Wednesday, September 29, 2010

REMEMBER THAT SEED???

Here's that seed from this spring ABOVE and here it is again BELOW from two days ago. We've said it before don't wait until the fall; get your seed as early as you can. If you don't want to wait on us or other guys get yourself some type of upweller system so you can get your seed direct from the hatcheries as soon as its ready.
Now it doesn't just majically get big without some help.
Got to upwell. There are three tanks in this picture plus two floating upwellers in the background.
We sort the seed out of the upwellers at 1/2" and send it out directly in .5"x.5" cages.
Then we start splitting...
and sorting...
and building lots of .5"x.5" cages...we had a lot of seed...
more sorting and splitting....
lots more...its exponetial...1-2-4-8-16 and so on until you reach that final density for growout.
cages coming in
Splitting seed on the farm, we do this twice before it comes back in for sorting.
Older seed coming in to be sorted, it will go back out in two different grades typically.
Running older seed in QuickTube...huge help, it mows through a hopper of oysters like this and you end up with a good pre-cull for later...we are selling this stuff right now, it blew up over the last month.

Splitting again...this is the KEY to having beautiful oysters in short order... but you need to be on it every two to four weeks depending on how fast your stuff is growing...2-3weeks for us.