I step inside a small cinder block building in Green Pond, S.C. that’s filled with the sound of rushing water. A network of pipes connect large plastic containers of muddy-looking liquid, each nearly the size of a luxury plunge pool. J.B. Layton, the director of ecotourism here at Lowcountry Oyster Co., leads me to the edge of one, sticks his hand in and pulls out what looks like miniature, oblong pieces of gravel.
“Little baby oysters,” he says, shifting the dark granules in his fingers so that they catch light. “When we get them, they’re about the size of coffee grounds.” I’ve never seen such a thing up close.
Typically, these “baby oysters” form out in the water basin, where adult oysters release gametes that find each other and fertilize as they swim about. But Lowcountry Oyster Co. imports its young from Virginia, then raises them on land before sending them out to float in cages in the saltwater marshlands of South Carolina’s coast, part of a region known as the Lowcountry. It’s their process of aquaculture, one which Layton takes me through, step by step, as part of Lowcountry Oyster Co.’s burgeoning ecotourism program.
The grapes of the basin
There’s been a push to imagine oysters as wine. After announcing the creation of the Connecticut Oyster Trail, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont called the state “the Napa Valley of oysters.” In 2021, The New York Times ran a piece entitled “To Eat Oysters Better, Treat Them Like Wine.”
In many ways, it’s an apt comparison. Whereas wines have terroir, which is the flavor profile they acquire from the natural environment of a vineyard, oyster producers and connoisseurs like to talk about an oyster’s merroir, the subtle and varied flavors an oyster picks up from the water it lives in. Also like a vineyard, you can visit an oyster farm and see for yourself how that merroir develops, talking to the growers, then feasting on their product.
Hotels have seen potential in oysters, too. Lowcountry Oyster Co. opened shop in 2017, started its tour in 2021, and today has partnerships with a handful of hotels in Charleston. The tour I am taking is arranged through a partnership with The Palmetto, a boutique hotel that opened last year in Charleston’s French Quarter. A trendy place, they’ve taken a postcard of Isle of Palms from the early 20th century, turned it into fabric and used it to cover the lobby couches. There’s a smoky green cocktail room that serves biscuits in the morning and a cocktail tour of the city among the hotel’s offerings — both help guests feel a part of the culture of Charleston. To them, oyster farm tours give guests a sense of place, especially in South Carolina, where the oyster is central to local cuisine.
“It just aligns with those authentic experiences that you can’t always get or maybe aren’t always on the forefront of what other properties or people would promote,” Shannon Hartman, director of sales and marketing at The Palmetto, says.
When I arrive at Lowcountry Oysters, chauffeured an hour and half out to Green Pond, Layton greets me in an unpaved parking lot, discarded oyster shells scattered about, with a vial bug spray and another vial of sunscreen — things you typically don’t need in a vineyard. The river basin is a different ecosystem than a hillside in Sonoma, Calif. Rather than linen, I’m wearing water-resistant leggings and a ballcap, prepared for splashing water. All of the crops and green here I must reach by boat, in the marsh.
Before joining Lowcountry Oyster, Layton, a man with shoulder-length blondish hair from West Ashley, S.C., spent years working in bars in Charleston, and as a boat captain around the world, including right here on the South Carolina coast. He dredged sand in from the Atlantic, depositing it on nearby Folly Beach to help rebuild its shoreline. It gave him extensive knowledge of the area, and he gives a thorough tour.
The farm
Layton walks me to see the conveyor belt, about 100 yards away in another shed next to the dock, where caged oysters tumble down to receive their monthly cleaning — three people pick growths off of 40,000 to 70,000 oysters a day. Then, it’s out to the water. We board a long, spare metal boat and turn into an open area of the ACE Basin wildlife refuge, where the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto rivers empty into the Atlantic. There are no grape vines gently winding toward the sky, but it’s high tide on a bright late September day, and the water looks like foggy glass.
“It’s a 350,000-acre estuary and one of the healthiest ecosystems in the southeast,” Layton says of the ACE Basin. Oysters, he explains, do a tremendous amount to support that health. Layton once used sand to renourish South Carolina’s already eroded beaches, but oysters prevent erosion, fortifying shorelines as they grab on to each other and coalesce into coral-reef-like clusters. From these clusters, they filter the water they live in, cleaning up to 50 gallons a day, and create habitats for hundreds of other species, including crab and shrimp.
The environmental benefits build upon themselves: smaller species become food for larger ones. Layton points out marine life as we motor along. A dolphin crests a few times near our boat; we turn toward the marsh and an egret flies over the low, yellow-green grass. The bounty of the oyster harvest is more than the oyster.
While South Carolina has not seen the same decimation of its oyster population as New York and the Chesapeake Bay — where oyster farming and pollution, among others things, have chiseled away oyster reefs to nearly nothing — the population in the state has still declined. Oysters farmed in cages are one way to help restore the population, Layton says. True, they do not have all of the benefits of wild oysters, unable to hold down a shoreline the way a stack of shells entrenched in the mud can, but the caged oysters filter water all the same and still support marine habitats. What’s more, the caged oysters spawn, he tells me. Those spawns swim beyond the cages and can build wild clusters of their own.
“As big as tourism’s got and as big as everything’s developed [in Charleston], I think we’re at this perfect tipping point, culturally and as a society, that people are starting to realize that you can’t just bulldoze over everything,” Layton says.
The fruit
The marsh grass creates alleyways in the water, and we emerge from one to find two boats idling around rows of cages. One boat’s crew is flipping cages. The other is rinsing the encased oysters with a hose, hoping to push off any parasitic sea oats growing on their shells. This is one of five plots Lowcountry Oyster Co. runs. All together, they produce over a million oysters a year.
A tanned, shirtless man in the water climbs on top of one cage and flips it. It’s small enough for him to get his arms about halfway around. He’s not the mysterious stranger plucking fruit in the Italian countryside, but if Nicholas Sparks was into the waders and mud bluff, he could probably turn this vista into something.
“To be fair, he could be using a winch to do that,” Layton says and points to a pulley contraption on one of the boats that a man on board is using to turn cages. “He’s showing off?” I ask. “He’s showing off,” Layton confirms.
Layton claims that Lowcountry Oyster Co. is the first to use this specific cage farming technique in South Carolina. The company’s founder, Trey McMillan, originally saw the technique in Chesapeake Bay. Floating cages are less labor intensive than other types of oyster farming, and using this method, the bivalves grow bigger, faster.
“The top bit of the water column has got the most nutrients in it,” Layton says. “That’s why in the wild, those colonies of oysters grow towards the water line.” Nutritionally, then, the cages are kind of like a Las Vegas casino: the oysters never have to leave the buffet.
A few birds lounge on top of black tubes poking above the water, gulls fishing for the food that congregates around the oysters. The tubes keep the cages afloat near the water’s surface, and the oysters live in wire mesh bags submerged underneath them. Layton pulls a random cage onto the side of the boat and extracts out a few shells.
We could eat them right now, Layton says, but these oysters are a little small, and Lowcountry Oyster Co. will keep growing them until they’re about 3 inches across. “Chefs like our 3-inch cup size because they’re not gonna fill you up too much,” Layton says. Back on shore, I’ll try them for myself.
The feast
About 25 minutes later, Layton asks Assistant Farm Manager Jimmy Stracey which oysters we can eat, and he directs us to a bright orange, knee-high bucket sitting next to the conveyor belt we saw earlier.
There’s only five species of oysters in the United States that we commonly consume, so merroir makes or breaks the flavor. “You saw how close we are to the Atlantic, so this is very salty, so our oyster flavor profile is very briny with kind of a creamy finish,” Layton says. ”We call ours Lowcountry Cups.”
I try a Cup standing over a picnic table next to the dock, and Layton is right: the Lowcountry Cups are salty and go down easy. Supplied with a protective glove and a quick lesson on how to use a shuck, I plow my way through about a dozen. Stracey joins us. He used to work in seafood kitchens in Charleston, and on the weekends, he and the shirtless swimmer — who I learn is named Joey De Mare — run a pop-up oyster bar called De Mare, selling the same oysters they care for during the week.
There aren’t any bells and whistles to my oyster meal like one might expect at a wine event. There’s no snacks, no drinks. Nobody even sits down. Upon request, Layton says he can organize any type of meal, though. If you want champagne, accouterments and the like, you can have it.
The farm tours start at $150 for the hour-and-a-half Essential Oyster Tour, sans champagne. If you purchase the Premier Package Tour at $275, transportation comes included, and a luxury vehicle transports you to Green Pond, S.C. A pleasant woman in a black Lexus drove me the hour and a half from The Palmetto, and, after I finish my last oyster, the same woman drives me back.
On September 27, a few weeks after I leave, Hurricane Helene moves through the Carolinas, devastating parts of western North Carolina. I call Layton to see if he and the farm are OK.
“The reality of that situation is that water’s gonna go somewhere,” Layton says over the phone. Floodwater draining from western North Carolina will empty into the ocean via estuaries like the ACE Basin. “The influx of that amount of fresh water kills off oysters.”
Fortunately, the runoff from Hurricane Helene didn’t have any deleterious effect on Lowcountry Oyster Co., and like in Charleston, life proceeds as normal. The tides are getting nearly a foot higher and a foot lower than usual, however, and Layton reports more dead fish in the water.
I ask Layton if the oysters are passive recipients of storms or if they can actually help a habitat withstand a storm’s effects. The latter, he says, is true.
“Those coastal wetlands rebound much more quickly if you’ve got oyster beds,” Layton says. As the storm surges pull sediment out to sea, oysters anchor the ecosystem in place and shelter local sea life after the storm. I cannot think of a grape varietal that can claim the same.
