Chris Francescani September 6, 2025
As orignially published on northforksun.com
The little cedar farm stand on Sound Avenue opens early and stays lit late, stocked with cold bags of oysters. Year-round, neighbors pull up, drop cash and leave with a dozen or two on ice.
This is the storefront for Peconic Gold Oysters farmer Matt Ketcham, who believes an oyster should taste like the water it grew up in and the work that shaped it.
“Some people like to name [the oyster] for where it’s from,” Ketcham said.
His choice is both literal and visual: “We call ours Peconic Golds, because they’re from the Peconic and they also have a beautiful gold color coming out of those bottom cages that we use.”
Ketcham was interviewed live from his boat in Cutchogue Harbor Friday morning on the podcast NoFo Live, with Sunita Narma and Tracy Kessler — co-hosted this week by the North Fork Sun‘s Chris Francescani.
Ketcham said the American oyster sold from Maine to Texas is the same species — the differences come from place and handling.
“Based on how they’re handled and what type of cages people use … the oysters will come out looking different,” he said. “It’s a lot like a Merlot grape … For wine, they call it terroir. For us, we call it ‘meroir.’”
In Cutchogue Harbor — calm and protected but flushed by “incredible tidal flow” — currents move microscopic algae through his gear all day, feeding the growing oysters.
Like many younger shellfish farmers, Ketcham arrived by way of the commercial fleet and a hard look at the future. He “saw the writing on the wall with fishing … regulations and just the fishing getting worse,” and shifted to aquaculture after watching friends at the University of Rhode Island turn a grad-school project into a business.
Oyster farming rewards labor and attention, he said.
“You’re farming them, but as hard as you work, you can make them better.”
He dates the modern boom to the early 2000s, when a public turn toward local food met cleaner bays and better hatcheries. Oysters are playing their part.
“We don’t put anything into the water … We don’t have to feed them … They’re improving the water. They’re creating essential fish habitat for a plethora of species.”
Hatcheries spawn high-quality brood stock, settle baby oysters onto shells, and deliver “seed” to farms. Ketcham starts with juveniles “nine to 13 millimeters” across—about a quarter of a pinky nail. From there, the job is organized motion: sort crowded bags, wash mud and barnacles, thin the fast growers.
“For me, it takes about a year to a year and a half” to reach market size, he said.
Gear is key, he said.
“Now we’re using a lot of floating gear, which creates a higher value product.”
Floats keep young oysters near the surface where food is thick; wave action naturally “tumbles” the shells into deeper cups prized by shuckers.
Without a dockside nursery, “my floating cages act as a nursery,” and later, if shells are “a little weird,” the same tumbling motion “gives them a really nice shape.”
Last winter, with ice in the forecast, Ketcham made a tough call.
“I was out here, I sunk all my stuff, like in the nick of time, and I avoided the ice,” he said. It was brutal work—“on top of all these floats was a lot of really heavy ice”—but it saved the crop other farms lost.
Autumn delivers a different stress: cash flow. Restaurants slow after Labor Day and Peconic Gold’s sales drop. When farms further north panic sell, prices fall. Ketcham answers by holding inventory through winter and betting on spring.
“I just spend the money on more gear and hold the stuff a lot longer, and that’s why I do really well in the spring.”
Much of that spring surge comes from triploids — oysters bred with three sets of chromosomes that don’t put energy into spawning and fatten quickly. “They’re almost like a seamless watermelon,” he said.
Shapes can be odd, but the checklist is simple: a cup that sits flat, a hinge that opens clean and “a good, healthy animal with a fat meat.”
The biggest structural challenge isn’t on the water; it’s the shoreline.
“The challenge of having no working waterfront has got to be number one,” he said.
Dockage is scarce and expensive, and the public ramp is jammed on the same afternoon trucks need loading.
Ketcham is cautiously optimistic about the recent passage of the Working Waterfronts Act, which support coastal communities and infrastructure vital for fishing, aquaculture and other water-dependent businesses. “It basically allows the county to buy development rights … in order to preserve working waterfront.”
Volume isn’t the issue.
“We put over a million in this year … we’re selling not quite a million, but close to that every year,” he said, direct to restaurants, wholesale distributors who ship to the city, and the Peconic Gold self-serve stand that became essential during COVID.
“When COVID hit, I really thought it was the end of the world,” he says. The community rallied, the town’s shellfish farm-stand law kicked in, and his cooler “really changed the game.” Today the stand is tidy and unfussy—native grasses, a big Yeti cooler, insulated totes for customers.
“I’m open every day, all day, year round.”
For newcomers, he offered a final piece of raw-bar etiquette: Don’t just knock it back.
“You’re supposed to eat it like you would eat a steak… you’re supposed to chew it and enjoy it,” Ketcham says. His house order is “a squeeze of lemon and three drops of hot sauce,” with seasonal mignonettes for fun.