| July 14, 2006
Putting the Oysters to Bed
The pearl of Drake’s Bay loses its luster for good in 2012.
BY GREG CAHILL
 Kevin Lunny stands on the muddy shore of Drake’s Estero. He gazes through a thin haze at a handful of low-slung wooden docks floating upon the distant mouth of the broad channel. The docks harbor racks laden with clusters of shellfish growing at his Drake’s Bay Oyster Farm.
Behind him tower mounds of discarded oyster shells, glinting in the afternoon sun and waiting to be recycled.
The serenity of this remote rural spot is broken only by the sound of occasional visitors driving on the gravel road and the shrill call of a red-tailed hawk circling above.
“It’s absolutely the most fabulous food system that I could imagine,” says Lunny, when asked why he decided to buy the then-beleaguered shellfish business two years ago.
“I fell in love with it and found it to be very, very cool.”
Unfortunately for him, and the many consumers of the company’s popular Pacific oysters, the Sierra Club and federal lawmakers think that aquaculture on this particular piece of West Marin paradise is very, very uncool.
Located in the heart of the sprawling Point Reyes National Seashore, the 1,100-acre oyster farm is California’s largest commercial shellfish operation and home to the state’s last shellfish cannery. Under the terms of the 1976 Philip Burton Wildlife Act, the lease for the oyster farm—which had been operated for nearly 50 years by the Johnson family—is scheduled to expire in 2012, with no renewal in sight.
Lunny’s ongoing efforts to gain support for renewal have stirred a mix of passion and politics that has split the local environmental community and challenged long-held assumptions in this county about what constitutes wilderness and responsible stewardship of the land.
Later, the 48-year-old Lunny sips a glass of chamomile tea at a bustling Point Reyes Station eatery while discussing the controversy. Dressed in a plain cotton work shirt, blue jeans and work boots, he is bright and soft spoken, but intense—as he offers tips on everything from organic-hay production to discerning a healthy cow pie from one produced by beef cattle treated with parasite-control drugs.
His connection to the land is evident in subtle ways as well; his trimmed fingernails are lined with a thin layer of dark Point Reyes dirt.
With a head of prematurely gray hair, bright blue eyes and a down-to-earth demeanor, Lunny is an unlikely poster boy for the new generation of sustainable-agriculture advocates—a growing international movement of farmers, ranchers, fishermen, restaurateurs, scientists and environmentalists savvy about the ways that global warming, depleted fisheries, pesticide use and fossil-fuel costs are being played out at the dinner table.
“The positive impact of buying locally produced food is the most important thing people in this area can learn about protecting their environment,” says Lunny, who also manages a grass-fed beef herd and cultivates heirloom organic artichokes. “There’s just lots and lots to be gained.”
LUNNY IS A third generation West Marin rancher and contractor who grew up on the windswept Point Reyes Peninsula. “From our house, we look out over the oyster beds and the estuary every day,” he says. “It’s a beautiful view and it’s something that we love and cherish. We’re deeply committed to that ecosystem and its protection. To be able to do that while using this resource to produce high-quality food is a match made in heaven.”
As a youth, Lunny and his five siblings worked the family dairy on the Lunny Ranch, or G Ranch as it is now known within the National Park Service. “Growing up there was absolutely fabulous,” he says, “though we didn’t always realize that as kids because we were so secluded. But I developed a real passion for dairy ranching.”
The high costs of meeting drainage regulations along the estuary led his parents in 1975 to sell the property to the federal government, which was acquiring local ranches for parkland with the understanding that the ranch could be leased back to the seller.
“That turned what had been a very intensive operation with lots of activity and income into a very extensive operation with little to do,” he says. “It became a time when we all had to think of doing other things.”
For Lunny, that meant enrolling at UC Davis, where he earned an undergraduate degree in animal science. “I wanted to continue in food production because I had a love for agriculture that was hard to get rid of,” he says.
After college he married and returned to the ranch with his wife, Nancy, supplementing his income by working at the family construction company run by his brothers Joe and Bob. “I was able to live the ranch lifestyle,” he says, “staying there and working on the ranch at night and on weekends, but having to go outside to make a real living.”
Over the years, he realized that his children probably wouldn’t share that same love of the land. “I remember talking to my mother eight or nine years ago about the fact that Marin County has a rich agricultural tradition, but that we were in jeopardy of losing it,” he says. “I felt like I needed to find a way to bring it all back.
“My mom, who has always had a lot of wisdom, told me, ‘Don’t worry, put your mind to it and we’ll find a way to make it work here.’”
So Lunny began “a quest” to make the ranch a viable family farm again. He soon decided to make the leap from conventional ranching to one governed by the then-emerging principles of sustainable agriculture—the ability of a farm to produce perpetually with minimal demands on the environment. “My family knew that there were many leaders in the organic movement in the area,” he says, “but we never considered ourselves one of those people—we were just traditional farmers.”
He started looking at ways to add value to the ranch’s cattle herd by entering the exclusive market for high-end grass-fed and natural beef, a profitable pursuit for such fellow West Marin ranchers as Bill Niman of Niman Ranch and David Evans of Marin Sun Farms. He became active in a West Marin work group that created the first certified grass-fed beef program in the nation.
Today, Lunny has the only certified-organic beef herd in Marin County and the county’s largest certified-organic pastures—500 acres that produce most of the winter feed for the ranch’s herd.
“It’s been an interesting ride,” says Lunny, who now sits on the board of Marin Organic, a nonprofit advocacy group that hosted Prince Charles and Lady Camilla last November when the royals toured the region’s organic farms. “What started out as having purely economic drivers has opened our eyes about what organic and sustainable farming also can do for the land and the community. We’re not only adding value to the product, we’re helping the land and the soils so they become more productive at the same time.
“Those economic drivers are becoming less and less important and my focus is shifting more and more toward this beautiful philosophy of food production.”
WHEN LUNNY TOOK over the shellfish production lease in 2004, Johnson’s Oyster Farm had been burdened by numerous public health, state building code and other regulatory violations. The California Coastal Commission had issued an order instructing Johnson’s to suspend operations until the business could meet state code requirements, including those regulating septic standards and the discharge of processing water into the estuary.
Initially, owner Tom Johnson had hired Lunny’s contracting company to help with the upgrades. But Johnson had grown discouraged with the regulations and Lunny found himself intrigued with the shellfish farm. “I started paying more attention to this food system they were dabbling in,” he explains. “That’s when I absolutely fell in love with it. We can grow 10 times more protein per acre in the bay than we can on land with absolutely no inputs: We don’t feed, we don’t fertilize, we don’t cultivate. There are no fossil fuels required. We don’t even have to herd them from pasture to pasture.
“Our own grass-fed beef production is probably the most sustainable ranch product possible,” he adds, “but even that can’t compete with the oyster farm.
“It’s just a beautiful system.”
Lunny knew the lease was set to expire in 2012, but he argues that, far from being a detriment, the oyster farm actually benefits the estuary’s ecology. A return to wilderness conditions, he says, could diminish the waterway’s environmental health.
“That estuary is smack in the middle of the pastoral zone that was created by Congress, when it created the park to protect agricultural resources,” he says, “and we are farming oysters in the middle of farmland. This is not farming oysters in the middle of a wilderness—not at all. To lose this production would be an environmental tragedy. This is a fabulous system. We know that it’s healthy, we know that the biodiversity is good, we know that the sub-aquatic vegetation is doing well—everything is working beautifully under today’s stewardship. But remove 35 million oysters that can each filter 50 gallons of water a day from a watershed that’s completely surrounded by livestock, and how can anyone say with certainty what will happen to the estuary? We know how healthy it is today, but do we know what will happen without that component in the ecosystem?”
A pair of recent scientific studies, funded by the National Park Service and completed during the past two years, have proven inconclusive, but lend some weight to his arguments.
The first study, by marine biologist Jesse Wechsler, was expected to find that oyster farming in Drake’s Estero had depleted biodiversity, reducing fish populations and the variety of fish species. Wechsler, then a grad student at UC Davis, used neighboring Estero de Limantour, which has no commercial shellfish operation, as a control subject. His four-year study instead found “no statistically significant differences in fish abundance or species richness among the sampling locations, which indicated that the oyster farm had not exerted a noticeable effect on the ichthyofauna of Drakes Estero.”
He did find that the racks tend to favor predatory fish.
The second and more recent study, authored by UC Davis professor Deborah Elliott-Fisk and National Seashore Chief Scientist Sarah Allen, incorporated Wechsler’s research and findings by two other grad students. That study examined the impact of the oyster racks on sensitive eelgrass, including the effect on mud-dwelling invertebrates, like crabs, living around and below the racks. One conclusion was that the hard surfaces of the racks provide habitat for a non-native fouling organism called Didemnum.
A recent Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute study has shown that Didemnum does not effectively adhere to eelgrass.
Those park service studies fail to show that the estuary would be better off without the oyster farm, Lunny says.
“It provides a structure for biodiversity,” he contends. “The oysters filter nutrient sediments that otherwise are pollutants and convert that into high-quality protein. They reduce the turbidity of the water, so sunlight makes it through and we have a more robust and healthy subaquatic vegetation, like the eel grass, that provides essential fish habitat.”
Much of that park service research, Lunny adds, is based on data gathered before he took over the lease. “We’ve chosen not to return to some of the less environmentally friendly practices [in place at Johnson’s during past years],” he says. “Every choice we make is governed by a desire to protect the environment and to do it better than it was done in the past.”
Last month, the feds turned down his request for a new National Park Service study into the benefits of reintroducing native oysters at the site.
THE HEAD OF the Sierra Club Marin Group isn’t buying Lunny’s argument that the estuary needs a commercial shellfish farm. In an article in the May/June issue of The Yodeler, the newsletter of the organization’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter, Marin Group chair Gordon Bennett argues that the Drake’s Bay Oyster Farm is fraught with environmental problems. He claims that “Drake’s Oyster has actually added new unpermitted development” (a claim Lunny denies) and asks Sierra Club members to lobby Rep. Lynn Woolsey to oppose renewal of the lease.
“The operation has a range of...adverse impacts on the future wilderness,” writes Bennett. “Broken oyster-growing debris litters the Estero and adjacent beaches in the national seashore... Cleanup responsibility for such abandoned items is currently unclear. Oyster stakes corrode nickel into the bottom of the Estero, creating a matrix of toxic hot spots. Use of motorized oyster equipment pollutes the Estero as well as disturbing one of California’s largest harbor-seal populations.
“Local residents report that Johnson Oyster spread pesticides in the Estero to eradicate native mollusks and eelgrass beds. The Drake’s Oyster [farm] profits from this prior environmental crime, and clearly intends to continue to do so. These former eelgrass beds are excellent candidates for restoration as extremely valuable fish habitat.”
Lunny should simply pack up in 2012, Bennett told the Sun, and move his oyster farm to neighboring Tomales Bay, which has available tracts and supports two successful shellfish farms: Hog Island Oysters and Tomales Bay Oyster Company. Those oyster farms are unaffected by the 1976 Burton Wilderness Act.
“[Drake’s] is the only estuary on the West Coast south of Alaska that has been designated by Congress as a wilderness area,” Bennett says. “Nevertheless, Drake’s Bay Oyster has lobbied...to carve up the Wilderness Act even further simply to protect their commercial income and thus deny the Estero from becoming wilderness. Wilderness areas, national marine sanctuaries and wildlife refuges are all under assault by the Bush administration. Now, right here in our own backyard, a genial local farmer is aiding and abetting the destruction of wilderness in our National Park and, if successful, setting a precedent that could unravel wilderness areas elsewhere. While I have a great deal of sympathy with local farmers, and organic ones in particular, this kind of behavior completely undermines that support.”
From a business standpoint, Lunny responds, Drake’s Bay is the more desirable location for the shellfish farm, since Tomales Bay oyster farmers are forced to suspend harvesting due to potential contamination from seasonal rains while Drake’s Estero has no such restrictions. Besides, commercial shellfish operations in Drake’s Bay go back to the late 1800s.
“If we lose this production, we’ll have to replace it with protein products trucked from great distances and grown in ways that are probably not as sustainable,” he says. “If we truly care about global impacts, and not just our backyards and the ideologies of hands-off preservation, then we need to move beyond selfishness.
“I think that if that happens, everybody can get on board here.”
PHOTO OF KEVIN LUNNY BY KEN PIEKNY
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