What about you! Today's video we're going to find out why this old fashioned fertilizer is key for a
healthy lawn. We're going to see how it's harvested, and the method they use to turn it from this into
what we would use on our lawns using cold pressed extraction. I'm going to be visiting Ballylisson Golf Course
- which was home to the Irish Open in 2018 - to find out exactly how they use the seaweed,
and why it is so important. I'll be talking to a leading scientist called Dr Deborah Cox, and Deborah
will be talking through the use of seaweed not only on grass but why you'd want to use seaweed
if you're going to be sowing seeds, or how you can use it to improve the plants in your garden.
I'm Mark here, from Ocean Knowledge, today we're going to talk you through the seaweed harvesting.
So the sea weed is harvested in low tide, the tidal movement is every six hours so there's a low tide
every 12 hours. Harvesters generally harvest along a shoreline, or else they're harvesting
out on a small island. Cut with a small knife or hook, the most important thing with seaweed
harvesting is to leave the growth on the plant, so we leave six eight inches of the
plant on the rock at all times. This allows the seaweed to regrow within three to five years.
This for Ocean Knowledgee knowledge is one of the most important factors in
the seaweed harvesting. It allows us to harvest in a site today, and we
know we can go back to that within that time frame, three to five years.
Once the seaweed lands on the truck it's loaded up onto this tray here for the boys to hand pick. Every
seaweed, every kilo of seaweed that we land to the factory is hand inspected to pick out any species
of seaweed that we don't want. Stone, shells, to wash off any sand or dirt that's in the seaweed.
It's moved along, and it's washed here now with fresh water.
So once the seaweed is inspected and washed outside, it then moves on the conveyor on into the
factory, and this is also hand inspected here. So once they're happy here it moves on to a conveyor.
This here conveyor is weighing the seaweed on on the screen so once the boys have five
kilos on this conveyor, the conveyor then moves automatically into the first tank down below.
It's stored in the tank for 10 minutes continuously chopping up and cutting in, in the tank,
so the next stage in the process after the chopping the seaweed and the cutting of the seaweed it's
pumped into this here tank , this tank here is under vacuum, this gives the product
that little bit more extraction, extracting more nutrients, carbohydrates from the product.
This is a decant machine or a separation machine, the product is pumped along in
here and spun at a high high speed, so the liquid is spun off the solid product, and this
in turn separates the soluble fibers from the insoluble fibers. Once the product is finished
in the separation process the insoluble fibers move along the belt and into another storage bag here.
We have a local customer base that purchases this off us for fertilizer, all the seaweed
liquid extracted is pumped along through this filter place and to always go through this filter sock
which is all less than 200 Micron. Once the product is filtered and cleaned it's then pumped across to this
final storage tank. In this final storage tank we add a food grade preservative to give the
product the shelf life required. It's then pumped along this packing line where we fill in the
10 liter bag in box. This is our main packaging, you can see here our new packaging of the bag
and boxes what we introduced this this year. It's a lot more environmental friendly than
our traditional jerry can we've used in the past. Each pallet that we ship out in bag
and box contained 1 000 liters, each pallet has a reduction of 39 per cent plastic in each pallet.
This pallet's for Sweden, we also ship all over Europe, we ship to Asia, Australia, and then we ship to both
East and West Coast in America. We also service our local markets here in Ireland and the UK.
Today I'm at Ballylisson Golf Course to find out how the seaweed is used.
My name is Andy Robertson the Link Superintendent here at Ballylisso n
Golf Club. I've been here for 25 years now, I've been green keeping for quite
a bit longer, and I started off up in the north of Scotland , went down to Sunningdale
in England, did seven years in Sunningdale, came here for a year's work. I'm still here yet.
We're on here, on the 12th Green, we have fescue greens here which we run on a program it's a
traditional green keeping program. I prefer the old, natural ways, we have good results for that and
it's a basic thing. Iron sulfate, sulfate of ammonia, and seaweed, three products. We spray for six
months a year with iron sulfate, sulfate of ammonia and seaweed. Winter months, just iron sulfate and seaweed.
Seaweed is a soil conditioner and to help keep the root structure good. Turf is good, strong, good sward
density, that's what people want when you're taking people to play golf, they want good greens.
I am Declan Gallagher, Managing Director of Ocean Knowledge. One of the first questions
I'm generally asked when I travel is, what's the difference between seaweed algae and kelp,
and for us they're the exact same thing. We harvest and use a brown seaweed called
ascophyllum nodosum, ascophyllum nodosum grows along the west coast of Ireland and in the Northern Hemisphere
and what makes the ascophyllum nodosum unique is that the environment that it grows naturally within.
it grows 50 % of it's life in the water, and 50 % of its life out of the water.
And over the last hundreds of years, for the plant to be able
to survive it had to build up of very strong immune system.
So ascophyllum nodosum contains high levels of carbohydrates amino acids micro macronutrients as well as vitamins all of
which are fundamental for the plant to be able to survive in a stressful growing environment
What is seaweed, and I view seaweed and sometimes don't see the results that I was hoping to see
from seaweed, but you've got to remember that seaweed is a product that's high in carbohydrates.
Carbohydrates are very very important for the plant to produce energy and for us the
plant is a living organism, the more energy we give the plant the healthier the plant becomes.
When we talk about a healthy plant, a healthy plant,
a healthy plant produces good density, it produces good color
and more importantly for us, starts to develop a strong and healthy root system.
One of the things that people don't know about seaweed is, seaweed not only
helps the plant but it also helps the ground that the plant grows in.
For us many of our customers feed the grass but they never feed the ground
that the grass has grown in so when you apply our product and spray it onto your grassland
sixty percent of the nutrients which is carbohydrates amino acids vitamins
and micro macronutrients absorbed by the leaf
but the remaining 40% is not absorbed by the leaf
is washed off the leaf down into your sand and soil profile .
Down into your satin soil profile you're putting
carbohydrates, carbohydrates benefit and feed beneficial microbacteria.
That beneficial microbacteria then start to break down all the dead organic matter
and for us that's massively important.
When talking about ascophyllum nodosum 62 percent of the dry matter within fresh
ascophyllum is carbohydrates, and carbohydrates are the group of elements which is most
important to turf grass, because when we talk about grass, grass is
a living organism, and like any living organism you've got to give it energy.
And when we talk about spraying our product, our liquid extract onto grass
our turf grass, we're basically applying high quantities of carbohydrates,
and then what the plant does is it stores them carbohydrates
and when it comes under stress whether it's dry stress, salinity stress, shade
stress, it can convert them carbohydrates into energy.
By applying high quantities of carbohydrates to the plant the
plant then stores them carbohydrates and can convert them into energy.
So when for example we talk about drought stress therefore, something that most people will see
when their plant come under drought stress, is they will start to notice a reduction in
chlorophyll, which obviously means the plant is losing the ability to be able to produce color.
When we look at seaweed, the plant then will take them carbohydrates, convert
them into energy and can use that energy to produce chlorophyll.
Today I'm at Belvoir Park Golf Course in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to find out not
only how the seaweed affects grass, but also grass seed and other plants .
My name is Deborah,
and I am Managing Director of Lagan Valley Scientific, based in Northern Ireland and here
we're at Belvoir Park, and I'm going to be talking to you a little bit about seaweeds.
So when we think about applying a seaweed product, and why we might want to do this, one of the main
reasons is root growth. So when you apply a seaweed-based product one of the things that
we see after a period of time , after a series of applications, is acceleration of growth in the root
system. One of the reasons this happens is because seaweed products contain what's called "auxins".
These are plant hormones, and these can actually help the plants to help themselves.
If you're thinking of applying a seaweed-based product it's important to think ahead of time.
Why? Well because abiotic stress is a major factor that leads to thinnng out
of the sward surface, and so if we want to think about preventing that we can apply
seaweed all through the year in advance of the turf suffering from cold stress or heat stress.
So another thing that can really help when it comes to applying seaweed is that it really helps
with the evenness of germination, and to accelerate growth during the early phases of growing.
so this gives a bit of an advantage to these plants because when they're very
young they're quite vulnerable to pests and diseases and so one
way of mitigating that is to encourage growth during the early phases of growing.
So we've just come over to the Clubhouse, and just to mention that you can apply seaweeds as a foliar
spray or a root drench, the difference between these two is obviously how it's applied and in
what volume. So a foliar spray would typically be on the surface of the plants, and a root drench
is most of that product going into the soil. Both can benefit the plants, and what we know
is that just like in turf, you can very subtly change the microbial profile in the root zone.
So what happens is that the roots become occupied by organisms called endophytes.
These live inside of the roots. These can really help with things like nutrient acquisition and
extending the roots through hifa. These are small little strands that extend from the
roots and they can really help with anchorage, and recruitment of water, so biostimulants and
seaweeds in particular can really help with water use efficiency across your
Course, and help you meet environmental policies that you have in place .
It's really important to think about incorporating a program into an ornamental plant's lifespan
early, because it can help create a more robust root system. As well as that it can help with the
onset of flowering, and enhance the number of buds, so if you have a plant which is maybe struggling
you can actually help it ahead of summer time when you would expect the flowering to be peaking,
and this can also help because during the heat of summer abiotic stress will rise, and
so incorporating a plan that includes seaweed products early will actually
help that plant be primed against that abiotic stress before that time occurs.