One of New Brunswick’s newest oyster farms and only the second one to operate in the Bay of Fundy will be harvesting its first crop this year.
Mink Brook Oysters was started by the husband and wife team of Mike and Becca Archilles in 2021.
“We bought a piece of land that included a large portion of the bottom of Lepreau Harbour. We don’t own the water but when the tide goes out, we own the beach under the water. The original idea was to grow soft shelled clams. Clams already grow on the beach here. We wanted to get clam seed and seed the beach but to get clams, there’s not a lot of hatcheries that do that, but that gave us the idea. It was something to use that land for because they grow oysters in New Brunswick so that was the next step we took,” said Mike Archilles.
Growing oysters in the Bay of Fundy didn’t come without some ingenuity.
“Because of our extreme tides, the land that I have, it goes from a bay full of water to just a small channel 150 feet wide. I grow oysters two different ways. I grow them on the beach in the intertidal zone. I have a pod that I built myself. It sits on top of concrete blocks. The tide comes in, the oysters feed, then the tide goes out, they air dry and they repeat that cycle daily, but you can’t let oysters freeze, so in order to get them through the winter I designed and built an oyster row wrap made out of HTP plastics — the same plastic used on salmon farms. In the wintertime, the oysters hang underneath these wraps. It keeps them in the water all winter long, but it prevents them from freezing,” explained Archilles.
“We also utilize the wraps in the summer. Weekly we bring the oysters out of the water and leave them on the wraps for a day or two to air dry, then put them back out under the water again,” he added.
Mink Brook Oysters also grows oysters suspended in the water column from a raft designed and modified by Archilles.
“The first year we built a raft out of 4×4 cedar posts and 55-gallon plastic barrels and just hung them underneath that and put it on my boat mooring. They survived the winter that way. Expanding on that idea, we made a supersized version of the small one that was held up by plastic barrels and had it made out of HTP plastic and started hanging them. This summer we will be deploying our third raft. It’s gotten bigger since the first one. The first year the cages hanging underneath them were cages other companies had built and we utilized them with my raft. This latest version the cages that hang underneath it are all my design and holds significantly more oysters.”
Mink Brook Oysters has slowly but steadily ramped up production since starting.
“The first year we started out with 20,000. Every year we stepped it up a bit. We now have 500,000 oysters in the water approximately,” said Archilles.
“This is the first year we’ve had oysters ready to sell. Up until now we have been giving out some samples, but this year we have oysters big enough to market,” said Archilles, who is hoping to harvest between 10,000 to 40,000 oysters.
As for markets, aside from the plan to open a roadside stand, Archilles said Mink Brook Oysters has been in contact with restaurants who have reached out.
“They want them. A distributor out of Montreal that wants them and there’s a couple of local buyers/sellers who want them as well. It’s going to be a matter of ‘are we going to be able to supply them this year with the quantity we have.’”
Mink Brook Oysters is basically a family run operation, said Archilles. “It’s just me, my wife, our parents. The only outside help is things that we can’t build ourselves like the raft itself. That’s done by a local company, a plastic welder. The deck for the raft we do ourselves.”
Oyster farming is pretty much a brand-new industry in the Bay of Fundy, said Archilles. “There was no oyster production here prior to the other farm and us.”
The Archilles are also new to the industry.
“We have no aquaculture background. I worked construction my whole life and my wife was an x-ray technologist at the regional hospital in Saint John, so this is something completely out of our wheelhouse. We had the idea, the land and thought we wanted to take on the challenge. We’re happy we’re doing it. It keeps us busy for sure. We’re kind of excited to get our oysters into stores and get some feedback on them.”
