Diversity Grows in Aquaculture

When Imani Black entered the aquaculture business, she rarely saw anyone who looked like her.

She was often the only Black person—and one of very few women—lifting cages and power-washing shells on the oyster farms where she worked in Maryland and Virginia. Often, she was the only person of color buying her morning coffee or the day’s supplies in the small rural towns where most of the farms are based.

Though she grew up on the Eastern Shore in a family with strong maritime roots, Black said she began to feel alone in an industry she’d hoped would be part of her future. “I began really looking inside the spaces that influence me, that influence my everyday, and asking, are my spaces as diverse and inclusive as they could be?” That feeling, she says, only grew after Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd last summer, spurring worldwide protests for racial justice and equity. At the time, Black was a hatchery technician for Hoopers Island Oyster Company in Maryland’s rural Dorchester County, and she spent all of her working hours in an entirely white space. She began asking colleagues, when was the last time you saw a minority in a leadership role in aquaculture?

“They were shocked that I was asking that,” Black said. “I don’t think people really thought about it until I asked, and when I did, they couldn’t give me an answer.”

Six months later Black answered her own question. She left Hoopers Island and founded Minorities in Aquaculture, a nonprofit dedicated to encouraging more women and people of color to enter the field. The goal, and the nonprofit’s mission, is to create a membership group that fosters networking, connects young graduates with mentors, and talks frankly about overcoming challenges in oyster farming.

The group has more than 50 members. Black has connected with other women of color at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), the Chesapeake Conservancy, and NOAA. It has allowed her to promote both her love of all sciences and her particular passion for aquaculture, which she honed as a summer intern working on oyster farms and as a biology major at Old Dominion University (ODU), where she also played lacrosse. (She has been running the nonprofit while coaching lacrosse in the Baltimore and Annapolis suburbs.)

At Old Dominion, she said, some professors steered her more to a career in communication or the social sciences, noting that she was “good at talking to people.” But Black didn’t want that, she said, and kept pushing for a discipline that would get her outside and also keep her physically and mentally strong. After earning her undergraduate degree in biology at ODU, she graduated from the Oyster Aquaculture Training program at Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), where renowned oyster geneticist Stan Allen mentored her. She also worked with a  team of women  that included Jessica Small, associate director of VIMS’ Aquaculture Genetics and Breeding Technology Center. Black said working with a mostly female team at VIMS in the hatchery helped her feel less isolated as a woman in the industry, and it also inspired her to build a support system for those who jumped into aquaculture after her.

“For me, what I love is being on the boat, being on the farm, being in the hatchery, doing the hard work,” Black said, noting that starting a nonprofit advocacy organization was “not part of my five-year plan.” But, she added, “It’s really important for me that this is an extension of my own career aspirations. I am bringing people along on my own journey. If I can’t do what I’m asking other people to do, then I don’t think it’s really authentic.”

Black is also starting as a faculty research assistant at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Horn Point Laboratory this year and intends to matriculate into the masters graduate program this fall with a focus on aquaculture. While at Horn Point, she will be assisting Matt Gray, an ecophysiologist who studies oyster aquaculture and restoration and how organisms adapt to expected environmental changes, including ocean acidification. It is a homecoming of sorts for the Chestertown native, who attended summer camp at the lab and says her mom likes to remind her how she barely stopped talking during the entire hour-long ride home about all the marine animals she’d studied.

“She’s exactly the kind of person that we want to have at Horn Point Laboratory,” said Michael Roman, the lab’s longtime director. Currently the lab has few students or faculty of color, he said, and thus has struggled to help the industry it supports increase its diversity. But Black and her ideas could help change that.

“We are trying to think of innovative ways to build these connections and a farm system to increase the diversity of our students,” Roman said. “If we could, that would be wonderful, not only for us, but for the entire field of environmental science.”

Black said one of her goals for her nonprofit is to partner with larger organizations, such as CBF and the Choose Clean Water Coalition, and expand opportunities for minorities in this field. That could mean more access to funding for establishing farms, providing assistance getting into graduate school, or connecting with mentors in the field.

She’s become a member of CBF’s Chesapeake Oyster Alliance and is partnering with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center on education programs. With the help of the connections established through this networking, she hopes to visit schools in Baltimore City and encourage careers in aquaculture. It may be a challenge, Black said, as some city students may not even be familiar with oysters.

But, more Americans are turning to fish and shellfish as healthy protein alternatives, and this may provide new opportunities. According to NOAA’s 2018  Fisheries of the United States Report , the average American ate 16.1 pounds of fish and shellfish, the highest level of consumption reported since 2007. When Americans turn to fish, they often turn to farm-raised seafood. It can take pressure off the oceans, and it’s often widely available in stores. Increased demand has helped grow jobs in this sector; Black just wants to make sure more of the new hires look like her.

Maryland natural resources officials want to make sure oyster farmers use their leases, so the general rule is that farmers must plant 25 percent of their lease annually.

Roscher said though the DNR doesn’t keep demographic data, he knows that some Black oyster farmers hold leases while others work on them. But several oyster farmers acknowledge that the profession is mostly white and mostly male. Steve Vilnit, who served as Maryland DNR’s seafood marketing manager from 2010 until 2015, said he “certainly didn’t know of many minorities that had leases” during his tenure there. As vice president of marketing for the distributor Capital Seaboard, Vilnit said the farmers he currently sees bringing oysters to market are overwhelmingly white.

Scott Budden, one of the three owners of Orchard Point Oyster Company in Queen Anne’s County, is of Korean descent. He believes he is the only leaseholder who is not white working in the state presently. Gardiner Douglas, a Black oyster shucker who started an oyster delivery business, said “it would be fair to say” that most oyster farmers in Maryland are white.

But, as Vince Leggett and other maritime historians have noted through extensive research, Black Americans’ participation in Chesapeake Bay maritime culture is neither a new idea nor is it taking a different approach; the reality is that they have a rich and long history on the water. African Americans captained schooners, dredged for oysters, clammed, crabbed, and made sails for all manner of sailing craft. They were also, at one time, oyster farmers. “Nearly a third” of the men who held leases on the Nanticoke River in the 1970s were Black, according to Don Webster, a regional specialist with University of Maryland Extension who has worked in the field for more than 40 years.

Many of the Black oyster farmers, including Nanticoke stalwarts Dave Wallace and Maurice Anderson, left the business because the pathogens Haplosporidium nelsoni and Perkinsus marinus led to, respectively, the MSX and Dermo diseases, which devastated regional oyster populations.

Black recently looked into her own ancestry and found that her longtime fascination with the Chesapeake Bay may well be in her genes. Her forebears worked the water in Rock Hall and Cambridge and were part of a deep waterman’s culture on the Eastern Shore dating back to the 1800s.

Hatcheries have long been welcoming to women–indeed, women manage the hatchery operations at Horn Point, the largest hatchery in Maryland, as well as at Morgan State University's Patuxent Environmental and Aquatic Research Laboratory (PEARL) in Calvert County. Women are also operating most of the private hatcheries in Virginia. But there are not as many women in the field, lifting the cages, setting the oysters, or power-washing the equipment.

Women, too, are part of Minorities in Aquaculture’s focus. Black said she always felt strong enough to do the heavy lifting, even as the men around her underestimated her. In some cases, Black had more training than her bosses where she worked, she said.

Shannon Hood knows that feeling, too, as well as that of proving herself over and over again. An agent with Maryland Sea Grant Extension,  Hood runs a demonstration oyster farm at Horn Point.  When she first decided she wanted to enter the aquaculture profession, she’d call oyster farmers and ask if she could get experience on their farm; they’d often respond offering her work in their nurseries or supporting their marketing efforts.

“It was tough because I was automatically relegated to do the light duty work,” Hood said. When she did get a chance to work on farms as part of an internship program, as with True Chesapeake Oyster Company in Southern Maryland and Madhouse Oyster Company on the Eastern Shore, Hood said, “I probably overdid it—trying not to show any weakness. I felt like I had to work really, really hard. What I experienced was this feeling of not wanting to mess it up.”

Eventually, Hood realized the heavy cages causing her to throw out her back were unwieldy for all staff to maneuver. She began thinking of innovative ways to make the work less physically stressful for everyone. The demonstration oyster farm makes equipment and tries new growing techniques that help oysters survive longer and reduce the amount of labor required. It ought to bode well for growing Maryland’s industry; Virginia, which has had a leased bed system for more than a century, already has the largest oyster aquaculture industry on the East Coast. And it has only been raising the “seedless,” sterile oysters that many farmers grow for less than 20 years. 

“We have the capacity, we have the people, we can build momentum,” Hood said. “I think we’ve got a shot at turning this into something big.”

Black is hoping that as she, Hood, and others help the aquaculture industry grow bigger, they can also make it more diverse. 

“In my own experience of being a minority, I’ve been heavily discouraged many times,” Black said. “I felt like it was my responsibility to create a safe space, because it was something I still needed.”