The El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve, Mexico's largest environmentally protected area, is a remote ecological marvel that bisects Baja California, midway down the arid 800-mile long peninsula. On the Pacific side, where gray whales migrate each winter to calve in the protected lagoons, the California current keeps the clear waters comfortably cool. A perfect place to grow oysters, figured Pedro Noriega, a Mexican aquaculturist and Philippe Danigo, whose family had been growing oysters on France's Brittany coast for three generations.
Philippe had come to Mexico to work in the shrimp-farming industry on the other side of the Gulf of California on the Sinaloa coast. While there, he met Pedro, formerly a fish farmer, who sported a Masters in Aquaculture from the University of Stirling in the U.K. Forget fish and shrimp, they eventually decided, too many potential problems like diseases and wildly fluctuating markets, not to mention the fact that they were capital intensive undertakings. Why not return to the family roots and engage in a more sustainable aquaculture venture like growing Pacific oysters, the same species the Danigo family farmed in France?
Since the sun was ever present and the water a deep blue, they decided to call their new venture Sol Azul. That was back in 1993. Based on the success of a pilot project, they harvested their first commercial crops in the late 1990s and today Sol Azul is the largest oyster producer in Mexico with an annual production of some 500 metric tons of both Pacific and kumamoto oysters. It hasn't been easy. First, Philippe and Pedro had to convince the local fishing communities that working on an oyster farm was a better way to make a living than trying to scrape by harvesting some severely overfished local species like abalone and scallops. They also had to get the local communities to change the way they lived.
"It was a bit problematic at
first, but we were eventually able to teach the local people to become good environmental stewards and protect the local flora and fauna," says Pedro. That meant organizing the communities and helping them put in ecological latrines and take their trash to a new dump. Sol Azul also invested in the local communities by upgrading their almost non-existent local infrastructure, supporting the construction of a desalination plant in a community that lacked access to drinking water, smoothing out the notoriously rough dirt roads and improving the local schools.
According to Pedro, Sol Azul, which exports over two-thirds of its production to the U.S. market, will double its production in two years, as the company converts more fishermen into farmers. In addition to more oysters, Sol Azul, through their sister company, Marimex del Pacifico, has started farming lions paw scallops in Bahia Tortugas, also on the Pacific side of the Baja Peninsula. Like Sol Azul's oysters, Marimex' scallops are distributed live to markets in the U.S. through their San Diego-based subsidiary, Sol Azul Seafarms, Inc.
Pedro said the Sol Azul oysters which are grown using the French off-bottom rack method, tend to be nice and briny, as there is no freshwater runoff, which is typical in major US production regions like the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Northwest. The company farms all season organic oysters, so their meat quality is uniform year-round. Because their oysters grow faster (18 months versus 36 months), Pedro says they are able to market them at a slight discount to other Pacific oyster producers.While business is good now, Philippe has another dream to fulfill. He wants to sell his oysters in France and convince his native Francophiles that Sol Azul oysters are just as ambrosial as theirs.
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