The State Shut Down My Oyster Farm Without Warning. The Scientist Who Signed the Order Came Back Alone at Night

My name is Jackson Pierce. I’m 49, and I farm oysters in the tidal creeks of the Lowcountry, outside Beaufort, South Carolina.

For twenty years before that, I was a real estate developer in Charleston. Golf communities. Waterfront condos. Luxury homes on land that used to be marsh.

I was very good at it. I made a lot of money.

And somewhere around year eighteen, I looked at a bulldozer filling in a salt marsh I’d fished as a boy, and I couldn’t breathe.

I sold my company. I put most of the money into investments and a trust for my nephews. I bought twenty acres of waterfront and a lease on two hundred acres of state tidal water, and I started growing oysters.

Oysters clean the water. Every adult oyster filters about fifty gallons a day. I liked the idea of spending the rest of my life cleaning up instead of building over.

The farm grew. Restaurants in Charleston and Savannah started carrying my oysters. I hired six people from town. We built a little dock bar where people come at sunset to eat oysters and watch the dolphins.

The bartender says the women who come on Saturdays come for “the oysters and the owner.” I tell her the oysters are better.

Last spring, a state truck pulled into my lot.

A woman got out in a Department of Natural Resources shirt, with a clipboard and a cooler of water samples.

She was about 43, with dark curly hair pulled back, sunburned cheeks and serious brown eyes.

“Mr. Pierce,” she said. “I’m Dr. Lila Grant, with the state shellfish program.”

She handed me a single page.

“Effective immediately, your harvest permit is suspended.”