Turning the Tide: Building a Farmer-First Blue Economy

Earlier this month, GreenWave Director of Market Development Sam Garwin delivered a keynote at the 2023 Seagriculture USA conference in Portland, Maine. Sam’s presentation dove into collaborative strategies to cultivate a seaweed industry that prioritizes farmers and fosters growth throughout the entire value chain. “We have the opportunity to look back at the lessons learned on land and in fisheries and choose to do things differently with seaweed,” says Sam. “Farmers need to own and operate more pieces of the puzzle to turn this vision into reality.” 

To get there, GreenWave collaborates with industry leaders to develop and test appropriate farmer-forward seed production and stabilization technologies. The organization has also developed apps like Seaweed Source that create robust opportunities for nurseries, farmers, buyers, and processors to connect, collaborate, and move the industry forward.

Farmers need reliable and affordable kelp seed to scale the regenerative ocean farming industry amid steadily increasing climate pressures that negatively impact farm productivity. Building on our work with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Bigelow Laboratory, and the University of Connecticut, we’ve teamed up with Hortimare, a global leader in kelp seed production, to design a farmer-forward seed bank and modular nursery. This collaboration has led to breakthroughs in seed quality, production costs, and control over the outplanting schedule, increasing on-farm yields and kelp quality.

Developments in seed banking technology give farmers more options at the start of the farm season. These facilities can either produce seedstring for farmers or, eventually, ship seed material on demand back to farmer-owned nurseries that prefer to grow their own.

A related challenge to expanding seed supply is the need to increase nursery capacity. GreenWave revamped our original labor- and energy intensive nursery facility turning into a cost-effective, commercially scalable, and easily replicable nursery infrastructure that will be easy for farmers to build and operate. Curriculum and materials are in the works for distribution in 2024.

The industry faces another obstacle at the end of the growing season when farmers race the clock to stabilize their kelp before it deteriorates. Current post-harvest processing and stabilization methods are expensive, labor-intensive, and application-specific, and present-day equipment can’t keep up with high volumes of kelp. “Stabilization is arguably the most critical piece of the value chain,” says Sam. “It’s the moment farmers can lock in quality and significantly reduce the time constraints to sell their crop.” 

To address this barrier, GreenWave partnered with Macro Oceans, a biorefinery startup that has developed stabilization technology to preserve kelp for up to 12 months at ambient temperatures. We executed a scaled pilot to process whole kelp into a shelf-stable slurry that requires minimal space, labor, power, and freshwater using off-the-shelf hardware and equipment. We will continue to refine the process in future iterations of testing and develop a business model that ensures the benefits of this technology are shared with farms of all sizes in 2024. 

Farmers need buyers to offload kelp when it comes off the docks. GreenWave has facilitated connections to align supply and demand through Seaweed Source for years. This program includes direct value chain coordination, consulting, and an interactive app to coordinate supply and demand across nurseries, farmers, processors, and buyers in North America. 

Fifty companies have joined the new version of the app since it re-launched in July. Seaweed Source provides a place for right-sized, values-aligned companies active in the seaweed industry to discover new partners, share their purchasing needs, and initiate forward contracts to secure a buyer—or a supplier—ahead of the season. “The app focuses on helping people build long-term partnerships rather than close one-off transactions,” says Sam. “In the coming years, we’ll release new features and functionalities responsive to industry needs to support meaningful business relationships.”

From seed to sale, GreenWave identifies farmer-forward solutions, technologies, and best practices to share with the industry to accelerate growth. “Collaboration is the way forward,” says Sam. “We need a unified vision and values for the industry so we can all reap the benefits of an equitable, transparent, and resilient blue economy.”