July 20, 2021 — On Vancouver Island, seaweed is abundant, diverse, useful, and symbolic. Indigenous peoples have used it for centuries for food preparation, fishing, and as a cultural and spiritual touchstone. On the island’s southwest coast, Dr. Louis Druehl started farming and researching kelp in the late 1970s and says he has dedicated his life to it “and loved every minute.” He mentored seaweed farmer Kristina Long, who now grows bull kelp over about 40 acres, and harvester Amanda Swinimer, who wades out into waist-deep water at low tide to carefully hand-cut blades of winged kelp in just the right spot to ensure regrowth.
These tiny operations barely create ripples within the vast coastal landscape, but kelp—here and elsewhere in North America—is at a crossroads.
In recent years, seaweed has been promoted around the globe as an overlooked, multifaceted climate solution: a sustainable food and biofuel source, a feed that reduces methane emissions from cattle, and a tool with the potential to absorb massive quantities of carbon from the atmosphere (although much more research is needed to determine how farms might actually contribute to sequestration). As a result, companies looking to capitalize on those promises are turning up in far-flung coastal communities with big plans.
Take Cascadia Seaweed. The company arrived on Vancouver Island soon after it was founded in 2019, and set a goal to farm 1,200 acres of the ocean there by 2025; its larger “stretch goal” is over 6,000 acre. In Alaska, Seagrove Kelp Co. has 127 acres in operation and 700 in the permitting phase. And in Maine, the continent’s seaweed-farming hub, Running Tide’s vision involves millions of biodegradable buoys attached to lines of kelp offshore.