“A nightmare”: Inside the harsh world of oyster farming

The oyster inspector would arrive at the Hawkesbury on a Friday, ready to sample the goodies set for market. 

“If the inspector was alive on Monday, they could sell them,” oyster farmer James Brown tells the Lorikeet, passing on a morsel of local lore about how things were 100 years ago.

Quality assurance and biosecurity have evolved over the decades. Automation and advancements in seeding, technology and AI have, and will continue, to see the industry adapt and change. 

But that is not all. A warming climate is also impacting oyster farmers. In some areas it’s the waters getting hotter, and in others - such as the Hawkesbury - it’s the increase in the ferocity and regularity of severe storm events.

All estuaries where oysters are harvested are monitored for water quality, and if salinity or water temperatures are not up to the standard, harvesting is stopped.

But for farmers, detection systems can only do so much. When floods, heavy rain, algae and disease hit estuaries, they will often incur massive losses.

In New South Wales, the Department of Primary Industries and oyster farmers collaborate to monitor water quality. 

• Salinity levels, water temperature, the presence of heavy metals and bacteria are among the things measured.

When the quality of stock can’t be assured, harvesting is prohibited. This means that farmers can incur major losses in times of floods and heavy rainfall. Brown says the hardest his farms have ever been hit was during heavy flooding in 2021.

That year, his entire stock was wiped out, losing between two and three million oysters. He says it’s the type of devastating event that can cause a business to close.

“Since 2021, the Hawkesbury has been a nightmare for the farmers that operate there. It's been shut, sometimes more often than it's open.”

Brown works various estuaries along the Hawkesbury River and Brisbane Water.

He spoke to us looking out across the water from a small boat shed in Woy Woy, part of his oyster and pearl farming business. 

The Hawkesbury’s warm, nutrient-rich waters make it a prime location for oyster farming. But the industry is also one of Australia’s most volatile, incredibly sensitive to disease, flooding and extreme weather. 

Brown has worked along the Hawkesbury since 2017, but the family’s history in oyster farming dates back 80 years to Broome.

He made the move to NSW after the industry in Western Australia was devastated by disease in 2007, compounded by the global financial crisis. This period saw the WA industry reduced from 16 companies to three, Brown says.

Along with disease, the health of oysters is also affected by the environment they grow in. 

• Marine biologists have referred to oysters as the “canary of the estuary” due to the fact that the broader health of an ecosystem is often first reflected in its oysters. 

Brown says that, in essence, oyster farming is about “working with the environment, understanding the environment really well, and responding to it”. 

• According to data from the CSIRO, one of the key impacts of climate change in Australia is more severe flooding, and more frequent extreme weather events.

While diseases like Pacific Oyster Mortality Syndrome and QX disease have been the biggest threats to the local industry in past decades, Brown says local farmers definitely consider the effects of climate change as a threat. 

So why does he hang about in such a high stakes industry?

“While we're talking, I'm actually looking at big bream swimming around. I'm on a shed just near one of those little mangrove islands. There's no one else around.”

Thumbnail: Toan Chu via Unsplash, Daramulan via Wikimedia