Long Island aquaculture industry benefiting from new $4.2M NYS funding program

Eric Stettner, a first-year oyster farmer working 150 cages on five acres of the Great South Bay, hit a jackpot of sorts last week when he was told his application for a grant to buy more gear had been selected by a new state program to help fund Long Island’s aquaculture industry.

"It’s a huge deal for me," said Stettner, owner of Islip-based Bombshell Oyster Farm, which received a $40,000 grant.

Stettner is one of 17 Long Island aquaculture businesses to receive a total of $1.2 million in the first phase of the state’s Long Island Aquaculture Infrastructure Grant Program to buy and upgrade equipment to help streamline and increase production.

Another round of funding for an additional $3 million will open to applications early next month to help facilitate even bigger infrastructure projects for small businesses.

"I just bought my farm last year," said Stettner, of West Islip. "This is my first full season of oyster farming."

The $40,000 will allow him to buy another 100 cages to grow the filter-feeding oysters over their two-year growth cycle, allowing him to nearly double his business in a year.

New York State Agriculture Commissioner Richard A. Ball, who announced the awards at the New Suffolk waterfront Wednesday, said the program stems in part from lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the seafood industry lost about half its customers.

"New York needed to have a food system that worked, that was resilient and could take on something like the pandemic," Ball said in an interview.

"Long Islanders have known for a long time there was this great industry on Long Island," Ball said of oyster farming, with a two-century legacy in the region. "But I look back at the CV pandemic and how that put a bright light on the whole food system."

Among many other lessons, it showed there was a need for more infrastructure to support the seafood industry, he said, to safely process, distribute and store product.

"So we said, OK, let’s fix this system. Let’s make sure it works for New Yorkers," Ball said.

The program is being administered by the Farm & Food Growth Fund, whose president Todd M. Erling said it would help aquaculture businesses on Long Island expand operations and capacity and potentially reach new markets.

"Oyster growing is one of the additive farming techniques that we are part of in New York State that leaves things better than the way they found them," he said, noting the water-quality benefits of oyster farming.

Another grant recipient is Joe Finora, who received a $100,000 grant for high-tech sorting equipment for his Hampton Oyster Co. facility in New Suffolk. He plans to apply for a second grant to turn a sandy, undeveloped waterfront parcel into a working dock for oyster farmers to land, maintain and process product.

Five oyster farmers operating in nearby Cutchogue Harbor "don’t have a place to land their product or keep their boats," he said. "There’s a great opportunity to restore a working waterfront and get a dock here that we can land our product on and that we can use as a community."

"Nearly a century ago," Finora told a crowd at the waterfront, "this wharf was alive with oyster shuckers, baymen, boat builders — the backbone of the working waterfront that defined the East End’s identity." He called the state grants a "catalyst for meaningful growth.

Eric Koepele, president of the Long Island Oyster Growers Association, an industry group, noted the Long Island oyster business has been growing at double-digit percentages for the past eight years, and harvested about 10 million oysters last year, but it hasn’t been easy.

"Every single oyster farm here is bootstrapped," he said. "There’s no venture fund out there" anxious to fund aquaculture operations.

"It’s hard to outfit a 10-acre bay bottom," Koepele said, costing "in the neighborhood of half a million bucks, give or take. On top of that you have to put the [oyster] seed in, and then the labor and the gas and then it takes two years to grow the oysters. For a bootstrapped organization, it gets hard to keep building and something like this [state program] makes a huge difference for us."

For Stettner, the grant is a game changer.

"I’m so bootstrapped right now, making it work as a first year small-business owner, but this is going to take so much financial pressure off me and allow me to grow at a significantly faster rate," he said. "I couldn’t believe it. I’m so happy I got approved for it."

For the next round, Stettner said he’s going to apply for a grant to allow him to build a structure to process his oysters on property he rents at the waterfront in Islip, "to get out of the cold."

"I need some landside infrastructure — all my operations are on the water right now so all winter long I have to be out there," on a flat-bottom boat, he said. "It gets tough."

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.