“Our Food Requires No Freshwater, No Land, No Fertilizer” Can Ocean Farming Fix Our Food System? | Bren Smith

Welcome back. I'm your host, James Barry. On Everyday Ancestral, we talk about how ancestral wisdom can guide our modern choices, from food to environment to community. Bren Smith is our next guest. He is someone who's doing exactly that, but with the sea. A former commercial fisherman, he is now a pioneer in regenerative ocean farming, growing kelp and shellfish to restore ocean health. build climate resilience, and reshape how we feed ourselves. So today we dig into kelp on your plate, the promise of 3D ocean farms, and what it takes to re-anchor our food systems back into living waters. Bren, thank you so much for being here.

I don't talk to healthy people very much, so this is exciting.

Well, you know, it occurred to me, we, we're actually kind of fighting the same fight, just you're doing it on the water and I'm doing it on land. We're both trying to reconnect people to Mother Nature, whose systems are really pretty divine and pretty awesome, and get people retied to those.

And absolutely. I mean, what I love about some of the tents that are being created, I liked the climate tent back when we were allowed to talk about it because it was such a big tent, right? Like I didn't have to be Love Seals in order to like participate in the larger environmental movement. Once I found the food movement, I think I just felt a home because I can be a working-class guy. I don't have to be all buttoned up. I've broken my nose 3 times. My sense of flavor is terrible. I don't have to be like this culinary person, but I belong. And then you add on top of that, the soil, the sea, we all share nutrients. So much of the land-based agricultural system ends up in the ocean, all that nitrogen, phosphorus, and that's what I use to grow. So, No, I like these linkages.

I'd love to share with everyone, you know, how you fell in love with ocean and fishing. Can you take us back to basically what, what got you on this path?

I'm here back home in Newfoundland. This is where I was born. My parents were Americans.

They came up during the Vietnam War and then had my, my sister and I, and I grew up in a little town called Madagaskar in the Petty Harbour area. Go to a Brooklyn coffee shop, imagine what an artisanal fishery is, you know, like their imagination. And that's what I grew up in, right?

Fisherman's co-op next door, selling cod tongues door to door, small, you know, skiffs, smaller boats going out jigging for cod, completely sustainable. And this, like all these norms that had worked out about how to fish sustainably, whose areas were what, you know, and like how to protect the bounty without even talking about it really. You know, it was just understood that our lives were tied to the sea.

And that we were thankful for the sea.

Like there was a certain humility to our extraction, you know, in those early days. So grew up in that and all I ever wanted to be was a fisherman.

Like, you know, my parents were pretty educated and my sister was smart and, you know, my sister ended up having a career and I wanted to work the water.

If I look back, you know, what I wanted was this sort of self-directed life with meaning, right? You know, you'd watch the fishermen go out, They wake up in the morning, they own their own boats, they succeeded and failed on their own terms. They had the pride of feeding their community. These were jobs, and I think of it now, these are soul-filling jobs and they're jobs we write songs about. No one's writing songs about a Google worker or there are no good songs about lawyers and stockbrokers, but there are thousands about fishermen, farmers, steelworkers, ironworkers. These are more than jobs, they're culture. If I think about what my journey has been, it's really about like, how do we protect or create new jobs that we'll write and sing songs about? That's what that beginning was. All of this change is as much about culture and retaining the culture and then tapping into like, the folks around me know so much.

That blue-collar innovation, they're just filled with invention and solutions, but we need to make sure that it like captures their heart so that we tap into that blue-collar spirit.

You know, your book Eat Like a Fish, that's how I got introduced to you. And that book to me is one of those seminal books similar to Fast Food Nation, to many Michael Pollan's books. I mean, to many of those books that awaken us to the bigger picture. And I feel like the fishing industry is just one that has been misrepresented to a degree, and then also potentially properly represented sometimes, but yet very misunderstood by the public. Can we dive a little bit into that? Just your experience, because that's the thing. It's the same thing with farmers. I feel like there's the media coverage of this, and then to your point, we're not talking to the people that are actually working the water or working the farms because they're the ones that have the true intel.

First of all, thanks so much for those kind words about, about the book.

It was, I'm not a writer and God, it was painful to write, but I can tell a few stories, you know, like I've been in enough bars my life, been in enough bar fights that I can spin a story, you know?

Is that how you broke your nose?

Hockey and bar fights, but I also have 6 concussions. So like, it's the nose is the worst of the worry. Like you're catching me on my last leg, right?

Oh geez. I hope not.

So I wanted to be a fisherman and then I dropped outta high school at 14.

I dropped outta school right away and headed out to sea.

And I fished at that point. I went down and fished in Gloucester and God, I loved it, right? It was everything.

And I thought I started as a lobsterman and we did some tuna. I, and I ended up in Alaska on the Bering Sea doing cod and crab.

And I tell you, I still miss that.

job, right? Like that humility of being in 30-foot seas, the solidarity of being in the belly of a boat with like, you know, 13, 15 other people for months at a time. Like those are true sort of brothers and then eventually sisters too, right?

As, as the fishing industry really evolved and changed and that sense of meaning of feeding my country. Like I, you know, most of the fish I was catching in Alaska was, it was gray and black cod.

It was going to McDonald's for their fish, which Was it called the Fishwich?

I think it was just called the fish sandwich.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. Fish sandwich. We used to call it the Fishwich for some reason. I was proud of that. Like really proud of like, you know, like providing McDonald's its food. And it felt like I was part of a national effort, right? So it wasn't just local, but we were, you know, we were operating at scale.

But as we now know, the problem was we just got too good at what we do.

Right? This is what humans do. We get too good at stuff, and that's our great quality, and it's also what we're sort of our downfall.

So, you know, we just became so efficient at, you know, using helicopters to find schools of fish.

We used a lot of World War II technology actually came into the end of radar, sonar. Those big fleets were like shifted into the industrial fishing system and, you know, tearing up entire ecosystems with the—

Our trawls, so much dead bycatch.

And, you know, as a young fisherman, we did know this couldn't continue. Once we got over like the excitement and we got, you know, we're sort of like established in the fishery and we watched what was happening year after year, there's just no way the ocean could provide this kind of bounty. But we had no control over it because the captains of industry, the captains on my boat, they owned a share of the boat.

And a lot of 'em were Norwegians at that point. This was, you know, a global commodity.

I mean, you know, when I learned that One of the hedge funds on Wall Street owns 40% of the Peruvian anchovy fishery. It's like, this has nothing to do with food.

This is just like a commodity, you know, like oil or gold or something like that.

We had no control. And actually the captains of industry, what they decided to do was fish the last fish, just chase fewer and fewer fish further and further out to sea.

They were heading into retirement, you know, so it was like, how much can we get in 10 years?

And the rest of us on the back of the boats, We're thinking differently.

We're like, no, we want to die in our boats one day, 50 years from now.

Like this is about actually a way of life, being on the ocean and making a good living.

All 3 of those, you know, being able to have healthcare and send my kids to college, all that sort of stuff.

And it was an excellent job.

You know, the environmental community saw the destruction and they were right about that, right? No question.

What they did was they created enemies and Just like an oil coal worker, like everyone's using lights, everyone's driving their cars, right? Like it's not the coal worker, the oil worker, the fisherman, the farmer who's growing soy at commodity scale isn't to blame. It's actually a much larger system. So the environmentalists actually demonized fishermen and then the sort of more conservative elements lifted up the individual fishermen, right?

Made us look like these small, like out on our boats jigging for cod. And that wasn't the way it is. And then we're stuck in the middle.

Because of that history, I would never think of myself as an environmentalist because it's too one-sided. Like it just didn't consider, and as I was growing up, it didn't have people at the, as part of the equation.

It was about pushing people off.

And I would say, we can talk about it later, but like, I still see that in huge strains of the environmental movement, the conservation movements, the folks that are creating, that are like hell-bent on creating marine parks, things like that. It's like, how do we get folks that work for a living out of the way and maybe just give them money.

I remember Bill McKibben saying this way back and he's moved, he's become sort of so much more sophisticated than this, but Bill McKibben, you know, the sort of, well, the father of the climate change movement around coal work and other, others.

He's like, ah, we'll just, you know, we'll pay them, eliminate coal, and then we'll make sure they're taken care of. And we don't want to be taken care of, right?

Like we don't want— You want purpose, right?

Yeah. Purpose. You know, there's a famous story. There are 2 stories we tell all the time around here. And one is about the fisherman that the government buys back the fishing license, gives him great money for it, a couple hundred thousand bucks, right?

The fishing license. And he beaches the boat and then buys a new truck and then every day drives down to the dock, 4 in the morning and drags himself to death.

And that is an iconic, I don't even know if it's true, But it's like something that's told.

Then the other story we're told, and I remember when this happened, was when the cod crashed here in Newfoundland and the canneries were closed and the fish plants were closed.

There was a woman from New York came in and she said, we're going to reemploy everybody. We're going to repurpose this fish plant. It was to make seatbelts for pets. This was her idea.

This is like, I don't know, in '97 or something like that, right?

We were like, fricking, right? But she was so entrepreneur, well-meaning, and she just did not understand that we don't want any job. We want to grow things with meaning that fill our souls. I say all that in that, like, having lived through the collapse of a, like, an ecosystem, which was the cod stocks crashed here in Newfoundland, right?

You know, 30,000 people thrown out of work. And then living through sort of the the results of that and seeing people like the captains of industry on one side, the environmentalists on the other side, the entrepreneurs and the climate people.

And we're just like stuck in it all. All we want to do is grow good, delicious things for folks we know and our communities and beyond.

I want to go to where that journey has taken you. You know, obviously you had a lot of learnings on the boat that then took you to this current chapter you're in. But before we do that, I, there was something that struck me from your book regarding the McDonald's. You talked about the fish, the sushi grade versus what was going to some of these fast food chains. And I realized a lot of people see this grading on fish, but I don't think they really understand it. Can you unpack that a bit for us?

I mean, back in the day, so every, all our boats had a, you know, the Japanese were buying all the high quality of fish and they were really controlling a lot of the Alaskan fish market. At that point, I was working the canners, the salmon canneries, and it was all Japanese buyers. And then the Grand Black Cod and the same thing.

And they had an inspector.

Every boat had a Japanese inspector on it because they wanted to grade the fish.

It was A through D, if I remember right.

And, uh, A being sushi grade.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At that point it was what I just knew as worms.

There were worms in the flesh that all went to the McDonald's.

grades. He would sort them all and tell us, you know, which pile they would take the best. And then the, the lowest quality would go into the fish sandwich because it's, you know, it's chunked up and you can never see the worms and stuff like that.

Yeah. In many ways it's just added protein. I guess that's the joke, right?

That's right. We've been eating bugs for a long time, right? Yeah.

That's the, that's what people don't realize. You know, they think bugs are new.

Yeah.

It's not necessarily that the fish are sick necessarily, but that it's just It's not going to be the flesh that you can give to a sushi restaurant.

Yeah.

Okay.

You know, I have a little 5-year-old now and I'm just shocked what we've decided as a country to feed our kids. Right.

I think we all are. Right. And it's just like stunning that this is what we came up with in terms of nutrition.

And, you know, it's just like crazy. It's just all crap.

I was thinking back to that time and it was interesting that the Japanese took everything that was high quality. And America took everything that was low quality because the Japanese took all the high quality fish, right?

They took A through B.

And then we, so that was sort of a beginning of like the American food system is the place where low quality goes. And then there are companies that specialize in making low quality food delicious, right?

And tricking our systems into needing that.

It is really heartbreaking. Like parents know this, but it wasn't until I became a parent where I was like, This is just nuts. It's like a society that's decided to do this with food.

It's kind of like how we run school cafeterias, right? Where most of the schools, they're just feeding the kids crap and it's all brand ultra-processed foods, you know, not really conducive towards health. You know, along those lines, I feel like a lot of people don't really understand wild versus farmed. And then also the distinctions between farm. Is it as big of a divide as we're being told? And attached to that is, is there a difference between sustainably farmed and just farmed? And what is that difference?

It's rough being a consumer in the seafood world, right? Red, greens, blues, they switch apps, they switch it around.

Like, you know, think about like ruining a nice date with your partner. You have to like pull out an app and look at the menu and like it's changed since last week. It's like, Fuck it. I'm going to eat chicken. You know, it's like, this is ridiculous. It just shows it's a broken system.

I think, you know, that level of complexity, the amount of money that goes into trying to figure out what a good fish is and to give it a label and stuff like that is just stunning.

I get asked all the time, what should I eat?

And my answer is like, I don't know. Meaning like, you know, what, what was it? They tested a third of the fish in New York restaurants were in high-end restaurants were mislabeled.

Right.

I remember this study a bunch of years ago. As a consumer, the amount of misinformation is heartbreaking.

And the principle, like Paul Greenberg's principles of eating lower in the food chain.

Absolutely. So that's just sort of to set the table.

The question about aquaculture is, and I've got lots of friends that grow, that are in the aquaculture industry and we disagree. My view is that the aquaculture industry, what it did was It looked at the wild palate, like people like to eat salmon, cod, tuna.

Let's grow salmon, tuna, cod. Like it was dictated by the markets, but like that's a wild taste that doesn't like pause for a moment and look at the ocean and ask, okay, what's unique about the ocean as an agricultural space?

What are the things we can grow that the ocean will allow us to grow, the unit economics work, and then shift markets?

And I know it's hard to shift markets. And shift flavor and taste.

But what's happened is that, you know, we're growing highly intense feed-intensive, huge amount of pollution. We're just jailing fish and it's just expensive to jail and feed fish, right? And I'd say the industry, fish farming is in its environmental incubator. Like it came out too early. Lots of folks are trying to lower the amount of wild fish that's going into the feed, deal with pollution, sea light, all these things. There really are, and they are getting better. But they rushed out to market and created industrial farms, like polluting farms. And then it's the worst brand in the ocean, in the grocery store is farm fish. And now everybody's trying to like figure out which is better as our wild fish stocks collapse. So I don't even think of myself as like an aquaculture farmer. I don't even want to get into that discussion.

I feel bad for consumers and it's just like, felt bad for fish.

It's just a brutal space. Instead, The idea is to stop, to pause and say, okay, what's unique about the ocean? Let's imagine right now on land we could pick from like the beginning, what are we going to grow? Would we say beef? I don't know. Would we say soy? But that's the advantage we have now. We can be like, okay, what's the best sea basket here that will grow? And when you stop and pause and you look at climate change and you look at sort of your unit economics of what takes to grow, it just makes sense to grow things that don't swim away and you don't have to feed. Like, that's the power of the ocean, right? If you can use the nutrients that are already there and you can use the sunlight and grow theoretically thousands of kind of sea vegetables, hundreds of kinds of shellfish. So I don't think in terms of sustainability anymore.

That's about trying to make a bad thing better. It's really important to go on that journey. Right? With clothing, food, all sorts of stuff.

We're trying to do, like, we think of this as the regenerative journey.

Like, actually, how do you grow things that breathe life back into the ocean and can create good jobs and breathe life back into communities? Like, that's our, our spot. So sadly, I don't have an answer of which fish to eat because I just don't see a way through it. You know?

I think you're basically saying, hey, this illusion we have that one is better than the other. is false, you know, that none of it is great. And that the reality is, is that what you're trying to do is, at least how I hear you talking about it, is you're trying to look at nature and say, how does nature want me to grow or use it to our advantage as humans? Not how am I going to manipulate nature to my advantage?

Absolutely. And I mean, I'd say that You know, we need to eat lower on the food chain. Eating from your local waters. Absolutely. The, like wild fishery, I deeply hope will always be part of our menu. It won't be with the collapse of the fish stocks and with rising populations and more and more pressures to eat from the ocean. We can't be eating the same amount of fish all the time, but I hope it's this really cherished thing that you have. Once a week, once every 2 weeks, and really appreciate that this is the last wild food on earth. And there's a fisherman behind it that is like hunting and chasing this. And it's a beautiful life and it's something we want to support.

And it's a wonderful nutritious food, but we just need to fill the plate with other things as well.

On the farmed piece, I mean, what is it? Half of all wild fish caught in China goes to feed farmed fish. It's stunning. So aquaculture, you know, there's US aquaculture and you move out and it is just so, so, so broken. You know, like I've been to farms where, you know, you look underneath the fish farm and it is just dead zones all the way through.

And essentially companies kill that water and then they move on to another site, set up their fish farm, kill the water. The amount of, you know, millions of fish are dying all the time in these farms.

I'm even more concerned of who owns them. Like it's a couple global companies.

These aren't like domestic fish farms in any, actually ones here in Canada were just purchased by the Japanese and I think the Norwegians, right?

These are, and the same in Chile.

Like these are not locally owned, even regionally owned companies. They're a handful.

So we're just creating an, like if we're going to recreate a farming system out in the ocean, let's use it to fix some other problems too.

Let's make sure it's not purely vertically integrated.

Let's get into that, because that's really, I think, where you've gone, right? In this chapter of your life. So what is something that kelp or shellfish can do that land crops wish they could? How are you revolutionizing sea farming?

To step back and say, we will be eating an incredible amount of shellfish and seaweed from the ocean. I'm absolutely positive of this.

And the reason is, one, Like drought and nutrient crisis on land is pushing our food system out to sea.

It's just like it is.

And it is just making it more and more harder and more expensive to grow food on land.

And our wild fisheries can't handle that burden of eating, of more people needing more food from the ocean.

So we're going to be farming.

There's just no question about it. Then it goes to what we were talking about, like what's that going to look like?

We really believe that it's going to be shellfish and seaweed, if nothing else, because the price is going to be stable. The climate economy winds are at our back. Anybody that's growing zero input food, right? Our food requires no freshwater, no land, no feed of any type, no fertilizer. Anybody that can do that as the price of, what is corn supposed to go up 150% in the next decade? Like it's just crazy, right? So it's going to get more and more expensive to grow a whole set of crops. And ours is going to remain stable. So it's part of our future. The question is, is it going to be delicious, creative? Is it going to breathe life into communities? Like, can we build a system out there that we're proud of? I didn't ever plan to grow seaweed, right? And I'm not like a big, real excited about seaweed. Like, I think seaweed's— I can talk endlessly. I find it really fascinating, but I wouldn't do this if this was just about like how special seaweed was. I do. I think seaweed is a way to rethink our food system out the ocean.

And to solve some of those problems that I faced when I was young, which was these hollowing out communities, the hollowing out of meaning, these loss of all this talent and skills. Like, how do we keep these coastal communities alive?

Can you talk a bit about the benefits of seaweed, you know, even nutritionally?

Environmentally, sort of out of the park, right?

Like we said, no inputs. Something like kelp captures multiple times more carbon than land-based plants.

It's, you know, these are rainforests of our ocean, right?

They rebuild reefs, they soak up nitrogen, phosphorus. You think of coral reefs in regions like kelp and oyster reefs are our foundational sort of systems to keep our oceans alive environmentally.

As far as food, if you look at, there are what, I think 11,000 different plants in the ocean and many of them are edible, but we haven't even looked at them, right? You know, it's, it's a, what's interesting is I remember a bunch of years ago I went around to see who had done the nutritional profile of seaweeds. And it was just like people were looking at a handful of them, basically just on custom and tradition. The only folks I found were a major global pet food company that had done an analysis of 250 types of seaweeds, a nutritional analysis, because they were very worried about the future of the price of their ingredients and climate change.

So they were bio-mining essentially, right, in the ocean, looking for different nutrients for their pet food. Right? Because they were so price sensitive.

And actually there's this whole history that I'm no expert on, but it turns out a lot of the innovation on like chewy granola bars and all sorts of stuff all come out of the pet food industry. The folks that invented all these different treats for pets, then that was then transferred into the snack industry. It's fun, like all the different mouthfeels and crunches and stuff like that.

Someone's gotta write a story about it.

Depending on the seaweed, more vitamin C than oranges, more protein than red meat in something like a, a nori, more D than in milk.

Like it is, the nutrients are just packed in the ocean and in these plants. Now they're not all in one kelp, like its protein level is low, for example. But if, as you begin looking at the plants and putting together dishes with different seaweeds, they can play a powerful role in keeping folks healthy.

I think the challenges, I mean, you know, in the book there's a chapter, Kelp is the New Kale.

Right.

And I think that was the stupidest thing I ever said. The reason I said that was I'd never had kale before, right? Ever.

But like students from Yale came out from the Yale Sustainable Farm Program and came out to work on the farm and they all had those kale shirts on and we crossed it out as a joke with a marker and wrote kelp, right?

So I was like, ah, kelp is the new kale.

I started saying it, you know, like at events and things like that.

And, you know, the trajectory of kale was that it was rabbit food. Right. And then some high-end chefs got hold of it. And then they did creative, amazing stuff.

There was like a kale lobby and all these things, and then it moved down into middle-class food. But there was this trajectory into high-end food and then into the center of the plate.

So, and it looked like that's what kelp was going to be, but it didn't go that way.

And I think kelp flavor profile, it's a much harder flavor profile to break open. So I think it's more powerful as a crop than kale, meaning its climate benefits is a potential to scale, just like the bounty of it is so much more powerful than kale.

But it's taken a while to really figure out what are the ingredient powers of kelp.

And we went through this early, you know, we were doing like, everyone was doing salads for a while, right?

Yeah. And then everybody was doing noodles and different things and it was like, yeah, it's good, but regular salad's better. Or like you'd taste it and you'd be excited that there was this hero ingredient in it.

You wouldn't be excited because there was a whole new sort of taste profile to it.

So that's been the journey. It's been like, okay, no, this isn't high-end chef doing amazing dishes and then that dribbling down.

It's a different journey. And so for me, it's been way more interesting.

Like there's an incredible, like kelp crumble company.

It's a co-op called Naughty Seafoods out of Maine.

If I were to replace one dish, it would be meatloaf, like that core American dish of meatloaf, because kelp and mushrooms go really, really well together. It became about how do you take sea vegetables, sea greens, and combine them with land-based flavors? Because kelp is like, it's a flavor enhancer. It has that umami. I mean, I remember René Redzepi out on the boat telling me he, like, when he started Noma, like standard was he'd use kelp to, in order to get more flavor out of all his vegetables.

He'd throw kelp in there not to eat, but to enhance the flavor.

So it's got all that umami, has a great mouthfeel, sort of an al dente piece. It turns bright green when you cook it.

So that move from like a seaweed into a sea green.

So like its aesthetics are really strong. And then, you know, as a salt sodium alternative, things like that, you get an incredible sort of salty, natural saltiness that comes with it. Like there's a salt marsh beef, there's a kelp beef out of the Hebrides Islands where the sheep all eat kelp for the season and paste it in their meat. You get the umami, you get the saltiness, you get all this sort of marbling. Same with chickens, the yolks, the flavor. Kelp becomes this thing to bring flavor back into our food system.

That's one of its role.

Like, I think of food kelp now, not as a hero ingredient of like this climate change warrior, Rather, it's a great problem solver.

It's a problem solver for, you know, let's take something like sunscreens, right?

It turns out kelp is excellent because it's exposed half of every day, usually out in the sun.

It just has these incredible qualities that as a natural sunscreen combined with other stuff, it functions really well.

So all of our work at GreenWave really is like, how do we use kelp to address problems that other industries are facing?

Will you just share with what GreenWave is for people? I don't, I don't think everyone's heard about that.

Sure. So GreenWave is a nonprofit.

We work throughout North America and we've got some programming in New Zealand and Argentina as well. It has a couple components. We created an online platform where we open source how to do a hatchery, how to do seed banks, how to build your own farm, how to build processing lines.

And then we also have high-touch programming.

GreenWave came out like as the model began to gain momentum, I started training just folks I knew, friends of mine, former fishermen to grow seaweed. It was like, you know, 5 people a year and we set up a website and 8,000 people signed up for the farmer training program in the US and then requests in over 100 countries.

Like that was, I think, 9 years ago.

I got together with Emily Stengel, my co-founder at GreenWave, and we were like, okay, how do we do this seriously? Let's not create a company. Let's do a nonprofit because we need collaboration, not competition as we're building this industry, moved out there.

But so GreenWave has this online platform. So it has the like information hub, you know, the curriculum, things like that, farm design tools, budgeting tools, but also has a community with 6,000 people on it, has a seaweed source where farmers and buyers of seaweed can come and do forward contracting.

And then we have something called the MyKelp app, which farmers use to Take measurements on their farm. So we have like the best dataset of kelp farming throughout North America. That's one part of the program.

And then we have a subsidy program and granting program where farmers get paid to grow kelp because what they're doing has all these environmental benefits. The market doesn't pay for it, doesn't recognize that.

So GreenWave actually gives up to $10,000 per farm. And then we have an infrastructure program where we help build hatcheries and processing lines.

So we got a pretty robust program.

We got a staff of 25. And it's great cuz it's made me obsolete. Like the folks doing it are just—

Did you find that the fishermen that moved to this model were, were to what you spoke about earlier? Did they feel fulfilled?

We don't know what the kelp farmer of the future is going to be. I thought it was all gonna like former addicts like me. There is that, right?

We got folks running 90-foot trawlers out doing it on the shoulder season, you know, when they're, you know, they'll fish and then the, the winter they'll grow kelp. We've got shell fishermen who, you know, were just oystermen, now they bring in kelp and now they're doing polyculture, which is I think really important.

But if you look at our, the folks out there, it's like everything from folks who wanted to grow on land but couldn't get land, like young farmers.

It's cops, it's lawyers, it's climate activists, it's fishermen.

It's like, it's just all over the place. And I think, and it's, I think it's majority women that are in the industry at this point. And I think it's attracted a lot of people because it's not built yet. That feeling of like, oh, we get to build this, own it, create our own new rules. Pioneers, like the pirate sensibility, right? You know, that we're like, we get to build something from their own. So I think there's a lot of ownership of it. So anyway, it's been fascinating. So I think the soul-filling part, like that pride of growing, of like lifting a wall of plants out of the water.

Yes, that's very soul-filling.

And it is interesting to see, like the commercial fishermen all the way to folks that are, you know, had cubicle jobs that entered.

I think they're all creating an identity together and we'll have to see in 10 years what it looks like.

I think it's the biggest surprise to me of who came into this.

It's like all walks of life.

And it's not just seaweed, right? Because it's all, it's the system is created where you have basically, I don't know if I'm using the right terminology, but like trees of seaweed. But then at the bottom, you're also doing shellfish, right? And which shellfish do you primarily do?

I started out as an oysterman and then I had to diversify into seaweed because I got wiped out by 2 hurricanes. And I just needed multiple species for multiple seasons, crops for different seasons so that I'd be able to sort of keep my business alive. That was like the origin of my polyculture. But so I grow oysters, mussels, clams, scallops, and kelp. And I tried a bunch of other stuff as well, Gracilaria and different things, but those are the ones I ended up centering. Centering on.

And I think the polyculture thing is key.

I mean, there's been a risk in the, as the kelp industry has gained momentum, I think there's some folks have come in, some big, big sort of speculative players that do want to do monoculture farms. And we all started very intentionally as polyculture because Mother Nature functions in a reef system.

And what we've learned, if you grow kelp next to mussels, it's stunning. You get 20% higher yield of kelp If these are grown together, these species don't compete. You think they would. I still don't really understand why this happens, but they don't compete. It's, they, they work together and the reef system is how to get the most productivity out of a farm.

That's fascinating. It makes you wonder if, well, that is true on land as well. Of course, there's certain, like tomatoes grow really well with certain herbs, right? And they help to actually keep the bugs off them. So there's lots of synergistic properties within nature. We just have to tap into them, right?

Yeah, exactly.

There's nothing new here.

All we need to do is take Mother Nature's technology, these natural solutions, and figure out how to replicate them, how to scale them, and how to turn them, you know, make sure that people can have livelihoods around them.

You know, I was looking at kind of some of your timelines. You know, I know 2017 was a big year of getting honored for this work, you know, from the Rolling Stone magazine, 25 People Shaping the Future, to the Time magazine. honoring your ocean farming as the best invention of 2017. And then that, that's 7 years ago now. So what are we seeing these days? Like, is there still that excitement? Because I feel like from my layman perspective, it got hot for a while, but then I don't hear anyone talking about it now.

It wasn't a bubble, but there's a thing called, um, what's it called? I forget what it is.

There's some name for this hype curve where you have an idea that's going to be part of humanity's future and growing plants underwater is going to be part of that, right?

And then there's too much excitement, right?

And you get all these different folks getting in and you get then really speculative behavior.

And then the speculators leave, like it doesn't meet its promise of like fully flat out solving climate change or fully flat out, you know, being biofueled to power planes, stuff like that.

Like that's where the discussion got.

And then folks leave and then there's this period of sort of disillusionment, and then there's a period of realistic, steady growth. But that's like a real thing that happens in industries.

And I didn't know it then, but if I look back, I think that's what happened.

You know, there was all this excitement and then like, you know, Bezos came in and all these, and Department of Energy came in and it got really nuts in that the Department of Energy put what, like $30 million into creating kelp as a biofuel. So we were all polyculture farmers, right? Growing food and growing soil amendments. That's sort of like what we were doing. And then like some cosmetics and like, that's what the industry was.

The speculators came in and they decided biofuel and blue carbon were the 2 best uses for kelp.

And it turns out those are the worst uses of kelp, right? What's blue carbon? You grow kelp, then you throw it in the bottom of the ocean.

Terrible use of kelp, right? And then biofuel, it's like taking it and competing with the fossil fuel industry is just nuts.

And is it even efficient? Like, is it, is it one of those things where it actually takes more energy to create it that way?

Absolutely. Like, you know, I end up doing studies. You look, you need a thou— you know, you need your farms offshore, deep waters. They need to be 1,000-acre farms. You know, kelp is not an app and agriculture is not like technology, right? All of us in the, who know farming and know systems, like we've seen the tech bros come in and try so many times to disrupt our, our industry.

And then they sort of move on and now they're in the, the, the AI world is I think where most of 'em ended up.

So that was like, they took all the oxygen out of the room and there were crazy plans.

There was one company, Running Tide, that got money from one of the big cashless apps and they might've raised like $100 million or something.

I'm not like some massive amount. And their goal was to create these pucks of kelp in the millions that float out into the ocean and then through some robotic thing, they let go and all that kelp sinks to the bottom and becomes blue carbon and they're selling blue carbon credits. All of those companies failed. So it was just a crazy, crazy time. And then they've all left and now we've been able to really concentrate on sort of serious, sort of sustainable, steady growth. Being a shiny thing in this kind of sort of fake it till you make it economy, that is where the investment is about incredible amount of money and then hockey stick curve and exit, right?

That's what they, it's a really short-term rather than long-haul thinking. Is really problematic, I think, in our ag system.

That's sort of what happened. Then they all left and then the chessboard changed.

A whole bunch of us were left standing.

And what we've been doing now is like permitting, setting up farms, setting up hatcheries, setting up processing stabilization hubs, and then creating groups of folks around certain market, you know, value-added products. And so now there are enough hatcheries, farms, farmers, seed, and hubs to produce.

We could do 30 million pounds in the US right now if we flipped a switch.

Market is not there, but supply we've solved. And the we is the big we, like this isn't just GreenWave.

There's an incredible network of folks working together on this stuff.

So now the big question is markets.

And we actually just brought, created a relationship with the Unilever Foundry, around cosmetics in order to use kelp as replacements for some of the chemicals they're using.

It's like food ingredients, like sodium alternatives and broths and flavoring and the kelp crumble, things like that. Cosmetics, bioplastics is like a very, you know, in London, I think most of the takeout containers now are coated with seaweed instead of plastic. And then the last is this biostimulant is using seaweed in the soil. I think that's very, very, very powerful.

We can go deeper into it if you want, but this using the ocean's biodiversity and getting it into land-based agriculture has potential.

These are the good uses of kelp, right? The use of the sensible, the ones with highest value that we can build an industry on.

We just had this moment that was just like chaos.

So what do you think it's going to take though, to bring this industry to the forefront? You mentioned those 4 avenues, but to really have it come back into play and maybe even dominate more, is it like kids can, you know, need to be snacking on seaweed instead of chips? Containers need to be lined with it. Like, do, do the things that are already in place just have to kind of have more time to amplify? Or, or is there some philosophical shift that has to happen?

Shifting tastes is tough and telling people what to eat is tough. It happens. It's just slow. My take is that like, this is going to be part of our future.

We just don't know how fast. And I actually think that what's really going to drive it is the unit economics. It's like the price of potatoes here are going through the roof because the droughts in the last 2 years up in the Maritimes have just been brutal. The number of vegetables that are losing their nutritional content because all their energy has to be fighting climate change, right? With the heat, drought stress, soil degradation, all those sort of things. Like I was saying before, as the price of those things go up, the demand for seaweed will go up because it'll just be the most affordable option.

We just don't know how fast that's going to— is that 50 years? Is it 10 years? We just don't know. So there's the climate economy piece. What was holding us up was this supply question. Like we had to permit hundreds and hundreds of farms.

It's, you know, so I think there are about 6,000 acres permitted in North America now, if I'm right.

And we needed enough hatcheries and skilled farmers and things like that. Like what happened on land took 10,000 years. We had to do it like really, really fast.

And so it took us a bunch of years to get the supply issue solved.

We've solved that.

Then the question is, what's the best use of kelp, right? As a problem solver.

Biostim will be the first really scalable thing that's going to come into play. And that's because folks have been using, farmers have been using seaweed for hundreds of years, of course, on their farms.

And I think it's like Less than 1% of farmers on the globe use seaweed biostimulant, right? Like as a fertilizer alternative.

Really? But what do we know it does? It allows, if you spray a kelp biostimulant on your crops, it activates that the biome in the soil and strengthens the plants with various hormones. It means 7,000 gallons less water needed per acre, 15% less fertilizer, You know, the wine industry, let's say they spray it in August. They call it the sunscreen every farmer needs.

They spray seaweed biostim as a way to deal with those sort of spikes in extreme weather temperature. So GreenWave has a goal of a million acres of land, land agriculture using seaweed biostim in the next few years. And I think we'll definitely hit that.

The seaweed biostim will be one where there's a lot of activity in that.

I think that's going to, because the drought issue is such a crisis and really messing with you know, the profitability of farms. I think that's one.

And then the other big thing that's driving this much faster than I thought it would was global instability of supply chains. So Unilever and Nestlé and all these folks have been swimming around us for a decade and they've been saying like, one, we want to meet our climate goals.

That was one reason, but it was all the supply, you know, do you have enough supply? They have like rushed to the table now because sourcing is such a such an issue. As we all know, it's global instability on top of climate change and this rise of like this belief that we need to rebuild things domestically for security. So anybody that can grow a renewable resource in regional and local and domestic waters anywhere has a huge advantage.

So we're getting approached now by Folks that are worried about their ingredient supply chains.

And it's the same people that are talking to soldier fly companies, black soldier fly companies are also looking for kelp because they're just on a search for new sources of nutrients.

I'm not familiar with the black soldier or what is it called?

Black soldier flies. So black soldier flies are, you know, it's these fly farms. They use them for proteins to feed chickens and they use it as in soil as frass and they use it as as bait alternatives and fish feed.

And like you can buy it at any pet store, you'll see BSF, black soldier fly.

And so these farms are popping up all over Europe and Africa, in the US and Canada, they're just starting to, but what's really interesting is to see the, some of the big strategic agricultural players that are now investing in building these because they need sources of protein for their chickens, for example.

Fertilizer prices doubled in 2004 because most of fertilizer is coming from Ukraine and Russia. So they need domestic secure sources of nutrients for ag. So this sort of like build, build, build infrastructure, infrastructure, the look for rare earth minerals, all those sort of things, oddly enough, and I didn't expect this, it just has shown itself, is that the fact we can grow an incredible amount of seaweed in local waters. And there's all this good stuff in seaweed is it sort of makes this way more attractive than, than before.

And it also does sound like it's a, it's a more natural and what you've already articulated, sustainable form of, of let's say fertilizer or whatever, you know, whatever the use is for it. As we close though, I always like to think about, well, what, what can the listener take with them today? Like what change can they incorporate from our, from your expertise or from our conversation that they can immediately start? And I think, you know, we're talking a lot about kelp farming, seaweed farming. We're talking a lot about the industry problems, but is there something that the listener can do to help solve some of these problems tomorrow?

Absolutely.

At a meta sense.

I just want to say, move into the solutions space, like the politics of yes. There is so much joy in trying to figure out and moving into these sort of solutions and directing our lives towards sort of building things rather than sort of tearing down or stopping things. I just said it's a get in that flow is one thing I'd say. And there are thousands of incredible solutions out there. You know, they're the folks doing like Fibershed that are rebuilding the cotton supply chain in the US with mills and cotton farmers. There are just so many solutions out there.

A good source of this place is if you go to Ashoka Network, I'm part of, part of just all these different folks just coming up with brilliant, workable sort of people-based solutions that I suggest folks plug into.

So that's one from the Ocean point of view, sort of immediately shifting and getting some sea vegetables into your diet, into the kitchen really does matter now.

I think it's the right time. The supply is there.

We can scale.

And I think that flavor profile, right, in something like the kelp crumble, like if you got kelp things 6, 7 years ago, I don't think it was delicious, amazing food.

There are now kelp curries and Dijon mustards made out of kelp. There's companies like Barnacle, which is doing incredible hot sauces. I'd say get that on the plate while the fish apps confuse you. This is a really simple, relaxing one to do, and you're supporting a domestic industry and you're supporting part of that sort of solution-based sort of perspective on the world. The other thing is like, Hop over to the GreenWave site and we've got some, you can swim through, like it's an AV thing where you can swim through a kelp farm, learn about it. You can design your own kelp farm, like hop over there to the GreenWave hub and sort of have fun and, but also get literate on it.

The ocean is going to be a big part of our future. I mean, listen, sea level is rising.

From my perspective, that's more farmland and everyone else is fleeing the coast, like turn towards the ocean. Let's embrace it. We're going to be getting more of our food there. We're going to be getting more of our, you know, all sorts of different ingredients and it's going to be showing up all over the place. So this is a chance for everybody to, all the landlubbers to start getting their sea legs.

I love that. Yeah. The landlubbers start embracing your sea legs. I'm just so grateful that you took the time to talk to me and to share your wisdom with everyone. I really do sincerely mean That your book is fantastic. I can't recommend it enough that people check it out. And what you're doing, you know, I really do love that you're redirecting people back to nature's systems and solutions. That is, I believe, one of the most important things for any of us to do in industry and innovation.

Mars is not the answer. The answers are here on Earth. Nature is a brilliant technology, right? If you gotta get stuck in a technology framework, like the things that happen in the ocean, the solutions in there are just stunning. We can solve this as long as we do exactly what you said.

We, like, our mentor is nature, not the tech bros.

I love that. Let nature be thy mentor.

Yeah, right on. So real honor to be on. Thanks so much.

And it's so great that like, I love getting to spend time with folks that I wouldn't normally.

Ditto. And so you mentioned a few things, a few things people can do to connect with organizations that you're passionate about or part of. How can they personally connect with you? Is that through social or specific site?

Yeah. So I have pulled completely off of social media world, but through Green Wave, there's a community on there and we're all on it.

Right.

So if you go to the Regenerative Ocean Farming Hub, connect through there and we'll, and we got a whole team and I'm on there of like folks that are engaging not only farmers, but the community of passion as well.

Awesome. And that's a good place for if someone is inspired to go down this path to start as well, right?

Absolutely.

And, you know, on there is everything, you know, there are scientists, there's students, there are entrepreneurs, there are farmers, there's, you know, it's a whole mix of mix of folks.

Fantastic. Well, thank you again for your time, and thank you everyone for joining us on today's talk. If you enjoyed what you heard or saw, the way to relay that to us is by following us on any of the platforms you listened or watched us on, by leaving a comment, and/or just sharing it with a friend or family member to encourage them to watch too. So thank you all and stay curious. Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links, and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's eatpluck.com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.