CHRISTIAN GUIDI: "We serve between fifteen hundred and three thousand oysters a day, and that obviously does create a lot of waste."

But the restaurant no longer throws away all those shells. The Oyster Recovery Partnership takes them away for recycling.

First the shells get washed. Then they go to the Center for Environmental Science at the University of Maryland for further processing.

The shells are placed in tanks with hundreds of millions of oyster larvae. This way, the baby oysters can be raised until they have grown big enough to be moved to the Chesapeake.

This year, the Oyster Recovery Partnership helped produce and plant more than four hundred fifty million baby oysters in the bay.

Don Meritt heads the oyster recovery program at the University of Maryland. He says the goal is not just to increase the oyster population.

DON MERITT: "Our real goal here is to try to restore healthy oysters to the Chesapeake Bay so that we can help restore a healthy Chesapeake Bay. Not just a healthy oyster population, but a healthy bay."

Mr. Meritt says it will take many years of work before the Chesapeake Bay has a good supply of oysters again.

DON MERITT: "We did not get to this crisis in a few years and we are not going to get out of it in a few years. It is going to take a concerted effort over a long period of time."

And that's the VOA Special English Agriculture Report, written by Jerilyn Watson and Elizabeth Lee. You can find all of our programs with transcripts and MP3s at voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Bob Doughty.