Tuesday April 15, 2014

Today was pretty rough.  School and dance were fine, but there has been a lot of personal drama.  In the dorm, there has been a pretty serious stealing issue going on.  I had 80 dollars taken out of my wallet, which I was pretty upset about, since it was all birthday money that I had gotten in cards in the mail. One of my best friends has also been having some issues with her family.  Since she was upset and stressed, I decided to dedicate my time to her.  (I firmly believe that your family and friends come before anything else you are doing.  So while I am a little bit behind in my schoolwork, I think I made the right choice in making her feel comfortable and supported.  Especially since it was English reading that was ignored.)

I have encountered a few frustrations in my senior project.  The main one being that I have a lot of information that’s swirling around, but I haven’t yet applied it.  For example, I know a lot about the different methods of culturing oysters, however I haven’t yet applied it to my business model.  SO, I spent the day setting some real world parameters for my business plan.

I have decided that my business plan will project the first 6 years of my business.  Next, I am assuming that my oyster farm will be in Marion and my permit will have been obtained in one go without objections.  (SBA.gov suggest that location and permitting should be tackled after writing a business plan.  However, since my location is integral to how I will culture the oysters, I decided this was a good starting point.)

Wide View.

Close up.

As you can see from the pictures, the area I selected is in the outer harbor of Marion.  I decided against having it in the inner harbor, since the town has a lot of boat traffic.  My placement has some thought behind it.  It is an area that is aside from the main channel, away from most homes, and deep enough to allow me to sink they oysters in winter.

Since Marion only allows ½ acre grants, I already had a parameter for the size of my farm.  Oyster Gro System suggests 100 of their cages per acre, which would mean 50 for “my grant.”  Since each of their cages can house around 1,200-15,000 oysters, that would mean my capacity would be around 60,000-75,000 oysters.  This estimate is much smaller than the set up Scotty has allows.  On his ½ acre, he is able to grow 312,500-750,000 oysters.  My plan with no information about startup costs is to have 50,000-100,00 oysters the first year.  This may change, once I have calculated my startup costs, which I plan to do tomorrow.