Episode 12: Revolutionizing Oyster Farming to Feed The World with Andy DePaola

In this episode of OYSTER-ology, Kevin interviews Andy DePaola, an innovative oysterman, scientist, consultant, and inventor located on Mobile Bay, Alabama. Andy explains how his unique Shellevator technology revolutionizes oyster farming by enabling multi-layered, three-dimensional oyster cultivation, significantly increasing yield per acre. Andy describes his four farming locations and the challenges of oyster farming in the dynamic salinity conditions of Mobile Bay and the Mississippi Sound.  He then describes the Shellevator, how it works and how it outperforms traditional floating gear in terms of efficiency, labor savings, and resilience to storm damage. Andy also explains his ideas to mass-producing Shellevators for large-scale oyster growing to make it more profitable, to sequester carbon and to feed the planet. But he doesn’t stop there; he also describes a parallel invention, Reefers, an oyster-infused, pliable and rigid material designed to quickly protect and restore coastal shoreline, reduce wave energy.  and enhancing rapid carbon sequestration and large-scale restoration. With a background with the FDA and years of hands-on experience, Andy aims to transform oyster farming, making it more efficient, scalable, and impactful on global food security and environmental health. This episode unwinds to reveal how BIG Andy’s thinking is to improve the planet and highlights some of his innovative contributions to oyster farming and their potential global impact.

00:00 Introduction to Oyster Farming Innovations

00:29 Meet Andy: The Multifaceted Oysterman

00:44 Geographical Challenges and Oyster Farming

02:04 The Impact of Salinity and Environmental Factors

04:01 Scaling Up: Multiple Farm Locations

06:19 The Shellevator: Revolutionizing Oyster Farming

22:39 The Future of Oyster Farming and Carbon Sequestration

42:25 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Andy DePaola's Bio:
Andy DePaola grew up on the North Carolina coast pier fishing with his dad, Depe; and honored by naming farm Depe Oysters. Andy studied food science, microbiology and marine biology earning BS and MS degrees at North Carolina State University and a Ph.D at the University of Florida. He spent his entire 37-year career in public service working at FDA in Dauphin Island, Alabama as a research microbiologist. He worked extensively with microbial oyster safety and was Agency’s subject matter expert on vibrios, Lead Seafood Microbiologists and National Vibrio Policy Coordinator from 2013 until he retired in 2015. Andy established Depe Oyster Farm, Angelo DePaola Consulting and filed the Shellevator invention patent in 2016 along with breaking his neck in a body surfing accident. Experimentation remains his passion and Shellevators have provided endless opportunities to test new ideas and innovate.

Show Links:

The Shellevator
(https://www.shellevator.com/)

Depe’s Oyster, Andy DiPaola’s oyster farm
(https://www.oystersalabama.com/depe-s-oysters)

Article with images about the Shellevator 
(https://www.scenic98coastal.com/posts/andy-depaola-depe-oysters-coden-alabama)

Oyster’s Alabama

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Transcript

Transcript

Episode 12: Revolutionizing Oyster Farming to Feed The World with Andy DePaola

[00:00:00] 

[Bubbles]

Andy: I'm able to grow about 20 times greater yield per acre than any other kind of gear that's operated manually because Shellevators can have multiple layers that occupy the entire water column. So in about 1 meter of water I can grow probably 3 to 5 million oysters. Whereas normally you'd only be one or 200,000. 

[Bubbles]

Welcome to OYSTER-ology, a podcast about oysters, aquaculture, and everything from spat to shuck. I'm your host, Kevin Cox. My guest this week is Dr. Andy DePaola, an oyster farmer, marine biologist, and inventor from the Gulf Coast of Alabama. In addition to being one of the world's foremost experts on oyster disease, Andy is an inventor who is leading the charge of large-scale oyster farming with an extraordinary invention that could transform the way we produce oysters.

He calls it the Shellevator, a [00:01:00] submersible, oyster growing watercraft with lift tanks that utilize compressed air to farm oysters in the complete water column from bottom to surface. Andy explains the concept to me, how the invention works and what it can mean not just for localized oyster farming, but as a method of feeding mass populations around the world.

As our riveting conversation went on, I came to see Andy as sort of a mad scientist, whose ideas are so big that they made my head spin. And when I say big ideas, I mean change-the-world big. That's because he sees his practical inventions as just the start of his greater plan to create a large-scale new industry for young people to basically implement a way to feed the planet in the future. 

And just when I thought Andy was done, he went on to describe another completely logical invention of his, designed to grow oyster castles while at the same time protecting and restoring coastal shorelines and reducing wave energy as the oceans rise. [00:02:00] It's all about the beauty of simplicity blended with serious science and homegrown inventions The make you realize that Andy's ideas can really work. And that realization is absolutely thrilling. 

So tussle up your hair and slip on your mad scientist, goggles and lab coat to enter the future of oystering, where we discuss things like increasing today's oyster farming yield by 20-fold; exploding prototypes; oil tankers as oyster farms; the connection between reefer and oysters; enhancing global food security; sequestering carbon; one person oyster farming made easy; and a new industry that can end up changing the world, with my guest and remarkable farmer, biologist, inventor, and mad scientist, Andy DePaola. 

 [Bubbles]

Kevin: Hey Andy, thank you so much for being on OYSTER-ology. I'm really excited to have you here. You know, you're a fascinating [00:03:00] guy. You're an oysterman, a scientist, a consultant, an inventor. You kind of do it all. where are you located right now? 

Andy: So I've been on Mobile Bay. The town is Coden Alabama. It's probably one of the least educated, poor zip codes. And it used to have the most oyster processing plants of any zip code the country. But it takes on part of the, South, West shore of Mobile Bay and then it also connects part of the northern shore of the Mississippi Sound and it borders Bayou La Batre, of Forest Gump fame. 

Kevin: So I'm picturing, kind of right past Florida border into Alabama somewhere down on the Gulf, right? 

Andy: Uh, we would probably be closer to the Mississippi border. So I'm on the west side of Mobile Bay and on the east side, it's more like the panhandle of Florida. Nice sugar sand beaches and clear water. But Mobile [00:04:00] Bay is the third largest flow in the country. So we have a lot of rain that fall through the state of Alabama.

So we have very dynamic salinity, probably more so than any place I know about. Right now my salinity here at the house may be three parts per thousand, but I can go out about 12 miles and it'll be 35 parts per thousand. But the fresh water really hugs the western side of the bay. And then it kind of goes out in the Gulf or goes, west toward Mississippi and the Mississippi Sound. 

Kevin: So tell me a little bit about your farm. Your farm is Depe's Oysters. Now is that the one that's at the house or the one further out on the island? 

Andy: So Depe's Oyster has four locations right now. We have one in, in Mobile Bay at my house. I have two more in a part of the Mississippi Sound called Portersville Bay. One of those is a neighbor oysterman who has a longer pier than me and has like a foot deeper water, which is critical for me right now. I just got my offshore lease [00:05:00] where I have deep water, but my water runs between two and three feet and it's very hard to operate Shellevators in that shallow water.

The oysters will spend a lot of time in the air and grow slower and sometimes this is rough. And then I have another location in Grand Bay, Alabama. The Bayou La Batre High School operates about a 50 acre park there, and they lease out two acre portions, and there's probably a dozen. That's where most of the farming in Alabama occurs.

Kevin: So in all of the four different locations, how many acres are you farming right now? 

Andy: I'm kind of squatting on a neighbor's stuff. He has a couple of acres, I have Shellevators there, so I probably have less than a 20th of an acre that occupy on his farm. But I have about a quarter of a million oysters there. I have one acre here in Mobile Bay, another acre of my farm in Portersville and two acres. So, I'm paying for four acres. 

Kevin: Are these, grown primarily for singles or half [00:06:00] shell consumption, or are they grown more for canning? 

Andy: So pretty much everybody that's farming oysters is growing for the half shell market. those are bringing in a lot more money than the shucking oysters. But eventually if we can bring the prices down, I hope to be growing for restoration and for the shucking market. Because I'm able to grow about 20 times greater yield per acre than any other kind of gear that's operated manually because the Shellevators can have multiple layers that occupy the entire water column. So I can grow probably up to about 1 meter of water. I can grow probably 3 to 5 million oysters. Whereas normally you'd only be one or 200,000 is what other people have floating gear and then, and they're growing on, on a single plane. Whereas I'm growing three dimensionally. 

Kevin: You're talking about the Shellevator. So tell me what the Shellevator is. Help our listeners [00:07:00] understand and kind of visualize what this thing is. 

Andy: It's a submersible oyster watercraft that uses compressed air and it consists of lift tanks that are, mounted under a frame. And on the frame you put your stacks of oyster gear, which is attached to the frame. And when you want to bring this thing up from the bottom, we use a small, uh, compressor that's, about the size of a six pack and it can transport about 80 cubic feet a minute into the air inlet, which forces the water out of the exhaust port at the bottom. And so within just a few minutes you could lift, tons and tons of oysters and it's very efficient. It's a 1200 watt. blower that they use on a Hydro-Hoist boat lifts and it's very inexpensive under $200. And you can lift a [00:08:00] Shellevator more than 10 times on a kilowatt. So in most places that brings that up to around one penny. Per per raising, which is incredible to raise tons of stuff for just a penny.

Kevin: Right. So basically what you're talking about is some sort of platform, whether it's just a barge or pontoon with air bladders underneath it, lift tanks, right. And then the gear that you would mount on top of that platform might be cages, condos, whatever. So as many oysters as will fit on that platform you can raise easily and incredibly inexpensively so that they can then be attended to. 

Andy: When I was, thinking about this, I was retiring from FDA in 2015 and I had already started growing oysters on my, pier in Mobile Bay 

Kevin: And you were with FDA for 37 years, right?

Andy: Right, I graduated from North Carolina State with a master's degree in, 1978. And, my first job was about two blocks from the Capitol. [00:09:00] And that's where FDA had all their offices. I didn't really want to be there. They had, wanted to hire me as a microbiologist and the position was in Dauphin Island, Alabama, But the Federal Registry for Microbiology closed. So they brought me on as a food technologist. But the only position they had was at their headquarters in D. C. So I spent three months in September and worked there. And it was really, uh, it was really great because Um, well, shoot in my first week, there was a cholera outbreak associated with blue crabs in Louisiana, which when I got to work for FDA, I was in the molluskin shellfish branch and it was hammered into my head that, you know, these were oyster clams and mussels. That's all I needed to worry about. A couple of days later I was on a plane to Dauphin Island, Alabama, and I was all of a sudden became the lead, on a, on a Gulf coast survey of oysters from uh mostly from Louisiana, four different sites.

 Kevin: so you've described the [00:10:00] Shellevator and how it works. How do you employ the Shellevator on your farms? And also, I'm curious to understand the difference in how you handle oysters and the volume of oysters you can handle with a Shellevator versus without a Shellevator.

Andy: So when I first, uh, you know, I was considering retirement in 2015 and Bill Walton, he came down from Massachusetts and now he's up at VIMS, but he came down here, um, and the industry was just starting and I went out with him and he was flipping these floating oyster grows, um, basically there's two floats on those and, they suspend cages, they have six bays, all six bags, and they're like 36 by 18 bags and three or four inches tall. You get in the water and you flip them so the floats are, instead of being on the top, they're on the bottom and the oysters are on the top.

And I thought, holy crap, that's a lot more work than an old man like me wants to do. So for years I thought [00:11:00] about submersibles and I had a friend of mine who was an architect and an engineer from Surf City, North Carolina, Gary Sunderland. So he was a retired architect and, you know, very, very capable, had a degree in engineering and, I told him I wanted to use compressed air.

So he and I worked together for a few years. And we built a couple of prototypes. One was a barge type. Another one was made out of one foot diameter PVC pipes, which we joined together like pontoons and, um, a couple of things that I really had not considered was that, now you have ability to, in a few minutes, to lift these things up with not even lifting a finger except to turn a switch.

And now you could move these things with the PVC one. My wife could take the kayak out and actually paddle it out and move it. So this mobility, you know, seemed to be something particularly where I was at and I was having these mass mortality [00:12:00] events. I could escape harm. So another feature that I quickly realized that these things in the submerged position when we had hurricanes and we've had a lot of them here since, uh, since I first put them in the water in 2017.

Matter of fact, I've lost my pier seven times. The original Shellevators, they sit on the bottom out of the wave energy, out of the debris field. And they're movable objects. and I have not lost an oyster or a Shellevator during a hurricane. And hurricanes have devastated North Carolina and Florida and Louisiana, and you know, you're not a sitting duck with floating gear. You're a dead duck. Um, people have lost their entire farms. You, you see these, floating gear up in trees. So, you know, the remedy is to go out there and flood your pontoons. But yes, if you've got a million oysters, you got a thousand of these things and it takes like over five minutes. So you [00:13:00] have to get out there five or six days in advance. Cause you're going to sink a few hundred a day, and even then they weigh maybe 200 pounds. When, when I have a Shellevator, I can put up to 10 tons of gear on it. Gear plus oysters, which is, you know, like 100, 000 oysters. It's since it's a whole farm on a boat. 

Kevin: So you can just lower the, Shellevator all the way down to the bottom. The oyster sit down there below most of the wave energy during a big storm 

Andy: And usually when you get a storm and you'll get a surge of water, you know, it could be two or three or four feet or 10 or 20 feet, but not only are they below that, but they're not on the bottom. The lift tanks are underneath them and the lift tanks are hold them off the bottom. When you sink floating gear, if it flips over in that cages that the floats are on the top, that, that, those things will bury. And you can't get them out when they bury, it kills all their [00:14:00] oysters. So, you know, sometimes what will happen is these pontoons will settle down like a half a foot, so you have to introduce some compressed air and they don't come up immediately, but, you know, if you, if you can get a little bit compressed air, over, you know, a few hours, they'll work their way off the, out of the mud, you know, do it, you know, it depends on what kind of bottom type it is, and then you can flush them out.

And they're good to go. They save the labor from, you know, accessing your oysters where you're desiccating. That was the main thing that we do. We get such barnacle growth down here that the manual gear, any kind of mesh gear has to be desiccated weekly. If you don't desiccate weekly down here, you'll, you'll get a biofilm within  10 days and that'll be populated with hard biofouling organs like, rib muscles and barnacles.

And once they get established, you can't, you know, desiccate and kill them anymore. You're gonna have to pressure wash. They clog your mesh up so you can get flow through your gear. You know, they're [00:15:00] gnarly. They make it heavy. They're, they're dangerous to handle.

And, you know, they just create a lot of work. So, the best thing to do is, is to dry these things out regularly. So, the problem I've had with Shellevators is that it takes forever to get permits. Um, it's, you can get a permit for under your pier or next to your pier without a Army Corps of Engineer, a nationwide 48 permit just through the state, which you can get in a few weeks.

But the problem is, is my, my pier only has 2 or 3 feet of water. So the, uh, the Shellevator, um, the oysters are out of the water and the particularly the top shelf. Sometimes I'll have 5 shelves and they'll be separated from 5 or 6 inches. So those top shelves may only be submerged a few hours a day and then they're up in the wave energy.

But really what I found out by having them in the shallow water is that these things don't have to [00:16:00] be tumbled. That the waves do it every second. Right, because there's so much wave energy. They tumble them. And these oysters, they're smooth as a baby's butt. They'll have, they'll sculpt it. They'll have the lid, instead of being flat, will look like you'll have two. You know, bottoms on it and there will not be a speck of, you know, mud or there will be no barnacles on the bags and that's without even raising them up and down. So when we do that, like the five shelves, I'll come out every month or six weeks and take the bottom shelf out in the top shelf and rotate those, which for 180 bags I can do and I have a helper that we can do that in a little over an hour.

 But now I can move them out to four or five feet of water where they'll stay submerged all the time and they'll grow faster out there. And then when I need to, you know, polish them up, I can bring them back to my [00:17:00] pier and, you know, wait for kind of a choppy day. And, you know, within two or three days, you know, they're reconditioned 

So we spend a lot of time, people using manual gear desiccating and about every month or two, they have to do a density reduction. And they tumble and grade, well, that can take, for what I'm doing, it can take a very long, time and days, which I only, it takes me a few minutes to do that. I can tilt it to one side and all the oysters, by gravity will roll down to the other side.

So there's other ways to tumble them, so each one of my bags. Holds about four or 500 market size oysters. They may hold 50, 000 seed. Most of the people with a baskets have about a hundred and with bags have about 200. So not only am I able to grow more bags, I actually have to grow in higher destiny. So the waves don't roll them around too much. So [00:18:00] most people stock at a quarter of a bag. I stock at a half a bag and then I'll, um, uh, I'll harvest it from two thirds to three quarters. Okay. Um, where I'll do a density

Kevin: You'll still need to, you'll still need to pull bags and sort them and cull them out to get the different sizes from time to time though. Is that right?

Andy: Usually I wait until, you know, all the oyster have gotten to a certain size. So, you know, I want to increase the mesh size cause I get better flow and everything, and sometimes I'll do some sorting there, but usually I sort at harvest and, not so much in between. 

Kevin: What I find amazing is the concept. So when I've seen these floating, floating gear, like you described earlier, and you got to flip them and that sort of thing. Yeah, that's a hell of a lot of work. But also what I've noticed is it's usually only two levels, the baskets. You're talking about being able, to do five or six or even more levels with the Shellevator, right? [00:19:00] 

Andy: So in one meter of water, which is where I have, my neighbor's pier has about one meter of water in it on an average tide. I have a barge style that's 32 feet long and 10 feet wide and one foot thick, and, um, I have five levels at five and a half inches on each one of them, which is. An inch and a half or two inches more than what you would get in the little wire. And these are very sturdy cages that will last a lifetime, I think. for entry right now, each Shellevator I make is a new design, new features, it's custom built it's experimental and, and, and sometimes … I had the last one I built exploded and 

Kevin: How did that happen? 

Andy: Well, it's a pressurized vessel and we had some weld seams that were on the top and when you introduce air, even though it's about only one pound per square inch if you got something 12 foot That's a hundred and forty four [00:20:00] by… You got 10, 000 pounds of internal pressure there. And, and if the exhaust gets a little bit plugged up from sinking in the mud, you, maybe you go from one pound up to almost two pounds per square inch. 

But if you got pontoons, those are much more resilient But then you have to have deeper water because the pontoons are like two feet in diameter Where I've had these barges from eight inches to 12 inches thick But if you really wanted to Add capacity you'd make them two or three foot thick and then you'd move them out to eight feet of water So then instead of growing 5 million per acre, I could grow more than 10 million per acre, 

Kevin: That's remarkable. 

Andy: Just think of a chicken house. Purdue and them, they built these climate controlled houses, but then they started stacking these cages vertically. So in a very small footprint, they were able to grow millions of chickens in climate controlled automatic feeding. So one person, you could grow a million chickens. So now it became the [00:21:00] cheapest protein on earth.

So, You know, a Shellevator is basically, a barge or some kind of, lift vessel system, that, you know, you can stack these things up and you can grow the whole water column in a single season. It's vertical. So that's probably the thing that I hadn't really thought about you know, you have a pier, you don't even have to have a boat to go out there and get the stuff, you know, a family with a pier, a couple hundred feet long could, grow oysters.

You know, make several hundred thousand dollars a year. They're getting current prices, which for me is 55 cents an oyster, which is incredible because these oysters only, you know, weigh a 10th of a pound each. So I get $5 dollars and 50 cent a pound for live oysters. But on a Shellevator, each one of those bags I have is gaining about a half a pound a day. So the big one that has 180 bags. is growing 90 pounds a day. So, yeah, I'm [00:22:00] making like, hundreds of dollars a day. I don't make any money till I sell the oyster, obviously, but you know, they're, they're growing at that rate. 

 Kevin: You've created this, the Shellevator, which now enables an oyster farmer to double, triple, even quadruple or more 

Andy: It's literally a 10, 20 fold. It's a, order of magnitude. It's basically a quantum leap of a production. And, and that's what we're going to need to do to feed the planet. And the thing is in the Gulf of Mexico, the growing season is very, very long. They grow all year round.

So you can go from a seed to a market oyster in as little as five months, whereas in Maine, it might take three years. So the Mississippi Sound where we're at it's basically the fertile crescent of the planet. that 10 mile wide sound that goes almost 100 miles from Dauphin Island Bridge all the way to, Louisiana, the whole coast of Alabama, Mississippi, the western coast and the salinities and everything.

They're a little bit [00:23:00] higher when you go a little bit south. So we could grow a gigaton of oysters. We could actually grow like 4 gigatons and sequester 1 gigaton of carbon. by having Shellevators throughout the Mississippi Sound. 

Kevin: I'm really glad you mentioned carbon because, that's another thing that is incredible about this.

When you've created this mechanism that enables you to grow so many more oysters in the same footprint, you're also having a tremendous impact on, the carbon removal from the water, the nitrogen removal, the filtering and cleaning of the water, because you've got so many more oysters doing all of that work, that's amazing.

Andy: Yeah, this is not theoretically uh, on my neighbor's pier right now We have four Shellevators that are like literally only three feet apart and they have an aisle So they're taking up not even a 20th of an acre they grow, almost equal rate all the way through that [00:24:00] water column.

So it is shocking. I don't think anybody's ever produced food. At that kind of density. you're doing it as scale, which to do 1000 tons, we would need 300 Shellevators like I have our biggest ones.

And they would do about three tons a year, which is about 12 tons of oysters, or about 88, 000 oysters per ton of carbon. So the carbon that's sequestered is inorganic carbon that forms the calcium carbonate shell. And calcifiers are part of the long term storage of carbon. The other is fossil fuels.

So if you look at the cliffs of Dover these were single cell organisms. That, settled over, millennia, to form this, they're just passively sequestering carbon and it's very stable in the shell.

We have shell mounds in Alabama Dauphin Island that are over 10, 000 years old and shells are still just like [00:25:00] they were. 

Kevin: Tell the listeners a little bit about XPRIZE because this was a great honor recognizing, the power of the Shellevator and that they saw you as one of the 100 top innovations for carbon removal. Is that right? 

Andy: Well, yeah, this is a planetary, a whole, a whole world competition. Um, there, there, there were 30 or 40 countries that entered 25 countries actually made the top, um, a hundred. And this is well over a thousand teams that actually made it to the finals. Um, there were more teams in the beginning, I think in Texas there were like a thousand teams.

So the human population. 7 billion plus, is emitting, I think around 37 gigatons, billion tons, 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually. If we were to produce a gigaton of oysters, which I can do on Shellevators, we would feed the planet 3 billion tons. 36 oysters a day, [00:26:00] every human. But we would still need 36 times that amount just to keep pace with our emissions. and we won't do that with oysters alone. Um, but a lot of these other things are going to take, um, inventions that haven't been invented yet. You know, if you do them, they're going to cost a lot of money.

So basically for me to grow oysters is the carbon sequestration is free. I'm getting the 50, 5 and 50 cent a pound on, you know, selling them for food. So to, to get the thousand tons, I would need 300 Shellevators like I have currently operating. And I could do that on my, um, on my three acre farm. I can put about a hundred per acre. 

So we have something we call the Megavator and basically as we wean ourself off of fossil fuel, we have all these barges that transport fuel all around, And these things [00:27:00] are 300 feet, long and 120 wide and you're 8, 10 feet tall.

And you know, we will repurpose these and make them into Shellevators, Megavaders. So each one of these would need about 20 foot of water to submerge, but you'd be growing instead of one meter, You'd be growing a lot higher and you could go out to 20 or 30 foot of water and grow, a thousand tons per megavator per year. So you would need a thousand megavators to doa megaton, so, you know, we, would have, those in a thousand places we'd have a gigaton and that's where we feed the whole world.

Kevin: So you're thinking big and I love that. 

Andy: Yeah. But in order to get the gigaton, our solution moved away from Shellevators. Cause Shellevators are for harvesting oysters. They have the lowest carbon footprint of any other food that we produce on the planet. So you would be saving that many orders of magnitude. Over other animal [00:28:00] protein, which you have to feed and stuff like this.

But what I want to do is to grow reefs, moving, oyster restoration out of the stone age with, 3D, reefs. So I've proven with the Shellevator that, in a matter of a season, you can grow from the surface to the bottom And what I've been proposing to do is to have something that will resemble a Chia Plant. Are you familiar with those? These are like a, you know, nest structures that they glue seeds to and you wet them and when they germinate they grow out sprouts that look like here and they fill out that mesh. So what I want to do is to take a lightweight matrix, 

 I've taken a crab trap wire. it's chicken wire. This coated basically. And we make crab traps out of them. I can buy a 150 foot roll of this crab trap wire for a hundred dollars and it's like two feet high and not two feet across, it'll fit inside a 55 [00:29:00] gallon drum.

And then what I do is I put like a maybe, a hundred thousand, eyed larvae and eyed larvae are, 21 days after fertilization. And, and when they get to that stage. Within a few days, they're going to settle and attach to something. So in this case, they settled it in attached to that mesh crab wire. And, they did that for several days in a static recirculating system with aeration, Where I fed them algal paste, began flowing water filter through a plankton net to keep the zooplankton for a couple of weeks and I could, you know, see that there was a really good set on the wire.

So at that point, the wire probably weighed 30, 40 pounds a roll of it. I tied it with a rope, suspended it from a pier and I came back in October after about, 12, 14 weeks, and that thing was a fused structure. The oysters had fused with each other and it probably must have weighed a couple hundred pounds.

I like never got it out of [00:30:00] the water When I unwound it, the oysters were grown between the wire mesh and I ended up probably killing most of them. But what I, what popped off, I put in baskets and I was shocked about how well they grew in the baskets, but there were some live ones left on the wire.

So I stretched them out between my pier piles, like 30 or 40 feet there. But then other ones, I made little circles around the pilings. So it was interesting after a couple of weeks, the ones I had stretched out and have baby oysters on them, the sheep's head or crabs or something to come by and eat and all of them, but the ones that are around the pile and they were, you know, they couldn't get to the inside and those lived until about January. And then, um, then we had a freeze and they, they died. So, you know, I plan to repeat that this spring 

So the cool thing about the crab trap wire is that when you unwind it, it has a memory where it's been wound up in a tight spiral. And it [00:31:00] forms a natural spiral, because of the memory.

And so you cut off like a 30 foot piece and you can make four or five layers that are like six inches apart or you could, have them at different distances. You put a cast net over it and now you've got something that's going to grow in a single season all the way through the water column.

I put them in about two foot of water. It's going to grow up two foot and be like six feet across. And it'll sequester a ton of carbon passively. But the cool thing about these is that if you were gonna, you know, put oyster on spat or rocks like, you know, people normally do restoration, it would take you hundreds of maybe a thousand years to grow up two or three foot through the water column.

And now you can do it in a single season. And not only that, you've got all these oysters that, um, as the oysters are growing, they secrete pseudo feces and they excrete feces, which are very high in organic carbon and [00:32:00] it'll settle in the interstitial spaces and as the oysters in the bottom become, covered with it, they'll die and they'll gape.

And the gaping shell will fill up with organic carbon and that will compress, and you know, only the outside of that structure will actually be alive after several years. But now you could plant grass on top of it, like, uh, Spartina or seagrass. So you could restore marshes and you could spring it in between the, mess.

So where the roots are going to, not wash out from the, tides, it'll be an intertidal. I haven't trademarked it, I probably will. We call these reefers, because these, unlike your father's reefer, which he rolled these you unroll into a reefer, which becomes a three dimensional freestanding.

You can just stake it down with like bamboo or wooden stakes. It has no water resistance while the oysters are small, but as they grow, they become heavy. Then it has the weight so that it'll [00:33:00] become a, it'll become a permanent structure that will stay put. 

Kevin: And I guess it'll drop down in the mud too, a little bit and be even more secured as it gets heavier and heavier, so you're creating basically piling. 

Andy: You're creating islands. that, that grow vertically, that, you know, for a, for a few hundred dollars, not even that much. So, so I can make like, you know, five or six reefers from a roll of crab trap wire that costs a hundred dollars.

So here we go, $20 and then maybe $50 worth of eyed larvae. And now you're sequestering a ton of carbon passively. You don't have to do any work. You just let it sit there and grow. 

You know, if we want to go out and make a reef, we have to go up the river, three or 400 miles and get granite boulders. Bring them back with all that carbon footprint, push them off with heavy equipment you know, hopes that, something, colonizes it usually as barnacles, not oysters.

And there are [00:34:00] fish attraction devices and stuff like that. But they're not really filtering water and doing the work that these reefers will be doing. With tens of thousands of oysters on them. 

Kevin: It sounds to me like you could almost use them to form bulkheads or certainly shorelines that are going to grow naturally. So in addition to cleaning the water and doing all the benefits that having all those oysters do. You're also creating a new environment, and you're shoring up the shoreline, and probably reducing a lot of the wave energy in the process, right? 

Andy: Yeah, and, you know, so, as the sea level rises, you can grow them up higher toward the surface to, you know, to protect against sea level rise. But to me the low hanging fruit is is working right along the coastline and protecting your shoreline and attract I love to fish off my pier the coast These oysters attract so many red, red drum and flounder and everything. And so it's a very integrated, [00:35:00] situation where, yeah, I'm growing oysters, which I love to eat. And, you know, what I want to do is establish an economy where, young people can become business people.

I don't want to have labor. I want to create businesses. And that, you know, people can go out and operate Shellevators, they'll have, factories where we build them we'll have operators, we'll have venture capital and somehow or another, like Uber does, we'll figure out, these things will eventually probably be sold, auctioned off on the internet.

So what I'd like to do is integrate the final user, the consumer, And it could be a restaurant, or it could actually be where they can invest in Shellevators, ahead of time for oysters that they will receive later. and create a new economy that works for people. 

Kevin: What kind of, um, barrier to entries would there be for a farmer? What does it cost to get one of your more typical Shellevators for a small to medium oyster farm? 

Andy: Uh, right [00:36:00] now, too much. What I have to do is to come up with a way to mass produce these things. And I'm thinking several different options. I'm going to be talking to a venture capital company that got my invention off the XPRIZE announcement And. Uh, like to make something. like a sit on top kayak. that you could connect together with beams. and you can make them different thicknesses you might make them, you know, six or eight or 12 inches tall and then you could put, a foot or two of gear and you might have 10 or 20,000 oysters, which, would feed your family, maybe if you have, multiple ones and you could have a living, but some that it would ultimately be like maybe 30 feet long and 10 feet wide that would hold 10 tons. And those would be the smaller versions right now for me to build one out of aluminum. It's over 20, 000.

It holds like 120 bags. So that comes up [00:37:00] to, a lot more than, than the 50 a bag, that you can get with an oyster. But I think. If we could mass produce these things and make a new gear that's not custom built, the stackable and transportable and modular that you could connect them together.

I think that, that I could bring my price down pretty even with what other floating gear costs.

Kevin: I mean, you are, you are really onto something and you are thinking big. 

Andy: So I'm thinking about instead of using lift tanks to, to use these, air bladders, and you can put 'em, you know, both on the bottom and on the top. And suspend this thing in the water column at a, desired depth and hold these oysters in refrigerated wet storage without using any electricity, I've, patented, one of these and, and now I have a continuation in part. But, you would have a, a minimum of two air bladders. 

So you would have a couple of these on the [00:38:00] bottom in a cage. Then you would have a section above that that holds your oysters. And then you'd have another cage on top with a single air bladder in the center When you deflate all the air bladders, it's going to sit on the bottom, right? And when you inflate all of them, the, the oyster gear will emerge above the sea surface and that way you can access it and move it. if you want to grow right at the surface, you deflate the, the underneath air bladders and it's suspended right at the surface by the top air bladder.

Now that it's underwater, it only weighs a third as much as it does when it's completely out of the water. So now you can hold it up there. And this is where oysters like to grow. You're, you're out away from the predators and everything. But let's say you've got a storm coming and you just, evacuate this thing.

It'll go down to the bottom. But let's just say you want to go into a thermocline where you can wet store. So now you evacuate this top air bladder. The bottom ones are already evacuated, [00:39:00] suspended from the surface. But instead of letting all the air out, letting it completely collapse, just let out enough that becomes a little heavier than neutrally buoyant.

So now this thing weighs nothing. It's suspended in the water column. And now you can take it like a teeny buoy and hold it at the surface. And you can put a line on that. If you want to go down 10 feet or 50 foot. To hold it in a desired position. So now let's say you want to bring it back to the surface and it only takes a puff of air to bring it back up which you could have a scuba tank or something Attached to it and do it remotely 

Kevin: it sounds like the same concept is establishing neutral buoyancy as a scuba diver and you can just basically suspend at any depth you want for as long as you can and Like you said a tiny puff of air will change that and bring you back up. 

Andy: And now Because you've got the stuff underneath it. You can bring it up and becomes a mobile.[00:40:00] So this whole thing becomes transportable 

Kevin: So I love the fact that, the Shellevator create this vertical farming opportunity, which enables you to scale dramatically the volume, but also that it's horizontal in that you can drag it like a barge, I suppose, to a different location depending on the water quality or temperature or whatever factors are important to you.

Andy: Or to avoid harm like a red tide. So the red tides coming up might be closed for months. So I would move the thing over to Mississippi or something like that. So we have two different kinds. I have one that we call the Shoreliner and that's the barge style and the entire surface is lift tank and it's divided into at least, four watertight airtight lift tank compartments and that you can move like five or six miles an hour. But I repurpose pontoon boats. Which we can tow those up to 20 miles an [00:41:00] hour. 

Kevin: On the back of your Carolina skiff 

Andy: And we call that the Shellevator Express

Kevin: It's genius. 

Andy: So we you know where you know, you're probably only going to get a 20 or 30,000 oysters on that one. But then you can take it up to a launch ramp and put it on a trailer and take it down the highway at 50 miles an hour. So you don't have to handle the bag at all. One person can go out there with a $150 blower, raise this thing up, disconnect, untie your bow lines or disconnect your carabiners, attach it to your bridle, go back to the ramp, and, pull this thing up on a trailer and go to your customer.

Kevin: That's unbelievable.I s there anything similar to this that exists in the world today?

 Andy: There, there's nothing like this in history. I mean, all of our agriculture has been very site specific. The only difference was, when the wild west was going on, we did cattle drives So now we have [00:42:00] something that could weigh 10 tons, could weigh 100 tons. But now you've got 100,000 oysters and you could, park it until, the conditions got better. 

They would have like some kind of propulsion steering system where you could either remote control them with your cell phone or you can bring them up and have a tow vessel to move them around. So there, there was just the, uh, as I look forward, I think, you know, we, we will, this will be the main source of protein on the planet. Um, by the end of my life, 

Kevin: I think it's going to be really interesting for other, oyster farmers to hear this right from you and to hear how you've designed it and the ideas you have for it. It's really exciting You are on the verge of something really big and this is going to happen. It sounds like pretty imminently, which is amazing. It's fantastic. 

Andy: We'll feed the planet and then we'll sequester all the carbon. 

Kevin: I can't, I can't imagine there's anybody who could do this as well as you're going to be [00:43:00] doing it. 

Well, Andy, I can't thank you enough for all the time you've given us and explaining these amazing inventions. The Shellevator sounds like a game changer. And the Reefers also just, these are two seemingly simple ideas that you can just tell conceptually are going to make a huge difference. So congratulations to you on coming up with those and the hard work you've put into it. And I can't wait to see. What happens and we'll be watching 

Andy: Kevin I really appreciate you having me and, and, uh, I can talk forever about Shellvators as your listeners will probably tune me out, but, hehe…

Kevin: No, I don't think anybody's going to be tuning you out. It's way too interesting, but we'll just end it now and come back for more later.

Kevin: Well, that's it for this week's episode of OYSTER-ology. Thanks so much to my guest, Andy DePaola, and his visionary ideas. Links to Andy's inventions are included in the show notes, complete with photos of some of his Shellevator prototypes, which really bring them to life, so check them out. [00:44:00] And if you enjoyed this episode, please let me know in the comments, and click to follow OYSTER-ology on your favorite podcast platform. And oh yeah, please spread the word to anyone you think who may be interested, so that they can listen in too. I'm your host, Kevin Cox. Join me next time as we pry open the shell of another interesting OYSTER-ology topic. 

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