by Amanda Olsen for northforker
As originally published in June 2025 issue of northforker magazine
Oysters on Long Island were once ubiquitous; you couldn’t dig into the shore without turning over slabs of rough white shells. The Lenape people regularly ate shellfish, to the point they left behind middens of shells some four feet deep, and early colonists also subsisted on the bivalves. Queen Victoria demanded her table only be served Long Island oysters, then called Blue Point oysters because they came from the Great South Bay.
But wild oysters, despite their abundance, were soon in a precarious place. Waste from agriculture and increasing human settlement, coupled with ever-increasing demand, led to smaller and smaller harvests. Die-offs from disease were the final blow for the wild harvest.
But all is not lost for Long Island oysters.
Aquaculture has boomed in recent years. By taking advantage of Suffolk County’s bottom leases, where portions of the seabed are leased to growers, oyster farms have sprung up all along the shore, with a large number concentrated on the East End. This explosion is due in no small part to the efforts of the Long Island Oyster Growers Association.
One such farm is Peconic Gold Oysters Inc. Owner Matt Ketcham got into oyster farming after starting his career as a commercial fisherman. He equates the state of the local oyster industry to where the wine industry was in its infancy, with an eye toward expansive growth.
“I like to think that the oyster industry on the North Fork now is a lot like the wine industry was, you know, decades ago, where nobody really knew about the wine industry out here. They didn’t know that we had good wine,” says Ketcham. “And now it’s a huge thing. So just by being consistent and through some marketing efforts, we’re really helping ourselves.”
The Taste of Place
In the same way that wines depend on different varieties grown under unique conditions to produce their signature flavors, oysters take on different “notes” depending on where and how they are grown, even though they are the same species.
Ketcham puts it this way: “They’re taking on the flavor of where they’re grown, and also how they’re grown and how they’re handled, and the kind of cages that they’re in.”
LIOGA has a goal of increasing yields to reach 100 million oysters harvested in 2035, with a projected value of $177 million added to the local economy.
“If we can get the state behind us and some other government entities behind us,” Ketcham continues, “we can get ourselves up to a 100 million oyster-year harvest, and let it put us in the same league as other important regions on the East Coast, like the Chesapeake, which harvest 100 million farmed oysters every year.”