Inland Bays Oysters are a Southern Delaware delicacy. If you didn’t know that before, you do now.
Those words are the calling card of a new marketing campaign for Delaware’s commercial shellfish aquaculture industry.
And if you didn’t know Delaware had a commercial shellfish aquaculture industry, don’t beat yourself up. It was only last June that Delaware’s shellfish aquaculture program began in earnest, administered by the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s Division of Fish & Wildlife, with legal oyster “planting.”
To get technical, the legislation that authorized commercial shellfish aquaculture in Delaware’s Inland Bays passed in 2013. Acres of the Inland Bay were then prepared to be leased to shellfish growers, the first of which were utilized in 2018.
Now, after a successful season of Inland Bays oyster farming, it’s time to get down to moving those molluscs.
The Cape Gazette reports that Ed Lewandowski, University of Delaware coastal communities development specialist, and Dr. Kent Messer, from the University of Delaware’s Center for Experimental & Applied Economics, put in months of market research for this and future Inland Bay marketing campaigns, thanks the USDA Rural Business Enterprise Grant and a NOAA Sea Grant Aquaculture Grant.
