Long known for its wild reefs, Calcasieu Lake now produces its first farmed oysters

Story by Alena Maschke

Hubern Doxey’s family has lived off the land in Cameron Parish for generations. His grandfather was one of the state’s most prolific fur traders. Prior to the 2020 hurricanes that reduced much of the parish to rubble and pushed many of its residents to leave, his family also owned an oyster house in Cameron. Doxey himself is a fisherman who specializes in crabs, shrimp and oysters.

“My kids, when they’re old enough to take over, hopefully I’ll still be in business,” Doxey said of the next generation poised to continue the family tradition.

Natural disasters, high insurance premiums, seafood imports and a local focus on making Cameron Parish the nation’s primary exporter of liquefied natural gas have made it difficult for residents to continue this tradition. But a grant program by the Louisiana State University Sea Grant initiative introduces an alternative way of doing so: farming oysters.

Oyster farms, or alternative oyster cultures, are not a new concept. In the eastern part of the state, where private water bottoms are more common, oystermen have farmed the hard-shelled mollusks for years. But on the western side of the state, where almost all water bottoms are public land, they were more difficult to establish.

It took years of advocacy, research and legislative action to find an appropriate area to house the farms, and go through the legal process and environmental surveys required to secure a spot where oystermen could place their cages, which comprise the farms. But eventually, last year, the first cages went into the waters of the Calcasieu Lake, and in March, the first oysterman was able to sell his Cameron Parish oysters to local restaurants.

“They are putting a product on the market now that is truly their identity,” said Earl Melancon, a scholar with LSU’s Sea Grant program. Unlike oystermen on the eastern side of the state, who have long leased their personal oyster grounds from the state, their Cameron counterparts “never had the ability to say: these are truly my oysters,” Melancon said. Now, he added, that’s changed. “I see the pride that they’re taking now.”

​So far, two oyster farmers, Doxey being one of them, have been able to raise oysters in the lake, with five more joining in the upcoming season. One, David Sorrells, recently started selling his first oysters. Together with Doxey, he sold 2,000 oysters on the half shell at a recent festival in Lake Charles. He also counts three high-end local restaurants among his clients.

A former restaurateur — he once owned one of the restaurants that he now sells his oysters to — Sorrells had long been interested in introducing more home-grown seafood to the local market, but struggled to procure it.

“I knew that we had good seafood in this area,” he said. “But I kept hitting a brick wall.” So when the opportunity arose to get into the business himself — and receive some funds to help him get started — he was all in. After doing extensive research on the industry, he built a bottle nursery for his first round of seeds and, a few months later, his first batch of oysters hit the market.

And the market responded. Andrew Green, the chef and owner of 1910 restaurant in downtown Lake Charles and an acquaintance of Sorrell’s from his restaurant days, said the quality of the oysters he has received from Cameron Parish so far has been top-notch. “His oysters are beautiful, that’s for sure,” he said. 

Green previously served Murder Point oysters from Alabama, but the response from customers to his introduction of a truly local product has been met with much more fervor. “The Murder Point oysters weren’t quite as hot a ticket,” he said. Now that he serves oysters from just across the parish line, “people are excited about them,” he noted.

Sorrells, who trained under world-renowned chef Thomas Keller at the three-Michelin-star restaurant French Laundry in Napa Valley, California, and was involved in some of the most well-regarded restaurants in Lake Charles, saw a business opportunity in the oyster farms, but that wasn’t all.

As an avid fly-fisherman, Sorrells was concerned about the depletion of local ecosystems caused by overfishing and industrialization, and the way Cameron Parish had been erased from public consciousness after several massive storms destroyed much of its infrastructure and sent people fleeing the coastal community.

“Cameron Parish has been all but forgotten, but man, if you can see the beauty in it. I want to start an effort to bring that back. We need more than just oil and gas in Cameron,” he said. “To me, it starts with oysters. Oysters are the foundation.” 

As for the business side of things, Sorrels said he’s not sure yet how things will bear out, but he sees plenty of potential. Together with another well-known Lake Charles restaurateur, he plans to open an oyster house, the pair is currently in lease negotiations for a large restaurant space on one of the city’s major thoroughfares. He also sees an opportunity to ship directly to clients through an online shop, possibly offering a line of hot sauces and other oyster-related condiments.

The Cameron Parish Port Commission, which was instrumental in securing an area for the budding oyster farmers to lease, certainly sees the economic potential. “I view this, and the port does, as another way to give our oystermen an opportunity to market a product year round,” Director Kim Montie said. “It’s just another source of economic development for the rebuilding of Cameron.”

It being Cameron Parish, there may be more rebuilding to be done in the future, with the looming threat of the next hurricane always hanging over the new farmers’ heads. According to Doxey, the oystermen have already created contingency plans, learning strategies from their counterparts to the East. While maybe not the most sophisticated option, they plan to stick with what they have learned to be effective. 

“Basically, we’re just going to sink them and hope for the best,” Doxey said. To recoup any losses associated with this approach, they are currently lobbying the Louisiana legislature to make their business eligible for crop insurance, protecting them in case of the ever-present risk of natural disaster.

​The AOC business, many of its proponents pointed out, is ripe with opportunities for collaboration — in Cameron, the two farmers currently farming oysters raise their seed in the same bottle nursery until they’re big enough to go into the lake. This mutual assistance stands in contrast to the more individualistic culture of wild oyster harvesting, experts interviewed for this story said. 

“That’s been the coolest thing for me is to be able to watch the guys with their own specialties work together to make all of them successful,” Montie said. “It’s really been neat to watch how they’re sharing equipment or they’re going out on boats together and learning from each other.”

Equally, the oystermen say they’re not looking to compete with the traditional oyster harvesting industry, but rather add another, more niche, option to the market. “They’re the Budweiser and we’re the microbrewery,” Sorrells said.

For the Doxeys, the reliability of the farming process and its income potential means a better shot at keeping the family business going for another generation to come. Doxey said his young children have already taken an interest in it, tagging along on boat trips to the farm and maintaining the nursery with him. 

“With this, if you really got your stuff together and you know what you’re doing, you’ve got a good chance of making serious money. It’s life-changing,” Doxey said. “I really do think it’s the future of oystering.”