Sourced: Clams, an open-and-shut case

You might call it a tale of two clams, soft-shell and hard-shell. Or of two states, Maryland and Virginia. Or of watermen and entrepreneurs figuring out how to make the best possible living in a shifting environment.

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.

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At my request, Tim Sughrue, owner of the Congressional Seafood distributing company in Jessup, arranged a clam tour late last month. We started in the upper Chesapeake Bay just off Kent Island, where independent clammer Bill Benton was harvesting wild soft-shell clams. (More on that later.)

From there, we drove 120 miles south and crossed over to Virginia’s Atlantic coast, where Mike McGee loaded us into his 17-foot Scout motorboat and showed us hundreds of beds of hatchery- and nursery-bred hard-shell clams being grown for Chincoteague Shellfish Farms. McGee owned that company until 2007, when he sold it to Ballard Fish & Oyster Co. At 65, with neither of his two children interested in the business, he figured it was the right time for him to sell. Now he runs the division for Ballard, with a proprietary eye.

McGee piloted his boat along Chincoteague Bay, the slice of water between the mainland and Assateague Island, navigating slim passageways often no deeper than 18 inches.

Along the way, he stopped so that his field manager, Eugene Fadeev, could wade between the beds and peel back the weighted mesh screens that keep predators such as cownose rays and crabs from getting to the crop, revealing clams that hadn’t quite yet grown to market size.

“Aquaculture is big business on the Eastern Shore,” yelled McGee as we zoomed back to shore, raising his raspy voice over the motor’s drone. “It’s like growing gold.”

Those nuggets, Sughrue pointed out, can make their way to a Washington dinner table in less than 24 hours.

“If Mike harvests clams in the morning and our trailer picks them up in the afternoon, they could be at DC Coast (in downtown Washington) or Giant by 8 a.m.,” Sughrue, a wholesale supplier, confirmed.

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.