Farming the Sea
It’s a sustainable way to get the food we need and to rehabilitate our oceans.
I still remember those Highliner ads on linear TV, before there was an Internet. Captain Highliner, that mythical man sporting a neatly trimmed grey beard, blue turtleneck and fisher’s cap, extolling the virtues of fish sticks. He still sports the beard, but the cap is gone and he looks like he’s sporting some kind of cuddly cardigan, rather than a fisher’s turtleneck.
I was somewhat naïve then. Yes, I knew that you couldn’t haul freshly breaded fish sticks out of the ocean. But I didn’t know how exploitive the whole seafood industry was, particularly in the 80’s, which saw the rapid rise of factory ships basically strip-mining the oceans for everything they could possible get.
Nor did I have a clue of the ingredients that went into those fish sticks. Today’s list is slightly less egregious than it was (although they’re mixing the natural Omega 3 fats of the fish with Canola oil, a source of Omega 6’s, which seems a bit counter-productive), but still: there’s a lot of extra stuff including corn starch and sugars (!) in the product even now.
And fishers who were pulling the fish out of the ocean had it bad. The boats, schooners, trawlers and everything in between were crewed by men who were being driven almost to death, badly equipped and lost their lives in greater numbers than any other profession. In the period between 1830 and 1900, 3,800 fishers based in Gloucester, Maine were lost at sea. The town had a population of only 15,000. As fishing modernized and electrified and boats grew in size, the dangers persisted: fishers could get twisted in electric winches, slammed by trawl doors flying across the deck in rough seas, crushed by rollers, or just drown at sea as the boat sinks, or they get swept overboard in a storm, or their foot gets ensnared in a rapidly playing out rope and get yanked into the sea.
Highliner and companies like them are using a model that’s been dominant for decades: they mine the resource. Year after year, they send their boats out to simply take fish out of the sea, and do absolutely nothing to protect the resource, rehabilitate the ocean or enrich the ecosystem. It happened with the cod fishery, a resource that was plundered by multiple European empires for 400 years that led to the resource completely collapsing in the 1990’s. Not a single thought was made for how to maintain the resource over all that time. And when government scientists finally raised the flag, it was too late.
The model of ‘fish for what you can get, year after year’, is essentially over. 80% of our fish now comes from fish stock raised in pens, or, as its also called, ‘aqualculture’. The ecological impact if seeding vast ocean pens with fry, and raising them with artificial feed, is still being discovered, but what is known is pretty grisly: pen-raised fish — who by virtue of being ‘grown’ in a highly competitive environment — are more aggressive that their wild cousins. When they escape from their pens into the natural ecosystem and cross-breed with wild species, they create offspring that are more dominant, less hardy and prone to disease; the pollution that accumulates on the ocean floor underneath a pen essentially asphyxiates all other life and is toxic; the final product can be riddled with disease or full of toxins or full of the wrong kind of fat due to what they are fed.
Thankfully, this method of raising fish is being phased out, for all the reasons noted above, and is being replaced with other methods that are more humane and more environmentally sustainable.
But let’s face it: it’s the land-based, intensively raised livestock model. No different than pigs, cows and chickens. This model does absolutely nothing for the environment where the animals are raised; on land, nothing for the soil. In the sea, nothing to support the ecosystem or keep the water healthy.
By some estimates, about 2.6 billion humans depend on getting their protein from the ocean. From all the evidence, our oceans are suffering from too much heat, acidity and pollution.
We need different models that allow for the continued harvesting of food from the ocean without making the the watery environment worse off.
Happily, there is another way. And its being pioneered by some remarkable individuals.
Meet Bren Smith. Ocean farmer.
In an incredibly lucid and powerful book, Smith started his career like any other fisher. He worked fishing boats, starting at the age of fifteen with a lobster boat off the coast of Massachusetts. He almost died in his first season, when, during the winter, a huge wave swamped the back of the boat, taking lobster traps overboard and him almost with it.
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He got the bug of the open sea — loved being out in the thick of it — and graduated to longliners, trawlers and shrimp boats out of Alaska. He started in the gear room of a 170 foot longliner, working 20-hour shifts setting 40 thousand hooks a shift. A longliner basically runs a long line out the back of the boat, with hooks 5 feet apart. Do the math. 40 thousand hooks, five feet apart. That’s a line 200 thousand feet long. Unbelievable. And an unbelievable amount of cod would get hooked on that line, until the resource dried up and the factory ships had to move on to other waters.
After several seasons of that, and coming to the realization that he was a mere cog in an entire industry that strip-mined the resource, with almost no connection to the resource in the first place, Smith decided that he wanted to do something else. He still wanted to be on the sea, but he also knew that he couldn’t continue doing what he did.
Enter ocean farming.
The basic principle of ocean farming: let the ocean decide what food to produce. To test out this approach, Smith tried first with oysters. In the early 2000’s, he acquired a lease on 20 acres of ocean, at $50 per acre, per year. It allowed him to raise oysters, and other permitted species, and nothing else. He bought a boat, some cages with shelving for the bags of seed oysters to mature in and started with 40 thousand seed. In his first season, all of them died in the mud; the cages were too heavy and tipped over and the oysters died.
But he was undeterred. The next season, he approached things more methodically and succeeded in raising a successful crop that he began to sell to local fish merchants. Oysters, he writes, are ‘powerful agents of restoration: they filter up to 50 gallons of water a day, pulling nitrogen out of the water column’. Not only was he raising a sustainable crop of highly nutritious food, but what he was raising helped clean the ocean of harmful nitrogen to boot.
Encouraged by this success, he started to experiment with direct-to-consumer business models; he was one of the first to start a shellfish community-supported fishery (CSF, similar to the land-based model of community-supported agriculture, or CSA, where consumers buy direct from the farmer at the beginning of the season, and receive the bounty all season long). It was all going well, until two successive annual storms raged up the East Coast of the United States, wiping out his ocean farm in a few hours each time. Climate change had hit home in ways that few of us can contemplate.
It started yet another reflection on the kind of crops he could raise in the ocean, demanding that he cultivate species that could withstand the changing ocean environment, with a farm design that was more resilient to rising ocean temperatures, acidification and extreme weather. He designed a farm that he could raise and lower in the ocean depending on the weather: if a storm came through, he’d lower the whole thing to depths that a storm surge couldn’t touch, thereby protecting his crops. It was all firmly anchored to the sea floor using cheap-to-produce cement anchors.
Now that that he had the whole water column (from the sea floor to the surface) to play with, he could also expand the kinds of crops he could harvest, but stick with a cardinal rule: grow only zero-input species that can’t swim away and don’t require any artificial feed. So, clams on the bottom, oysters that would start on the bottom, but then, once they reached a certain size, get moved up the column; mussels; scallops and the real prize: sea greens.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. There’s an instinctive reaction when you say ‘algae’ to someone. More often than not, you get an ‘yuck’ that’s written all over their face. Even though they never eat it, or even tried to eat it. And honestly, it’s just not well known outside of certain Asian cuisines. In fact, seaweed (or kelp, or algae) has been cultivated by many cultures throughout history. Japan is famous for it; they’ve been cultivating it for centuries, mostly on a small scale. Canada was home to a large Irish moss industry in the mid-20th Century that was cultivated primarily for carrageenan, a natural thickener for processed foods (chocolate milk, and even beer). But native seaweed is highly nutritious — more Vitamin C than orange juice, more calcium than dairy milk and more protein than soy. And, don’t forget Omega 3’s — fish get them from what they consume, and they consume sea weed.
So, off Smith went, finding experts to mentor him and showing him how he could grow seaweed within his existing ocean farm infrastructure. He soon had large blades of chocolate brown seaweed hanging like ribbons from his rope lines, while underneath, he kept cultivating clams, oysters and scallops. A complete diverse ecosystem that required no feed, little maintenance and was completely native to the waters he was farming. The bonus was that the shellfish would do the filtration while the kelp absorbed nitrogen. A win-win-win.
Smith isn’t alone. The East and West coasts of the United States are peppered with ocean farming endeavours. He co-founded an organization called GreenWave, whose mission is to provide training and innovation to aspiring ocean farmers in the United States. The goal: 10,000 farmers harvesting from 1 million acres of ocean. That will really start to tip the scales in terms of making a dent on the degradation of our oceans.
In order to make that happen, markets have to be created for what those farmers grown. Enter Blue Evolution, whose mission is to take the seaweed product grown by ocean farmers, and market it to consumers and food processors. Products such as Sea Lettuce, Kombu and Wakame are available (dried, fresh or quick frozen) as well as a line of land animal feed for pigs and cows. Other products, such as protein powders and biostimulants are under development. For consumers, companies such as Atlantic Sea Farms, Sea Tangle, Barnacle Foods and Akua market products like jerky, pasta, salsa and pickles.
The industry is taking off in the United States due in large part to efforts by people like Bren Smith. Local permitting for ocean leases is permissive and cheap which means a critical barrier to entry is low. Which is as it should be for farmers who invest incredible amounts of time and effort and smarts in harvesting nourishing food from the sea.
In Canada, the rules are murkier. The Federal Government, which has ultimate jurisdiction over all coastal resources, has been actively consulting since 2019 on a new regulatory framework to stimulate the ‘blue economy’. But after reading through the many documents associated with this review, there is not one word about how to sustainably farm the ocean. The Federal Government seems entirely focussed on generating economic benefits from a variety of sectors, including ports, transport, aquaculture, commercial fisheries and tourism, amongst others. However, their definition of ‘aquaculture’ includes production of shellfish, like oysters, mussels and clams. There’s an opening there for ocean farmers, albeit a very narrow one. And the only mention of seaweed is as a source of biofuel. Hopefully, those commenting on the policy review will come in with some suggestions to generate a new economy from seaweed and shellfish.
We’ll see what the consultation will generate in terms of policy and new legislation. There is an Aquaculture Act in development, so, my guess it won’t be until 2024 until we see some clarity on all this.
In the meantime, entrepreneurs like Bren Smith in the United States will continue to build on what they’ve constructed to date, refining their techniques, expanding their product, creating markets, and growing an industry. So far, they have 90 acres of ocean harvesting over 500 thousand pounds of seaweed a year. And cleaning our ocean resources. Let’s hope other nations can be inspired by these visionaries.
