Richard Perkins visits the only spirulina farm in northern Europe (on a former forestry research site) to inspect production and reused farm infrastructure. The host interviews a marine biologist and Chris about spirulina biology (a photosynthetic cyanobacterium, grown here as Platensis), production scale (ponds ~10 m^3, rapid doubling every 2–3 days) and harvesting/processing methods (pumping through a fine mesh, pressing to a paste). Reported wet production is ~10 kg/week (≈2.5 kg dry), with dry prices mentioned in the dialogue.
Questions this video answers
Platensis
About 10 cubic meters
About 10 kilograms per week (wet)
About one quarter (dry ≈ 2.5 kg from 10 kg wet)
Reportedly about 1,500 (Swedish crowns) per kilogram (as stated in dialogue)
Chapters
Today we've come to the only spirulina farm in northern Europe. And the reason we come here partly to meet interesting neighbours doing interesting things, but also to look at their scrap. This was an old forestry research site that the friends had bought to start their spirulina production. For me, it's always intriguing to look at what goes into the dumps here and what gets thrown away from changes to businesses, etc. I'm interested in parts, things that I can make things with. And whenever we need to develop infrastructure at the farm, we always. The first question we ask is how do we make that ravelin or where can we buy one of them? One of the big projects I've got coming up is boiler pens. I want to build a boiler pen that can be pulled by the ATV and raise 250 birds at a time. We've had an order for a thousand birds early in the year and I want to be able to produce them more efficiently. So it's a good opportunity for us to try a different way of production. You see this big water here that would have watered all their tree seedlings on this rail system. So this is all going to scrap other than what we take. Maybe I can grow some salad crops up in the top of the greenhouse above our tomato and cucumber crops and also vertically up on the walls. There's quite a lot of resources here that I think we could have some fun experimenting with. Seeing as this is the only spirulina farm in northern Europe. We should go and take a. I'm.
A marine biologist from beginning and I always had big interest in aquaculture. I was thinking how, how can I make a living from growing something in water? And I was actually, I told Michelle I was going to Fiji and trying to start a company there, growing a Langusta, big lobster without claws. But it didn't work. So I. I was. For several years I was just trying to stay, study and find out what can I do that is not too hard to do and still gets a good profit. And eventually this is what I came up with.
Chris, what's in here then?
Algae.
Algae? Is it an algae? It's a cyanobacteria. No. What is that exactly?
If you are looking at biology, I would rather say it's bacteria. Bacteria. But cyanobacteria is more like an algae than a bacteria.
So it's the bacteria that behaves like algae.
This is the only bacteria that has photosynthesis.
What does it happen when you. What does that mean?
It means it can turn Sunlight into what? Food. Food. And how many spirulina farms have you been to, Gracie? This is the only spirulina production in northern Europe, you said.
Yeah, but maybe I've been to one in southern Europe, in France. It's very popular. A lot of micro spirulina farms.
And what sort of. How many cubic meters is.
This is about 10 cubic meters.
And what would you expect the production to be from?
Production is about 10 kilos a week.
10 kilos a week. And it's a high value product, obviously. So it's. That sounds like a lot of spirulina, actually.
Yeah, yeah. They grow much faster than plants and also they have. Because if you consider it as a bacteria and bacteria they have exponential growth rate. So I mean they double themselves in every two or three days. So if you harvest half of it on Monday, you have them all back on Wednesday, Thursday. So it's really, really rapid growth. When they're cold like they are now, it's about, I think 8 or 9 degrees. They're sensitive to light, so if you expose them to direct sunlight, they will die. So you need to. And also this insulates a little bit.
And which species is it? Is it Maxima or. There's two. No, main.
This is platensis.
Is that more common for production?
It is. I don't know exactly why it's better, but that's the one they recommend. The water is a very special medium because. And that's the advantage of growing spirulina. It's an extremophile, it can survive in extreme environment. So I create this very alkaline water for them and then there will be no other organisms that can survive in the water. So you get very pure product. And since we have this alkaline environment that only they are thriving in, we don't have to use any kinds of pesticides or nothing to extinguish to remove other kinds of organisms. That's what we can growth like this in open ponds. If you look at a lot of other algae, they're very sensitive to invasion and they have to use these bioreactors in an enclosed system. So you will protect them from foreign species. We would prefer to have it on the floor, but this all kinds of old structure was too hard to remove. And also we just had a testing period, six months and if it wouldn't work, we had to restore everything afterwards. So we just built on top of all of this to make a new support. This is to see the depth. This is how you measure how much spirulina you have in the water. It's very simple. And you just put it in the water and when it disappears, when you can't see it anymore, you measure how many sand centimeters you can see and then you can calculate how much spirulina you have in the water. It's there. It's a good state of growing for them. They have still space and they want to grow. And I have another stripe there, the blue one, that's 2cm depth on that tree. And when it reaches 2cm, then you can harvest, because they won't grow much more after that. They're like full. So you harvest back up to this one and then you go back and forth there.
So which one is that?
Right now it's like the whole nail is almost vanished.
And when you say 10 kilo production a week, that's wet, obviously. What would that turn into in dry, like powdered form or.
One quarter would be the dry.
So two and a half kilos.
Yeah.
And what's that worth in Sweden?
It's a lot. It's about. If you have a dry price, of course, it's much cheaper than the fresh one. The fresh one is more expensive. But it's. I've seen prices about 150 crowns hectare. So that's 1,500 a kilo.
Yeah.
So maybe. Yeah, it's 5,000.
Can you tell me just quickly how you harvest? Yeah.
So this is just a product.
Okay. Okay.
So what's your hand grace? We have a stand for it. So yeah, put it out there and then we just take the pump.
And this is just a very fine.
Yeah, very fine mesh. It's 550.
Okay. This is like we'd use for compost tea or something. And so you just pump water through and you pump until it blocks up.
Basically we have a big shovel, so when it pumps up, we just shovel it and then we pick it up and then it's still really wet. So we have a press afterwards. So we put it in a press and just squeeze out every last drop of water.
Yeah.
And then it's. It's. It forms like a paste. It's quite a hard paste. It's not wet form anymore.
Yeah.
This total would be about 80 cubic meters.
80 cubic meters. And. That was pretty cool. Pretty interesting. I'm going to go home to do some notes and sketches to see if I can turn any of this stuff into useful infrastructure. I hope you enjoy our videos. If you want to follow the farm, you can click subscribe below and follow us on Facebook. And if you want to find out more about our farm, how we work, you can read our book, Making Small Farms Work, which is available in the links below. Thanks for watching. See you next time.
