It took almost six years, but Adam Younes checked every conceivable box on the path to becoming a successful independent aquaculture farmer.
Undergraduate business degree from New York University, check. Graduate degree in marine and atmospheric sciences from Stony Brook, check. Aquaculture classes, check. Firsthand experience working at a shellfish hatchery, check.
Along the way Younes repeatedly heard this advice: Wherever you end up farming the sea, “you always want to be a good neighbor,” he said in an interview recently. He was told to reach out to other nearby sea farmers, fishermen, recreational users, and property owners on shore. You’ll need them, he was told. Among other things, they’ll be your eyes should something happen to your gear when you’re not around.
That’s what was on Younes’s mind last August as he was readying his equipment in his driveway in Springs, preparing to set up his operation in Gardiner’s Bay. That’s when the trouble started.
We are surrounded by water on the South Fork, but finding a site east of Shelter Island to have a small commercial oyster farm is no easy feat. Nearly every piece of water is public, owned either by the town or the state. The waters closest to shore (bays, creeks, and harbors) are controlled by the town, and East Hampton has traditionally opposed aquaculture on public waters—that is, it has, with a few exceptions, opposed the ceding of bottom and surface rights to private interests.
The only possible aquaculture sites have been in waters the state handed over to the county in 1969 precisely to develop sea farming. After an exhaustive process, town and county officials agreed in 2009 to open up oyster farming in Gardiner’s Bay, south of Gardiner’s Island, in a hook that stretches from the beach at Fresh Pond, along the shore by Cranberry Hole Road, eastward toward the old fish factory at Promised Land, and up to Hicks Island.
Younes, last year, secured a 10-acre site from Suffolk County to start his farm. Although the bay, routinely battered by the brutal northerly wind, is far from an ideal aquaculture location, he chose the most protected spot available, tucked into the southwest corner of the horseshoe curve of shoreline. Best of all, it was visible from the parking lots at both Fresh Pond and Abram’s Landing Roads, from where he could check his gear with binoculars.
On that day last August, Younes said, he was brimming with excitement. His project had been years in coming. He had poured tens of thousands of dollars in education and gear into it. He was ready: 80 floating mesh grow bags (into which his tiny seed oysters would be placed), lines, buoys, and anchors for the initial set of 100,000 oyster seed he intended for that first season.
There was one more step: The neighbors. He was keen to share the news—“I’ll have very local oysters for you in a few years!” he might have beamed—although, he figured, after all the years the county had been prepping for aquaculture in the bay, the neighbors probably already knew all about it.
The closest neighbor, the Devon Yacht Club—with its dock a distance, by his estimate, of 2,500 feet from his plot—was Younes’s first call. He dialed the main number, finding it in the phone book. It was the first and last call he made.
“They put me through to someone, I think it was the manager. . . . It didn’t turn out how I was expecting. Suddenly, I was in a confrontation, with the person asking where I’d gotten permission, and that they’d been using that area of the bay for a hundred years.”
When he hung up, everything had changed. In that brief exchange he learned that Devon, founded in 1908 and a power in the community with some 325 member families, would be deeply unhappy with his floating farm. His site was smack in the middle of their traditional sailing and sailboat-racing grounds.
“I remember feeling super alone,” Younes said. “It got into my head, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.” A few days later, he went ahead and set up his gear. By January, Devon had filed a lawsuit to block the county’s aquaculture program in Gardiner’s Bay. Due to a legal technicality, Younes is not named in the lawsuit, as it only challenges project activity beginning in 2017, but he’s heard informally from a Devon member that they don’t want him there, and will go after him next.
Continue reading on east.easthamptonstar.com