Thoughts

The profession of regenerative ocean farming actually goes back thousands of years to Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest, when tribes lived in lockstep with their environment. As a designer, my mind now works in HMW statements - so I would guess the question going on in their heads back then was “How might we best leverage everything around us to survive?”

But Bren Smith had a different question when he picked up the practice.

“How might we rethink the ocean as an agricultural space?”

Smith cultivates kelp, mussels, and oysters on his 10-acre ocean farm off of the Thimble Islands of Connecticut - and loves it. Here’s an excerpt from his book:

By 2014, I had grown a blue thumb and learned to read my waters in new ways. Through oysters, I’d gotten to know every inch of my farm’s seafloor, and by growing plants vertically, I learned the patterns and seasonal variations of the full water column. This meant daily observation of how the currents moved through my fields, where the sweetest nutrients flowed in the water column, and how a mix of winds and tides shifted the movement of my kelp rows. My inner life was changing, too. I was fully reborn as a farmer. The hunter in me was gone, and I had lost my thirst for blood. My brain felt different, like it had been rewired. My need for high-octane adventure waned. My shift happened slowly, born out of watching kelp grow. I can’t put my thumb on it, but there was a mystery to growing plants, a pleasure apart from fishing and farming shellfish. Maybe it was the kelp’s iridescent colors, maybe the wonder of hoisting 15-foot walls of plants out of the water… Seaweed had changed me.

What stood out to me was the experience of being an ocean farmer. I felt that his description was perfect for the design in marketing necessary to grow the profession. The way he describes with the focus of his company being to optimize the process and how its outputs are monetized.

The opportunity, from an environmental perspective is huge - according to Smith, if you take less than 5% of U.S. waters and just grow seaweed, you can capture the carbon-output equivalent of around 20 million cars. That’s exciting enough as it is, but what really got me thinking was hearing about how this sect of farming could be made profitable.

Although he initially started with oysters, kelp now comprises of around 80% of his yearly profits. Growth rate benefits from a couple factors:

• It requires virtually zero inputs to grow - meaning that farmers avoid spending time on doling out feed, freshwater, or fertilizers

• Kelp also creates new habitats and replenishes the local ecosystem, acting in a similar way to coral reefs in harboring and fostering aquatic life

• From a sustainability perspective, kelp farms also act as efficient carbon sinks.

In terms of nutrition, kelp and other native seaweeds contain more Vitamin C than orange juice, more calcium than milk, and more protein than soybeans. You also receive the same benefits as eating seafood, as fish just transfer over Omega-3, etc. over to humans from what they eat.

At this point, if someone told me that “kelp [was] the new kale”, I would be convinced.

But…

Smith has found that his biggest challenge is selling kelp to the masses. Seaweed and other aquatic plants have found some success in the food products space (see the industry in Asia for example) but it hasn’t yet reached the momentum required for the mainstream.

Where he is focusing on is the possibility of using kelp as an edible ingredient in everyday grocery products - imitating what food producers did with soy in the 1970s and 80s. By weaving it into the ingredient lists of common food items as a nutritious building block, I could see how kelp could potentially wean us off of other ingredients that aren’t grown as sustainably. By no means am I advocating that kelp be the main ingredient in my cheerios, but this stood out to me as a promising way through which we start curtailing our dependence on unsustainable practices in the food industry.

Overall, this venture excited me for several reasons. Based off of the numbers, I see viability in using kelp as a food supplement and opportunity to reduce unsustainable practices used in the aquaculture industry. It fascinated me to hear that someth

I also enjoyed hearing this story because of how easy the experience could potentially be when converting over to the ocean farming profession.

I see advantages from a user experience perspective as well - based on who we assume the user to be. Two main ones come to mind. If we take the food industry as the user, the business model design to package kelp as a nutritional supplement makes it easy for the industry to adopt a more sustainable ingredient - assuming approval by the FDA and other legal hurdles. And if