The Scarborough News ‘Scarborough Council is set to give its backing to a plan to establish England’s first commercial seaweed hatchery in the waters off the town’s coast. The council’s cabinet is being asked to act as an accountable body for a £472,150 grant from the Coastal Communities Fund (CCF) to SeaGrown Limited. The Scarborough-based company has licensed a 25-hectare site three miles off the town, which is clear of shipping and otherwise unused in which to grow and harvest seaweed on sunken platforms. A network of buoys and chains will be anchored there, and the plants grown on submerged lines. By 2021 the project aims to introduce UK (Scarborough) farmed seaweed into new markets such as bioplastics, biotextiles and pharmaceutical products. The company has been founded by Wave Crookes, a former Scarborough fisherman and his partner, Laura Robinson, a marine scientist. Mr Crookes told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that it had been hoped the first seaweed lines would have been in the water by now. He said: “The project needs the council to sign on as an accountable body for the funding but due to the local elections and the changes with the council it has led to a delay. “We’d hoped to start in May but now it’s looking like August. It’s not ideal but it has allowed us to get on with some things in the background.” SeaGrown is hoping to create nine direct jobs in the first two years of the project rising to 23 direct jobs within five years, plus many more indirect jobs anticipated within the supply chain. Click here to read more
Kelp culture: Meet the ‘star ingredient’ changing fortunes in Alaska’s waters: seaweed
Guardian: While farmers in much of the US spend the late spring patiently waiting for their crops to mature, a small band of sea farmers have taken to the cold ocean waters of Alaska to harvest the state’s newest cash crop: kelp. Huge demand for seaweed, hauled up in slimy green bunches from the Pacific Ocean, has kick started an industry that existed as a mere fantasy only five years ago.
“There’s lot of interest in sustainability,” says Beau Perry, head of Blue Evolution, a California-based company at the centre of Alaska’s nascent seaweed boom. “As we deal with climate change and the movement towards plant-based diets, all of those trends play towards seaweed being a new sort of star ingredient.” In recent years, farmers in Alaska have begun growing sugar kelp and ribbon kelp – two species that occur naturally in the ecosystem of remote communities like Kodiak and Ketchikan. With a $6bn (£4.7bn) global market for seaweed, residents are hopeful that kelp farming is a sustainable way to cultivate – and harvest – the coveted aquatic plant.
“There’s huge potential in Alaska. There’s so much space and it really fills an interesting niche,” says Alf Pryor, co-owner of Kodiak Kelp Company. “There’s a lot of potential for tons of different kinds of products … [I] see it taking off pretty quickly.”
A career salmon fisherman, Pryor along with his wife, Lexa Meyer, were drawn into the kelp business recently as a way to supplement their income. But interest in kelp farming is now so intense that Pryor believes a new farmer might have to wait up to three years for the necessary permits. Unlike in other parts of the world, where wild kelp is harvested by ships, Alaska’s aquatic plants are grown by farmers in a months-long process, which begins in the dead of winter.
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