Saving Seafood

Rift over sustainability leads to cancellation of Maine Seaweed Festival

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — The Maine Seaweed Festival is a dream day for New England’s natural food lovers, who spend the day munching on seaweed granola and schmoozing with kelp harvesters at a daylong party astride sun-splashed Casco Bay.

But this year, it’s not happening, and a rift between the event’s organizers and some seaweed harvesters is the reason why. The planners of the popular festival, located in the country’s biggest seaweed state, said they are canceling the event this year over concerns about lack of sustainability.

Organizer Hillary Krapf, who runs a seaweed products and education company called Moon And Tide, said Maine’s seaweed industry has been besieged by a “Gold Rush mentality” that threatens sustainability as seaweed grows in popularity. New players are getting involved in Maine seaweed farming before there is anywhere near the infrastructure needed to sustainably process and sell it, she said.

“I would like to see more regulation and accountability. We can feel good about what we are promoting and make sure we are doing right by the ocean and its resources,” she said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald

How Maine lobsters’ future could depend on seaweed that surrounds them

January 4, 2016 — As the global focus on climate change shifts from negotiations in Paris to taking action to limit the globe’s average temperature increase, the focus is decidedly terrestrial. The text of the climate accord finalized last month isn’t exceedingly detailed when it comes to climate change mitigation strategies, but it devotes special attention to the importance of the world’s forests.

Meanwhile, there’s only one mention in the document’s 32 pages of a natural feature that covers 71 percent of the Earth’s surface, contains 97 percent of its water and produces at least half of its oxygen.

Oceans — which dissolve about a quarter of the world’s climate change-causing carbon dioxide — are key to any effort to combat climate change. And, of special importance to a coastal state such as Maine, oceans and the creatures that live in them are particularly susceptible to the consequences of climate change, from sea level rise to the increasing acidity of the world’s oceans.

There have been several reminders of that reality over the past year.

Read the full editorial at the Bangor Daily News

End of an era as Tokyo has last New Year tuna auction before historic fish market closes

January 5, 2015 (AP) — TOKYO — It’s among the biggest of Japan’s many New Year holiday rituals: Early on Tuesday, a huge, glistening tuna was auctioned for about $118,000 at Tokyo’s 80-year-old Tsukiji market. Next year, if all goes as planned, the tradition won’t be quite the same.

The world’s biggest and most famous fish and seafood market is due to move in November to a massive complex farther south in Tokyo Bay, making way for redevelopment of the prime slice of downtown real estate.

The closure of the Tsukiji market will punctuate the end of the post-war era for many of the mom-and-pop shops just outside the main market that peddle a cornucopia of sea-related products, from dried squid and seaweed to whale bacon and caviar.

The auction is typical of Japan’s penchant for fresh starts at the beginning of the year — the first visit of the year to a shrine and the first dream of the year are other important firsts — and it’s meant to set an auspicious precedent for the 12 months to come.

Sushi restaurateur Kiyoshi Kimura has prevailed in most of the recent New Year auctions, and he did so again this year in the bidding for a 440-pound tuna.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New York Post

 

Seaweed can help feed the world – but will we eat it?

November 2, 2015 — Let’s say you want to farm.

And let’s say there is a crop that requires you to plant and harvest, but do very little in between. It needs no fertilizing, no weeding, no watering, and it has very few enemies in the form of pests or disease. It gets all it needs from the environment around it and, under optimal conditions, can grow almost six inches a day. It’s healthful for people, and it actually leaves the environment better than it finds it.

That’s the case in favor of seaweed, and it’s a case that Charlie Yarish, a professor in the department of marine sciences at the University of Connecticut at Stamford, has been making for nigh on half a century. They call him “Captain Seaweed.” I visited his lab, and I’m a believer.

Yarish has spent decades doing the work that brings an interesting idea – let’s farm seaweed! – to the point where growers can start viable farms. There are some 3,500 kinds of seaweed, and figuring out which kind to grow, and where, and how, is a big job. The first rule? “Always grow a species native to the water you’re growing in,” says Yarish. Because some seaweeds are wildly invasive, that’s an important point.

One of the farmers who has taken advantage of Yarish’s research is Paul Dobbins. He’s a co-owner of Ocean Approved, a company that farms sugar kelp off the coast of Maine and sells it frozen, rather than dried. In a kind of busman’s holiday (I farm oysters), I went out with him to take a look at the kelp. It was early spring, and most of his crop had already been harvested, but he still had a line or two in the water. We pulled up to the buoy that marked a line, and he reached into the water.

What he pulled into the boat was a remarkable abundance of plant. Sugar kelp gives magic beanstalks a run for their money: It can grow from seedling to 15 feet over one winter. In the process, it cleans the water by removing some of the nutrients that can lead to algae blooms. Along with shellfish, kelp is one of the few farmed foods with a positive environmental impact.

And it doesn’t consume much in the way of resources. There’s the gas for the boat. There’s the labor in planting, harvesting and processing. And that’s about it.

There are a couple of ancillary non-environmental benefits. Most shellfish farming takes place from spring through early winter, so a crop that can grow from early winter through spring is an excellent complement; it can use both the space and the labor in the off-season.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald

New England seaweed the next big thing in local food?

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