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- Geoduck is a very sought-after species.
It's a native burrowing clam in the state of Washington,
it's actually the largest burrowing clam species.
We are one of the largest players
in the farmed geoduck space.
We are targeting somewhere around a million pounds a year.
The crop takes six years to grow
and it could be as much as $100 on the plate.
It's very expensive.
There's no machinery at any stage of the game.
So from our hatchery to the nursery, to the beach,
to the processing plant, all of it's done by hand.
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(boat engine howling)
All right, we're just rolling out to our our geoduck nursery
out here in Totten Inlet getting ready to start our day,
which is planting geoducks,
one of our first low tides of the spring season.
(lively music)
So this here, which what I'm standing on
on is our geoduck nursery float.
This is a apparatus that we engineered
in-house, fully custom.
This raft itself is really quite handy.
It allows us to be able to access the geoduck all day long
versus having to work with the intertidal.
Overnight, when no one's working,
this piston will go down
and this whole frame will go back underwater.
And this will just look like one flat float,
allows us to keep kind of a low profile out here,
which is really the goal.
These trays just came off
of the shelves of this nursery float.
The geoduck at this stage are living in sand.
There's about a thousand geoduck or so
in each one of these trays.
Like a clam or an oyster, they have siphons.
One half of their siphon is actually
pulling in food and clean water
and then their other side is their discharge.
So geoduck in particular, their shells are really brittle,
especially when they're small.
It's really important to handle them very carefully
from this stage on.
(urgent music)
And what they're doing is they're very gently
washing the sand from the geoduck itself.
They've taken low pressure water and they've sifted
the sand out and let the geoducks fall onto this netting.
And what they're doing is they're going through
and they're identifying geoduck that's alive,
it's healthy, it's in good condition.
They're pulling out any dead shell, any debris,
any fouling in order to get perfect geoduck
that is gonna be successful to plant on the farm.
And then they're gonna count
and see how many seeds that they have.
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So Taylor Shellfish is a family-owned business.
The first farms that we had were farming Olympia oysters
and that goes back to 1890,
and then our infamous geoduck, early 1990s.
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There is very limited areas that geoduck grow,
I mean, it's native to just this area and the markets
in Asian communities, they seek high dollar.
That's how we're gonna keep track
of the quantities that we're gonna go plant on the beach.
They're gonna put two of them in each of these bags
to get ourselves to approximately 1000 count of geoduck.
(engine chattering)
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In the early stage of geoducks' life
there's a lot of predators that want to eat it.
If you don't do it right,
you could have crabs, flounder, ducks, you name it,
could come and eat your entire crop in one tide cycle.
And so we have to be very careful on the time of year
and how we protect the geoduck from predation.
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These are our geoduck nursery tubes, and the whole purpose
of these is just to protect the baby geoducks from predators
for their first couple years of life.
We'll remove these at either 18 months,
sometimes maybe more like 30 months.
And so what the guys will do is they'll come
and they'll go through and they'll poke holes,
four holes per tube, and then they'll be
planting a seed in each one.
From there, they'll do what they normally do
and they'll just dig themselves down into the ground.
Well, we're gonna end up
with a brown 80 to 90,000 seed per acre.
- As they get bigger, they grow
and they go deeper into the sand.
They don't move.
They're not like a type of clam that gets up
and walks and moves and finds a new home.
It is where you plant it, is where it stays
for its entire life.
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- So all of our farms are intertidal, which means
that they're underwater at high tide and they get exposed
to the low tide and they're gonna go as fast as they can
because they've got a short window.
Low tide water's coming back in.
Water comes in, you're done for the day.
There's only so many tides in a year.
You miss half your tide, that's two hours
you don't get it back, it's gone.
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There's a lot of planning that goes into making sure
that we have enough time to do what we need
and we're not either over-supplying seed
or under-supplying it.
And from that point, it's about a six year wait
until the geoduck comes to size,
until it's ready to be harvested for market.
So we've just arrived here at the beach
that we've got our scheduled harvest on for today.
Tide is just now starting to recede and show the bed.
And so we'll be getting ready to harvest now.
(boat engine burbling)
So you can see him stomping through.
When you stomp, the ducks will respond and they'll dig down,
which will make a little hole, make 'em easier to find.
So you stomp around, scare 'em,
they retract their necks, then you got 'em.
(intense music)
So geoduck harvesting is a very gentle process.
As hardy as they look, they're a gentle creature
and you need to to treat them as such.
The traditional way of harvesting geoduck
is doing it underwater, diving.
Either way, they're using a low velocity sea pump
with a small hose to gently liquefy the sand
in order to free the animal from its resting place.
- Here's what we call our harvest wand, valve for your wand.
And then from there,
you just direct the water with your hand.
And so like right here, we've got a geoduck there.
Gently try not to blast the duct directly or you'll break it
and all you're doing is adding water to the beach
from the bay, which softens the sand.
And from there you just loosen up
the anchor hold that the ducks have.
It's pretty much all done by touch.
And so the guys get a really good feel
for the ground and how the water's moving
through their hands as they get it down into the sand.
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- You figure out how to pull up ducks without injuring.
In order to have a premium product in the market
it has to be perfect, perfect white meat, no tears,
no blisters, nothing like that.
One harvester, you know, could bring in anywhere between
you know, 300 and 600 pounds in a day.
Geoducks live for an extremely long time.
There's geoducks that can live over a hundred years
and in size, there's been geoducks that have been found
to be over 20 pounds in certain areas,
so they can get really big and live a really long time.
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Geoducks have a unique shell that protects their organs.
When you harvest them, you have to make sure you use
a rubber band to keep it shut 'cause that's how
they stay alive while they're being transported.
But their necks will grow as long as two to three feet
while they're deep in the sand to get to the surface longer,
and so they've got a very unique feature,
I guess, in order for them to survive.
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Good size to this duck.
Good weight, perfectly fine and healthy.
But you'll see the discoloring, and in my opinion,
it's not gonna affect the quality of the meat whatsoever,
but aesthetically, though, it is going to lower the value.
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- Geoduck are sold live.
And so when you harvest them,
they are no longer in the water, clock has started
in order to get them from point A to point B.
So right now, just getting the ducks onto a pallet
so we can forklift them inside the plant, so.
So our geoducks have four primary grades
and number one would be a geoduck
that is greater than 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 pounds.
It's white meat, it's perfect condition.
What our crew's gonna do is they're gonna evaluate
the duck based on its color, mostly the siphon.
I would say this would probably be a number two.
You bring in everything from small runts
to this, to larger variations like this.
- So these would go into our restaurant directly, all local.
So these came out of the water possibly an hour ago.
They'll be in a truck within the hour,
at location within a couple.
So I mean, you're talking, that's scenario
maybe five hours from farm to location.
- Straight from the farms today, we've got a real treat.
It's a six pound geoduck,
but we don't get very many of these often.
So yeah, let's check it out.
That's by far the biggest one I've seen.
We have different gradings of geoducks
from number threes all the way up to number ones.
Obviously this is a number one plus, plus, plus.
So this guy will be a number three.
And then next to a number one.
These have been growing for millennia.
It's a local delicacy and it's kind of taken off now.
These guys, they'll spray water out.
Usually what ends up happening is a group of people
that maybe some bachelorette parties,
and they all line up here and take pictures and videos
with our local guys here.
And you know, we try to make 'em perform on demand
but sometimes it's a little tough, they get a little shy.
It'll be very surprising on how this tastes
'cause the way it looks turns people off,
but the way it tastes is amazing.
So right now we're gonna choose this lovely guy here
and we're gonna show you how to prepare a geoduck.
So we're gonna take boiling water.
We're gonna drop this guy in here really gently
and we're just gonna count to 10.
All we're doing is making sure that the outer layer of skin
is gonna be removable.
Now we're just gonna let this chill.
(bold percussive music)
Now resting inside here is gonna be the gonad,
the reproductive organ of the clams here.
You can already tell
that the skin is loosening up here.
All you have to do is just peel, peel that off.
Well, you can tell like how long that neck is.
We're also gonna go
and separate the belly from the siphon here.
The siphon will have texture like calamari.
The belly's just gonna be a lot more tender, actually.
This is the intake valve,
where they're drinking in that water.
You can tell that there's a little bit of sand in there.
So once you pop this open,
you're just want to gonna give it a quick rinse.
And there you have a nice clean siphon.
And you're just gonna do real thin.
And one of the biggest thing
you're gonna see is this curling.
A super fresh geoduck is gonna curl like this.
It doesn't really need anything.
This is very, very sweet.
And that's how you know that it's really fresh.
With the belly, we're gonna do the same exact cutting.
A little more richness because of how fatty this belly is.
But again, it's still very, very sweet, yeah.
So we have the belly here
and then the siphon on this side.
You want the flavor of the geoduck to shine through,
so you don't need a lot
of other sauces or anything like that.
This is local salmon roe, so some Ikura.
So that's gonna add a little bit of salt,
a little bit of texture, a little pop into this dish.
The lemon tumeric will just kind of enhance
the natural flavor of the geoduck itself.
(rippling music)
- Shellfish farming in general
is built for people who want to be outside.
I mean, it is a hands-on work.
Every single geoduck was harvested by somebody's hand
as they were, you know, waist deep in mud pulling it up,
so it is labor of love.
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