Can Alaska’s kelp farms transform its economy?

CORDOVA, Alaska — Dune Lankard piloted the gleaming gill-net fishing boat to Simpson Bay, where eight buoys bobbed in the sunlight. The bright orange inflatables, connected by lines and spread out across five acres, provided the only indication of the ocean farm that lay beneath the water’s surface.

A look at the new frontier of ocean exploration, and ways to harness the sea's power for regeneration.

Lankard, 64, spent decades fishing while running the Native Conservancy and the Eyak Preservation Council, nonprofits that have preserved a millionacres of land in this part of Alaska. But now, he raises kelp, a type of seaweed, as a way of buffering his communities and others from the dwindling numbers of wild salmon and other species they catch and hunt.

“I realized when the climate started changing, we didn’t have an answer for ocean acidification, and ocean warming, and ocean rise,” said Lankard, who holds back his long, slightly graying hair with a batik bandanna. “We had to figure out how to grow things on the land and in the sea.”

The act of raising sea plants and bivalves — known as mariculture — is accelerating across the globe. Once largely concentrated in Asia, the industry has expanded to Europe and the United States.

Everyone from Amazon to the European Union is pouring money into it. As climate change threatens crops and fisheries, some are hailing seaweed as “seawheat” — but with a much lower carbon footprint than its land counterpart. Seaweed is nutritious, rich in dietary fiber, omega-3 fatty acids, essential amino acids, and vitamins A, B, C and E. It does not require fertilizer or added nutrients, like most land crops, and absorbs carbon in addition to nitrogen as it grows.

While it does not sequester carbon dioxide like long-lived trees, companies are exploring whether it could store carbon on the seafloor if it’s buried. Scientists are also investigating other ways seaweed could help the planet, from reducing livestock’s methane emissions to replacing lettuce in salad and fossil fuels in plastics and fertilizer.

Alaska underscores both the urgency in developing the industry, and its promise. The communities here are losing their livelihoods and food faster than in many other places. In Alaska, ocean farming could chart a different path from the sort of extraction that’s defined it for more than two centuries.

For many Alaska Natives, who have lost ancestral land and have moved away from harvesting old-growth timber, cultivating sea plants that they have gathered in the wild for centuries could offer economic opportunity.

At the same time, Alaska’s cold waters are the next frontier for kelp farming as waters warm in places like New England and the Mediterranean.

“The sky’s the limit, because we have more coastline than the rest of the Lower 48 put together,” Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) said in a phone interview.

Alaska has already attracted large operators. Seagrove Kelp now ranks as the country’s largest active seaweed farm. There are nearly a dozen other applications pending for kelp farms of at least 100 acres submitted by a mix of Alaskan, out-of-state and overseas players.

“There is a new seaweed economy that can be created,” said Dan Lesh, deputy director of the Southeast Conference, a regional business group in Alaska that’s helping distribute tens of millions of federal dollars to help develop the industry.

It’s the kind of reinvention that has to take place if the agriculture industry is to shed its carbon-intensive ways. But Alaska’s nascent kelp industry also shows that growing the infrastructure and market for a new crop is not going to be easy, with everyone involved, including Lesh and Lankard, charting the path as they go along. In the process, the oceans could become more industrialized — and there could be more competition among locals, and with outsiders, for waters off its shores.

“It’s one of the first regenerative industries based on restoration, conservation and mitigation, rather than extraction of finite resources,” said Lankard, who is Eyak Athabaskan. “The concern that we have about the mariculture industry is that there’s no plan for Alaska, America and the world, for that matter. And it’s on fire.”

Jonny Antoni, who’s erected a $38,000 kelp farm 1o miles from Juneau, has a vision for what ocean farming could look like — if the anchors securing a network of ropes below the water’s surface would cooperate.

The setup for most ocean farms is simple. At least in theory.

In March, a few weeks before Antoni and his partners planned to harvest their sugar and bull kelp, two anchors on the edge of the farm ended up in the middle, tangling several lines. “It was a rat’s nest,” Antoni recalled. They lost 20 percent of their crop.

“So it’s been kind of interesting. It hasn’t been a straight path,” the 38-year-old reflected.

Antoni and his partners hope to sell value-added food products, like a kelp burger. Americans don’t eat plain seaweed in large volumes like Asian consumers, making the economics challenging.

(Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

A tiny portion of the kelp they harvest is bull kelp, which proliferates in the wild off Alaska’s southern coast. But it’s much harder to cultivate: Sugar kelp, a yellow-brown marine algae, is easier to raise.

Antoni pulls the bull kelp from the water by attaching a long metal hook to a buoy and then grabbing the rope it’s attached to hand over hand. The kelp’s flexible stem, or stipe, trails downward as Lia Heifetz examines it.

This season, Sea Quester harvested a total of 8,025 pounds, most of which it sold to Barnacle Foods, a Juneau-based business that helped kick-start the state’s kelp industry. Heifetz and her husband, Matt Kern, founded Barnacle in 2016.

“There are not people knocking down our door trying to buy kelp,” Heifetz observed. “And that is because, I think, the mainstream consumers in our country, at least, don’t see it as a food source that they’re familiar with.”

So Barnacle has made it accessible through “gateway” items, she added, weaving it through hot sauce, salsa and dark chocolate, among other items.

For now, Sea Quester is just selling sugar kelp, which it piles up in plastic totes in primary colors on Antoni’s own boat, Frances G.

It has patched together a few deals to keep its business running as he works to scale up production. For all the enthusiasm among the region’s kelpers, “there’s not a whole lot of money in it to support them at this point,” he said. “Probably the most difficult part for me is I’ve invested all my savings into it. I’m hoping that it’ll be there. … There will be a place to land, because I feel like I’ve jumped.”

Globally, the outlook for seaweed farming is uncertain. The number of publicly disclosed seaweed start-ups rose last year compared with 2021, according to Phyconomy, a Belgium-based newsletter that tracks the industry. But the total amount invested in those deals dipped between 2021 and 2022, from more than $160 million to $120 million.

“There’s all these challenges. We’re trying to overcome them,” said Steven Hermans, Phyconomy’s editor.

In Europe, the near shore is crowded, and farming the ocean further offshore can be daunting, with high winds and waves. In South Korea, many farmers opt for a cooperative approach where they pool equipment and marketing resources, Hermans added, which helps lower the cost of operating. But they face the prospect of warming waters.

Kelp needs to be blanched and frozen, or dried, not long after being harvested, or it can degrade. For an operation near Juneau, this is doable. But for farms scattered throughout more remote parts of Alaska, this will require building new processing plants.

New England, the region that leads the nation’s kelp production right now, doesn’t face the same hurdles when it comes to getting its product to market.

“Maine’s producing the majority of the kelp in the United States, but they’ve got 130 million people within 24 trucking hours of them,” said Kodiak Island Sustainable Seaweed CEO Nick Mangini, who got the second permit in Alaska to farm kelp and began harvesting in 2017. “It’s a very exciting industry, with a ton of possibilities. But nobody’s doing that at scale yet” in Alaska.

To make it work, last year the Alaska Mariculture Cluster — a coalition that includes the Southeast Conference and that enjoys the support of a key tribal corporation, Sealaska — received a nearly $49 million Build Back Better grant to expand ocean farming.

The group pledged to distribute 50 percent of the money to underserved areas, with a quarter of the total funds going to Alaska Native communities.

In a small warehouse, not far from downtown Juneau, Kern, Heifetz’s husband, has unloaded the plastic tote of Sea Quester’s sugar kelp that came ashore less than an hour earlier, so it can be sorted and dried.

Given Alaska’s high-cost environment, turning a profit in the first few years of running a farm is close to impossible.

Sealaska President and CEO Anthony Mallott, whose tribal corporation invests in Barnacle Foods, said kelp farming will have to generate revenue and jobs now that other industries — like old-growth logging, which dominated the region for decades — are being phased out.

But he wants to ensure the economics work before too many people start growing kelp. “I have a fear that, what if small-scale farms aren’t viable? I’d rather know that now, than build out a bunch of small-scale farms that then are left.”

For Native Alaskans, especially, the stakes are high. Lankard’s community has been fighting the state and federal government for rights to their land and resources for more than half a century.

Lankard grew up in an abundant land, wedged between the Copper River Delta and Prince William Sound, immersed in the battles over what had been taken from the Eyak people. Eyak means “throat of the lake,” referring to the best place to catch salmon when they come in from the ocean to spawn and die. For centuries, the fish have provided food for animals and humans alike, while nourishing the hemlock and spruce trees that dominate the forests ringing the island. Lankard’s mother, Rosie Saska Zillsenoff, fought for her community’s rights to this bounty.

After the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound and polluted its pristine waters with crude oil, Lankard helped steer $1 billion of the settlement to give locals an alternative to clear-cutting.

In 2003, he founded his own conservation group and focused on keeping the region’s unspoiled areas intact. Now he sees kelp farming as a continuation of this work, by restoring ocean health and providing food security to Indigenous people.

Alaska’s current mariculture permitting program provides no preferences for Alaska Natives or state residents. Anyone involved in commercial fishing or a large operator, Lankard argued, has an automatic advantage.

“They have the boats, they have collateral. They know anchors, lines and buoys,” he said, adding that many Alaska Natives cannot afford to apply for a permit — only after which they can qualify for federal loans — let alone the $300,000 it costs for a boat. “I feel we’re set up for failure, for Indigenous peoples.”

Dunleavy said he does not see why Alaska Natives would get a preference when it comes to permitting. “There’s no bar to entry for any Alaska Native,” he said. “If you have a boat and investors, it doesn’t matter if you’re Alaska Native or not, you can enter this industry. And if you don’t have a boat and investors, it’s going to be tough.”

The Native Conservancy has set up its own program, to help any Indigenous kelp farmer get the permits and equipment they need. It’s started a boat-building business, to make them more affordable. By the time they’re done, 20 Alaska Native kelp farmers should have permits.

There’s also a steep learning curve. Three years ago, Tesia Bobrycki, the group’s OceanBack program director, “knew nothing about seaweed.” Today she’s helped develop their own seed nursery in a 40-foot shipping container and plans to train someone from a different island, Kake, so that they can develop their own test sites and kelp farms and then share that expertise with their neighbors.

For her and others in the group, farming kelp is more about giving communities tools to control their own resources. “There’s a lot of hope that kelp will be the one to save us,” Bobrycki said. “That’s a lot of pressure to put on one little species.”

Lankard can’t say whether his group’s 10 test sites and 22-acre research farm will succeed. But he intends to rename the fishing boat he recently bought from one of his best friends “OceanBack.” He’s planted kelp close to one of his ancestral village sites, near a cove called Hole in the Wall, where the Eyak people hid out to avoid being exterminated more than a century ago.

“If we don’t start evolving and adapting right now, we don’t stand a chance,” he said, as he steered the ship toward the cove. “At least we’re doing something. The jury’s still out. It’s about hope, more than anything.”

Photo editing by Amanda Voisard. Editing by Ana Campoy. Copy editing by Mike Cirelli. Video editing by John Farrell. Design editing by Joe Moore. Design and development by Andrew Braford, Irfan Uraizee and Joe Fox.

Map data from Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

This article has been updated.