A bumper sticker on Dave DeWitt's truck.

Dave DeWitt going to work on his organic vegetable farm on the former site of Rock Spray Nursery, which DeWitt transitioned into vegetable farming in 2012.

Mushrooms on Dave DeWitt's farm in Turo, Massachusetts are grown by the farm’s manager, Uli Winslow, for which he, too, makes his own growing medium.

DeWitt believes that farming is a form of service. “Getting healthy food that’s been picked at its ripest with the most dense flavor and nutrition into people’s homes and into their bodies is a service,” he says. “To that end, Dave’s Greens is all about diversity. “We grow 26 varieties of tomatoes because nature doesn’t want mono-cropping,” DeWitt says. He grows primarily heirloom tomatoes including Striped German, Carbon, Evergreen, Paul Robeson, Green Zebra, Pink Berkeley Tie Dye, and Cherokee Greens, as well as farm stand standards like eggplant, cucumber, peppers, garlic, Swiss chard, and kale, again, all leaning toward heirlooms.

“Regenerative farming is where we’re heading,” DeWitt explains. “It’s about the soil/food web, and KNF incorporates all of the indigenous microorganisms to foster a healthy food web.”

It's low tide on the new moon at Crosby Landing Beach, in Brewster. The water in the bay is out—way out, on a negative tide. This is the optimum time to harvest razor clams, when the beach is most uncovered. For all the world, it looks as if 17-year-old Kieran Norton and his 14-year-old sister, Elizabeth, are playing an aquatic version of the favorite carnival game, Whack-a-Mole. Kieran squirts a saltwater solution into a hole shaped like a keyhole, and up pops a razor clam. Elizabeth, following, snatches the clam before it can retreat back in its hole. This is how you harvest razor clams on Cape Cod.

Elizabeth Norton gathers up a razor clam. Both Nortons are Brewster-born and raised, and have turned to the age-old tradition on the Cape of harvesting from the sea when you’re young and looking for ways to earn some money and don’t want to deal with the tourists. “It’s not a conventional way to grow up,” said the elder Norton. “I know people who want to get off Cape Cod when they graduate high school, but our family takes advantage of living on the Cape.”

Elizabeth Norton gathers up a razor clam. Kieran Norton is a senior at Nauset Regional High School. He also tends 50 lobster traps with friends. Elizabeth works as his apprentice. “I have a student razor clamming license,” she explains, because she’s just old enough to work legally in Brewster. She likes being out with her brother, and “…it’s not something an average 14-year-old girl would be doing at 5:00 a.m.” she says.

Scott Leonhardt, husband to oyster farmer, Sally Andreola, owner of Mant's Landing Oysters, splashes through the low tide of Cape Cod Bay. Since she got her half-acre grant 15 years ago, the sands have shifted so the grant isn't always uncovered during low tide.

Oyster farmer Sally Andreola works Mant’s Landing Oysters. She is a retired schoolteacher and quite correctly insisted on including the possessive apostrophe in her company’s name. Mant’s Landing Oysters is one of the farthest and also was one of the first grants off the town beach at the end of Robbins Hill Road. She’s been working the same half-acre for 15 years. “I could have requested more, but a half-acre seemed liked a good place to start,” she says. “With just Scott and me working the farm, we really couldn’t handle more.”

The Town of Brewster's oyster grant at Mants Landing.

Oyster farmer Sally Andreola with a bag of oysters, 100 oysters to a bag.

A neighboring oyster grant on Mants Landing.

Oyster farmer Sally Andreola carefully counts oysters, 100 to a bag.

Oyster farmer Sally Andreola at her grant on Mants Landing in Brewster, Massachusetts on Cape Cod.

Scott Leonhardt working on the Mant's Landing Oysters grant on Mants Landing in Brewster, Massachusetts on Cape Cod.

Oyster farmer Sally Andreola and her husband Andreola and her husband, Scott Leonhardt, work Mant’s Landing Oysters, a grant set against a backdrop of shoreline that can make them look as if they’re figures in a giant Impressionist painting.

It’s 10 a.m. and the lobster boat, Dorothea Isabel, is steaming northward out of Sesuit Harbor in Dennis against a steady chop and headwind. Normally, Tyler Daley, the boat’s owner, would already have been on the bay six hours earlier, but weather kept him in. But conditions should break in a few hours and until then the two- to two-and-a-half foot waves will just be an annoyance when harvesting begins. Daley’s concentration, too, is unflagging as he monitors the boat, charts his course, and plans the workday. “I try not to let my mind wander, otherwise I’d end up screwing something up,” he says. “I have to make sure I stay with the program and Julian is safe.” The Brewster native has been fishing for lobster for more than 20 years, since he was 12 and had 25 traps of his own. Now, after a few stints fishing for lobster offshore for others ending in 2012, he owns the Dorothea Isabel outright and tends 800 traps, the maximum amount allowed, plus an acre grant for oysters.

Deckhand Julian Escobar readies the deck for harvesting. Escobar is a chef and has worked in some of the finest restaurants including Clio and Bricco in Boston, 5 Corners Kitchen in Marblehead, and the Woodstock Inn in Vermont. But today, like many Cape Codders, he’s doing what he has to do to make ends meet. He likes lobster fishing though. “It was scary at first,” he says. “ But eventually it gave me such a sense of life. You have to constantly be aware to take care of yourself when you’re on the boat.”

Each lobster trap weighs anywhere from 45 to 65 pounds, and Daley tends 800 traps on Cape Cod Bay.

In the interest of sustainability, easily two-thirds of what Daley catches this day will get tossed back into the bay. The lobster might be a female, the eggs covering her underside looking like coffee grounds, or either too small or surprisingly too big—lobsters mate front to front, and large, egg-bearing females need a similar sized fertile male to procreate. A Chihuahua/Great Dane mix isn’t in the crustaceans’ cards.

A lobster fresh from the bay waits to get banded.

They say fishing is the most optimistic pursuit a person can do. You cast a fetid piece of bait into all of that water in hopes of a retrieving a fish to eat or sell. A few of the trawls were all but empty, and Daley repositioned those trawls somewhere else along the bottom, playing cat and mouse with an enormous, crawling pod of lobster he knows is down there somewhere. The work may be hard and monotonous, but it’s the hunt that continues to thrill Daley. “It’s boring when you’re not catching them, but it’s what you keep trying for and it keeps you coming back,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”

Daley throttles up the boat, heading to a another trawl, a 2,000-foot line that sits on the bottom of the bay with 16 traps connected to it at intervals while Escobar positions each trap at the stern, being mindful not to get his feet caught in all the lines that are uncoiling overboard as each trap slips into the boat’s wake and back to the bottom of the bay.

Deckhand Julian Escobar transfers part of the catch to coolers while Daily throttles the Dorothea Isabel to another trawl, a 2,000-foot line that sits on the bottom of the bay with 16 traps connected to it at intervals.