Persistent pioneers work kinks out of oyster farming

HOLLY RIDGE -- To raise a good oyster, it helps to have the tenacity of one.

Much the way that tasty bivalve attaches itself to a solid foundation and stays there until it's forcibly removed, Jim and Bonnie Swartzenberg have set their minds to making oyster farming a viable enterprise in North Carolina.

As pioneers in the field, the Swartzenbergs have helped draw attention to the need to protect coastal water quality. They have given researchers a living classroom in which to study oysters and the creatures that share their shrinking habitats. And they have created a template for a business that could provide supplemental income for anyone with access to clean, briny water and a penchant for hard work.

"They are persistent, insistent, and consistent," says Philip "Skip" Kemp Jr., an aquaculture professor at Carteret Community College who has worked on several projects with the Swartzenbergs over the past decade.

The business, called J&B AquaFood, began like Bonnie and Jim's courtship: as an experiment.

Bonnie Rice was born in 1948 on the same farm on Stump Sound where the tanks of J&B's oyster nursery now cluster at the water's edge. Her parents taught their seven children to work the land in the summer, harvesting peanuts, and to work the water in the winter, harvesting shellfish. But the Rices made sure all their kids went to college.

"My father didn't want us to farm," Bonnie says. "It was too hard."

So Bonnie got a sociology degree and a master's in social work. She was working for the Onslow County Department of Social Services in 1981 when mutual friends talked her and Jim into a blind date.

Jim was spokesman for Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville then. He had joined the Marines in 1961, as soon as he graduated from high school in Victor, N.Y., where he grew up. In the Marines, he earned degrees in English and human resources management.

The day before the pair were to meet for the first time, there was a triple murder on base. Jim's boss told him to stay in town to deal with the press.

Dating in a johnboat

"The first time I saw him, he was on TV," Bonnie recalls. They made alternative dinner plans and began dating, often in a johnboat on the sound. In August, they'll celebrate 25 years of marriage.

Jim retired from the military the year he and Bonnie met. He later handled advertising for Rose Brothers Furniture, tried teaching English at Jacksonville High School and later made a little money as a stringer for the Wilmington Star.

In 1994, after years of helping Bonnie harvest clams in Stump Sound for spending money, Jim suggested something that was being done on the West Coast and around the world but not in North Carolina. He wanted to farm oysters. Bonnie's one stipulation: They didn't have to make money, but they couldn't lose any.

The first few years, they reinvested their profits in equipment and materials to build better tanks and cages where the oysters get started. They read everything they could find and talked with anyone who knew shellfish.

They tested other people's techniques, combining ones that worked with ideas of their own.

The business evolved into three modes of production: oysters grown on the bottom of Stump Sound; oysters grown in flat mesh cages fixed on racks that are exposed when the tide goes out; and oysters in floating mesh sacks that are wet all the time.

Coaxing larvae to 'set'

The couple start each year's new crop in late spring with $250 worth of larvae from a hatchery in Virginia. That's about a million microscopic oysters in a mass the size of a golf ball.