Rising Tides: Johns River Oyster and a 4,000-Year-Old Tradition — with David Cheney

Maine's Damariscotta River has been producing oysters for thousands of years. The shell middens that line its banks — some rising 31 vertical feet — are evidence that Native Americans were harvesting here at commercial scale long before lobstering, clamming, or any other fishery Maine is known for. David Cheney farms 650 feet from the largest of them, and he'll tell you that's all the science he needs.

In this episode of Rising Tides, Bill Perna speaks with David Cheney, founder of Johns River Oyster, about a life spent entirely in and on the water — digging clams commercially from fourth grade, lobstering out of New Harbor for sixteen years, and ultimately building one of Maine's more distinctive oyster operations from the ground up.

David's farm runs across two sites: oysters are started in the nutrient-rich, fast-growing waters of the upper Damariscotta River, then relayed twenty-two miles to Johns River — where he grew up — to finish in higher-salinity water that hardens the shell and produces what he calls a clean finish. His Whaleback oysters are named for the shell midden on whose doorstep he farms.

Their conversation covers the economics of leaving lobstering behind, the science of oyster flavour and terroir, what warming waters mean for the species that can thrive on Maine's coast, and why David believes aquaculture here is still just the beginning.

Perna Content's Rising Tides explores how coastal Maine is adapting to environmental, economic, and cultural change through long-form conversations with people working on and alongside the water. New episodes are released fortnightly.

The podcast accompanies the book Rising Tides: Adapting to Maine’s Coastal Future, available at www.pernacontent.com/publishing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Okay. Well, don't ask me a question unless you want the truth. Oh I'm looking for. And I mean, I have your book. It's on the coffee table. Yeah, I read the whole thing cover to cover.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Oh, fantastic. Oh, great, great.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

I'll briefly ramble even without the um question. You have to cut me off to keep me on. I'm a 55-year-old commercial fisherman who did go to college for marketing as you did, um Bryant University. So I started digging clams commercially in the summer of fourth grade. I've dug clams every summer since then. I was quite successful at it because my father and his brothers all worked their way through college and medical school digging clams. So I learned from my grandfather and my uncles, and so I grew up where was this? Well, I I grew up in Pemelquid in Johns River. I founded John's River Oyster in 2000 and to this day I'm the only producer in Johns River. So that's where I grew up, you know, I had a boat paid for by the time I was fifteen. I bought a pickup truck digging clams by the time I was a junior in high school and uh I just made a lot of money as I got stronger, I dug more. I would say that I actually began aquaculture back in nineteen eighty seven because my uncle owned a lobster pound and during double tides and big full moon tides, the buyers used to shut us off or the price would drop ten or fifteen dollars. I used to stockpile clams when the buyers would shut off and I wouldn't miss a tide and they'd shut down for two or three days, and I'd dig two or three bushel every day, and when the market opened up and stabilized during the preceding small tide, the price would be five, ten, fifteen dollars more bushel, which was a lot. When I first dug clams in nineteen eighty-two, they were seventeen fifty a bushel. So um, but anyways, so I dug clams, and then I I guess I'll make the claim that in June of 1987, when I was a sophomore in high school, I found the first European oysters on big tides picking soft shells. I found European flats and I brought them to Bill Mook and I asked him if he'd buy them. And he said, Oh yeah, I'll buy those. They're 45 cents each. So I went to Mike Farron, who was in South Bristol gut, and he said, Well, geez, I'll pay you um 65 cents. And so the the Damascotta clam diggers in Bristol and South Bristol, we would harvest Europeans and steamers and sell 'em.

SPEAKER_02 4:03

When you say European c you do you mean bologns?

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Yeah, but well, they're really not bolon. Balon is it's like champagne. Ballons come from Brittany, France. So they're technically European flats or uh edgeless. And that's basically all they really had back then growing wild in the river. And then somehow right around 1998, 1999, there was enough farming going on from Pemicwood and Glidden and Mook that the Americans spawned. It was almost like it coincided with kind of climate change, the you know, warmer waters, you needed 70 degree water for the Americans to spawn, and then we were selling those, you know, alongside our clams. So surprisingly, the aquaculture industry in the Damascata River created a wild fishery for American oysters. So then we ended up picking them on the shore and then diving, and then I basically dug clams until until 1994. I graduated college in ninety-two and I dug full time for a couple years, and then I went lobstering full time for sixteen years out of New Harbor.

SPEAKER_02 5:21

Let me ask you, what triggered or what was the thought process to go from lobstering for sixteen years into aquaculture?

SPEAKER_00 5:30

Well, basically what I didn't like about it was that lobsters became a commodity. They were you were paid by the pound, and I felt that even though I had a 37-foot boat, the boat wasn't big enough, and so I saw the rising costs. So when I first started lobstering in nineteen ninety-six, diesel fuel was fifty-seven cents a gallon. We went through a time where it hit over four dollars. Lobster traps were forty-two dollars. I mean, now they're $125. So the the the they made fun of me and said I was rich when I built the $190,000 lobster boat in 2003, but now they're building million dollar boats. So I would really argue the price of lobsters really hasn't gone up. I felt that I didn't have a brand name, the license isn't transferable, and actually I hurt my back lobstering, you know, lifting. And I thought actually aquaculture would be easier. And it could be until you buy enough oyster spat. That's basically the issue, is we're starting to get a lot of boutique and smaller farms, which is great, but there's almost like a sweet spot with every business. You need to scale up until you're profitable. And I'm kind of glad that I did start buying my first oyster seed in 2008 and that I have uh, you know, 10 acres of least acreage.

SPEAKER_02 7:00

Do you buy from MOOC?

SPEAKER_00 7:02

I did for years. I did for years. And but now the fact is that the Canadian-owned Atlantic aquaculture farms i is in the process of closing on MOOCs, so now they're gonna have ninety percent of Maine's oyster seed production owned by a foreign country. And and I would probably argue maybe forty, forty-five percent of Maine's production is owned by them. There's vertical integration that they're possessing, and because they raise the seed, they can produce oysters at a lower price point profitably than the rest of us can. So it's it really is monopolistic. And I just, you know, I I want Maine resources to be for Maine, you know, at least US citizens. So the whole premise why aquacul and oysters in particular are the most sustainable protein source in the world is because you're growing something and it's not depleting any resources. There's way too much phytoplankton in the water, and the oysters are eating that. So it's good for the environment. And the structure of the oysters is the habitat. Baby Jonah crabs, Picot crabs, and lobsters live in our oyster beds, in our cages on purpose. So if algae is the basis of everything, the structure of the oyster beds is just highly beneficial to the coastal estuaries. The reason why we're successful is that we don't deplete wild resources. The seed is grown in a hatchery and we buy it. I buy twenty thousand dollars worth of fat a year, and my job is not to kill it and to grow it and to nurture it and and to keep it clean and give it the best, you know, the most amount of space. And that's the issue with the shellfish committees. They're not enhancing the inventory of soft shells. If they're not buying and catching clam spat, so they're really lucky that in 2024 there is such a renewable resource. But the biggest predator to soft shells is actually clam diggers, you know. And and and then and basically we're removing all the clam shells or ending up in a landfill. The Damascotta River estuary has the largest shell middens in North America.

SPEAKER_03 9:30

Right.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

So even though the whaleback shell midden has been depleted, and that's the name of my brand of oysters, whalebacks, the Glitten Point shell midden is still there, and the whole bottom of that river is plastered with calcium of dead oyster shells, because I'm a diver. I put in uh over a hundred anchors. So the Native Americans they were such environmentalists that when they ate a lobster or clams or quahs, they returned it to where it came from. It almost like their religion. So that calcium is buffering the pH of that river and softening the waters to the proper pH. And you know, that plus the father. Yeah, so the dam is about a lake is yeah, is 12 miles long, so there's your freshwater, and then it's a narrow river, so you have a lot of current, so you have food production and current and warm water because if you think about it, you you're up above Route 1, so that's how far inland. And actually, Oyster Creek in Great Salt Bay has about three million oysters, and they're very hard to find because there's so many oysters, they're such clumps that we actually run aground and hit our propellers on it because we winter our rafts up there. So if I grow oysters six hundred and fifty feet from the largest shell midden in North America, that's all the science I need for production. Do you see?

SPEAKER_02 11:03

Yeah. Where you grow them is at more at the mouth, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 11:07

The Damascuda River kind of ends at the mouth of G Great Salt Bay, which is Blackstone Arrows. But the shell middens are really almost right underneath that bridge there.

SPEAKER_02 11:19

Yeah, I've been out to them. I bounced around and took a bunch of pictures. I thought the historical photos were more interesting than anything I took, though.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Well, the thing is they're not really giving you access. They've closed the trail. You have to walk two and a half miles from Newcastle. But basically the calcium still is there on the shores, especially on the Glidden side. But also where I'm growing, and perhaps you can see it this summer, there's another point there that's starting to erode. I'm quite certain that underneath that field is are more shell. When the Native Americans live there, so basically, when anyone criticizes aquaculture as a new industry, my argument is nope. It's been here longer than lomstring and claming. Because for for the whaleback shell midden to be 31 vertical feet of shells, that is a commercial enterprise. This isn't this isn't a family barbecue. You know what I mean? You could eat a dozen oysters the rest of your life, and your driveway would perhaps be speckled with oyster shells. You know, not like pages in a book, you you know, going down that deep.

SPEAKER_03 12:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

So that's my argument is that they were processing them, perhaps as like a winter store uh of food, because if you smoke them, you could travel inland. Surprisingly, they spent the summers on the coast to escape the mosquitoes, and they moved inland where maybe deer and caribou were. But I I just basically feel the Indians' presence because the corner of our lease, we're really a hundred feet away from another kind of unmarked mid-in. And I've seen them outcropping the whole length. So there was literally thousands of Native Americans.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

Or better yet, leave a review. It really helps more folks find this podcast. It's a small thing, but it really means a lot.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

But basically, the key to our production is the fact that we grow them fast and that that we start all our seed in the upper Damascata. So that's why the Damascata River, because of those characteristics, historically has produced up to 75% of Maine's oysters. So it's it it's ideal for oyster cultivation. So the oysters grow very fast there, and then I relay them 22 miles away to South Bristol, kind of where I grew up.

SPEAKER_03 13:59

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

And I kind of fell into that. Somehow business evolves if you never give up and you always try, and if you're consumed with efficiency and production and quality, you're always going to find the biggest, best, fastest way to do something. So you're always analyzing. That's what I like about aquaculture is that yes, you're using strength and brawn in your tough. I mean, I'm going diving tomorrow, and and we produce year-round, but you also have to slow down and be a master of creating the perfect conditions to grow your oysters because you're in competition with everyone else, and you've got to have the best looking, the best tasting, the best shaped product. So we're also diversifying. Because we have hundreds of thousands of oysters, you run out of equipment and gear, and the best way to do something in July might not be the best way to do it in January. So everyone's constantly improving and adapting, and it's a truly international business. So those oyster grow cages that MOOC started to use come from Prince Edward Island, Canada.

SPEAKER_03 15:12

Oh, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

The the ADPI bags came from France, and now we're using flip farm system from New Zealand. We actually have water for weeks on end that's really between 70 and 80 degrees in the upper Damascata, and we have a two and three knot current, and the water is so full of phytoplankton up there, so they're basically being force fed, the algae, so they grow well there, but then when I move them to Johns River, it's the harvest site, so then they slow down growing, the shells harden, but also there's a different phytoplankton there because it's historically it's for clams and lobsters, and it's more it's higher salinity. So the oyster shells bleach out. Everyone uses the same adjectives, but basically a clean finish is what makes us unique. Everyone really says it, but if you really chewed their oysters, it's not always the case. I've got a million oysters and damn as got a river, and when I bring those down to John's River and not even put them in the water, and I pull one out of John's River, every blind taste test, all my customers, friends, and family always choose the John's River.

SPEAKER_02 16:29

Believe me, you've won many, many, many blind taste tests here at my house as well.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

Yours advice. But regardless, you can't ever see everyone works so hard as a farmer. All you can really say is that it's unique, and I would argue that we could have an argument of which is the better tasting beer. You have to give customers choices, right? And I just want to be a choice.

SPEAKER_02 16:51

Can I let me ask a question, which because to me, some of the best plate of oysters I've ever had were pemiquids and yours near point. But then I often wonder is it my own biology or is it the seasons and things that change? Sometimes they don't taste the same. You know, like they'll be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Yeah, yeah. Well remember, a McDonald's quarter pounder with cheese is going to be highly uniform, right? So the head of Olive Garden, Chef Jans, he would put up three million pounds of stewed tomatoes, all taken from the same area, same time of year, so he'd have a consistent like marinara sauce. So the oysters are actually they really are the best Thanksgiving until Father's Day when the water is cold. So that even being said, if we had a two-inch rainstorm, they are what they eat. So their salinity can change and their diet changes because there's all types of different phytoplankton blooms at different times of the year. Then supposedly if they're grown in surface cages or rafts, they're in the midwater column, they're more apt to be more mild because if an oyster is grown on the bottom, you know, they call it the substrate, if it's rocky, you could have high mineral content in iron. If they're grown on the shores, they theoretically could be earthy, they could take on the characteristics of that topography. You know, like the Damascata River has a lot of clay because they had brickyards. Apparently, all Boston and like Portsmouth, all of those bricks came out of the Damascata River. And then prior to that, there was shipbuilding. There was fifty-five boat yards on the Damascata River. So the Damascata River has been working waterfront. The aquaculture is just an extension of the working waterfront. And the soft shell clams are not spawning as well because the water remember how swimming in Maine as a kid the water was too cold. Now we're getting great white sharks because we have 70 degree water. So the lobsters are migrating offshore. The lobsters are up in Stonington, Eastport, Canada. And if you go down to Kiddery and Kennybunk, those boats are old, they're not catching the lobsters unless they're way offshore in colder, deeper water. So that's why the quahogs, which never used to be really in Maine, that was a Cape Cod, New Jersey thing. Them and the American oysters are better suited for climate change, warm water in Maine, even though it's kind of sounds like an oxymoron. So that's kind of why I went into aquaculture is that it I can have a brand name, I can have my own customers, I can set my own prices, and I'm literally, you know, as a marketing business major, i if you do creative financing through the you know farm services and you work hard, save your money, reinvest it, you get enough acreage, you know, to justify your seed production, your sales. So that's what I like about it, that it is sustainable. I can grow the oysters that the market deems the most valuable. So it's really rewarding when some fanatic tells you how great they are. And I don't really like them and enjoy 'em just because they're dirty, they're muddy, I've got to clean them. It's like the last thing I want to do is scrub them and shuck them in hand. I just want to sit on the couch and have a beer myself.

SPEAKER_02 20:39

Yeah, I know. Tony Simmons said, because no, I don't eat 'em. That is disgusting.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

But you know the thing is, why would you every time you eat one, you just like that's the h our biggest problem. All our best oysters are all sold. You see, so you can never really hoard your best ones. It is highly competitive and and it's a real challenge. I mean, this might have been a mild winter, but if you talk to the people I mean, New Harbor got devastated with these big tides and storm surges.

unknown 21:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

You know, the shorefront property is literally washing away stone walls, retaining walls. So sea level rise is real, climate change is real. That's why I have seven rafts that I built myself. And so my custom oyster rafts hold twenty-five thousand oysters. So I built, designed, and created them all out of necessity. I have a heated building with a generator. Because when I go diving, I want it seventy degrees. We use the lobster tank, not for cooking lobsters, but to warm up our nearby gloves. So that's what I like about the aquaculture is that you can build and create things out of need. It's really stimulating to challenge yourself in a multifaceted. It is really almost easy once you figure it out, but maintaining the boat communic being a good manager to your employees when you're really just a loner and you want to dig clams by yourself you know communicating with your customers. So it's sure it has great potential I would say. This really is just the beginning. This really is the future of sustainable food production. And apparently in Japan there's no difference between aquaculturists and commercial fishermen. It's all the same word. Do you see?

SPEAKER_03 22:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

I guess I'm proud of the industry and what really just hurts my feelings is when people criticize aquaculture when they haven't worked on a farm or been on a farm and I just think these stereotypes are wrong and if we really were doing something wrong it would get out there. And I really want the good things to get out there because I think you can raise all this seafood. I mean people just need good healthy seafood and look at the portions in the restaurant. Everything's just getting smaller and more expensive. So I'm trying to feed people and give value and um it's a hard thing to do. Some of my first memories in life were playing in like tide pools with seaweed and I've been killing green crabs for a long time. But th thanks for your time.

SPEAKER_02 23:21

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Take care.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

If you're enjoying these stories visit pernacontent.com or Maine Oysterbook.com where you can pre-order our new book Rising Tides Adapting to Coastal Maine's Future. And while you're there you can grab a copy of Maine Oysters stories of resilience and innovation as well. You can also find these books on Amazon if that's easier or at most of Maine's independent bookstores. Both books are filled with insights from some very smart folks and some beautiful photography of Maine. They make great gifts for people who love things Maine. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time if you've got something that you want to share with our listeners just drop me a line at pernacontent.com thanks again.