A year ago, oyster growers who farm New Jersey’s marshy coastal inlets and tidal flats were fighting for survival.

Restaurants were shut down by the pandemic, and the oysters they had nurtured for two years were growing past their prime. They were in cages and racks in Barnegat and Delaware bays, crowding out a younger crop of oysters.

Unable to pay for boat fuel or the following year’s seed, some small aquaculture farmers in New York and New Jersey, struggling to revitalize what was once the country’s preeminent oyster market, braced for the worst.

Now, against long odds, the industry is poised for a summertime boom.

With restaurants free of occupancy limits as the coronavirus outbreak eases and states lift most restrictions, sales are brisk, growers said.

“It’s going to be a bonkers year,” said Scott Lennox, a founder of the Barnegat Oyster Collective, which sells to restaurants in the New York region and watched sales plummet by 40% after the lockdown.

The turnaround stems in part from two conservation buyback programs, a robust home-delivery market, farm stands crowded with customers and an unexpectedly strong demand for other shellfish.

An oyster mail-order business that the Barnegat collective started at the beginning of the pandemic now ships to 48 states and accounts for 20% of its sales, Lennox said.

At Cape May Salt Oyster Farms, New Jersey’s largest aquaculture company, home-delivery sales have soared and restaurant orders have gone “through the roof,” said manager Brian Harman.

Cape May Salt opened in 1997 as one of the state’s aquaculture pioneers. Today, New Jersey is home to about 30 aquaculture growers, most of whom lease water parcels from the state and produce oysters for the half-shell.

Lisa Calvo, a marine scientist at Rutgers University who also farms oysters in the Delaware Bay, wrote a grant proposal that led to the first buyback program in New Jersey. Sixteen growers sold a total of 79,000 oysters for 65 cents apiece, resulting in a payday of about $3,200 each.

The purchased oysters, which can each filter and clean 50 gallons of water a day during their nondormant months, were placed on existing coastal reefs in the fall. Adding oysters to reefs expands the habitat for fish, adds a layer of coastal resiliency and helps to clean turbid water, said Steve Evert, who runs the marine field station at Stockton University. Separately, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Nature Conservancy used a $2 million gift from an anonymous donor to fund a larger buyback program for growers in New Jersey and six other states.

Millions of oysters were purchased and placed at sites off coastlines, offering a twofold benefit: protecting many of the 3,000 jobs connected to the industry nationwide while retaining the oysters’ ecological value.

Farmers were also hustling to find new places to sell shellfish. Fish stands thrived, said Dale Parsons, who runs Parsons Seafood, a company based in Tuckerton, New Jersey, and participated in the Pew buyback.

As oyster sales dipped, he said, sales of clams exploded. “The clam market was insanely busy,” he said.