Oysters are a mainstay of Australia's summer for some people, but a South Australian farmer says there is nothing simple about bringing them from the ocean to the plate.
Cowell oyster farmer Simon Turner's day is dominated by the same task — collecting oysters from the water, sorting them, then returning them to the waters of his Eyre Peninsula farm.
"There is a bit of a theory out there that we just put oysters out there, come back in two years and sell them and that's not true," Mr Turner says.
"We spend a lot of time nurturing these things and making sure they get to market with the quality that our customers expect."
He says many consumers would be surprised to learn that oysters must be starved during their growing phase in order to produce meat over shells.
He says Australians eat on average about 7 kilograms of oysters per person annually.
A careful balancing act
Mr Turner and his workers collect the oysters from pre-determined plots by boat, take them back to the farm and sort them by size.
The oysters are then put back on the boat and returned to the ocean, perhaps in a different area that will best support their growth.
Mr Turner says the key to growing them is all about timing — being careful to separate fast-growing "greedy" oysters from those that are slower growing.
"At the end of the day, oysters are pumps that filter-feed the seawater and some oysters are stronger than others and they literally will steal the feed off the small ones," he says.
Once the oysters have reached an optimal size, they need to be "starved" so the molluscs focus on growing meat rather than their shell.
He said it was a similar concept to gardeners watering plants less frequently so plants grow deeper roots and became drought resilient.
"[It] will trigger something in their anatomy to think, 'I've had a lot of food up until now. Something's not quite right. I'm going to put something into reserves', and they will essentially trigger over to looking after themselves," Mr Turner says.
Plenty more to learn
But getting the timing wrong while starving the oysters could be disastrous.
"It's so much around experience of understanding the animal and knowing where you can and can't go with it, because you can kill the animal if you get the fundamentals wrong," he says.
While Mr Turner believes the oyster industry still has a lot to learn, he says it had come a long way.
"As oyster farmers, our experience has come from our mistakes and we're still learning," he says.
"I'm not claiming we've got it right yet, but we are far more advanced in our understanding of the oyster growing process then we were 30 years ago."
