Southern New England’s climate offers ideal conditions for producing bay scallops—a sustainable seafood option that also diversifies aquaculture enterprises. However, an important challenge in bay scallop farming is access to nursery systems that can efficiently raise scallops to maturity before transferring them to grow-out environments.
With support from a Northeast SARE Farmer grant, Dr. Daniel Ward, owner of Ward Aquafarms, helped to bridge this gap by developing a floating downweller nursery system designed to optimize growth and survival rates for juvenile bay scallops.
Dr. Ward’s innovative system uses stacked trays that increase water flow and surface area, thereby supporting higher production densities without compromising scallop growth or survival. The system allows scallops to grow from fertilized eggs to market-ready sizes more efficiently, improving Ward Aquafarms’ production of high-quality scallops for both market and propagation in overfished or degraded ecosystems.
The project has improved the economic sustainability and environmental quality of New England aquaculture production by enabling producers to sell scallops while simultaneously reviving their production ecosystems.
A recent post-project evaluation of SARE projects awarded between 2016 and 2019 found that fostering innovation through affordable, farmer-driven research grants was key to the project’s success.
“The entire SARE program has been great, and I really believe in their mission to enable farmers to drive the process and partner with academics, instead of the other way around,” Dr. Ward said. ”The amount of money for each project is relatively small, and risk-reward wise, it has led to an amazing return for our industry.”
Visit https://www.sare.org/sare-impacts-fne16-861 for more information on this project’s impact.
Expanding Sustainable Shellfish Aquaculture: Optimizing Growth and Survival in a Bay Scallop Nursery System is part of a series of 23 case studies produced by Insight for Action as part of a post-project evaluation of SARE's regional grant programs. For more information visit https://www.sare.org/sare-impacts.
For information on grants and resources available from SARE, visit www.sare.org.
View Related SARE Grant:
- Expanding sustainable shellfish aquaculture: Optimizing growth and survival in a bay scallop nursery system (FNE16-861)