This Once Iconic Oyster Industry Crashed. Soon, Harvesting Will Begin Again.

The Washington Post

11:54 JST, January 2, 2026

Chad Hanson remembers a time, not so long ago, when driving on a bridge across Florida’s Apalachicola Bay meant witnessing an astounding sight.

“You’d see just boats lined up along the reefs and spread out,” he said of the hundreds of oyster fisherman that used to harvest from roughly 10,000 acres of the bay. For generations, those boats helped fuel the local economy and provided 90 percent of the oysters harvested in Florida, as well as about 10 percent of the nation’s wild caught oysters.

“Pretty much the whole community, in one way or another, was involved with the oyster industry,” said Hanson, a science and policy officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts who works on conservation issues around the Southeast.

Now, more than a decade after the once-iconic industry began to fade – and five years after harvesting was shuttered completely – Apalachicola’s storied oyster beds will open once more beginning Jan. 1.

In 2013, the fishery entered a precipitous decline, the result of pressures such as excessive drought, overharvesting, the loss of reef material and long-running water disputes along the rivers that feed the bay – a reflection of stressors that have affected oyster populations across the Gulf of Mexico and beyond.

By 2020, Florida had imposed a five-year oyster harvesting ban, in an effort to try to jump-start an ecological recovery.

When harvesting in Apalachicola begins in the new year, it won’t be anything like the glory days just yet, with a truncated season, fewer permits available to harvest fewer acres and catches strictly monitored and limited.

But for folks such as Shannon Hartsfield, a fourth-generation Franklin County fisherman, it’s something.

“How can I put it?” Hartsfield, 56, said on a recent afternoon. “It’s a step forward, but it’s not going to be enough to say you can make a living in the bay.”

The decision to reopen the bay

This fall, Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission voted unanimously to reopen Apalachicola Bay to oyster harvesting on Jan. 1 – a decision that drew swift praise from Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

“Apalachicola’s oyster industry has been the cornerstone of Florida’s seafood economy for generations. No place knows oysters better than Apalachicola,” DeSantis said at the time. “I look forward to continuing to invest in restoration activities that support the long-term restoration of Apalachicola Bay and the communities that rely on it.”

The approval came with a series of restrictions. To begin with, the state will only allow for a two-month season, ending on Feb. 28. If all goes well, officials plan to reopen future seasons beginning in October.

For now, the state considers only about 500 acres suitable for harvesting, and commercial crews who qualify for a permit will be allowed to fish Monday through Friday along four small, designated reefs. Each permit holder also will be limited to a certain number of bags from each reef. A bag is equal to two 5-gallon buckets, one 10-gallon bucket or 60 pounds of oysters.

No one is pretending such modest limits are enough to bring back oystering jobs that have been lost over the years, or to immediately make harvesting a sustainable line of work again in Apalachicola, where some oystermen have sold their boats and many have had to seek other kinds of work.

“I just don’t know how it’s going to be,” said Hartsfield, who said he quit harvesting oysters in 2013 but has helped academic researchers with their ongoing search for solutions. “We have a drop in the bucket compared to what we used to have.”

Merely reaching the point of being able to temporarily reopen Apalachicola Bay to harvesting took years of work and significant funding. Numerous small-scale restoration efforts have unfolded during the years of closure, but the largest effort came in 2024, when the state’s fish and wildlife commission constructed 77 acres of new reef on degraded oyster habitat, the agency said.

State officials have set a long-term goal to restore 2,000 acres of oyster reefs in the bay by 2032 – still a fraction of what once existed, but far more than its recent lows. The state also hopes to re-establish an oyster fishery with a long-term “cultch” program, in which oyster shells or other material are added back onto reefs to create an ideal habitat for baby oysters to attach and grow. Such a program “is necessary component of any sustainable oyster fishery,” state wildlife officials wrote in a recent presentation.

“The success of oyster recovery in Apalachicola Bay, which includes a viable oyster fishery, depends on continued restoration and reef maintenance,” the agency wrote, estimating that such efforts will require an annual budget between $30 million and $55 million.

A budget proposal rolled out by DeSantis in December seeks $30 million in funding to expedite the state’s efforts to restore oyster habitats, including $25 million in Apalachicola Bay. But even if that amount ultimately is approved, restoring resilience in the estuary will take time.

“I’ll be frank,” said Hanson, who also serves on the board of the Partnership for a Resilient Apalachicola Bay. “Oyster restoration and habitat rebuilding is on the order not of years, but decades.”

Stress on the industry across the region

The pressures facing Florida’s once-renowned oyster industry are not unique. Other oyster populations around the Gulf of Mexico have faced declines in recent years for a litany of reasons, including the loss of habitat, pollution and damage from storms.

Recently, Alabama announced the state would close all public water bottoms oyster harvesting on Dec. 23 after one of the worst harvests in years. State conservation officials said in a statement that surveys of reefs “suggest Alabama’s oyster populations have faced multiple stressors in recent years which have led to a population decline.”

Those threats extend across much of the Gulf Coast – and far beyond – said Tom Wheatley, a conservation project director for Pew. “It’s a global issue,” he said.

Indeed, researchers have estimated that as much as 85 percent of oyster reefs have been lost. Those losses matter not only because of the fishing industry they support, but also because of the habitat they provide for other marine life and the critical role they play in improving water quality and helping buffer the impacts of storm surges and waves.

Hanson said so much work remains in Apalachicola Bay before its beloved reefs resembled anything from decades ago. But he sees the reopening of the harvest season as a small step to a potentially brighter future.

“Hopefully, this is the beginning of a success story,” he said.

Hartsfield, like others who come from generations of oyster families, shares that hope. He said he plans to be back out on the water come January, and so does his 78-year-old father.

But he also knows how delicate the situation remains. How if another drought hits hard, or salinity levels aren’t just right, or other threats deepen, “It could go right back to where it was” when officials closed the bay in 2020.

“Right now, for the next few years, we will just be waiting to see what happens,” he said. “It’s very fragile.”