BREN SMITH: Unlike sort of salmon aquaculture
and other things, there just isn't much to see.
You just see some buoys floating.
But you can imagine this sort of this underwater garden.
SUZIE FLORES: It's farming just like somebody
who has a tomato farm or some sort of vegetable garden.
It's just I do it out on the water instead of on land.
BREN SMITH: It's one of the fastest growing
plants on Earth.
So we can grow an incredible amount
of vegetables in small areas.
SUZIE FLORES: And we don't have to add any fertilizer at all.
We're just kind of taking something that's
happening naturally and trying to organize it
into one location so that we can make
the most of what's growing.
My name is Suzie Flores and I am an executive market development
manager at McGraw-Hill Education.
And on the side, I am a kelp farmer.
I had heard about seaweed farming
and I wanted to grow some just for consumption.
The more that I looked into it and the more I read about it,
I realized that it's also a fantastic thing
to do for the environment.
And then once we saw that there was
a possible economic upside for it,
we decided to give it a shot.
BREN SMITH: My name is Bren Smith.
I'm a 3D ocean farmer.
I came into this as a commercial fisherman.
And I had to be sort of a nurturing arugula
farmer in a way.
It was a psychic shift for me.
When I first showed up here 15 years ago, my patch of ocean
was this barren water and now it's
this whole thriving ecosystem with mussels, clams, oysters,
kelp.
The challenge is imagine growing in an environment
where the soil turns over 1,000 times a day.
I mean, we're just getting currents and changeover
and nutrients.
And that dynamism is what grows sort of a beautiful vegetable,
but it also makes it difficult for a farmer.
The kelp we grow is called sugar kelp.
SUZIE FLORES: Which is a native seaweed
that grows all along the east coast corridor.
BREN SMITH: And what we do is every fall,
we go out and collect a few pieces of kelp
that are reproductive and bring it back to our hatchery.
And the little spores attach to pieces of string.
SUZIE FLORES: And then we take it
back out into the ocean from whence
it came and we outplant it on our long lines, which
are submerged about three feet underneath the water.
The turbidity of the water, the murkiness of the water impact
how much sunlight is actually getting through to the kelp.
Kelp gets everything from the water.
So as the water current goes through our kelp farm,
it's also bringing with it all of the nutrition.
BREN SMITH: Kelp needs a mix of phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen,
and sunlight.
So my job with the kelp is to find that sweet spot
where we capture the nutrients and also the sunlight.
SUZIE FLORES: We harvest the kelp in the spring season
before all of the other competing species
are going to be around.
BREN SMITH: All the junk that grows on the kelp--
the epiphytes, the sea squirts, all these different things
that as the water temperatures increase and the oceans
essentially wake up, they attack the kelp.
SUZIE FLORES: And it doesn't render it completely useless.
You still could use it for fertilizer and things
like that.
But it does mean that it's not pretty enough for people
to consume.
BREN SMITH: But this is a good thing.
I mean, we're creating a foundation for the ecosystem
for everything to come eat, hide, and thrive.
The economics of kelp farming and ocean farming
are in some ways the most powerful piece.
SUZIE FLORES: Land, especially in this area, is not cheap.
But leasing space in the ocean, it
makes much more economical sense.
BREN SMITH: The fact that overhead is so low
when you don't grow fish opens up opportunities
for regular folks like me to be out here and starting
our own farms.
We grow about 10 to 20 tons per acre in basically a four
to five-month time.
SUZIE FLORES: It is one of the few crops that
could be used for food consumption, that
could be used for fuel, that could be used for fertilizer.
BREN SMITH: I mean, kelp people think that disgusting thing
on the beach.
But what we're trying to do is really make kelp the new kale
and reimagine the seafood plate of the future.
SUZIE FLORES: There's no fish flavor to it at all.
It's very mild and subtle.
If you cut it into noodles and you boil it,
it turns a really beautiful bright green color.
And then you can throw it in any sort of sauce
like you would spaghetti.
BREN SMITH: Luckily, in the US, this
is one of the great sort of culinary moments of our history
with all these brilliant chefs all around the country
thinking of kelp as not seafood, but as a vegetable.
We need to push beyond sustainability in our food
system and our agricultural system
into restoration, into regenerative crops.
Kelp, for example, captures five times more carbon
than land-based plants.
SUZIE FLORES: And one of the things
that it likes to absorb through the blades
is nitrogen. So it can offset other algaes from blooming.
BREN SMITH: As nitrogen runs into Long Island Sound,
for example, it creates these dead zones.
Our kelp can actually breathe life.
It can capture that nitrogen. This nexus
of job creation, economic opportunity, food justice,
and environmentalism, that's the sweet spot.
What's exciting for me, who's been out here doing
this for a long time, is to see Jay and Suzie Flores.
There they're energetic, they're talented,
they care about both the economy and the ecology of this.
And they're just exactly what the future of ocean farming
should be.
SUZIE FLORES: I never thought that I would be a kelp farmer.
I hope that I'm at the forefront of a larger wave of aquaculture
and I hope that people continue to learn more about this sea
vegetable and think about ways it
can be infused into our economy and into our diets.
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