged.

After all the clams are bagged and stacked against the wall, Silverbeach manager Bill Rausch writes Clayton a check for $725 for about 6,500 clams. It's not even noon. Clayton heads for the bank, then home for lunch with his wife and son.

When Clayton reflects on the changes to his life wrought by the state's net ban, his long-simmering anger cools.

"I was pretty p--- off," Clayton says. "In retrospect, those good people of the state of Florida who voted me out of a job, I was lucky enough to get a job doing this. They really did me a favor."

From seeds to sale

Here are the steps in the clam farming process:

1: Obtain a lease in state-approved sea waters for clam farming, such as the Cedar Key area and Charlotte, Volusia, Lee, Brevard and Indian River counties. Some lease agreements are being exchanged between clam farmers in the Cedar Key area for $20,000 per 2-acre lease. Aside from these private agreements, you must get approval from local county officials and state officials, including the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which charges about $40 a year for a 2-acre parcel. Leases run for 10 years with an option to renew for another 10 years. This lease approval process can take six to 18 months.

2. Buy clam seeds. Most clam farmers in the Cedar Key area are trying to buy about 1-million clam seeds a year, which cost about $11,000. They spend another $6,000 to $8,000 on mesh bags in which they place those 1-million clams for planting on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Additional equipment costs about $2,000 or $3,000. In all, you could spend $20,000 to $22,000 on seeds and equipment before any planting begins.

3. Place your 1-million seeds in nursery bags that have holes small enough so that clams 3.3 millimeters in length -- the size of a pencil eraser -- won't fall through, but big enough to allow water and food, such as algae, to wash through the bag. Roll the nursery bags in plastic wire-like rolls of carpet for transport to sea on the boat. Climb into the water with a roll in your arms. Unroll the plastic wire like a carpet and fix it to the sea floor with wire stakes. Repeat this until all the rolls are planted. Mark them with white poles, so you know how to find them later. Depending on the depth of the water, which could be knee-high or neck-high, some clam farmers use a face mask and an engine-driven air compressor to see and breathe under the water. Many feel their way with their feet.

4. After two or three months, retrieve the nursery bags from the water and bring them back to shore to move the shells into "grow-out bags," which have bigger holes. At this point, the shells are about the size of a fingernail. Replant these "grow-out" bags on the sea floor exactly as you planted the nursery bags.

5. Wait eight to 16 months, checking on the shells periodically. When they are ready for harvest, the shells should be 7/8 to 11/8 inches wide. Remove them from the sea and bring them to a buyer/distributor in town.

6. At the buyer's store, machines will clean, grade and bag the shells. The normal survival rate is about 70 percent, so you should have 700,000 clams. The going sale rate is between 10 and 12 cents a clam, so you stand to gross $70,000 to $84,000 for these clams. Take your check to the bank.

Source: Clam farmers and Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution Inc.

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