This is the first episode of the Aquaculture in Maine Podcast. I spoke with Adam St. Gelais - the Aquaculture Innovation Specialist at the Aquaculture Research Institute in Walpole, ME to learn more about how kelp is farmed, the environmental, economic, and social aspects of the process, and the benefits it could bring us in the face of climate change.

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Corinne

Welcome to the Aquaculture and Maine Podcast. This is your Go to podcast. For information about the aquaculture sector in Maine. Today I'm here with Adam Saint Julie, who is the Aquaculture innovation specialist at the Aquaculture Research Institute. So this is the first episode of the podcast, and I think that content like this has been a long time coming, and I cannot think of a better person than Adam to kick off the series by talking all things kelp with us. So, Adam, if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself by just saying a little bit about your position and letting the audience get to know you a little bit.

Adam

My name is Adam Saint Gelais. I'm an aquaculture innovation specialist with ARI. What does that mean? That means that I work on a lot of different research projects that are sort of facing the industry in an applied way, trying to move it forward. As the title sounds right, innovating? Right now I'm working on some bivalve projects, so working on scallops and oysters as well as I've been doing applied seaweed research for probably a little over six years, almost seven years now.

Corinne

Thanks, Adam. So I'm hoping, before we get into the nitty gritty of seaweed, if you could just set the stage for our listeners by describing broadly the seaweed industry in Maine falling within the context of the global seaweed industry.

Adam

Seaweed farming is relatively new to Maine, as well as some other areas across the North Atlantic and the North Pacific but seaweed farming is not not new. It's been happening for a very long time in other areas around the world, namely in places like China and Japan and South Korea. So globally, aquaculture of seaweeds is massive. Right. It's like a $15 billion a year industry. So it is at scale in these places already, and in places like Maine and other places in the US. That are just emerging into seaweed farming. We're very much starting at square one. So I would say seaweed farming in Maine centers mostly around one particular species at this moment, which is sugar kelp. Saccharina Latisima. There are about, give or take, ten species of seaweed in Maine that could be farmed. Sugar kelp is the one that seems to have taken off at the moment, and that started about ten years ago today.

Corinne

Yeah. So is sugar kelp native to Maine?

Adam

Yes, so it is native to Maine, Seaweeds that are farmed or will be farmed in Maine will always be native to Maine. It is illegal to import nonnative species for aquaculture in Maine for aquaculture in the ocean.

Corinne

Thanks, Adam. I'd love to start with the actual farming process of seaweed and then chat about why we're farming it and why it's so important to Maine and how it all got started. So, Adam, maybe if you could start with the creation of the actual farm and then go into how farmers begin to grow this product, followed by what happens once the product is ready to harvest.

Adam

Sure. Yeah, so seaweed I mean, it's like a $15 billion a year industry, right? So that's, why are we farming seaweed to begin with. So people must be using it for something if we're selling food. $15 billion a year of it. So it's in everything. A lot of the seaweeds that produce carrageenan and other sort of, like, compounds within the seaweed end out as ingredients in things that you use and eat every day that you don't really think about, like toothpaste or yogurt or ice cream. Those are kind of the classic examples of things that seaweed components are hidden in. In Maine with sugar cup. Specifically, the first companies had to vertically integrate because there wasn't really a domestic market for seaweed. And like I said, it's at scale globally, right? So you can't start at a really small scale and expect to compete with those international markets because they're already traded at commodity scales. So they're very large farms and going for very low prices per pound. Right? So the companies in Maine started by vertically integrating, so they had to figure out how do we create the babies, how do we create the farm and how do we create the products. So I can kind of walk our way through that. Every farmer has to start with seeds, right? There's no direct analog with kelp because there are no kelp seeds. The way you create baby kelp to go onto a farm right now, now anyway, is that the industry is dependent on wild kelp beds, right? So a farmer will, or whoever is running the kelp, we call them nurseries, will go out into the Gulf of Maine around now, well, a little earlier than now, call it fall, and look for wild kelp blades that are reproductive. So that means they've got this special tissue called sorous tissue that grows down the center of the blade. It's really dark and kind of raised. So if you're ever out on the beach after a big storm and you see kelp washed up, you can pick it up and kind of look at it. And if the center of the kelp blade looks dark and very different from the rest, that's the sourus tissue. So that's the goal, that's what everyone is after. So you can take that sourus issue back onto land and into a lab or a nursery facility and you can make that kelp release spores.

Corinne

Sorry, Adam, I want to interrupt you for a second. You were mentioning spores and I think it would be interesting for listeners to hear about the life cycle of macroalgae and what these spores really are

Adam

So kelp has a complex, but not so complex lifestyle cycle in the grand scheme of macroalgae. Macroalges have just really convoluted life cycles…kelp will release spores. Those spores swim around, which is really cool. You don't think of kelp being mobile, but you look at them under the microscope and they're motoring all over the place. So they swim around looking for something to settle on. Once they settle, they create an intermediary life phase, which is called a gametophyte. Those gametophytes are very, very tiny, microscopic filamentous little things that look like brown fuzz, but those brown fuzzes are both boys and girls. And once those mature, the gametophytes then release eggs and sperm, which fertilize in the water column or sometimes internally, and then resettle back out. And then those grow into what's called a sporophyte, which is the thing that you think of when you think of a kelp blade, right? A big piece of lasagna in the ocean. So that's the life cycle. You can control all of that in a facility, and boy, I could talk for a really long time on this. So, long story short, right, you get the source issue, you release spores. The goal is then to have those spores settle on something that you want them to settle on. And the way this is done in Maine right now is on what we call spools. So it's a two inch feet of PVC pipe with a bunch of nylon twine wrapped really tightly around it for the entire length of the pipe, usually about 2ft long. So figure 200 ft of twine wrapped around 2 ft of pipe. So when you put that spool in seawater and you put spores in it, spores will settle onto the twine, and then it's just a matter of making those spores happy for three to four weeks. So you put them in a tank, you give them nutrients, you give them light, give them the right temperature, and they'll go through that developmental reproductive process. And in four weeks, you end up with a spool that has hundreds of thousands to millions of tiny little baby kelps on it. That's the nursery phase.

Corinne

What nutrients are you giving them in this phase?

Adam

So kelp are not plants, but they're very light plants, right? So they photosynthesize, they're autotrophs, so they need light and they need nutrients, just like a plant would. So we use a formulation called F over two. It's something that was developed, um, by other scientists long ago specifically for microalgae. So it has the right ratios of things like iron and nitrogen and phosphorus and other trace nutrients and minerals that you would find in seawater. So once they've been in the nursery for about four weeks, then they're ready to go out onto the farm.

Corinne

Okay, so I'm following you so far. So we are at the end of the nursery phase, and these spools are ready to be set out in the water. So how is the twine being placed in the water for the growing process to actually begin?

Adam

So the next task, obviously, is to get this 200ft of kelpie twine that is condensed onto this two foot piece of pipe stretched out in the ocean so that it can grow. So kelpie, typically, what a kelp farm is, if you think about it, is it's a rope that's suspended at a certain depth that a kelp will be happy at in the Gulf of Maine, that seems to be around 2 meters. And on that rope, you then unspool this piece of twine. Right. So the most simplest version of a farm would be an anchor and a mooring line and then your culture line, which is at 2 meters to another mooring line down to another anchor. Right. So it's just a rope between two anchors with some booze on the corners. The way that you get the seed onto the farm is that you thread your culture line so that rope, that's 2 meters under the surface of the water, you thread it through your two inch PVC pipe. Then you take one end of the kelp twine off of that pipe, tie it to your rope, and then basically, you can motor your boat down the farm. And that 200ft of kelp twine unschools off the PVC pipe and winds itself around your larger rope in the ocean. And that's how you seed the kelp farm. And then in terms of sort of farm tasks and husbandry, it's fairly hands on from that point on. Hands off. It's not that labor intensive. I guess that's what I'm trying. So it's really sort of front loaded and backloaded with labor in the middle. It's advisable to go out and make sure your farm is there. Right. It's out there in the wintertime, which I sort of buried that lead. Right. So the nursery season is in the fall, and typically kelp seed will be outplanted anytime between October through now. Like early December. So it's growing throughout the entire winter months, which is pretty cool. Right. It's a crop that happens in the wintertime. It's a crop that doesn't require land, it doesn't require fresh water, it doesn't require fertilizers. And it will grow from this tiny little two millimeter sporophyte to something that's two and 3 meters long by the time you harvest it in May and June.

Corinne

So once it's grown from the small sporophyte to what I think most people can picture as a couple of meters long kelp blade then what happens next. Because to my knowledge now, in Maine, most of the seaweed that's grown is used for food products and then animal feed.

Adam

Right, yeah. At the moment, I think it's heavily weighted towards food value added food products simply because Maine is still growing a relatively small quantity of seaweed. It has increased that quantity pretty rapidly over the last, I would say, five years. It's sort of been doubling on an annual basis in terms of output. So we're approaching a million pounds, and I wouldn't be surprised if we exceeded that after this winter's harvest, which is great. But the highest value products are those sort of boutique, health food products. So that's primarily where most of the cup that's being grown, it's going to there are some other companies that are like you alluded to looking at things like animal feed, and I know of at least one company, maybe two, that are looking at kelp farming in Maine for bioproduct production. I think the company is called Everything Seaweed. They're based at the Ocean Cluster, in Portland, and they're looking at biorefining to create things like nanocellulose from kelp. And those are really cool, exciting avenues for the industry to go down, but they're going to require some scale.

Corinne

So talking about scale, I think this is a great segue to discuss. One of the papers you sent me. Yes, I did my homework, and I'd love to talk about the farm that you all designed called Farm in a Box and why it's important to develop this smaller scale farm for a newer kelp farm farmer and for Maine's working waterfronts.

Adam

Corinne

So the less protected areas, that means that you're having, like, higher wind action?

Adam

More wind, bigger waves, higher currents. So there's a lot of talk up in air quality offshore aquaculture, but in the academic sphere, people really will define what offshore really means. Is that outside of 3 miles, is it outside 12 miles? Is it anywhere in the EEZ? But from our perspective in Maine, I think there's a lot of space that is sort of near shore but exposed, so it's not offshore. So you're not having to steam 12 miles out to get to your kelp farm, but it's not tucked inside some cove or behind in the lee of an island right. Where it's really protected. So, for example, the farm in the box paper, that farm was in Sacco Bay, so it was less than a mile from port, but had unlimited full exposure. Right. So we got, I think we measured a seven meter wave in like, 14 meters of water. That's like half the water column, right? Yeah. It was really, really energetic. Yeah.

Corinne

Well, this farm in a box sounds really cool. So are people currently using this design, or is that the hopes for the future?

Adam

I think that's the hopes in the future. And that was a sort of a single long line system thing, where at least our next projects have moved away from that model and are looking at things like arrays, where you have multiple lines that are held in place. Because right now it's one line, two moorings. So if you have a larger farm and say you have 100 lines, it's a really big farm for me. But then you've got 200 moorings, and those, in terms of a cost capex for your farm equipment, those are probably the most expensive components. So the more that you can decrease those while maintaining the amount of lines you have in the water or sort of area for growing kelp, that really helps the bottom line.

Corinne

So far, I think I've heard you touch on topics revolving around our coastal economy and livelihoods and economic sustainability. And just so we don't run out of time, it would be great if we could move into more of the environmental sustainability side of things and chat a little bit about carbon sequestration and all of that fun stuff. That I think most listeners probably have at least heard of and may have a little bit of background information on, but might not be totally sure what that all really means.

Adam

Yeah. So it's interesting, right, because thus far, my foray into the kelp universe has been on sort of opposite ends of the spectrum, right? It's like starting with super focused community scale, 400 foot long farm and decreasing the cost as much as possible for someone for supplemental livelihoods. And now, way on the other end of the spectrum, talking about, well, can seaweed be grown at large enough scales to be a source of offsetting carbon and a nature based climate change solution?

Corinne

Yeah. So offsetting carbon, I guess, backing up. So there's CO2 in the atmosphere, right? And that's too much of it. Too much of it. And we keep hearing this, like global warming CO2, and there's all of these different realms that are engineering based or nature based that have been used in the past or are currently being used to try and lower greenhouse gas emissions. And so relatively new is using kelpin as a way to sequester carbon, right. Take carbon out of the atmosphere and helps to lower CO2. And I think that's something that, because it's pretty new, a lot of people are unsure of what that looks like and really how that even works.

Adam

Yeah. I mean, it's so new that we're still trying to figure out if it works. Right. I mean, the science here is this is sort of bleeding edge, right. Sort of like to back up and be like, so why? So we know climate change is a problem. What would be at 420 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere? And then pre industrial levels are something like 350. So we've like way overshot where we should be. And even if we stop emitting all carbon now, we're still on our way to more than 1.5 degrees of global planetary warming. Right? So we're now to the point where we're going to have to suck some of that carbon back out of the atmosphere to try to re equilibrate the climate. Right? Well, that's going to be fun. There's sort of a multitude of different viewpoints and approaches to carbon sequestration, removing carbon from the atmosphere to try to decrease the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and hopefully limit warming. Kelp is sort of one of the newest ones and broadly it's sort of ocean based carbon to accident removal. So we call that CDR broadly. A hot topic area, right? So we figure this. There's only so much land on the Earth. They're covered in 70% ocean. So perhaps the oceans would be a solution for for climate. In fact, they already have been. Right? Like, people don't really understand that. But without the oceans, we would have cooked ourselves off this planet a long time ago. The the biggest CO2 sink. So that's part of the reason that the oceans are really attractive for carbon dioxide removal, is that most of the carbon dioxide that we emit actually just goes into the ocean, dissolved just naturally. Right. So this is what's driving things. Like if you're familiar with concepts around ocean acidification, right? The oceans are becoming more acidic. That's because the oceans are big giant sponges for CO2. They suck them up. Thank you, oceans. But that comes with consequences, right? So there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere. There's also too much CO2 in the ocean. So the idea is by using something like kelp or what are some other ocean alkalinity or iron fertilization. So ways to create or to increase the primary productivity in the ocean, which sucks carbon out of the ocean. And then if you can take that car, the trick is getting that carbon to then be sequestered away and I have gone around in the circle, and now I'm back to where I was starting… So kelp has been proposed as one of these solutions, right? So terrestrial analogues might be something like forests, right? Or at forest station, where you're planting a forest, where there wasn't a forest before, those trees grow, you leave them there for a really long time, and they suck carbon out of the atmosphere, put them in their trunks, and it's there for a meaningful period of time to help us decrease carbon. In many ways, that's a lot less challenging than doing it in the ocean, because you can measure a tree, you can measure a forest, you can say fairly reliably, this is how much carbon is in here and how much carbon is in there on an annual basis. That's more difficult with kelp. But one of the reasons kelp is, I think, attractive, or is proposed to be attractive, is that it grows a lot faster than a tree. Like I was saying earlier, you seed this kelp farm up, and these tiny kelps are at 2 mm long. And then, you know, four to six months later, they're 3 meters long. And that's just sugar kelp, right? So, macrocystis, the the giant kelps on the West Coast, they grow on the border of meters per day. So that's and they're really efficient at sucking nutrients and carbon out of the ocean. The problem is they're not a tree, right? So you have to lock that carbon away somewhere.

Corinne

So to lock the carbon away, is this where sinking kelp to the bottom of the ocean comes into play?

Adam

Corinne

So to be clear, no one is sinking kelp right now. But there is hope from researchers that this is a potential viable solution to address ever increasing levels of carbon in the atmosphere, correct?

Adam

Corinne

So if we're talking about carbon, we should probably talk about the emissions released during the farming process while the kelp is growing on the water. It's minimal resource effort, meaning you're not having help or any of that. But you do have to go out to the farm and check on it throughout the process. Right. So is more carbon sequestered than is emitted during farming and processing?

Adam

Corinne

So all of the research that you've been a part of than that we've been talking about throughout this episode has been done in Maine. Is this applicable or relevant to other areas of the US. Like maybe on the West Coast or even other parts of the world as well?

Adam

Corinne

Thanks. I actually feel like this is a pretty good wrap up spot. So thanks for talking about Kelp with us, Adam, and sharing everything you know about it

Adam

Yeah, it wasn't everything, but we'd be here for a long time.

Corinne

That'd be like a follow up, hour long podcast.

Adam

Thanks, Corinne.

Corinne

Thanks for listening to our conversation about Kelp. Hope you enjoyed it and got something out of it. It's always fun to hear Adam talk about Kelp, and I really appreciate him taking the time to share his knowledge and research with us.