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The first challenge is to get the larvae to "set" on tiny flakes of oyster shell, their preferred bedding, by agitating the larvae and shell bits in an aerated tank for two or three days. If 15 percent to 20 percent of the larvae set, it'll be a good year.

For the next six weeks, the larvae are moved into larger and larger tanks as they grow to dime size, when they need to be put in the sound. In 18 months, J&B can expect to harvest a sweet, salty oyster so big that some chefs want no other.

Like all farming, successful oyster production depends on factors beyond growers' control. Some years, there's not enough phytoplankton to fatten up the oysters. Heavy rains wash contaminants from the land into the sound, and the state orders the waters closed until the contamination clears. A prime cause of this contamination is thought to be shoreline development.

Oysters devastated

This season's crop, $37,000 worth of oysters the couple expected to start hauling in by the bushel in October, was almost a total loss. Researchers are still trying to figure out why the animals died, but the Swartzenbergs suspect they were overstressed by water that stayed too salty too long because of the drought.

Jim is philosophical about the income loss. If he continues to improve his growing techniques, he says in jest, "Next year, I might be able to lose $40,000."

But he and Bonnie take the deaths of those thousands of oysters personally.

"I really do feel like they're my babies," says Bonnie, who describes herself as the nurturer and Jim as the detail man. While she and her 82-year-old mother, Bernice Rice, go out on the water each day to check the crop, Jim attends meetings with fishery management officials, or handles the mountain of paperwork involved in water leases, or applies for research grants to help pay for new oyster experiments, or writes reports on the work he's already done so others can read it.

Oysters overharvested

Once plentiful enough to ship out by the train-carload, North Carolina oysters have been declining for decades. Overharvesting in the first half of the 20th century and degradation of water quality in the second half have pushed down oyster harvests an estimated 50 percent to 90 percent from their historic highs.

"If oysters disappear completely, the people who harvest them would be out of business, but also, oysters do a great deal to remove pollutants from the water," says Matt Parker, an aquaculture business specialist with the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services' New Bern office. "We don't want to lose that."

Many of the wild oysters found in Stump Sound are said to be the spawn of ones Jim and Bonnie Swartzenberg have planted on their leases. The couple think that if they stopped planting oysters and returned their leased waters to public use, there would be almost no oysters in the sound within four years.

The Swartzenbergs were honored in recent weeks with a Coastal and Ocean Management Award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and with the N.C. Governor's Conservation Achievement Award. The honors are recognition that raising oysters is relentless work, whether it's a 90-degree summer afternoon or a 38-degree winter morning. But every spring when they put their larvae in the tank to set, the Swartzenbergs still get excited.

"You try to make a difference," Jim says. "You don't make a big difference, but you make a little difference. You feel like you're part of something that's bigger than you."

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