In September 2023 the ECSGA updated its 2010 Best Management Practices manual and renamed it, "Best Practices for the East Coast Shellfish Aquaculture Industry."

Since Best Practices are developed with grower input, they often achieve higher rates of acceptance and compliance than regulations since they lead to a greater level of buy-in and an ethic of peer pressure and self-enforcement.

This 2023 revision of the original 2010 document involved several workshops and conference calls to collect views and recommendations on the management and handling of floating gear and on how growers might improve the provision of ecosystem services associated with shellfish farming. The project was made possible through support provided by The Nature Conservancy, through the SOAR Shellfish Growers Resiliency Fund.

The original manual incorporated input from  hundreds of stakeholders who attended 22 workshops. It was funded by the USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the Northeastern Regional Aquaculture Center, and NOAA's Office of Aquaculture.

To create your own farm-specific BP document use our Best Practices Form. It  contains all the best practices described in the Best Practices Manual, presented as a series of check boxes. You can select the best practices used on your farm and submit the form. This triggers the sending of an email with an attached pdf containing some generic principles and explanations, along with the specific best practices you selected. The email contains a link to a free version of Adobe’s pdf-to-MS-Word file converter, so you will end up with a downloaded Word file that you can tweak, format, add images to or embellish however you want.