Muddy Waters

For one thing, there is no more ardent, effective, or politically powerful advocate for clean water in Washington State. This leadership caught the attention of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which gave Taylor its Excellence Award in 2005. The company has been a magnet for people like Dewey—one of three founding board members of the Skagit Conservation Education Alliance, an all-volunteer, 501(c)3 outfit with a mission to “protect, conserve, and enhance the natural ecosystems in the Skagit Watersheds.” For this kind of activism NOAA presented him with its 2008 Environmental Hero Award. With his longtime friend and ally—Audubon Washington’s executive director, Nina Carter—Dewey served on the board of People for Puget Sound.

In a rugged, seatless aluminum workboat constructed at Taylor’s Shelton shop, we sped along the glassy sound to a farm leased from Manke Lumber Company where squirting geoducks, inches apart, made the mudflats look like they were being irrigated by one vast sprinkler system. Along the timbered bluff a bald eagle glided toward its nest.

Whatever the environmental and aesthetic impacts of Taylor’s farms may be, the company makes an effort to get things as right as it can. When shoreline residents complained about the unsightliness of the white PVC pipes, it changed the color to gray. When they complained that they couldn’t tell whose PVC was littering their beaches, it invented a machine to brand each pipe. When they complained about dislodged netting and rubber bands that held it over each PVC pipe, Taylor went to no bands and one big net. The big nets, which collect seaweed, look somewhat natural and hide the pipes, but when a bald eagle got entangled in one, barely escaping the advancing tide, Taylor promised to go back to individual netting near active eagle nests, and it had done so at the Manke farm. When shoreline residents complained about the noise of the gasoline pumps that powered the harvest hoses, Taylor went to diesels enclosed in insulated boxes.

If Carr Inlet is not appropriate for geoduck farming, maybe the Foss family beach in Pierce County is. Taylor leases it. We walked the farm at low tide, and it didn’t look a lot different than Laurie Brauneis’s beach. The water was clear. Sand dollars and crabs abounded. If some companies strip beaches of rocks, logs, and other habitat, Taylor hadn’t done it here. According to Dewey and Phipps, it doesn’t do it anywhere.

The 12-acre Foss farm stretches along a mile of wild, undeveloped shoreline sandwiched between other families’ houses, bulkheads, docks, and sloughing banks. The previous week Phipps had watched a black bear amble out of the woods. Not long before that two cougars had screamed at the Foss kids who had gotten between them and a deer kill.

Presently Leslie Foss and her husband, Ken Johnson, appeared on the beach, wondering who we were. After introductions Foss told me the family had been trying to figure a way to avoid developing its 125 acres. Logging had paid the property taxes until about 15 years earlier. When Taylor offered to lease the beach in 2001, it had seemed like a win-win, and according to Foss, that’s just what it has been. The family gets $1,000 per acre, per year, then 10 percent of the total harvest value about every five to six years, which at current prices should net it $720,000.

Dewey attributes geoduck farming’s enormous unpopularity mostly to the Internet. “The vitriol surprised us,” he said. “With the clear-cutting debates it took a while for the opposition to build momentum and become effective. But with the Internet a few people can create a facade, copying every legislator in the state with a push of a button. It’s overwhelmed us.”

Pierce County, unlike most others, requires a Shoreline Development Permit for geoduck farms—to be issued only after approved environmental review. After such review had been approved and the permit had been issued, and after Taylor had developed its Foss farm, the company believed (and says it was told by county officials) that it didn’t need another development permit. But last March, under pressure from shoreline residents, the county proclaimed that it does. With at least $20 million worth of geoducks potentially growing past optimal market size and no possibility of harvesting them until the issue was resolved, Taylor filed a $25 million damage claim against the county. Taylor has since received a new determination from the county, allowing it to harvest the Foss farm geoducks. This will reduce the damage claim, said Dewey.

At the Stretch Island farm, also 12 acres, we encountered baseball-size moon snails, their thick white feet tangled in the nets as they probed for geoduck necks into which they inject acid and eat away the flesh with their raspy, conveyer-belt tongues. Geoduck farmers have to live with them. In 1998 Taylor lost $1.2 million by pulling the Stretch Island tubes too early. “After two years the geoducks were down 18 inches, and we thought that was enough,” said Phipps. Two weeks later almost all were gone. The crew returned with an underwater camera but didn’t bother to deploy it because an enormous raft of scoters, whose appetite for geoducks rivals that of Asians, floated over the remnant plantation.

There was nothing “antiseptic” about the harvest and planting operations, which obviously had been going on for days. Twenty-one workers were planting thumbnail-size seedling geoducks, raised at the Taylor hatchery, three to a tube. (About half die or get eaten.) Two wet-suit-clad harvesters were on their hands and knees, stabbing the beach with hoses and reaching into the mud to their armpits. During weak-tide months harvesters have to use scuba gear, and in the winter they have to work at night because there are no low tides during the day.