An oyster farm has no feed bill: oysters strain their own food out of the seawater. USDA counted how many dollars' worth of farm-raised oysters each state sold in a year. Which states sold the most? Tap them most-to-least.
Tapping assigns 1→4 in order
Oysters mean the Chesapeake. Maryland! 🐾
2Answer
Among the states USDA prints a number for, the order is…
Washington — 118,331,000 dollars worth in a single year, about 3.36× the next state on USDA's list, and more than a third of the national total. Not a Chesapeake state. Not a Gulf state. The state at the top of USDA's list is on the Pacific side, and its oyster farms lie on wide, shallow tideflats where the sea slides out twice a day and leaves whole fields of oysters sitting in the open air — then slides back in and feeds them. And the West Coast's leading farmed oyster is not an American oyster at all: the Pacific oyster was brought over from Japan in the 1920s by the Washington State Department of Fisheries.
📚 BackgroundAn oyster farm is a farm with no feed bill. Oysters are filter feeders: NOAA says growing them “requires no feed — they filter phytoplankton directly from the water column,” and a single grown Pacific oyster can strain up to 50 gallons of seawater in a day. So oyster farmers do not plant fields or fill feed troughs; they pick a patch of tidal water and let the tide do the feeding. The West Coast's leading farmed oyster is not even a native — the Pacific oyster was brought over from Japan in the 1920s by the Washington State Department of Fisheries.(NOAA Fisheries species profiles: Pacific Oyster / Eastern Oyster)↗ (opens in a new tab)
Most: Washington (118,331,000 dollars); fewest shown here: Delaware (335,000 dollars).
Note: dollars of oysters sold by aquaculture farms, from USDA's 2023 Census of Aquaculture — a count USDA takes once every five years. Oysters caught wild are not in this number. USDA NASS. USDA printed an oyster-sales figure for 14 states. Seven more — Alaska, Maine, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon and South Carolina — are blanked out to protect the few farms behind them, and the other 29 states are not in the table at all. Everything those seven could hold together is smaller than Washington's figure, so Washington's first place is the national one. Below first place, this is the order among the states with a printed number.
USDA printed an oyster-sales figure for 14 states. Seven more — Alaska, Maine, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon and South Carolina — are blanked out to protect the few farms behind them, and the other 29 states are not in the table at all. Everything those seven could hold together is smaller than Washington's figure, so Washington's first place is the national one. Below first place, this is the order among the states with a printed number.
Source: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (2023 (Census of Aquaculture))
Sources
Data as of: 2023 (Census of Aquaculture)
USDA NASS Quick Stats: MOLLUSKS, OYSTERS - SALES, MEASURED IN $, 2023 Census of Aquaculture, by state↗ (opens in a new tab) (2026-08-16) — Published values only (the committed raw file holds the API response verbatim). USDA printed an oyster-sales figure for 14 states. Seven more — Alaska, Maine, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon and South Carolina — are withheld because printing their figures would give away information about individual farms, and the other 29 states are not in the table at all. Everything the seven withheld states could hold together is smaller than Washington's figure, so Washington's first place is the national one — a check this site re-runs on every build. Below first place, this is the order among the states with a printed number.
↳ In Quick Stats, pick MOLLUSKS / MOLLUSKS, OYSTERS - SALES, MEASURED IN $, Census year 2023, Total domain, and compare states.