Seaweed becomes the new frontier of agriculture – 03/31/2023 – Environment

For centuries, they’ve been prized in Asian cuisines and overlooked almost everywhere else: those shiny ribbons of seaweed that dance to the rhythm of the ocean’s cool waves.

Today, they are suddenly a successful global commodity. They are attracting money and new purpose everywhere because of their potential to help control some of the dangers of the modern age, such as climate change.

In London, a startup is making a plastic substitute with seaweed. In Australia and Hawaii, others are racing to grow algae that, when turned into livestock feed, can reduce methane from cattle belching. Researchers are studying how much carbon dioxide can be captured by seaweed farms, as investors see them as a new source of carbon credits for polluters to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.

And in South Korea, one of the world’s most established seaweed producing countries, farmers are struggling to keep up with rising export demand.

What was primarily a relatively small Asian industry is now coveted by the West. Far beyond South Korea, new farms have sprung up in the US state of Maine, the Faroe Islands, Australia and even the North Sea. Globally, seaweed production has grown by nearly 75% over the past decade. The focus is going far beyond its traditional use in cooking.

But even if its advocates see it as a miracle crop for a warmer planet, others fear that growing in the ocean could replicate some of the same damage as farming on land. Little is known about how kelp farms, particularly those farther away, can affect marine ecosystems.

“Algae advocates believe it’s a cure-all, a magical panacea for climate problems. Opponents think there’s a lot of hype,” said David Koweek, chief scientist at Ocean Visions, a consortium of research organizations that studies interventions. ocean resources to the climate crisis.

There is another problem. Algae themselves are feeling the impact of climate change, particularly in Asia.

“The water is very warm,” said Sung-kil Shin, a third-generation seaweed farmer, as he brought his boat into port one morning on Soando Island, south of the South Korean mainland, where seaweed has long been harvested and cultivated.

“Plastic” from seaweed

Pierre Paslier made his living designing plastic packaging for cosmetics. “For me, it was like renting my brain to a big plastic polluter.”

He wanted to stop. He wanted to create packaging that comes from nature and disappears into nature quickly. With a friend from graduate school, Rodrigo García González, he created a company called NotPla, short for “not plastic”.

In a warehouse in east London, they designed an edible sachet of water, made from seaweed and other plant extracts: to drink the water, just put the sachet in your mouth. They designed another for ketchup and a third for cosmetics.

They also started making a seaweed-based coating for cardboard delivery boxes. Just Eat, a food delivery app in Britain, has started using it for some of its orders, including at the European women’s football final in July at Wembley Stadium.

The segment is still a niche. The seaweed liner, designed for home compost bins, is considerably more expensive than the plastic liner used in most paper food bins today.

But Paslier is looking to the future. The European Union has a new law that restricts the use of single-use plastic. A global plastics treaty is under negotiation.

“Seaweed isn’t going to replace all plastic, but when combined with other things, it can tackle single-use plastic. This is just the beginning,” he said.

Past food collectors

In the gray light of dawn, Soon-ok Goh, an agile 71-year-old woman, was swimming in the shallow waters of Gijang, on the south coast of South Korea. Slim and petite, she wore yellow flippers and a wetsuit. She surfaced for a few seconds, took a deep breath in the morning silence, then dove under again, fins facing up.

Goh is one of the last practitioners of a disappearing activity. Since the late 7th century, women like her have collected wild seaweed and other seafood in the cold waters around the Korean Peninsula.

That morning, with a small pink knife in her hand, she cut bright green and brown stripes from the large seaweed called miyeok. She collected sea snails clinging to rocks, two types of sea cucumbers, and a handful of algae-eating sea urchins. She put everything in a bag.

Hye Kyung Jeong, a food historian at Hoseo University in Seoul, South Korea, said that decades ago, when there was no money to buy rice, you could go out to sea and find seaweed. “They helped people survive during the scarcity,” she said.

This isn’t the first time seaweed has helped stave off a flare-up.

slimy arms race

The new frontier for seaweed production lies beyond Asia. Steve Meller, an American entrepreneur in Australia, grows them in giant glass tanks on land — specifically, a red algae native to Australian coastal waters called asparagopsis, which is being targeted by livestock companies as a way to meet their climate targets.

A pinch of asparagopsis in cattle feed can reduce the methane in their burps by between 82% and 98%, according to several independent studies. Cattle belching is a major source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

“I suppose the race to get the world’s first commercial supply has begun. Demand is on an insane scale,” said Meller.

His company, called CH4 Global, after the chemical formula for methane, is competing to bring asparagopsis to cattle. At least two other Australian startups, Sea Forest and Rumin8, are in the race for seaweed for livestock. As well as Symbrosia and Blue Ocean Barns, both in Hawaii.

New Zealand dairy producer Fonterra has begun commercial trials of the seaweed supplement, and Ben & Jerry’s is planning trials of its own soon. Global dairy giant Danone has invested in an asparagopsis startup.

It is not yet known for sure whether seaweed can have an impact on livestock methane. In the United States, there is another hurdle to overcome: regulatory approval.

However, this could be the key for the beef and dairy industry to meet climate targets. Emissions from food systems alone, particularly meat and dairy, could raise average global temperatures by one degree by the end of the century, crossing the threshold for relatively safe global warming, researchers say.

Climatic pressures

Seabirds dive and squawk around the fishing harbor on Soando, South Korea’s southernmost island, as Shin’s boat arrives with the morning’s harvest.

Now 44, he has been sailing these waters for two decades and has seen climate change turn his trade upside down. Shin grows a species of red algae called pyropia, which prefers cold water during its growing season. So he has been going further and further away from the coast in search of icy waves.

He explained that in mid-April (early spring in the northern hemisphere) the water is not as cold as pyropia likes it. Yields from it suffered: “People want more seaweed these days. But there’s no more seaweed.”

Since 1968, the waters where Shin collects have warmed by 1.4°C, just above the global average. That’s why South Korean scientists are in a hurry to create strains that can thrive in warmer waters.

Seaweed farms are very different from the corn and wheat farms that make up the monoculture on land. But, even if they mean new opportunities, they present ecological risks, many of them unknown.

They can block sunlight for creatures that need it. They can spread plastic buoys in the ocean, which already suffers from a lot of plastic. They can leave their plant debris at the bottom of the sea, altering the marine ecosystem.

“This needs to be done very carefully,” said Scott Pillias, a doctoral student in economics who studies marine systems at the University of Queensland. “We shouldn’t expect algae to save us.”