💡 Member Spotlight: Dewey Houck

This week we are featuring Dewey Houck @dewey of Cypress Point Oyster Company, who won last year’s AIE award for Farmer of the Year. We spoke with him about his aerospace background, how technology is impacting oyster farming, and his advice for new shellfish farmers. -Joe

AIE: Can you tell us about your career pivot from aerospace to oyster farming?

Dewey: My wife and I decided that after retiring we wanted to do things that were socially redeeming and we could do together. Oyster farming wins on both counts. I also got to keep my technical skills going by building an AI Data Model that tracks our oyster’s growth patterns which was similar to what I did in aerospace.

AIE: How has technology changed the way you farm?

Dewey: Our farm would be much harder to manage without the technology we use. We have a good handle of how many oysters by size class we have at any given instant. More importantly we know what sizes we’re likely to have in one, two and three weeks out. Oysters grow so fast here that if you don’t have a handle on their compound daily growth rate you end up with ‘bricked cages”. Our oysters can double their weight in as little as eight days.

AIE: What impact have you seen technology have on aquaculture in general?

Dewey: Regrettably, not much for oyster aquaculture.  We’ve been able to convince the FSU Marine Lab to put an environmental monitoring station on our lease and that has contributed greatly to our understanding of growth.

AIE: What’s a typical day on the farm like?

Dewey: It’s either tumble/sort or harvest or both. Usually we’ll go out and get bags in the morning and bring them back to the dock where our tumbler and processing facility is. We tumble to shape the shells and size sort. Using RFID tags on the bags, we log the weights of the incoming oysters and the time since they were last touched. This gives us the current daily growth rate. After the sort we get 100 cout weights for the size classes and load like sized oysters in bags, noting the loaded weight using the RFID system. Harvest is similar.

AIE: If you could give a piece of advice to someone just getting into shellfish farming, what would you say?

Dewey: Watch what other people do. Steal good ideas shamelessly.  Start small and try to maximize yield percentage. We shoot for 90% and usually make it.