Plus insight from oysterman Trey McMillian who has ambitious plans for expanding his aquaculture enterprise, Lowcountry Oyster Co.
On the serene waters of Mosquito Creek, located about an hour south of Charleston in the ACE Basin, a flat-bottomed boat picks its way along a line of floating cages. Pelicans and seagulls cluster around, looking to snag an easy snack. The boat’s small crew stops at each cage, unloading mesh bags full of oysters to take back to the dock for cleaning, sorting, and distributing.
These oysters are being raised by Lowcountry Oyster Co. (LowCo), the largest oyster mariculture operation in the state. Trey McMillan established the company in 2017 after he purchased some equipment from St. Jude Farms, which had been cultivating a small crop of wild and farmed oysters on the site since 2012. Currently, LowCo is permitted for 3,000 cages across 16 acres, growing an average of one million oysters per year that he sells directly to restaurants and consumers across the Southeast.
Before he became an oyster farmer, McMillan was a successful sport fisherman, winning tournaments and captaining boats around the Atlantic Seaboard and the Caribbean. Inspired by an oyster farm he visited in Chesapeake Bay, he decided to transition from sportfishing, which some might perceive as impulsive, considering his success reeling in champion-sized catches. “I’m very reckless in my decision-making, and I try not to think about things too much,” jokes McMillan about his tolerance for risk. “I have no problem signing a million-dollar contract with $500 in my bank account. We’re gonna figure it out, you know what I mean?” Perhaps it’s that angler’s instinct for knowing when the fish are biting that allows him to trust his gut and go for it.
McMillan is literally the face of Lowcountry Oyster Co. A caricature of him and his signature black beard serves as its logo. And he’s quickly becoming the face of the local oyster farming industry, too, thanks to his passion for aquaculture and ambitious plans to scale his business.
The Mount Pleasant native, who serves as president of the SC Shellfish Growers Association, is expanding his operation with a retail seafood market in West Ashley and a state-of-the-art processing center near his farm in Green Pond. The processing center, which will distribute LowCo oysters in addition to local fish and shrimp from other purveyors, represents an exciting step forward for the delicious Lowcountry oyster, one that harkens back to the industry’s heyday, when shucking houses and canneries helped export them around the world.
Trey McMillan, whose Lowcountry Oyster Co. farming operation spans 3,000 cages across 16 acres in the ACE Basin, grows about one million oysters per year that are sold directly to restaurants and consumers across the Southeast. Bullish on the industry and local select oysters, he’s building a $6.4-million processing and distribution center to expand production.
The waters of the Lowcountry have been a source of sustenance and commerce for centuries. In South Carolina Oyster Industry: A History, the late Victor G. Burrell Jr. chronicled the industry from its beginnings in colonial times to its rise—and fall—in the 20th century.
When colonial settlers established Charles Town in 1670 in honor of King Charles, oysters were a prominent feature of the landscape. They dubbed the southern part of the peninsula “Oyster Point” due to the proliferation of sun-bleached shells there. With the help of land grants from the king, the English settlers quickly took control of the wild and abundant oyster beds that Native Americans had been harvesting for thousands of years. Before long, oysters were being sold from street carts to locals with a big appetite for the fresh, briny bivalves.
By the mid-19th century, oysters weren’t just being consumed in local homes and oyster saloons. Ice availability made it possible to ship oysters, whether shucked or in the shell, to areas farther from the coast. After the Civil War, the industry grew quickly with the opening of shucking houses and canneries. In 1883, L.P. Maggioni opened one of the first shucking houses on Daufuskie Island. Four generations later, his descendants still operate the Maggioni Oyster Company, a wild-harvest oyster distributor in St. Helena.
The industry reached its zenith in the 1900s, fueled by canning operations that shipped oysters around the world. Burrell’s history shows it peaking in 1935 with 11 canneries, 31 shucking houses, and 3,500 employees. The industry eventually sputtered in the 1960s due to market changes and increased competition from imports, a story that’s all too familiar to Lowcountry seafood purveyors.
As Burrell published his chronicle in 2003, when all the canneries were closed and only two shucking houses remained, he pondered the state of the oyster and wondered, “What’s in store for the once great South Carolina industry?” Worried it would fade into history like crops such as indigo, he offered this final thought: “To envision greater commercial production, one must look to innovative ways to utilize the intertidal oyster.” Oyster farming might be the innovation he had hoped for.
The harvested selects pass through the grader, which sorts them by size. The holes get progressively bigger as the shells tumble down and fall into bins with similarly sized oysters.
Modern oyster aquaculture differs significantly from traditional wild harvesting. A distinctive trait of local oysters is the way they grow, clustered together in tidal mud flats instead of submerged underwater. Burrell attributes clustering to the flat topography of the area combined with a large tidal range and the prolonged oyster spawning season. Whatever the reason, Lowcountry oysters are unique in how they grow—and how they are eaten. Because of their clustering tendencies, they are more likely to be roasted than served raw on the half shell, which can limit its market to local consumers and oyster roasts.
A decade ago, diners would likely be surprised to find a local oyster on a raw bar menu. If you were lucky, you might stumble across a Capers Blade, a wild-harvest oyster that “Clammer” Dave Belanger started cultivating before oyster farming was a gleam in McMillan’s eye.
To grow his wild singles, Belanger used an antebellum technique to break apart clusters and replant them as singles in the mud, leaving them to grow to maturity. The replanting gave the oyster shell a distinctive blade shape while retaining that special brininess. While this produced a delectable oyster to serve on the half shell, the process was arduous and time-consuming. And just because more time was spent cultivating them didn’t mean diners would pay more than the market rate.
As Belanger’s technique illustrates, harvesting wild oysters is difficult and dirty. Clusters have to be plucked from the muddy flats, broken apart, and cleaned before they can be sold. And because they are often exposed to the air during low tides, oyster harvesting during the hot summer months has long been prohibited, leading to the common refrain that oysters should only be eaten during months with the letter “R.”
Aquaculture liberates oyster farmers from the mud—and the cluster—by growing individual oysters (singles) in cages and either floating them in the water or attaching them with long lines to the bottom of the creek bed. During the growing process, cages must be flipped regularly to prevent barnacles and algae from growing. Oysters must also be sorted by size and moved periodically so they have room to keep growing. It can take a year or more for oysters to reach a size ready for the raw bar.
Farming oysters, while less muddy, is still a long, labor-intensive process. And it wasn’t as promising a business opportunity until 2017, when the state adopted new regulations that allowed farmed oysters to be harvested year-round. Because caged oysters, unlike wild ones, stay submerged in moving waters, they are less vulnerable to bacteria and can be eaten safely, even during warmer months.
Year-round harvesting opened the door to ambitious new oyster farms like LowCo and expanded others like Lady’s Island Oyster Inc., which had already been farming with the state’s first commercial permit. Barrier Island Oyster Company, Charleston Oyster Farm, and Steamboat Creek Oyster Farm are currently growing the mollusks near Charleston, while May River Oyster Company farms in the Beaufort area near Lady’s Island.
Collectively, they create a tasty variety of cleverly branded local singles. Oyster lovers can find LowCo’s Lowcountry Cups, Lady’s Island Oyster’s Single Ladies, and Charleston Oyster Farm’s Perky Sea Cups and Mosquito Fleet Petites, along with Steamboat Creek’s selects on menus all over town.
McMillan says oyster farming delivers a net good. “It is 100 percent the most sustainable practice that you can ever do,” he says. “The only thing we take from the water is what we’re putting there. We’re not taking from the environment, we’re adding to it. Our waste is just natural shells, which we put back for wild stock.” Oysters also naturally enhance water quality: An adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water per day. McMillan says his farm has improved the local wild oyster stock just by virtue of his caged oysters filtering the creek water.
However, that net good isn’t always valued by the public—or supported by state leaders. A few spats over oyster farms have cropped up over the years. The latest is being waged against Old Man Oysters, a new farm hoping to get permitted for five acres on Tom Point Creek in southern Charleston County. Landowners have come out against the idea, telling The Post and Courier they are worried about boat safety, water access, and wildlife. The argument against farms typically comes down to being able to see the cages and having to navigate around them. It’s an ongoing issue that any new oyster farmer will have to combat. Their only weapon is spreading awareness of the industry’s economic and environmental benefits.
Josh Eboch, co-owner of Barrier Island Oyster Co., says it’s unfortunate that such a small industry continues to face opposition, especially when influential leaders publicly oppose them. In 2021, Sandy Senn, a former state senator, filed a bill that would have prohibited summer harvesting and effectively killed the fledgling oyster farming industry. The bill died in committee, but it was a bruising experience for farmers who were left feeling misunderstood and unsupported.
Matthew Gorstein, director of development and extension at the SC Sea Grant Consortium, which monitors the economic and environmental value in aquaculture, works closely with the industry, providing a tool kit to help potential farms navigate everything from permitting and site selection to seed purchasing and cage flipping. He says the industry has gone from generating around $30,000 of dock value (the amount of direct sales revenue that the seafood industry reports to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources) in 2012, when it was still experimental, to nearly $1.5 million in 2023. In contrast, the wild oyster harvest brought in $4.3 million in 2023.
While mariculture has a promising growth trajectory, it will likely require state investment to create infrastructure, such as distribution centers and a hatchery, that the industry needs to expand. One piece of the puzzle is LowCo’s processing center, which received partial funding in the form of a grant from the State Department of Agriculture.
For Eboch, the processing center is exciting to see, but a hatchery is at the top of his wish list. “Most of the local farms are too small to grow without [one],” says Eboch. “And there aren’t enough farms to justify a commercial hatchery, which takes enormous resources.”
Currently, farms either have to spawn their own seed, which McMillan is planning to do in the near future, or import it from a hatchery outside the state. The difficulty with importing is the state’s size restriction, which means farmers must buy more than they need in hopes that enough of the small seeds survive. Eboch says if you buy a million seeds, you might get 300,000 to grow, which require intensive nurturing.
“It’s a very tough business,” says McMillan. “You’re at the mercy of Mother Nature all the time.” If your seed makes it to maturity, you still face threats from storms, die-offs, and pollution runoff.
The unforeseen threat of the pandemic forced many young oyster businesses to quickly diversify as best they could when restaurants shut down. Today, most are offering tasting tours of their farms and selling directly to consumers. LowCo fabricates oyster cages and sells them to other farms. Charleston Oyster Farm has a mobile raw bar for catering events. Some also started harvesting wild clusters for sale.
One of those is Barrier Island, which purchased Clammer Dave’s operations in 2023 when Belanger retired. Those famous Capers Blades are still available, but Eboch says they don’t have plans to expand that part of the operation. “There is a strong demand for local wild oysters, as well as our farmed clams, and we are continuing to expand production of both of those items as a means of diversifying our overall business.”
McMillan says LowCo’s expansion will increase the company’s production by 300 percent and bring at least 30 new jobs to the region.
One thing local oyster farmers know is that they grow premium quality oysters that can hold their own against any in the world, as they once did during the heyday of oyster canning. The local variety is saltier, brinier, and different from an oyster you’d find in Chesapeake Bay or the Pacific Northwest.
The modern appetite for local raw oysters is indeed strong and growing. A survey conducted by the SC Sea Grant Consortium with Clemson University found that only one out of every five raw oysters eaten in the state is local—and that’s with 83.5 percent of locally farmed oysters being sold here. Local consumption alone could support production of 5.3 million oysters per year, according to another Sea Grant-led study by the USC School of Business.
For a farmer like McMillan, these numbers only reinforce what he already knows in his gut—that South Carolina oysters are delicious and in demand. His dream is to spread the gospel by distributing coast to coast. But doing so requires bold moves, new permits, and more acreage to farm. Opening a $6.4-million processing and distribution center is the next step in achieving that goal.
Last fall, McMillan broke ground on his property in Green Pond, and he expects to be up and running this spring. “If all goes right,” he says, “we can produce between three and five million oysters a year with our current footprint.” The center’s chilled wet-storage area will let him pull oysters from the waters as they mature and keep them dormant for a longer journey.
His ultimate goal is to grow up to seven million oysters annually, helping the local oyster farming industry get one step closer to a bright, briny future—one that might just see Lowcountry oysters being enjoyed around the world again.
At the turn of the 20th century, well before child labor laws were enacted, children and adults shucked oysters side-by-side to fill the growing demand
(Clockwise from top) Oyster shuckers at work at the Varn & Platt Canning Co. in Bluffton circa 1913; a circa-1870 stereograph of African American women selling oysters and fish in Charleston; Henry, age 10, did “five pots... a day,” working for the Maggioni cannery before and after school and on Saturdays; 10-year old Sephie, pictured with her mother at the Maggioni Canning Co. in Port Royal in 1912, is said to have shucked six pots of oysters a day.
Dressed So Fine: (Left) Barrier Island Oysters’ Sea Clouds; (Right) A selection of LowCo’s Lowcountry Cups.
Barrier Island Oysters:
Sea Cloud selects grown off Wadmalaw Island, plus Barrier Island Clusters by the bushel and Clammer Dave’s clams; barrierislandoysters.com
Find them: Order Sea Clouds, clusters, and clams ahead for pickup at their farm store (2871 Maybank Highway, John’s Island), and get wild, cultivated Capers Blades at The Ordinary.
Charleston Oyster Farm
Perky Sea Cups, Mosquito Fleet Petites from the farm near Folly Beach; charlestonoysterfarm.com
Find them: CudaCo. Seafood House, a fresh market on James Island, as well as The Obstinate Daughter, Wood & Grain, The Harlow, The Royal Tern, Chubby Fish, Raw Lab, and MOMO Riverfront Park, among others
Lady’s Island Oyster
Single Lady selects from the Coosaw River farm; singleladyoysters.com
Find them: The Ordinary, The Darling, Amen Street Fish and Raw Bar, NICO, The Obstinate Daughter, The Establishment, and FIG
Lowcountry Oyster Co.
Lowcountry Cups from Green Pond, have them shipped directly to your house or pick up at their downtown warehouse (2147 Heriot Street, Unit G); lowcooysters.com
Find them: Amen Street Fish and Raw Bar, 167 Raw Oyster Bar, By The Way, Pearlz Oyster Bar, Oyster House, The Select, The Perch, and The Boathouse at Breach Inlet, among others
May River Oysters
Mini Mayz from the farm for pickup in Beaufort; mayriveroyster.com
Find them: CudaCo. Seafood House, 167 Raw, The Harlow, Pearlz, and The Darling
Steamboat Creek Oyster Farm
Find them: CudaCo. Seafood House, The Obstinate Daughter, Rappahannock Oyster Bar, Delaney Oyster House, FIG, The Quinte, 167 Raw Oyster Bar, High Cotton, Hank’s Seafood Restaurant, The Establishment, Chubby Fish, The Harlow, and The Royal Tern, among others
WATCH: Take a video tour of Lowcountry Oyster Co.’s operations, plus learn how to shuck an oyster.