Middlebury Magazine

  • Recent Stories
  • Menu
    • Features
    • Essays
    • Q&A
    • Podcasts
    • Review
    • Videos
    • About
    • Advertising
    • Contact
    • Support
    • Writers’ Guidelines
  • Search

Summer 2019 Pursuits

Water Works

What exactly does it take to start an oyster farm? Will Peckham ’14 left a job on Wall Street and, with a friend, figured it out.

By Sara Thurber Marshall
August 9, 2019
  • Facebook icon
  • Twitter icon
  • Email icon

Will Peckham ’14 lifts the hatch door on the upweller just off the dock and reveals a row of wire silos suspended in the bay water, each holding what looks like thousands of tiny oysters.  “Actually about 40,000 to 50,000 in each one,” he says. Next to each silo a size is listed: 1 millimeter, 2 mm, 3 mm. It’s his job to watch the oysters’ growth, as they graze on the phytoplankton in the water, and move them along in the process of becoming full adults. As they grow from one millimeter to two, he keeps track, handling them each week and sieving them to separate them into size classes before restocking. When they are between one half inch and three quarters of an inch, he’ll move them into cages farther out in the bay, where they’ll continue to grow until they are big enough to be taken out to the oyster farm in Great Peconic Bay, between the North Fork and the South Fork, or Hamptons, of Long Island, New York.

Peckham is the co-owner, with Walker Lourie, of the West Robins Oyster Company. The idea to establish their own oyster business was seeded one hot summer weekend in 2015, when Peckham, who was working on Wall Street at the time, went with some mutual Middlebury friends to visit Lourie where he was working, at the Fishers Island Oyster Farm. Not knowing anything about oysters, Peckham saw a pile of about 15,000 market-sized ones and thought, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” It brought him back to his childhood, when he spent time on a trawler with his parents, cruising between coastal Maine and the Bahamas.

Working on Wall Street seemed a natural move for an economics major after graduation, but Peckham was also on the lookout for an entrepreneurial opportunity. As an undergraduate, he had worked at the Center for Social Entrepreneurship. But it was an internship his junior summer with Beartooth Capital in Montana, a company that uses capital to buy ecologically degraded cattle ranches and restore their ecosystems to make them viable, that really excited him. “I became aware that a niche existed where you could work in a business and have your goal be both making money and helping the environment. It was an absolute no-brainer.”

He bided his time on Wall Street until the right opportunity came along. Oysters intrigued him, and Lourie was a willing partner for a new venture. Peckham read all he could about the oyster business and researched what it would take to start a company. How much would a boat cost? How many oysters would they need to grow? Where would they grow them? The customary tactic was to lease a piece of water from a municipality. But you have no claim over it, and he wasn’t excited about starting a new business that way.

The catalyst to get the start-up under way came when Lourie found a property they could buy for $30,000, a 225-acre piece of Peconic Bay. It felt like the right move to acquire it, so on a Friday, Peckham took the train out to Long Island, met a guy on the beach in New Suffolk, and did a handshake deal. “Then we really started planning our jump.”

With the property and the permits that they needed, Peckham and Lourie got to work. “Looking back,” Peckham says, “we made mistakes typical of beginning farmers.”

For one, they planted their farm right before winter. Peckham found the largest seed they could buy to shorten the growing cycle, but it still ran longer than they anticipated. And they encountered a serious issue—their farm was in a naturally productive scallop area, where baymen caught the commercially valuable scallops by towing steel dredges—and it turned out they were towing them right through the oyster farm. A newcomer to the bay, Peckham realized he didn’t have much credibility to confront the baymen. So he picked up a 24-pack of Budweiser and drove to the home of the leader of the Town of Southold Baymens Association. He said, “Hey, we just started this oyster farm. What can we do to stay out of your way until we get it figured out?” The bayman pulled out his chart and Peckham drew a map of the farm on it. Since the farm only needed five acres at the time, they figured out where it could be out of the way of the scallop fishermen. He and Lourie resited it to what became an even better spot.

Other setbacks have occurred, but with resilience, ingenuity, and a lot of sweat equity, Peckham and Lourie have found answers, and this year’s crop is on track to produce about half a million oysters. A viable client base of restaurants in New York City and on Long Island are eager to buy. But it’s not just the money that Peckham thinks about. He loves the fact that oysters are environmentally beneficial. They filter the water as they feed, and they are an ecosystem facilitator. “When we put in the oyster equipment with the oysters, it creates an artificial reef that attracts all kinds of juvenile marine organisms. Not only do people pay us for the oysters as food; we are also providing a ton of benefits that extend from biodiversity to potentially providing some of the tools to combat climate change and ocean acidification over time.”

In looking to the future, Peckham thinks shellfish farming is “really just beginning to have its moment in the sun.” He sees two broad themes emerging. “One is to reduce the cost of producing a really high-quality product through mechanization, much the way it’s been done in conventional agriculture.” (He has already designed and has in production one mechanical tool.) “And then on the demographics and the marketing side of things, how do we get Americans to eat more oysters? They have been a lost component of the American food culture ever since the demise of the expansive wild beds of the late 1800s, when oysters were so prolific they were every man’s food.”

The excitement of a start-up is that it’s ever-evolving, and Peckham is not short on ideas of what the future may hold. Clearly, he has found the entrepreneurial niche he was looking for where he can combine profit and purpose in a sustainable way of doing business.

Parallels

Fisherman

Fishing is Peckham’s favorite hobby—fly-fishing, conventional fishing, spearfishing, all kinds. “Since I was a boy I’ve been really interested in the process and in the kind of mental games you play. Where are the fish going to be? What will they be eating? These boots have gone with me to fish in California, Montana, and even Otter Creek in Middlebury.”

Chess Player

Introduced to the game by a friend, Peckham is hooked. “It’s so cool because chess is one of those games that it’s hard to get bored by. I like that it has a lot of applicability to different parts of life and business: a really good chess player is always analyzing opportunities, costs, and likelihoods of success. With just a few pieces with specified moves, you can have millions of different outcomes.”

Chef

Peckham loves to cook. He’s fascinated by the process by which raw materials end up as a meal. He has read a lot of chef memoirs and cookbooks, but the one that made the most impact on him is Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat. “It’s a cool book about cooking intuitively with those four levers. Cooking for me is a way to fill up my spare time. If I have four hours to kill, what kind of really delicious braise can I put together?”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent Stories

Features

More Than a Game

In a critically acclaimed work of nonfiction, Abe Streep '04 introduces readers to the Arlee Warriors, a high school basketball team on a Native American reservation in Montana, where life's challenges are abundant.

By Alexander Wolff
Photograph by Devin Yalkin
October 21, 2022

Munya Munyati Has A Few Stories to Tell

Catching up with a young filmmaker who is rapidly making a name for himself at Vice.

By Mara Dolan
Film stills by Munya Munyati
September 16, 2022

Reverberations

A transcontinental move, a career discovered, a landmark speech studied and translated—and an identity reshaped.

By Clara Clymer, MA Translation '22
Illustration by Anna Gusella
April 2, 2022

The Road(s)

A little over a year ago, a writing student headed south to Florida for no other reason than J-Term was forced to go remote. She soon found herself reporting on an environmental justice battle that was roiling the state.

By Alexandra Burns '21.5
Illustrations by Yevgenia Nayberg
March 2, 2022

Dispatches

Tossed and Found

Artists give new meaning to discarded objects in a Museum of Art exhibit.

By Jessie Raymond ’90
Art by Mark Dion
November 30, 2023

Silo Transformation

A common sight in the Vermont countryside becomes a public art display on the Middlebury campus.

By Sara Thurber Marshall
Photo by EJ Bartlett
November 10, 2023

No Risk, No Gain

From an early age, Elsa Alvarado ’18 knew she wanted to be in politics. Her perseverance led her to a leadership role at the Pentagon and a political path forward.

By Sara Thurber Marshall
Photo by Adam Ewing
October 19, 2023

Japan Wants to Dump Water from a Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean

Middlebury's Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress thinks that's a terrible idea.

By Sierra Abukins
August 11, 2023

When Mini Golf Meets Reproductive Justice

A summertime staple becomes a first-of-its-kind teaching tool.

By Jessie Raymond '90
Photographs by Todd Balfour
June 30, 2023

Welcome to All Things Scottish

Toward the end of the academic year, a group of Midd students turned Battell Beach into a setting that more closely resembled a Scottish moor.

By Caroline Crawford
Photograph by Brian MacDonald
June 30, 2023

Let’s Dance

How can one's digital experiences be interpreted through performance art? Choreographer Maia Sauer ’22 and a troupe of recent Midd grads attempt to find out.

By Alexandra Jhamb Burns '21.5
Photographs by Alexis Welch '22
June 2, 2023

The Repatriation

The Leopard Head Hip Ornament returns to Africa.

By Jessie Raymond '90
Courtesy Middlebury Museum of Art
February 16, 2023

Adventures in Filmmaking

Two professors and an alum have embarked on a journey to take a screenplay from its creation to the end product of a full-length feature film.

By Sara Thurber Marshall
Still Photograph from The Swim Lesson Proof of Concept
February 14, 2023
View All

Essays

Making Democracy Real

An Update on Our Conflict Transformation Initiative

By Laurie L. Patton
Illustration by Brian Staufer
January 20, 2023

Q&A

The Making of a Teacher

Hebrew Professor Michal Strier reflects on her life an education—in Israel and the States—a journey that led the Language School instructor to the undergraduate College for the first time this year.

By Jessie Raymond '90
Photograph by Paul Dahm
May 19, 2022

Quotation

A summer immersed in a language can do wonders, as veterans of Middlebury College’s famous language-learning program can attest. The lockdown is clearly going to amount to the equivalent of about two summers, and there are mini-Middleburys happening in millions of houses worldwide.”

—John McWhorter, writing “The Coronavirus Generation Will Use Language Differently” in the Atlantic.

Podcasts

Old Stories Being Told Differently, Part 2, featuring Carolyn Finney

Our guest for episode three of season three is Carolyn Finney, who is a storyteller, author, cultural geographer, and self-described “accidental environmentalist” whose work explores the intersection of identity, privilege, and our natural surroundings. In part two of this two-part interview, Carolyn joins host and president of Middlebury, Laurie Patton, to discuss how her upbringing and family history in Westchester County, New York became the foundation of her life’s work.

By Middlebury Magazine Staff
October 2, 2023

Old Stories Being Told Differently, Part 1, featuring Carolyn Finney

Our guest for episode three of season three is Carolyn Finney, who is a storyteller, author, cultural geographer, and self-described “accidental environmentalist” whose work explores the intersection of identity, privilege, and our natural surroundings. In part one of this two-part interview, Carolyn joins host and president of Middlebury, Laurie Patton, to discuss how her upbringing and family history in Westchester County, New York became the foundation of her life’s work.

By Middlebury Magazine Staff
September 18, 2023

Every Book You Write Is a Mystery, feat. Rebecca Makkai, MA English ’04

Our guest for episode two of season three is Rebecca Makkai, MA English '04, a critically acclaimed novelist and short story writer. She joins Laurie Patton to discuss her teaching career, overcoming writer's block, her time at Bread Loaf, dabbling in other genres or mediums for inspiration, and her deep personal roots to Vermont.

By Middlebury Magazine Staff
May 30, 2023

Review

Editors’ Picks for September and October

By Middlebury Magazine Staff
October 6, 2023

Editors’ Picks for July and August

By Middlebury Magazine Staff
August 11, 2023

The Morse Code

A remarkable journalist helped create community in a small Vermont town.

By Tim Etchells ’74
August 4, 2023

Videos

Creating Community Through Hip Hop

For three days in March, the sounds, styles, and fashions of global hip hop converged on Middlebury for an electric symposium.

By Jordan Saint-Louis '24
April 17, 2023

Pomp and Unusual Circumstances

As viewed from above.

By Chris Spencer
June 1, 2021

Davis the Owl Returns Home

Having recovered from life-threatening injuries, a beautiful winged creature is released to its natural habitat.

By Andrew Cassell
April 22, 2021
Middlebury College
  • Alumni
  • Newsroom
  • Contact Us
  • icon-instagram

The views presented are not necessarily those of the editors or the official policies of the College.

© 2023 Middlebury College Publications.