While seafood companies near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge are processing oysters from Texas and Louisiana and crabs from North Carolina, my thoughts turn to a plate of delicately fried steamer clams and a heaping bowl of spaghetti dotted with delicate steamed littlenecks. And, as luck would have it, the largest producer of farm-raised hard-shell littlenecks in the United States, Ballard Fish & Oyster Co., is harvesting those little jewels all along Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Aquaculture farms abound in Virginia because that state, unlike Maryland, made the business-friendly decision, beginning in the 1900s, to offer 10-year renewable leases of oyster bottom to private growers at a nominal rate.
Doing business since 1895, the Ballard Fish & Oyster Co. has acquired thousands of leased acres. The company began as an oyster harvesting concern, but when disease decimated the Chesapeake Bay’s oyster population in the 1960s and ’70s, then-owner Chad Ballard saw the writing on the wall. In 1983, he opened a new division, Cherrystone Aqua-Farms, focusing on hard-shell clams and the nascent aquaculture industry.
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