By Fred Delkin (photos also by the author)

“What a great office!” exclaims Todd Riggert as he waves his arm over the foggy expanse of Netarts Bay where he tends 75 acres of a growing underwater resource.  Riggert, 38, opted five years ago to spend his working hours in the great outdoors as an oyster farmer.

Riggert’s twelve hour days, sometimes seven days a week, have established T&S Oyster Farms as an important supplier of toothsome mollusks ( “T&S” Todd explains, stands for Tom and his chocolate Labrador companion, Sherman). This farm is marked by a maze of slender plastic rods implanted in the eelgrass-covered bottom of the southern reaches of a bay that is off the beaten tourist track on the Oregon coast.

Touring his acreage with Todd on a very foggy late summer morn, one marvels at his back-of-the-hand knowledge of the featureless seascape covering his crops.  He deftly pilots his flat bottomed, outboard-powered boat, motoring into the midst of his holdings, then hopping out to push his craft over eelgrass shallows where his motor would foul.

“Keeps your legs in real good shape,” Todd exclaims, as he performs his daily routine.

Crop rotation

He reaches underwater to flip hundreds of mesh bags of oysters, enhancing their exposure to the bay’s tidal currents.  Riggert’s a ‘learner,’ constantly experimenting with crop placement and handling to achieve prime product quality.  He admits to carefully listening to the theories and practices of veteran oystermen, then crafting his own techniques.  This enables him to produce ideal sized, remarkably clean bivalves for market.  There are eight oystermen tending their own patches of Netarts Bay, but we are certain that none work or study harder than Riggert.

Todd’s cohorts typically combine two job pursuits (oystering and timber falling, for instance).  He began to work his state-leased bay holdings while in the construction business, but soon found oystering was his calling and deserved his full attention.  “I love it out here,” he says.  “I figure I’ve got it made, even with twelve hour days…nobody tells me what to do!”  We can imagine it sometimes gets pretty cold and lonely, though, and Todd admits winter days can be trying.

Recently, Riggert added a single employee, who “works hard and makes the days a little shorter.”  The assistance enhances the ability of T&S to supply a live oysters-in-the-shell contract with the Pacific Northwest region of Safeway stores.  He also mans a booth at the Beaverton Farmers’ Market, May through October.  Recently, he gained supplier status with Uwajimaya, the giant Asian retailer with outlets in Beaverton and the Seattle area.

Smoking out profit

The latter connection provides Riggert with an opportunity to expand his latest oystering innovation, a smoked, value-added product.  Early in his mollusk-manipulating career, he noticed that a percentage of his crop of Pacific oysters inevitably grew beyond marketable size.  “These big guys represented waste,” he explains.  So, he came up with a sales solution of brining and smoking them and packaging for a gourmet audience.  Sampling the results with Farmers’ Market customers, Todd knew he had a winner, and a product that particularly appeals to the Asian market.

Riggert also envisions restaurants as smoked oyster purchasors, with his product inspiring recipe creation (sliced into an Alfredo pasta sauce, for instance).  He estimates a total investment of $6,000 in his downtown Tillamook facility to process smoked Pacifics.  Surprisingly, a $400,  mini-refrigerator-sized smoker turns out a sufficient volume of product, which is vacuum sealed in plastic packs.  “Toughest part of this process was getting the state license approval and passing regular inspection,” Riggert says.

State licensing is a major hurdle for all oystermen.  The state dictates how a farmer may raise his crop.  Netarts licenses dictate the rigors of hand-farming, with no mechanical equipment allowed.  This bay has a rare estuarial environment, with strong tides recycling fresh ocean water every 24 hours.  Unlike virtually all other Oregon coastal bays, Netarts is not an outlet for any major fresh water streams and thus its nutrients-rich saltwater is not diluted (or polluted by upstream farming or logging activity).

A rich, diverse ecosystem

Netarts Bay remains one of the least disturbed estuaries on the Oregon coast.  Juvenile salmon and a variety of shellfish find food and shelter here.  Several species of clam and Dungeness Crab abound. A herd of several dozen Sea Lions intermittently basks on the shore of Netarts spit.  Over a dozen species of seabirds fly and float about the bay, with low-flying Pelicans perhaps the most prominent (Todd refers to the large Loons and Herons grazing low tide flats as “Tideland Turkeys”).  We met Riggert’s ‘pet’ seagull that daily perches on his large 110-horsepower outboard motor as Todd wades and pushes his craft over his cropland. 

Riggert practices a diversity in his oyster beds.  In addition to Pacifics, he raises the small Kumamotos, popular with half-shell devotees, and has a bed of Belons, a flat-shelled European variety he will soon begin to harvest.  The bulk of his crop grows in clusters, which must be knocked apart, but, true to his innovative nature, he’s developing the growth of ‘singles’ and is concentrating upon Triploids, a relatively new type of oyster produced by hatchery spawning of Pacifics.  These oysters remain firm, full and sweet during their life cycle, avoiding the milky spawniness common to oysters in the wild and source of the old adage to eat oysters only in the ‘r’ months.

Oystering, we observe, is definitely not for everyone, but if you’re going to do something, do it right, and do it with enthusiasm.  That’s a Riggert maxim to admire.

Editor’s note:  See the article in this month’s Travel section on the tourist aspects of the Netarts Bay area.