"You can say that we're the only farmers who don't like rain," said Neal Maloney, owner of Morro Bay Oyster Co., a Central California harvester that produces around 1 million Pacific Gold oysters per year.
Since the tail end of last year, when the first in a parade of storms slammed into California, Maloney and many of the state's other oyster farmers have been unable to harvest the mollusks, temporarily closing some operations and taking California oysters off some menus.
Although the storms brought much-needed rain to the state, helping to refill reservoirs and soaking drought-stricken regions, the water runoff into places such as Morro and Tomales bays prompted oyster harvesters to pause operations for bacterial testing.
