CEDAR KEY, Fla – Under overcast skies and driving 30 mile-per-hour winds, Tim Solano and his three-person crew head to the leases off Florida’s west coast. The men, along with other businesses in Cedar Key, contribute to the production of more than 90% of Florida’s clams.
Since a statewide net ban in 1994, the area of Levy County once known for fishing has transitioned and become Florida’s largest aquaculture town, supporting over 500 of the industry’s jobs.
History of industry
In 1994, 71.7% of Florida voters approved a ban on all gill nets and other entangling nets from use in Florida’s waters.
Leslie Sturmer is a shellfish aquaculture extension specialist at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. She has lived in Cedar Key since 1991.
“[The net ban] was devastating to these multi-generational fisherfolks that lived here,” she said. “They were almost forced to look at what an alternative would be.”
Originally reluctant to transition away from the net fishing that fed generations of their community, Sturmer said farmers received money from the state to begin aquaculture farming, and it took off rapidly.
In the first USDA Aquaculture census, which took place in 1998, Florida placed first in number of clams sold per state.
After the 1998 census, Cedar Key changed the sign at the town’s entrance to add the tag, “#1 Producer of USA’s Farm Raised Clams.”
“I think that was a sign that we might do OK,” Sturmer said.
Process and production
Clams begin production at two months old and are about four millimeters wide. Before they arrive to a farm for planting, they spend most of those two months floating in pools of water at a hatchery.
Once they are dense enough to sink to the bottom, they are drained out and placed in upwellers to be planted by clam farmers.
Tim Solano, 29, the owner of Cedar Key Aquaculture Farms Inc., is a 28-year Cedar Key resident and a second-generation clam farmer with his wife and three children.
Solano’s family are 14th generation Floridians and have been clam farming since 1995. He said his family moved to Cedar Key from Charlotte Harbor in 1998 because of the higher water quality for aquaculture.
For his farm, the process begins by taking baby clams out of the bags from the hatchery and spreading them into bags to be rolled out along leases, which are areas of the ocean contracted by clam farmers every 10 years where they can plant their product under water.
Once they are planted, the roughly 12,000 clams per bag are left to develop over two to three months depending on the season. Next, Solano and his team return to the lease to redistribute the now larger clams to about 1,300 per bag.
After redistribution, the clams are replanted underwater for 10-15 months depending on the size requested by the customer. Larger clams take a longer time to grow.
When the clams are ready, clammers return once more to the leases to harvest them. On land, the mollusks go through tumblers, large rotating metal cages that wash and clean the clams while filtering out bad ones.
Finally, they are placed into buckets, bagged and ready to be processed for distribution. All bags from Cedar Key Aquaculture Farms are individually tagged to allow a consumer to track their clams back to the specific acre of water where their meal was grown.
Solano’s most known customers are Whole Foods in Florida, and Costco Wholesale across the east coast.
Environmental challenges
Despite having some of the best growing conditions for mollusks and crustaceans in the country, Cedar Key’s clamming, like other industries, is facing the threat of climate change.
Two back-to-back major hurricanes in 2023 and 2024 decimated the island and the nearby aquaculture leases along with it.
Solano said the environment is the biggest threat to his business as the storms get bigger and surges become more powerful.
“Mother nature is a business partner that you can’t control,” he said. “You have to adapt, and you have to work with her.”
In addition to powerful hurricanes, heat death loss has been rising in recent summers. Water temperatures often rise above 95 degrees according to Solano, which kills clams.
To combat rising temperatures, he said his company has begun using genetic selection. The process involved leaving clams in a tank between 95-97 degrees for a week, taking the survivors and analyzing their traits to find what allows them to grow in higher temperatures.
Then, the clams with higher heat tolerance are bred together with the goal of more clams having similar survival techniques.
Climate changes aren’t affecting just one aquaculture farm. John Fradella, 29, is a co-owner of his family’s business Fradella Farms with his mother.
“If you want the god’s honest truth, we make less money,” he said.
The 26-year Cedar key resident said he hopes the industry will not be impacted long-term by hurricanes and believes it is just a challenge of the business.
Why Cedar Key?
Besides the exceptional brackish water quality that is not common in other parts of Florida, Cedar Key is one of few working waterfront communities left in Florida.
For Solano, the community and togetherness of the island is why he said he couldn’t imagine raising his kids anywhere else. He said when people’s homes were destroyed from the hurricanes, they helped their neighbors rather than focusing on their own issues.
“It touched me to the heart,” he said. “This community supports this industry so much.”
For Fradella, being close to his family and having a flexible schedule is the best perk of the job.