Cedar Key aquaculture threatened by climate change, stronger storms - Gainesville Sun

Trucking Georgia clams to Cedar Key is rather like sending coals to Newcastle. But that's where things are right now.

Cedar Key Aquaculture Farms, Timothy Solano's family-run business, grows millions of clams on nearly 50 acres of state-leased sea bottom. The company ships the fruits of its underwater harvests to Costco stores in Florida and elsewhere.

The Solanos boast that their long neck clams are "Cedar Key Sweet…the finest quality cultured shellfish grown only in Certified Clean Florida Waters."

But to meet customer commitments, the family recently had to buy clams farmed in Georgia.

"We've never had to do it before," Solano said. "It's a losing proposition."

Economics aside, being forced to import out-of-state shellfish to a town that brags about raising 90% of the clams sold in Florida "hurts, because we're proud farmers."

The immediate cause of the current disruption in Cedar Key clam production was Hurricane Idalia, which roared in on Aug. 30 with a brutal storm surge that tore apart submerged clam bags and buried them under tons of silt.

But the storm wasn't the only adverse weather-related event of the summer. Even before Idalia, Cedar Key clams were under stress caused by unusually warm water temperatures.

"We know that our growers were experiencing more mortality as August went on," said Leslie Sturmer, University of Florida IFAS extension agent who oversees Florida shellfish aquaculture. "Clams are cold-blooded animals" and warmer water disrupts their metabolism.

Ironically, there is little hard data immediately available to help researchers determine the full impact of record August water temperatures on Cedar Key clams this year. Why? 

"August 30 turned up and wham!" Sturmer said. Idalia brought with it a different kind of chaos. 

"Are we going to continue every year to see increased water temperatures? Are we going to have to deal with stronger hurricanes?" Sturmer poses.

In other words: Can Cedar Key aquaculture — a 30-year economic success story by nearly any measure — continue to be profitable, or even sustainable, in the face of rising seas, warmer waters and stronger storms?

"If we want to maintain an open water industry, we are going to need better management practices and strategies," Sturmer said. "Because we can't change the temperatures."

Cedar Key is no stranger to economic booms and busts.

In an earlier century, the red cedar trees that gave the island its name were cut down to supply northern pencil factories. When David Levy Yulee built his railroad from Fernandina to Cedar Key, before the Civil War, he turned the town into a prosperous shipping port. Then the railroad went on to Tampa, and Cedar Key languished.

During much of the last century, gill-netted mullet sustained the island's economy. But that industry died almost overnight when Florida voters approved a ban on commercial netting in 1994.

"I had to start over at the age of 47," recalls Mike Davis, whose fish house was put out of business by the ban. "I had to borrow money to pay off my debts. I had to mortgage my house."

Now, Davis is one of the island's leading clam farmers and wholesalers. His company provides most of the clams sold in Publix supermarkets. "Clam farming is not as much fun," he said. "But at least it lets us stay out on the water, which is what we have always done."

Fishing town to farming town

Turning commercial fishermen into aqua-farmers was no easy task. Fishermen who had for generations used tongs to pull oysters out of Apalachicola Bay flatly resisted state efforts to retrain them to grow oysters.

Apalachicola "didn't want it, we did," Sturmer recalls. In 1998, 70 former Cedar Key net fishermen were retrained as clam farmers and provided access to 2-acre state leases.

How successful was Cedar Key's transition from fishing town to farming town? Well, Sturmer recalls, she once put together a slide show presentation about the conversion. "The last slide showed how many new pickup trucks" netters-turned-farmers were buying. 

Now, when you drive into this isolated community perched just off a spit of land that juts out into the Gulf of Mexico, the first thing you see is this sign: "Welcome To Cedar Key: A leading producer of USA's farm-raised clams."

It is no idle boast.

Cultivated clams — and to a lesser extent, oysters — sustain upwards of 500 jobs in this island community of 750 souls. And in an era when Apalachicola's legendary oyster beds have played out, shellfishing in Florida's impaired Indian River Lagoon is in trouble and poisonous red tides are more and more common from Naples to Tampa Bay, clam farmers continue to generate upwards of $40 million a year of economic impact in and around Cedar Key.

"This just turned out to be a really good environment for culturing clams," Sturmer said. "We didn't know that going in. Not really."

For starters, shellfish need very good water quality to thrive. Cedar Key sits on Florida's most undeveloped stretch of coastline and, to boot, is further protected from encroachment by an 88,000-square-acre buffer of public forests and marshes.

There are no beaches to speak of to attract flocks of tourists. And to help keep its water clean, Cedar Key even got rid of its septic tanks.

Cultivation also requires just the right mix of fresh and salt water to produce phytoplankton, the micro-algae that clams and oysters feed on. And this is where the Gulf blends with the tannic-brown waters of the Suwannee River.

Aquaculture challenges

For all its success, however, Cedar Key aquaculture faces two challenges — one short term and the other long term.

The first challenge is recovering from the damage done by Idalia. Solano and another oyster farmer, Michael Presley Bobbitt, have been making the rounds in Tallahassee, lobbying the Legislature for disaster relief.

"We're trying to get the state to help us with cleaning the stuff off our leases that was destroyed and also help replanting," Solano said.

Solano recalls pulling up just one clam bag after the storm and finding "nothing alive" in it. His family leases alone contain multiple thousands of storm-ruined bags.

"We need help pulling them up, cleaning them out and dumping" the dead clams, he said. "Smaller farmers are going to starve" without state help. "They're not able to go out there and spend time and money" on cleanup. "They'll have to find other work, and we'll be losing the small farmers who are the backbone of the industry."

And if that's not enough to persuade lawmakers, Solano throws in this sweetener: His clams actually purify the water by consuming its nutrients.

"We're cleaning the waters in Florida for free," he said. "We have a zero-carbon footprint."

For his part, Bobbitt wants the state to get more actively involved in helping Florida aquaculture succeed. He cites, as an example, the degree to which Virginia supports its growers on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

Bobbitt says Virginia's Cooperative Extension program (its version of IFAS) and Virginia State University College of Agriculture "have dedicated researchers, biologists and extension agents whose daily work life is focused on growing the clam industry.

"In Florida, we are largely just winging it, using trial and error to advance our industry," he said.

Bobbitt argues that Cedar Key alone should have, at least, "one full-time researcher and a dedicated IFAS extension agent."

"Leslie Sturmer does a great job but she is overextended" because her responsibilities encompass all of Florida aquaculture. 

The Legislature is still in session, but millions of dollars in disaster relief are being earmarked for Idalia recovery. How much of that funding will ultimately find its way to Cedar Key specifically or to Gulf Coast aquaculture in general is yet to be determined.

Moreover, while there are already existing sources of government-backed insurance and disaster relief available for distressed farmers, applying for and getting it tends to be a lengthy process. Strum said it could be months before financial compensation begins to arrive.

Still, she has reason for optimism. "For the first time ever I've had folks from (the departments of) Agriculture, Commerce and FEMA come to me and say, 'What can we do? What's needed to recover?' "

"I don't make my living off of insurance," says Davis, who worries about falling back into serious debt much as he was forced to do after the net ban. "But this time we got hurt and we could sure use some help."

Adds Bobbitt, "this is our prime planting season, and a lot of our smaller farmers haven't had a paycheck in months. If they miss this season, they could be out of the business for two years."

That Cedar Key clam farming will sooner or later recover from Idalia is almost certain. That the industry will be able to continue to prosper in an environment increasingly impacted by climate change is less so.

Climate change

Last year NOAA Fisheries issued a climate vulnerability assessment for the Gulf of Mexico that warned: "All species in the Gulf of Mexico are projected to experience high or very high exposure to climate-driven change in environmental variables" due to changes in "temperature, salinity, ocean acidification, and dissolved oxygen."

"However," it concluded, "life-history traits are such that some species are expected to be susceptible and many others resilient to these changes."

Which is another way of saying that climate change is bound to hit some Gulf marine species harder than others. And shellfish tend to be especially vulnerable to changes in their environment.

Cedar Key farmers are raising Great Northern clams, which are already being grown on the southern edges of their habitat range. But clam species that can thrive in warmer waters tend to be less likely to survive processing and shipping to market.

"All serious clam farmers agree that the biggest area in which we need institutional support is that of genetic research" to develop a more climate-resistant clam, said Bobbitt. "Virgina is leading the world in such research, and is able to support their industry by researching, growing, and providing the highest quality clam seed to its industry. In Florida, we are light years behind."

Selectively breeding a hybrid clam is one possibility, Sturmer said, but even that may not be enough to insure the ultimate survival of the industry. Reducing clam bed densities, changing cultivation methods, shorter growing seasons and other management changes may also be necessary.

"I think there's a lot of resilience here," she says, "as long as folks are open-minded and understand that adaption is part of the survival process. They've had it so good here for so long, but they are going to have to change to survive."

But even doing all of the above may not be enough to save Cedar Key aquaculture if farms and dairy operations up and down the Suwannee River Valley do not also adopt more environmentally sustainable practices.

Before he retired as UF's Vice President for Agricultural Affairs, Jack Payne — who used to own a house on Cedar Key — helped launch the Florida Climate Smart Agriculture Initiative.

"We have to convince farmers and ranchers to believe what the science is telling them about climate change," he said. "They need to know they've got to be good stewards of the land because of the importance of the Suwannee River. If we lose agriculture in the Suwannee Valley and development comes in we lose aquaculture in Cedar Key. They will no longer have the healthy estuary they need to support it."