This story was originally produced by the Portsmouth Herald. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
Cormorants glide across the Great Bay tidal estuary, skimming the surface of the water. Peak foliage is visible in the abutting communities along the coastline, a backdrop serving as Kit Gallagher’s everyday office.
The owner of Little Bay Beauties, Gallagher spends his days managing the estuary’s only floating gear oyster farm, with hopes of expanding in the near future. The business, founded in 2018, is among the oyster harvesting operations scattered throughout Little Bay.
The floating equipment has helped Gallagher increase his production and sell approximately 500,000 oysters a year, a fivefold increase from years past. Little Bay Beauties has an application before New Hampshire Fish and Game, the regulatory body for oyster farming, to add another four-and-a-half acres to his business.
Gallagher, a Hampton resident, and Little Bay’s other farm owners not only make a living growing oysters, but by selling them to researchers to help repopulate reefs in the estuary. That work is part of a yearslong natural restoration cause headed by The Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit, scientists from the University of New Hampshire and other partners to revive the oyster population.
Read more of this story at Seacoastonline.
