Meet the 'star ingredient' changing fortunes in Alaska's waters: seaweed

While farmers in much of the US spend the late spring patiently waiting for their crops to mature, a small band of sea farmers have taken to the cold ocean waters of Alaska to harvest the state’s newest cash crop: kelp.

Huge demand for seaweed, hauled up in slimy green bunches from the Pacific Ocean, has kickstarted an industry that existed as a mere fantasy only five years ago.

“There’s lot of interest in sustainability,” says Beau Perry, head of Blue Evolution, a California-based company at the centre of Alaska’s nascent seaweed boom. “As we deal with climate change and the movement towards plant-based diets, all of those trends play towards seaweed being a new sort of star ingredient.”

A career salmon fisherman, Pryor along with his wife, Lexa Meyer, were drawn into the kelp business recently as a way to supplement their income. But interest in kelp farming is now so intense that Pryor believes a new farmer might have to wait up to three years for the necessary permits.

Unlike in other parts of the world, where wild kelp is harvested by ships, Alaska’s aquatic plants are grown by farmers in a months-long process, which begins in the dead of winter.

“For small coastal communities, [seaweed farming] could be a big deal,” says Pryor. “Just from the farm that we did this year, we put between 30 and 40 people to work.”

In summer 2018, the proposed wide-scale harvest of wild kelp led to a fierce row in Scotland, where environmental groups say the dredging of kelp forests could cause irreparable harm to marine life off the coastline because the plants play such a crucial role in preserving a healthy ecosystem.

In Alaska, companies are required to follow strict government rules on cultivation: strains of seaweed crops, taken from wild plants, must be grown within 50km of the source plant. This ensures genetic strength and diversity are maintained, says Perry, with salmon hatcheries in the state following similarly strict guidelines.

On the whole, any environmental damage from the cultivation of farmed seaweed – which requires wild plants be picked for spore extraction – appears to be “minimal”, says Matthew Bracken, an associate professor of biology at the University of California Irvine.

“It’s not like plants where you just put seeds in the ground. They have a complex life. You have to really understand that well and be able to then magnify it,” says Bracken. “It can teach us a lot about how life works.”