Jeri's Seafood

Photo Right: Ben Nelson holding Live Oysters ~ 1966 

“We farm,” said Justin Woody, “the only difference between us and a regular farmer is we farm what we can’t see. All the state waters are held in the land trust for the citizens of Texas. Essentially you have to go to the state and apply for a permit for a location. Oysters are unique in that they don’t move in a water column like shrimp and fish. If an oyster sits there and grows, it’s going to stay in that location, so you can actually lease out a spot to be able to harvest them. When my grandfather started leasing you had all the shell dredging going on in Galveston Bay. There was something to the tune of 180,000,000 cubic yards of shell harvested out of Galveston Bay alone from shell dredging. I think there was 300,000,000 cubic yards in the whole state of Texas. They used it to pave all the roads and build the Astrodome on. He started getting leases as a way to protect them from shell dredgers.” 

“Texas Parks and Wildlife, I believe, was founded in 1963, and the Governor is the one who appoints commissioners for the Parks and Wildlife. Up until 1963, there had to be a minimum of two foot overburden over a reef before they could mine it for shell and you had to stay about 1,200 feet from a live reef. In 1963, within about 3 months of the Texas Parks and Wildlife being created, there was no more regulation for overburden, which means the reef didn’t have to be covered in mud in order for them to dredge it. Not only did they eliminate that rule, now they could dredge within 300 feet of a live oyster reef. There was also a rule that if an oyster reef was dead, there’s no more overburden rule, so now they can go in and mine these reefs. 

“So, on Todd’s Dump across the Bay they went in and set up two dredge boats on each side of Todd’s Dump and all the silt from their dredging covered the reef and killed it. So then they said, this is no longer a live reef so we can mine it. The state was making a million dollars a year in revenue from shell dredging, that was a lot of money in 1963,” exclaimed Justin. “They sold it as a renewable resource, which it is if you’re just taking the oysters off the top and leaving the reef there, but they were making fifty foot holes out in the bay, that’s not sustainable harvesting. My grandfather and great grandfather, Neal, were out there in front of the dredge boats, because supposedly there wasn’t any live oysters there on the reef. They’re sitting there in front of the dredge head holding clusters of live oysters saying, ‘Hey, you’re not supposed to be dredging here, what’s going on?’ That’s when he got his first lease, and there were still a lot of oysters in the bay at that time. In 1989, they put a moratorium on oyster leases and there has not been an oyster lease issued in the state of Texas since then and they rarely ever change hands. The average age of our oyster leases is 48-years-old. We are the largest lease owner in Texas. In 1970, my grandparents started Jeri’s seafood, named for my grandmother. They started out small with oysters, shrimp, fish, anything they could make money on. I even worked on the shrimp boats when I was a kid. Eventually, in the late 90s or 2000, other than shrimping for ourselves, we went to straight oysters. The shrimp industry was already dying, they had started to do the buy back in the shrimp industry and they put a moratorium on shrimp licenses and started buying back licenses. You had all these shrimpers who sold their shrimp license back to the State, so they went to oyster fishing with their boats. In 2005, my grandpa and my dad went to Austin and got a moratorium put on oyster licenses. What they wanted them to do was make a stipulation that if you had bought an oyster license in the last couple of years then you could buy a license, but the state said no, what we’re going to do is make the requirement that you have to buy a license by August of that year. We went from historically 250-300 oyster licenses being sold in the state of Texas to 900 and something that year. That’s a large increase, not everyone used them but if they did that would be a considerable increase in the number of boats in the bay during oyster season,” he exclaimed. 

“I’d say the really big change in the oyster business was when Ike hit in 2008,” surmised Justin. When Ike hit they estimate we lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,000 acres of reef in Galveston Bay. It silted them over and killed out the live oysters. Sometimes when you have a storm, the storm may move the mud off an old reef and now you have a new reef, other times they cover up a lot of reefs, it’s just “Mother Nature”. Oysters are kind of the canary of the bay system, if oysters are doing good, everything’s doing good. In 2010, we had the Deepwater Horizon blowout. The oil spill itself didn’t impact the oysters here, but it seriously impacted the Louisiana oyster industry. Louisiana and Texas have always been the largest oyster producers, Louisiana is number one and Texas is number two. When the BP disaster hit the entire state of Louisiana shut down for oystering for about two years. Now, all the pressure came to Texas to make the oyster demands for the nation. All the people who bought oyster licenses and were just sitting on them now have entered the business to make the harvest demands, bringing an influx of boats to the bay. In 2011-2012, we had a horrible drought that killed a lot of oysters. Oysters like a range of salinity, between 10-28 parts per thousand, the Gulf is probably about 35 parts per thousand. They can live in the higher salinity, but they become weak and predators that eat oysters thrive in the higher salinity. You take an oyster that is already in poor health there’s more predation that’s eating them. They can survive below five parts per thousand, which is really fresh, but they can’t survive for very long. Our most recent battle is fighting for more leases. There are only 2,300 leases in the entire state of Texas. Louisiana has 420,000 acres, Maryland and Virginia combined have somewhere near 200,000 acres. In the 2003-2004 eras in Virginia, we’re talking about the Chesapeake Bay area, they pretty much lost all their harvest . . . 100%. With private leasing and restoration efforts, in late 2022-2023, they beat out Texas in oyster production. In 2021, Texas allowed mariculture, which is oysters grown in cages, a common practice on the East Coast. It’s not that practical in Texas due to the size of our bays where wind is a factor.” 

“Typically, during the 60s to the 90s, Galveston Bay was the largest producer of oysters in the state of Texas. Before the ship channel was dredged and all the shell mining began, Galveston was not. The ship channel began in the 1900s and went from a 10-foot deep channel to a 50-foot deep channel now. Basically the only zone you had with a quality to grow oysters really good was Hannah’s Reef that comes through East Bay and wraps around (in years past, Hannah’s reef was used to run cattle from Smith Point to Bolivar) and Redfish Reef that starts at Smith Point and goes to San Leon. So you had those two big reefs there where only the good production was because everything else was too fresh, all the areas up in East Bay and Trinity Bay was too fresh to grow oysters. There wasn’t any water circulation and there weren’t any nutrients. Once they dredged the ship channel and shell mined some of the reefs they started getting more salt water circulation in the bay, increasing the habitable zone for oysters. In the early 1900’s, the lower bays were more productive than Galveston Bay, in the 50’s or 60’s. Galveston Bay became the most productive, now it is shifting back to the southern bays. There’s a balance and now you’re getting too far in the opposite direction, the ship channels getting too big bringing too much salinity and causing the habitable zone for oysters to move closer to fresh water. Oysters like brackish water. Salt water in thirty-five parts per thousand, they’ll survive in that but they don’t like it, eight to ten parts is what their low is, twenty-eight parts is their high. The gulf is thirty-five parts per thousand or higher and of course, fresh water is zero. During the drought of 2012, there were a lot of oysters that were produced out of upper Trinity Bay but since then there hasn’t been another oyster harvested out of there. Then you got into the 2015 flood and 2017 and then last year we had Hurricane Beryl. That’s the most oysters we’ve ever lost,” proclaimed Justin sadly. “We had all the rain that killed a lot of oysters but all of East Bay got really fresh, it hovered around three to 5 parts per thousand and the oysters were just barely hanging on. Then you had Beryl come in about this time last year and you went from three to five parts per thousand in East Bay up to thirty parts per thousand overnight. The oysters were already stressed out from being so fresh for so long it just killed almost all of them. If it would have just gradually raised up and we didn’t have Beryl come in we would have probably only lost 20% of our oysters but with Beryl we lost 80%-90%. So, to sum it up, the biggest detriment to the oyster industry is the ship channel expansions, severe weather events and harvest pressure. Losing all your oysters is a bad thing, you’ve lost a lot of oysters and a lot of money, but now you’ve got all these dead oysters that have opened up and setting there to catch fresh spat and you don’t have to go out and provide the cultch for them. The spat really like the clean surface the dead oysters provide for them,” he noted recognizing the silver lining in the tragedy.