Town Point Oysters in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, started off as a small, family-run oyster seed operation, which has now expanded to growing market-sized oysters with the help of home-brewed technology.
Rachel Odgers and her partner Ted Porter, two business school graduates, were living in the United States with a goal of moving back to Porter’s home of Antigonish County, Nova Scotia. The couple, however, initially encountered problems finding steady employment in the area.
“One summer, Ted wanted to dabble with wild harvesting oysters for a summer job, which we realized wouldn’t be possible because there’s so few licenses available for that,” said Odgers.
“The more we researched it, the more we realized wild harvest isn’t necessarily as eco-friendly or sustainable as farming, and we just started diving down that path. The more we learned, the more we decided there was a huge opportunity here.”
By 2020, Town Point Oysters’ nursery was up and running. It wasn’t until
January 2024 that the company was approved for a marine-based lease site, which Odgers and Porter applied for five years prior.
Ted Porter’s father and Town Point Oysters’ President Ernie Porter and his company DockPort have since played an instrumental part in the production of full-grown, market-sized oysters due to the technology he and his business partner Philip Docker have developed.
“Part of my due diligence, since it looked like we would become oyster farmers, that maybe it was a good idea to actually work on an oyster farm before we got all the way in just to make sure that it was something we’d actually like to do,” said Porter. “So, I looked around to find an existing farmer to approach and offer my volunteer services. And that led me to Philip Docker.”
Docker at the time was using a rudimentary cage system for growing oysters, made of five-gallon pails with the bottoms cut off and mesh bags attached to either side.
“I immediately recognized that this was a good idea. All of the other existing cage types lend themselves only to manual operation, and one of the big challenges in the industry is there’s way too much labour,” said Porter. “It’s fantastic because that shape can be mechanized — a machine can run it; you don’t need to do it by hand.”
From there, Docker and Porter created the Benefits of Being Round (BOBR) system. The BOBR system is a series of cylindrical cages suspended between two static lines which float on top of the water. The shape allows the cages to spin freely between the two lines by using wave action to roll them without manual labour.
“We started using these cages on Philip’s farm, and they worked really well, but we needed to do some more product development on the machine side,” said Porter.
After a few iterations, DockPort fine-tuned a mechanized work platform with which to fix their BOBR system known as the Oyster Matic, which they had manufactured by A.F. Theriault in Meteghan, Nova Scotia. The work platform allows the units to be mechanically tumbled if wave action doesn’t suffice, as well as providing a method for defouling the cages by rolling the cages onto the work platform, into a heated seawater dunk tank and back into the water.
“Any farmer who is using other technology today on their lease; on the same lease footprint with the same labour, if they just switch to our gear, the farm will be twice as productive with less effort,” said Porter. “The farmer won’t be working as hard, but he’ll be producing twice as much product.”
Now with a lease approved and the BOBR and Oyster Matic technology onsite, Town Point Oysters is in the process of raising market-sized oysters for restaurant raw bars by summer 2025. Odgers said that in the process of supplying the market with local oysters, the company keeps sustainability in mind every step of the way.
“Responsibly done shellfish and marine plant aquaculture on its own is already one of the most sustainable and regenerative forms of food available, because it’s zero input. You don’t feed them, there’s no pesticides,” said Odgers. “With our nursery, it’s a design that John and Ernie designed themselves, and it’s run on solar. So, that’s one way we’re trying to be carbon-neutral, at least. Eventually we’d like to have our vessels be electric or hybrid.”
The company now has its sights set on building a depuration facility, which uses clean seawater tanks which the oysters filter feed in to remove contaminants from their digestive system.
“We’ll soon have a depuration facility built, and there is the possibility that the facility will service our farm along with other farms in the region,” said Odgers. “If you have a closed estuary, you can’t just take it from the water and sell to market, and many farmers are in a closed estuary.”
By introducing a depuration facility to the community, Odgers is hoping to remove some inefficiencies in the oyster farming industry in the area as well as reducing the fuel costs to bring oysters to consumers’ tables.
“We’re trying to streamline that process to be most efficient, taking a lot of the trucking and fuel inputs out of the picture while also making the product very safe for consumption,” said Odgers.
