October 5, 2015 — Sarah Redmond has known she wanted to be a seaweed farmer since she was 15 years old, when she would explore the coastal shores of Maine, learning to identify species and cook with them at home.

“It combined my two favorite things, which were gardening and the ocean,” she said. “I thought it would be pretty cool to have a garden in the sea.”

Now, as a marine extension agent for the Maine Sea Grant, a federal-state partnership to promote marine science funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the State of Maine, Redmond has seen her longtime dream come true. Her time is split between helping would-be seaweed farmers learn to tend and harvest their crops, conducting original research on how to grow species that have never before been cultivated in North America, and championing native, domestically grown seaweeds.

Wild seaweeds have long been eaten as food in the Northeast, but deliberately farming them by seeding spores into the open ocean, which is how seaweed is generally produced for Asian markets, is still exceedingly rare in North America. According to Redmond, though, who holds a master’s degree in ecology, the rich nutritional content and low environmental footprint of native seaweeds like kelp, nori, and dulse makes their cultivation a promising venture for a new wave of growers who are just now starting to experiment with aquaculture.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe