How One Farm Raises the Rarest, Most Expensive Mollusk in America

If you’ve ever ordered an abalone dish at a restaurant in the U.S., that pricy sea snail probably came from this farm in Santa Barbara, California. The Cultured Abalone Farm is one of only two red abalone farms that commercially grows the tender shellfish (and the other farm in Monterey, California buys seed abalone from them). “So any abalone that you eat started here,” farm manager Andie Van Horn explains. “We really want to make abalone [a] California icon again.”

The farmed abalone are fed a diet of fresh seaweed and kelp, with about 30,000 pounds of kelp being placed in each of the 450 tanks every week. Once ready to harvest, large tanks of abalone and urchin are drained to gather the mature sea snails, which are carefully pried off the walls of the tank by an experienced harvester. The delicate shellfish do not naturally produce blood clots, so one small cut could kill them.

The farm is also committed to helping with abalone conservation; wild populations have experienced a huge decline since the ’70s from overfishing and habitat loss. The Cultured Abalone Farm’s hatchery currently has five million eggs from white abalone, which are almost extinct on the California coastline. Out of those millions of microscopic eggs, a few hundred thousand will become larvae, and tens of thousands will make it to adulthood. Those abalone will take about four to six years to reach a harvesting size, slowly being moved to larger tanks at every stage.

Harvested abalone are packed into ice pack-filled boxes and are still alive when they are delivered to distributors and restaurants, staying fresh for four to five days.

Watch the latest episode of Vendors to learn more about how the California abalone farm is supplying this shellfish delicacy and helping with conservations efforts.