- You can't do this very long unless you love it, unless you're passionate about providing North Carolinians fresh North Carolina seafood.

It's challenging.

There are some days that it's not easy to get out on the water.

And then there's other days where I couldn't imagine doing anything else.

My name is Ryan Stelter Bethea and my home is North Carolina.

[uplifting music] So the name of our company is called Oysters Carolina.

And what we wanted to do is we wanted to bring fresh North Carolina seafood to North Carolinians.

It's important to have really good stewardship with anything, and especially farming.

But with oyster farming, it's really important because you're out here in this great natural resource that is so pristine.

It's so much easier to keep something pristine than it is to clean something up.

- So you guys would come out here.

How many oysters are out here in these beds right now, if you had to venture a guess?

- There's about 200,000 out here.

You're planting 'em kind of in different times throughout the planting season, which is generally March through November.

But they're wild animals.

They're not wild animals, but they're animals.

So they grow in different speeds.

You might plant 100,000 and half of those are ready within the first year.

And then the other half might take two years.

- So when you get these oysters out and you take them to, there's gotta be such satisfaction to be able to farm these and get them to the people in North Carolina that really maybe never have had oysters.

I know that that's really one of your missions is to do that.

- It is, it is.

We have a lot of people that have, we're a lot of people's first oyster.

People really trust us to bring them the freshest oyster and they know that we're harvesting it that day and bringing it to them.

So I think they have a lot of trust in us.

We grow oysters here.

We harvest them the same day that we deliver them.

We take a picture and a video with a timestamp, and then we text it to you so you know that we pulled them out of the water that day.

And then we deliver them ourselves anywhere in North Carolina.

[upbeat music] We're gonna finish out today probably around 450 miles.

It's gonna take about nine hours overall, 9 to 10 hours.

And we're gonna get to see some cool things and deliver some great seafood.

[knocking on door] We got your oysters right there.

- We got oysters today.

- Yeah, got your oysters.

- Thank you.

- Pleasure to meet you.

I'm Ryan.

I've been great.

Oh, I didn't know you even had a cat.

I really enjoyed talking with you too on the phone the other day.

- Have a good day.

- Thanks, you too.

- [Woman In House] Thank you.

- Herons is our only restaurant that we work with.

We're really proud of our relationship with them.

Chef Thompson may be there two, three times a week, texts us, say, hey, we need this many oysters tomorrow.

We go out, we get him his oysters and then just drive them right there.

So if you've eaten oysters here, they are definitely the freshest oysters in North Carolina.

- There you go, man.

- All right.

You're looking through for an example of how to shuck oyster?

You should use these.

And then you hand him one of these.

Be like, here you go.

Good luck.

- [Ryan] You made it look so easy.

Good seeing you man.

- Good seeing you.

Thank you again.

- See ya, bro.

[uplifting piano music] - I came up with the idea to grow oysters when I came home one night after bartending and there was a magazine on the coffee table and it just happened to be flipped to something.

I think it was about how North Carolina just has the perfect water.

It's pristine.

There's no development other than housing out here.

It's just a place that would grow really good oysters.

And everything just kind of clicked.

I thought, okay, this is what I want to do.

We'll take the oysters when they're like this with this shell growth.

And in order to keep the oysters from growing long and thin like a blade, okay?

We tumble them until they grow fat like this with a cup.

So you can kind of see the different stages of growth.

So we'd put it in a bag.

We're gonna shake it 'cause we do everything by hand.

That's gonna knock all this off and it's gonna have the oyster continue to grow fat instead of just long.

- So you're just kind of looking for quality?

- Yep.

- Is what you're looking for?

- That's exactly right.

So like this, this is gonna be low-quality 'cause it has a bunch of this wild strike on it.

Like, this one doesn't.

So this one right here, we're gonna tumble it, get this shell growth off, and then it's gonna be a nice, pretty oyster.

This we have to continue to work on.

[uplifting piano music continues] - [Heather] What goes through your mind when you see your farm?

- Oh, well, it's great.

It's great, right?

I mean, you can't beat this.

We're out here on a beautiful day.

Everything that's out here, we've worked really hard to get to this point and we're really proud of the oysters that we grow out here.

[uplifting piano music continues] [upbeat music] The best way I can tell to shuck is you're gonna put the knife at the end of the oyster.

And if you can get the knife to stand up on its own, you're pretty much already there.

So once the knife is like this, you're gonna push and turn at the same time.

You're gonna cut the abductor muscle.

Boom.

Mmm.

[laughing]