Horse Breeder Trades Life in the Fast Lane for a Slow-Growth Industry : Maryland Entrepreneur Hoping to Score With Her Snail Ranch

For J. T. St. Bell, switching jobs nine months ago meant trading a dozen racehorses for 20,000 gastropod mollusks.

“I always said I’d do things until I didn’t enjoy them anymore,” said the fledgling entrepreneur, who explains that after 10 years in the horse-breeding business, “I had my fill of arrogant horse buyers.” Besides, she adds, the transition from “slow horses to slow snails seems logical.”

So these days, instead of raising, training and selling Arabians and thoroughbreds, she’s displaying what she likes to call her “road show,” a small plastic container holding four surprisingly lively petit gris snails, considered by gourmands to be among the best eating.

The rest of her slimy herd, just a few weeks away from market size, lies in several hundred deep plastic buckets, locked behind the doors of a two-story, barn-like structure that she has leased on a sprawling mushroom farm.

East Coast Escargot is what St. Bell calls her company, and it is the East Coast market that she intends to tap first, by offering both fresh and canned snails that she feels are superior to the imported variety more frequently encountered by consumers.

Hers is the first such business to be permitted by the state agriculture department to operate in Maryland, where snails are considered a serious plant pest, and one of apparently only two state-licensed commercial snail ranches in the United States. (The other is the 3-year-old Enfant Riant in Petaluma, Calif., which sells 20,000 to 25,000 dozen snails per month.)

Waiting List Includes French

Though St. Bell has yet to sell a single mollusk, her waiting list of potential clients includes a dozen French purveyors. “Can you imagine the French looking to America for a source for one of their prime treats?” she asked, laughing. (In fact, the French consume an estimated 30,000 tons of snails annually, according to the Center for Foreign Trade in Paris, and import what they can’t produce themselves from Greece, Turkey, Indonesia and elsewhere.)

Belying St. Bell’s market research and the success of her West Coast counterpart, Americans haven’t demonstrated much affection for the stuff. A recent Gallup survey of unusual foods ranked snails just behind brains as the food consumers most detested, with 39% of those polled indicating that they would never want to try escargot .

That leaves 61% who might try snails, said a confident St. Bell. As with similar gourmet items, “this is a market already in place.”

The businesswoman expects her snails, packed in spring water in 7 1/2-ounce cans, to sell for $7 to $9 a can retail. (At Sutton Place Gourmet in Washington, which sells the California product, a 7 1/2-ounce can costs $7.99; at Giant supermarket a 4 1/2-ounce tin of French snails costs $3.79; Safeway sells a 7-ounce can of French snails for $2.99.)

If the decision to abandon horses in favor of snails was an easy one, the career change has been riddled with obstacles. For one thing, most of the available information on snails details techniques for eradicating, as opposed to nurturing, the animal.

Foreign Sources

And most of the pertinent scientific literature is printed either in French or Italian, adds St. Bell, who had volumes of journals translated into English.

Moreover, officials at the Maryland Department of Agriculture first had to be convinced of the soundness of her proposal. “Generally, we are extremely reluctant to get involved in these situations,” said Bill Gimpel, chief of the department’s plant-protection section and one of two supervisors working with St. Bell.

While inquiries have been relatively few in number, Gimpel acknowledges, the department denies several requests from prospective snail farmers each year. St. Bell was granted a permit only after she invested in a facility that is virtually escape-proof, on a site that is also vegetation-free. (The concrete structure is surrounded by asphalt.)

“They were tough,” said the entrepreneur of her supervisors. To satisfy the inspectors’ demands, St. Bell watches over her operation like a guard at Ft. Knox.

Only those employees directly responsible for the daily cleaning, feeding and watering are permitted into the snail houses, and then only after they don protective overalls with banded pants legs, to prevent the accidental transfer of any snails to the outside. Further, entrances and windows are bordered with copper flashing, which repels snails and keeps them contained.

Such caution on the part of the state agricultural officials is not without good reason. About three years ago a shipment of snail-contaminated nursery stock brought into Laurel, Md., from California resulted in the partial quarantine of a local commercial nursery.

While the infestation is now under control, the state agriculture department “has yet to declare the area free of snails,” according to Gimpel.

St. Bell understands the concern. “These guys are prolific,” she said knowingly of her snails. To illustrate a point, she offers that she started with 3,000 snails and expects to reach her target of 50 million within the next 18 months.

Snails are hermaphrodites, which means they have both male and female sex parts, although they must mate with another before they lay eggs. A snail can breed three to four times a year and lay from 50 to 80 eggs, with a survival rate of about 80% each time.

To ensure the optimum environment for her snails, St. Bell created a setting that provides 9 1/2 hours of illumination (snails are nocturnal) and a high degree of humidity (about 92%). Unlike their wild counterparts--which, depending on the species, feed on such diverse meals as mud and fish--St. Bell’s snails don’t have to forage for their food. Instead, they are hand-fed a diet of select grains and fruits and vegetables including carrots, cucumbers, watermelon and strawberries.

The petit gris, often referred to as the common brown garden snail, is but one of an estimated 60,000 species of snails, according to Robert Hershler, an associate curator with the Smithsonian’s mollusk division.

Land snails range in size from about 1 millimeter long to the Giant African snail, which can grow up to 1 foot in length. The latter is often sliced and canned and passed off as escargot.

Hershler cautions against the consumption of snails that one might encounter around the home or garden. “It’s not a terribly good idea to eat them,” advises the curator, who points out that wild varieties need first to be starved (to clear their digestive tracts of foliage inimical to humans), then rinsed and cooked several times in acidulated water to destroy potential parasites or bacteria.

(St. Bell, prior to parboiling and repeatedly rinsing her snails, withholds food from them for three days.)

Cannery Processing

Eventually, St. Bell hopes to process her snails on-site in Glyndon. For now, she’s sending small numbers of her product to canneries in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the snails are custom-packed and forwarded to a food chemical laboratory in Baltimore, where the mollusks are tested to ensure the sterility of the canning process.

With the actual marketing of the snails, there’s the problem of St. Bell’s becoming too attached to her subjects. Looking down at her wriggling “road show,” she smiled and said, “I try not to spend too much time looking at them, or I’ll have 50 million pets.”

St. Bell calls herself “the founder, owner, president, chief cook and bottle washer” of East Coast Escargot. Throughout the course of the past year, though, she’s been assisted in her undertaking by her brother, who initially helped with the breeding process, her mother, who tested recipes, and her father, who St. Bell dubbed “the official taster, the one with the perks.”