Bren Smith is the man. I’m a young ocean farmer (2 years in) and absolutely follow his Greenwave program. I’m so excited for the future this industry wholes for human survival.
As a corn and soybean farmer for 35 years I have seen the devastation Industrial agriculture has done to the land. The loss of natural filter systems to stop nitrogen and erosion runoff is massive. And with the rise is corn production to feed ethanol we are on a collision course. Hypoxia is a threat,real or not it is there. I really like his idea of smaller farms, but in our country, big is better. I like his concept, I like that he has inner city kids involved. I like his organic fertilizer.. are there negatives? I am sure there are, but the positives out weigh the negatives... highly labor intensive, you cant be lazy and farm his way. And you cant rely on mechanical bulls to do the work... I will continue to research his concept...lets put 100 of his farms off the coast of New Orleans and see if Hypoxia goes away,if sea life returns..what 50 years of corn production and city runoff has killed,can we bring it back...heavy thoughts.
This is almost a decade old now. Have we made much progress? Honestly, I live on a boat in Boston Harbor and I'd absolutely love it if we had these sorts of vertical farms operating just below my hull.
Unfortunately not. If you're interested you can watch "2040 Regeneration" documentary. In that documentary they outlined how mass production of seaweed can be done and how they are building physical models as large as 250 acres (100 hectares) to do marine permaculture (seaweed+shellfish+other related farming) on a massive scale.
It’s moving along, but much slower than it should. I’m an ocean farmer on Long Island and the first state commercial kelp permit was just approved last month.
Wow!!!! I know you from Madisonville, KY. I am on your email list. I moved back to VA now. This is so crazy to notice your name from an eight year old you tube. It is crazy. I ordered some salmon from you around 2016!!!!!!
Ive been meaning to do this for over 30 years!You just give the sea life a surface to grow on!Youre producing the sea food not stealing it from mother ocean.
This could solve so many problems for the fishing community as well as the eating and breathing community.. it will be difficult to start in the SF Bay Area but it must and can be done. I am seriously looking into this now. Thanks
"in a 300 by 300 foot area i can grow 24 tons of seaweed in 5 months" -- this translates to 12 wet tons per acre, and it takes 8 wet tons to yield a dry ton. elsewhere bren claims that he gets $1/lb for wet kelp (with 24k wet lbs per acre, that's $24k/acre, if the market can absorb that much kelp at that price). china, with roughly 200k acres in kelp production, yields roughly 2800 dry lbs per acre. bren is saying here that he yields 3000 dry lbs per acre, elsewhere he claims that 20k wet lbs (2500 dry lbs) from an acre would be a good year. from what i can tell, these numbers are reasonable.
It's also beeing done in larger and larger scales in Fjords in denmark (fjords= less storm problems, many nutrients) This might be one of my favorite ted talks
Norway and Denmark are more notorious for poisoned fish than Vietnam. Watch the documentary on MOTHERBOARD. The French don't want Norwegian salmon.Or anything near the Baltic sea. Maybe you can make the change.
I was going to say that we can already feed the world, the problem is a matter of logistics ~ specifically, safely transporting the food to the people, and the funding to make it possible. This might be a useful idea for when the planet hits 9 billion people, due sometime around 2100 ... watching this, I can say that the overfishing of our oceans has left us with a need to find sustainable alternatives ...
I *really* want to know the answer to this one: is it truly scalable? The area of Washington State is just short of 185 thousand km2! Is there that much ocean with the right conditions? 1. High-nutrient (usually an ocean upwelling area). 2. Shallow enough to anchor his buoy 3. Not in shipping lanes 4. Not too cold, too hot, or spoiling coral reefs etc 5. Not going to disrupt mangroves, wetlands, or other important ecosystems I looked at question 1, and the ocean upwelling area tends to be 2% of world oceans which I work out ot be 7.2 MILLION km2, so that's not an issue. But the others? Is there enough appropriately out of the way shallow ocean in the world?
High nutrient areas are not just in natural upwelling areas, but near the mouths of rivers due fertilizers and human waste generated from terrestrial landscapes.
Yeah its possible? Tilapia or Grass Carps fed on high protein seaweeds? People generally have an apatite for fish like Salmon, Trout, etc which are carnivores. Its all doable its just a matter of will, marketing, passing by regulations. With land-based aquaculture you also ideally are in a warm place, like the tropics where you can grow fish faster.
That has Packard Foundation written all over it. That's the group that spent $65million over a few years to badmouth salmon aquaculture. It's also the group that funds the Monterey Bay Aquarium and their fish advisories based on their own set of criteria. And I'd love to see his gear actually stop storm surge...good luck with that.
It's not genuinely carbon sequestration if you grown a carbon-grabbing crop, and then introduce it into the human (or animal) food supply. It would only be C sequestration if you removed the seaweed by, say, burying it.
Okay, the diversity and relatively small scale shouldn't become pest and desease vectors as quickly. A 20 acre surface area puts this in the position of a large scale business. All fine and good. Around the world small individual and family fishermen are loosing their livelihoods to mega seafood processing floating factories. How small can these methods be reduced to to provide a good living to a small family or individual ran by one or two people using trimaran canoes in a tropical area? I'm thinking specifically about the Philippines, and not so much about making all these fishermen millionaires but providing a comfortable living.
If you think we need to develop a 'sustainable' (environmentally speaking) economy, before one that reaches full employment then you're heading down a dead end.
A Vegan Worshipping dis guy,, hes gona make ocean plants sustainable? AND RENEW WILD LIfe? nhannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn... really? saw a video of him gorgeous from a kid,,, following 3D farm, to kale Fertilizer, to restaurants,, to de guy making documentary (Awarness) to promote algea ;)
