Oyster Farming at Tio Point

Bruce Hearn is a pioneer of the mussel industry who is now using his interest and enthusiasm for aquaculture to pioneer flat oyster farming.

Bruce has 35 years in the mussel industry. He holds the number 2 license. He first went mussel farming in 1973. He continues to have mussel farming interests in Portage in Marlborough.

Bruce started as an accountant/auditor. He was involved with the local Power Board.

He started with mussels as a part time job. He did that for 7 years and then risked his comfortable job at the Power Board to do it full time. His kids were toddlers and it goes without saying that his partner was nervous.

In retrospect the move to full time aquaculture was a good one. But Bruce says the mussel industry is currently facing the same type of challenges that Marlborough’s wine industry has in front of it….oversupply.

Having established himself in the mussel industry Bruce was always on the lookout for a diversification. A bit like land based farmers, he wanted to spread the risk.

Bruce looked at crayfish and paua and eventually oysters. He says he had been trying to find a way of farming oysters for 20 years, most of that behind the scenes.

Early attempts at farming oysters focussed on putting juvenile oysters on trays and growing them on from there but this had a range of problems. The breakthrough for Tio Point was the idea of growing oysters by attaching them to plastic ropes and growing them like mussels.

Bruce says marketing is the biggest challenge of the business.

One of the points of difference for Tio Point is that they sell their oysters “live”. What that means is the oysters are harvested in their shells and delivered to the customers in the same way. Shellfish officiandos say the juice of the live oyster is part of the attraction of having oysters this way. Al Brown of Logan Brown is a big fan. Shucking them and putting them in pottles (a la Bluff oysters) is destroying a big part of the attraction of the live product says Bruce. Not only that – the labour involved in shucking the oysters would push the cost beyond $5.50 per dozen.

Tio Point can harvest and deliver a dozen live oysters at $17 per dozen (a minimum of 2 dozen per order).

The season for Tio Point is January – October. Bruce has three staff working on this business along with another two on the mussels.

FLUPSY is the floating upwelling system which enables the oysters to develop and grow from the “spat”. Bruce says this is recognised technology.

The real challenge has been getting the oysters onto the long lines that they use to grow-on.

There’s a factory at Spring Creek where juvenile oysters are drilled and pinned to the ropes.

The “pinning system” is where the bulk of Bruce’s intellectual property lies.

Fundamentally the oysters are drilled and then pinned to the ropes – it sounds straight forward but it has taken years to refine. Bruce now says he has a system that works and his workers can pin as many as 800 oysters per hour. He says his workers can do around 10 thousand a day.

The oysters are gathered off the upweller and brought back to Spring Creek near Blenheim for pinning.

The completed lines are then taken back out to Tio Point for further on-growing.

Mussels in the sounds have a few issues around line fouling – didendum is an ongoing issue – as are other sources of fouling.