TED Radio Hour - Bonus Episode: Kelp Farming, for the Climate

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

As part of our series about oceans, we're featuring a special bonus episode from our friends at Gimlet's How to Save a Planet. Hosts Alex Blumberg and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson explore how seaweed and giant kelp can help us address climate change and how fisherman Bren Smith has become kelp's unlikely evangelist. Listen to more episodes of How to Save a Planet on Spotify, including part II of Bren Smith's story. Follow How to Save a Planet and host Alex Blumberg and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on Twitter. (Warning: This episode contains some explicit language).See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Manus here. We are all in the midst of wrapping up 2021. And here on the show, we want to dive back into our series about oceans. Last week was part one, a love letter to the ocean. And before we get to part two, we've got something special for you, from our friends at the podcast, How to Save a Planet, from Gimlet. It's hosted by former NPR journalist Alex Bloomberg and marine biologist Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson. Ianna is a TED speaker, and you might recognize her voice. She is featured not once, but twice in our Ocean series because she's that good. Yes, we love Ayanna.

And we also love this episode about kelp and kelp farming, especially a variety that I have not heard of called sugar kelp. So we wanted to share it with you right here, right now. Enjoy. Welcome to How to Sayable Planet. I'm Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson. And I'm Alex. And this is the podcast where we talk about what we need to do to address the climate crisis and how we make those things happen. So, Alex, back when we were first discussing this podcast when it was but the barest idea of a seed in our minds, I knew that I definitely wanted us to interview this fascinating fisherman, Bren Smith.

And I was like, fascinating fisherman, I'm in. This is not a hard sell. He's so much fun to talk to. He's got an amazing life story. And we got him to share it with us. Bren told us he grew up in Newfoundland, Canada, in a small town called Maddox Cove. It's the most eastern point in all of North America. You know, our houses were bolted to the cliffs up above the ocean.

And you imagine they were red, green, yellow, orange houses, all painted with leftover boat paint. And, you know, the saying around town was that we paint them bright colors so we can find our way home drunk in the fog. And it was just like the idyllic town. He was, you know, fishermen's co-op next door, kids growing, selling cod tongues door to door, the squid runs, Kaplan runs. It was just sort of, you know, when we think of that artisanal small-scale fishery, that's where I grew up. I think I did like I also think cold in the winter. Well, if you're a coward.

Which I am. I mean, definitely, you know, like I remember one year the snow was above our doorway and we had to like open it. and dig from the inside. So, yeah, we'd put out jeans and towels, and they'd crack in the ice. So, yeah, it was definitely cold. How did you get your first taste of fishing? It was on the cliffs of my dad. We had this thermos of tomato soup, and it was storming.

It was like, it was just blowing. I must have been blowing like 30 or 40. So we didn't catch anything forever. And then my dad told me, this was my. my last cast. And so I cast, and I caught a fish. I cut this beautiful cod. And so it was like my, my first time was a really positive fishing experience. I got a picture of my wall of that fish. How old were you then? I don't know, four or something. Oh, wow. And you're like, this is my job now. Yeah. This is what I'm doing. Yeah, yeah. So Alex, you know my mom's family is also from Newfoundland.

My grandfather grew up fishing in those same waters. That's crazy. Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah. But of course, that's not the reason that we're talking to Bren today. You're shared. No. That's totally tendential. Yes.

I wanted to talk to Bren because I think he represents this sort of philosophical transformation that I think we really need to see and foster more broadly, right? So he started out as a commercial fisherman who went from not really thinking about climate change at all to being at the leading edge of a whole new industry that's developing as part of the solution. And his transformation, it took a long time, right? It took him a long time to see climate change even as a threat,

and then to find his place as part of the solution. He's like the poster child for trial and error as a viable approach to making your way through the world. As a lifestyle choice. And, Brent, he crisscrossed the concept. country. He lived in trailers, tents. He worked on different boats of one kind or another. And it took a natural disaster for him to fully comprehend the threat of climate change and for him to finally arrive at the solution he hit on for himself. And this solution, Bren thinks it could be a solution

not just for him, but for many, many people, thousands, possibly millions of people up and down the coastlines of North America and even the world. That solution is seaweed. Seweed. So, today, how seaweed can play a role in addressing climate change and how Brenz Smith became its unlikely evangelist. Okay, so before we launched it into this episode, we just want to say, Bren's a fisherman, and not to stereotype, but sometimes the language gets a little salty. Get it. And so we just want to sort of warn listeners that there is one bad word in this episode, a synonym for poop. And some like sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Yep. So nothing crazy, but, you know, just to be warned. All right. So let's begin Bren's story in that town of Maddox Cove, where he spent his childhood. And back then when he was a kid, he didn't think about climate change. He didn't think about seaweed. He thought a lot about the local fishermen because he idolized them. You know, being a fisherman, right, they get up in the morning.

You see him going out on their boats. They own boats. No bosses, self-directed lives, and they just go over. It's horizon where there's just no rules. You get to live wild. You're some of the last hunters on earth, and you get to feed your community. I mean, that is like, you know, a great job. And keep me out of the cubicles.

Give me that any day. But Bren's early dreams of becoming a fisherman, those were squashed by his parents. When he was in his early teens, his family decided it was time to move back to the U.S. where they were from. So it was actually a vote in the family. And I got my parents and my sister and me about whether to stay in Newfoundland or come to America. It's just so democratic. I love it.

Yeah, well, I didn't because it was three to one vote. Like I was the only one vote of Newfoundland. And it's actually why now I deeply believe in benevolent dictatorships as opposed to democracy. You know, because that first taste of democracy was just like ruined my life. I mean, you know, when I ended up, up in the suburbs of Connecticut. It was like a war crime for a kid like me. And end up there. And, you know, I ended up in this school and it just immediately wasn't for me. And I think I'm packed full of learning disabilities and sort of frustration and that

anger that comes with, you know, when you have trouble learning like other people and you got doing on your own terms. And I started getting trouble, started getting arrested, fights. I punched a kid with braces and I still got the scar right in my middle, middle knuckle. So anyway, I got out of there and I headed to Lynn, Massachusetts. And Lynn was a pretty rough place. It was called Lynn Lynn, the city of Sin. And went there and worked on a lobster boat. So that was my first, my first commercial job.

And how old were you at that point? I was 14. 14. Oh, my gosh. And at 14, you were working on a lobster boat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was pretty much it for Brun. He knew he wanted to live his life as a fisherman.

So from Lynn, Massachusetts, he eventually made his way to Alaska, where he worked first in the canneries, and then eventually got on a boat out to the Bering Sea, fishing for crab and for cod. And this was in the early 90s when something really dramatic was happening for cod fishermen on the other side of the continent from where Bren was, off the coast, actually, of Bren's childhood home of Newfoundland.

Good evening. The news was expected, but that didn't make it any less devastating. For at least the next two years, much of Newfoundland will lose a way of life. It's a moratorium on fishing for northern cod, a ban that will affect about 20,000 people and gut the backbone of the Atlantic fishery. This is a 1992 broadcast from the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The entire area is off limits to cod fishing as of midnight tonight. Small independents, big company trawlers, all will have to pull their nets,

and dock their boats. It's an unprecedented move prompted by a troubling situation. The lowest level of codstocks ever recorded. So Brian is on one side of the continent in the Bering Sea in the Pacific Ocean, fishing for cod, but hearing about the collapse of the codstocks

on the other side of the continent in the Atlantic Ocean off Newfoundland. Largest layoff in Canadian history, 30,000 people thrown out at work, boats, beach, canneries emptied. And it's just devastating to, something that's built up over hundreds of years, if you don't be a steward of this resource, just can rip communities apart.

And for me, that was a sort of wake-up call. I was like, okay, fishing is not going to be a livelihood. How were you hearing about it? You're on the Bering Sea. How does the news filter to you? What specifically are you hearing? I guess it was a fax machine. I mean, I never saw it because it was on the captain's quarters.

But they would send out weather and sports and news sometimes. So that's how I heard of it, the captain told us about it because it was, you know, big news we were, I was fishing for black cod. In the Bering Sea, which is on the other side of the continent. Exactly. Yeah. And he comes out with a fax paper. What did he say? I think it was just pretty, you know, it was like short.

Like there was a, you know, it wasn't that there was a collapse of the cod fishery. It wasn't framed that way. It was framed as like, like they shut down the cod fishery. There was a they, right? And that's been one of the issues is, you know, that we see to this day, like, yeah, environment. environmentalists get blamed as opposed to economic and environmental issues. So it was just real short. It was like they shut down the con stocks. And what did you think when you heard that? So for me it was, you know, it was it was particular. And then it was back home in Newfoundland. It was the place I loved.

So it was this like mixed consciousness of like, you know, I knew that it's clear to us. You're working on the boats and it was unsustainable. I mean, what happened with fishing was World War II technology actually shifted into the industry. And so, you know, whether it was the sonar radar, the spotter planes, going around trying to identify fish stocks, we just got too good at what we did. It was like an arms race to catch the last fish. Yeah. And we won. Exactly. Exactly.

I mean, we're too good at this stuff as humans, finding those efficiencies, just getting better and better and trying to solve problems. Fish don't really have a chance. Exactly. So there was this sort of inkling that this wasn't sustainable. What did that feeling feel like to you, like when you were out there? Like what was the thought that came into your head as you were thinking of that? Yeah, I mean, you just see a lot of dead stuff around. We work on the draggers.

You haul up all this fish. You only got permits for, say, cod, and you throw back everything else. And a whole bunch of it's dead. You know, bycatch is the famous. Oh. And I don't know so much about this. Yeah, all that bycatch, I mean, the ratio can be really dramatic, right? Sometimes it's like three to one. You're throwing back like three fish you're not allowed to catch, you know, permits for, for every one that you keep.

Wow. Because you're fishing with these huge nets and the smaller the thing you want to catch, the finer the meshes. So it's just catching everything. In shrimp, it can be like 10, 20, 30 to 1. And you just pick out what you want. And in the time that it takes to pick out the things that you want or are permits, permitted to keep, everything else is just on the deck dying. And you just shove it back overboard. Exactly. And Ianna, you know this. Is it the pressure that kills the fish? Yeah, the pressure is so different at the surface and the depths that which you're fishing, that you pull the fish up so quickly, they don't have a chance to equalize. So like all this like

internal pressure just like pushes everything out of them. Their guts can come out, you know? They're not just like you put them back overboard and they'll be fine. Yeah, it's like scuba diving, right? you rocket to the surface from 100 meters deep, that's really bad for you. Right. So fish are going through the same issue of pressure. So when you pull them up to the surface super quickly, they'll have the bends. Basically, they'll have the bends, yeah. So you're on the deck, you're chucking some dead ones over and you're keeping others.

And so you just have these sort of floating rings of death around your boat. It's just so wasteful, you know. It really is. I mean, it is heartbreaking to see. And was it heartbreaking? for you in the very beginning, or did it become heartbreaking over time for you? Oh, that's interesting question. I think it became over time. And this is why I miss fishing so much. Like that thrill, the adrenaline, the independence, the lawlessness of it. I have a feeling of

just no eyes on you is just such a wonderful feeling. So I think that's how it might, emotionally that's where I started. But then, yeah, it's just like haul after haul, year after year. That's what it really digs away at you. Huh. You just see that much death at that scale. So there's an important caveat here. The types of commercial fishing, Brenn is describing the particularly destructive, trawling, and what I was describing with high rates of bycatch are not something that necessarily

always happens in commercial fishing. That's sort of the worst case scenario. And thankfully, regulations have evolved since. Bren was fishing, and in general, fishing in the U.S. is actually more sustainable now than it used to be. Huh. That's good news. Yeah, it is good news. You know, policy, policy matters. You got to change the rules to keep up with the state of the ecosystem. Right.

But for Bren, at the time, there was this conundrum. He desperately wanted to stay on the sea to make his living, but was becoming increasingly aware that the common ways to do that were not sustainable. But he'd been hearing about this thing, aquaculture, which, what's the layman's term for that, Dr. Ian Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist? Fish farming? Fish farming, yes. And specifically salmon farming.

And so he thought maybe this could be a way for me to stay on the ocean and make a sustainable living. So he decided to give it a try. He found his way back to Newfoundland and got a job on a salmon farm. And it was just terrible. I mean, it was at that time, this was the early 90s. And just when land-based farming was trying to figure out how to move away from industrial agriculture into some other mode, like, you know, organics, regenerative, things like that, aquaculture borrowed all the lessons, the bad lessons from land-based agriculture and essentially were running pig farms out at sea. Right.

You know, just shovel and feed into huge pens and just salmon shit and everywhere and, like, use of antibiotics, pesticides and the fish tasted terrible. And so that was not what I was looking for. So I just, I kept searching from there. You know, it's back up in Newfoundland and I was drinking. Guinness and trying to read, you know, environmental reports about aquaculture to put my life, my daily. You know, drinking Guinness and reading environmental reports. I can totally picture you doing this. Just checking out.

Just going to have a beer and nerd out on these government documents. But actually, I remember I applied for a contest. Guinness was given away a thing where if you came up with a slogan for Guinness, you'd get a free bar in Ireland. And so we all entered and tried to get in. And mine was, I love Guinness so much, it makes me angry. Did you win? I didn't win.

Please tell me what. No, I'm not even close. Not even close. They were looking for a Guinness is good for you kind of vibe, probably. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So Brian is sitting there drinking Guinness. He's still young. He's barely in his 20s.

You know, the only thing that's made him happy professionally was being on the ocean, but every time he found a spot for himself there, something would drive him back on land, whether it was the collapse of the fisheries, the moral dilemma of bycatch, or his disenchantment with commercial salmon farming. And so he decided, maybe a college education will help.

And he enrolled in the University of Vermont, planning to major in marine biology. Yeah. Your field. Did you make that decision over a Guinness? No, I was five. I was not yet drinking Guinness at the time. Right.

Right, right, right. The Guinness came later for me. Yeah. So, anyway, that decision made. He spent the summer making some money, fishing in Alaska, he flew to the East Coast to start his life as a college student. And I flew in right out of Dutch Harbor in the Bering Sea, landed, and I found myself in this dorm full of fret, like meatheads.

And it was just this bizarre thing. I was in this room with this roommate. And I was just like, no freaking way. So second day I moved out of the dorm into the golf course. They had, you know, they got woods and golf course of the fair, you know, I don't know what's called Fairway or something. And I built a lean-to and lived there my first semester. And I got to tell you, if you want to, like, get lucky in Vermont at UVM, live in a lean-to, like, all the women just loved it. I got the most action I ever got in my life actually was in that lean-to. The back-to-land, not man of the UVM golf course. Yeah. And I was making bank.

Like, I was selling mushroom and asses. and dope and stuffed all these, you know, prep school kids and stuff. And, you know, they'd pay anything. So in the lean two, I had these scales and I'd measure it out and they'd come and I'd sell it. So I was, you know, and that's how I was paying for school and stuff. Just a hustler. I've always wondered, like when I started telling the story, I'm just wondering if any of these places are going to revoke my, you know, my graduation or my degrees. I'm just waiting for that.

It just occurred to me, I know, like, at this point in the story, I wonder if our listeners are like, wait, How are we away? We seem to be moving further away from a climate solution. We started as a fisherman and now we're like feeling drugs out of a lean-to-in-all-fours. It's all leading somewhere. Hey, it's Manushe. You are listening to a bonus episode from our friends at How to Save a Planet as part of our special series on the ocean. And I just want to take a sec to let you know what we are cooking up for 2020. I am kind of crazy excited about the episode coming your way on January 7th. We are dedicating the hour to exploring genes, specifically genetic tools,

and how we are on the cusp of a scientific revolution that is changing the very nature of evolution. And one of the big brains leading the way is Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Dowdna, the inventor of the gene editing CRISPR technology. Here's a little sneak listen of our conversation. You know, I had just come home from the lab, and, you know, we had just gotten the data that showed how this worked. And I was at home. I was, you know, I was cooking spaghetti in my kitchen for my young son. And I just suddenly burst out laughing because I thought, this is so crazy, you know, that we started working on this thing.

I didn't really know where it was going. And it certainly wasn't a popular area of science. at the time most people had never heard of CRISPR, and yet we had uncovered this just absolutely extraordinary molecule whose chemistry was going to probably change the world. More from Jennifer Dowdna very soon. Also, the story of a cloned black-footed ferret named Elizabeth Ann, that's in 2022, very soon. For now, let's get back to this episode of How to Save a Planet. It hosts Ianna Elizabeth Johnson and Alex Bloomberg were talking to Bren Smith, a fisherman trying to make a living off the ocean sustainably without contributing to its demise.

We left things in a not very promising spot. Brand had been forced off the sea again and was dealing drugs out of a lean-to in the middle of a golf course at the University of Vermont. That's where he was. But now, let's fast forward a couple decades or so to where he is today. We're about a mile off shore, maybe half a mile, not far at all. So, Ianna, you know that in the summer of 2020, I donned a mask, grabbed a six-foot-long boom pole to hold a microphone at a proper pandemic distance and met Brann and went out with him on his boat into the Long Island Sound. I was so jealous that I couldn't join you that day. I mean, I've never been out on a boat with Brann, and I've known him for many years.

years, and I can't believe you got to go before I did. I know. It sucks. But it was really fun for me. Yeah, he took me out and showed me what he's doing now. And I'm going to tell you and our listeners all about that. But before I do that, we should fill in the rest of the story, which Brenn laid out for me while we were on his boat. So basically, he says, around the time he was living at the University of Vermont on the golf course, he had this epiphany. He realized that the way we as a society were trying to do seafood at scale, it was backwards because we were working backwards. We're trying to farm the seafood that we used to hunt, like that you used to catch, like wild large fish that we would catch with nets and fishing lines. Everybody ate salmon and tuna, which is a wild palate.

So we started growing salmon, tuna, whatever we could. And instead of asking the ocean what to grow. And you ask the ocean what to grow, and it's just so simple. It says grow things that don't swim away and you don't have to feed. Uh-huh. I love it. Grow things that don't swim away and you don't have to feed. It really is simple, isn't it?

So wise. Yeah. And so with that epiphany, friend was like, oh, I know what I'm in a farm. Not salmon. Oysters. Wait a second. We're supposed to be talking about seaweed. You and your detours.

We also did promise lots of trial and error. We warned you. So after graduating from college and bumming around here and there, Brand decided to set himself up as an oyster farmer. He's like he went out on the ocean. He got himself set up with oyster. What is it? Seeds or something? What is it?

Larvae. Larvae or larvae? Larva is singular and larvae, B-A-E-E-is plural. All right. You did not know that how to save a planet was your good. two for Latin endings of pressures. And so he got some

oyster larvae. Right. So these larval oysters, they actually seek out and then settle on the shells of old oysters. And that's where they decide to put down roots and grow their own shells. And then they accumulate

into what's called an oyster reef as all these oysters start growing, essentially on top of each other. And they form what can be quite large natural structures. And in New York City, in New York Harbor, there used to be like billions and billions of oysters that were creating these structures so large that they were navigational hazards.

Oh. But, you know, because oysters are pretty easy to catch, they don't swim away. Right. Pretty easy to overfish oysters. So there used to be like oyster carts on the streets in Manhattan. just like there are now like hot dog stance.

That's amazing. It was like a penny for an oyster. So crazy. And so it was this really big part of the coastal economy for a bit. And now we have figured out how to farm them instead. So he started doing that. He had this oyster bed that he was farming and tending. And that was going okay for a while.

But then there's this pretty big problem, which we are familiar with on this podcast, called Climate Change. change. My oyster farm got wiped out by Hurricane. I reeded hurricane. Sandy, so two years in a row. These hurricanes, they came with these huge storm surges, and the surges swept all this mud

and plopped it right on top of Bren's oysters that were on the seafloor wiping out the crop. And these strong storm surges are exactly what scientists have been predicting we would see more of with climate change. So when Bren saw this happen year after year, he saw it as an alarm bell. So before 2011 and 2012, when these hurricanes hit, Bren says that climate change wasn't something he thought that much about. He was thinking about the environmental impacts of fishing and farming, but climate change, it didn't seem like something that would affect him personally, until his oyster crop got wiped out two years in a row.

First year, you're like, oh, okay, that's socks, he'll recover. two years in a row you're like you know this isn't a slow lobster boil this is climate change is here and now and those of us on the water are sort of cadaries of the coal line so that's when you know I want to die on my boat so I wasn't going to leave the water but I need to figure out what was more resilient to grow so like anybody just hopped online Google started searching everything I could grow uh I typed in I typed in aquaculture in Connecticut um expecting, you know, just oysters to come up. And Charlie's name popped up.

Charlie is Charlie Yerrish, a professor at the University of Connecticut. Have you ever come across him? I don't know him. So he's one of these people who's been basically on this quiet quest for decades. And the thing he's been quietly questing about is seaweed farming. His official title is marine phycologist, meaning he studies seaweed. And his big point for a long time is that basically in America, we're thinking about seaweed all wrong. First of all, it's not a weed. It's a vegetable that just happens to grow underwater.

And of course, we should say this fact is widely known in large parts of the world outside the United States. Seweed is a staple of many, many diets globally, especially in Asia. And seaweed farming is big business. It's a $6 billion industry globally. There are huge seaweed farms all throughout Asia. And what Charlie has been saying is that we should try to set up a domestic industry here in the United States. And so when Bren got in touch with Charlie yours, Charlie explained all of this to him and said, if we did manage in the United States to set up our own domestic seaweed industry, the benefits would be enormous. As a marine biologist, I strongly co-sign the benefits of seaweed.

I knew you would. Let's dive in. So first of all, seaweed is tasty. and nutritious, and it fits with Bren's rule about what to farm in the ocean. Kelp does not them away, and you don't have to feed it. The variety that Charlie proposed brand should grow is called sugar kelp, which is native to Long Island Sound, and it doesn't require any fertilizer or anything. It just sucks up photons from the sun and nutrients from the ocean and does photosynthesis. Another advantage is you can grow kelp on these long ropes that are attached to buoys. And so the kelp is growing off of the seafloor.

And it doesn't get buried by storm surges like Brent's oysters did. And when you grow kelp, you can grow lots of other things along with it, sort of on the same lines that you're growing your kelp on. Bren calls this 3D ocean farming. He's told you about this, right? Yeah, I first learned about it with the term polyculture, like the opposite of monoculture. Like you're growing a bunch of different species in the same place. And the thing that's different between farming the ocean and farming on land is that when you're farming on land, you just have like this one surface, right? Right.

But in the ocean, you have this third dimension, which is depth. And you can farm seaweed that's hanging down from these ropes between buoys at the surface. You can farm oysters down at the bottom. You can farm muscles that are hanging down. on ropes. And so you can kind of use every different depth level to grow something like scallops,

hanging in these baskets. And it's really cool. So you can produce all this food in a pretty small surface area of the ocean because you can farm it top to bottom. And the hope is if this type of 3D ocean farming catches on, it can shift some of our food production off of the land and into the sea.

You know, because on the land, agriculture can have a pretty profound environmental effect since it relies so heavily on herbicides and pesticides and fertilizers. Some kinds of agriculture. Yeah, a lot. See our previous episodes on regenerative farming. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't have to, but in many places it still does. But in this kind of ocean farming, you don't need any of that stuff, right? Like the kelp plus the other things that you're growing, like the oysters and scallops and muscles, they just feed on the nutrients already in the water. And there was one other huge, huge benefit to seaweed farming.

Seweed is a climate solution. There's actually four ways that seaweed can help us address climate change. So first and foremost, it's a plant that does photosynthesis, so it's absorbing carbon dioxide, which is great. The second thing is that as these seaweed underwater plants are absorbing all this carbon dioxide, that's actually helping to address ocean acidification. So over the last century, all these fossil fuels that we've burned have released all this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And the ocean has actually absorbed about a third of that CO2, which has led to the ocean now being 30% more acidic than it was 150 years ago. Jesus.

And this just blows my mind that we have changed the pH of the entire ocean. That's crazy. We have changed the chemistry of seawater globally, and this has all sorts of effects from making it harder for shellfish to grow their shells, making it harder for fish to smell their way home or smell predators. And so the seaweed, by absorbing some of that carbon, is actually locally helping to mitigate the impacts of ocean acidification. So that's great. And then number three, having these kelp forest, these seaweed farms out there, means that when a storm comes, the storm surge hits the seaweed before it hits the shoreline and it actually serves as a physical barrier to protect the coast. It lessens the impact of storms. And in a world where warming makes storm surges bigger and more damaging, this could actually make us more resilient to those effects.

Yeah, it could protect us a little bit. And then the last one is just that it creates habitat for biodiversity, for all these different species. So there's just more life in the ocean because fish and crabs and snails and worms and all these things, they just like to have something to live on or hide under or hang out near. And so it's just more habitat. So that's great too. So basically, I'm super into seaweed. I don't know if that was obvious or not.

Lots of reasons that we want to be focusing on seaweed instead of fishing large wild fish. Yes. And the more Bren was learning about all this from Charlie Earsh and others, the more he realized that this was his next move. This was the move that would allow him to stay on the sea and be part of the solution to climate change, which, you know, had in part driven him off his oyster farm. Bren decided I will become a kelp farmer. And it was this very kelp farm that Bren was showing me on the day I went to visit him. Oh, can you, do you mind handing me that tote?

So I need another barrel there. We're on one of those working fishing boats. You know, it's like 25 feet long, really sturdy, lots of barrels and ropes. We were looking at a farm. But I can't stress enough how much this farm did not look like a farm. You know what it looked like? Water. Yep. Some buoys. Yes. Just like open water, some buoys. And that was pretty much it.

But the farm was there. It was just underwater. At one point, Bren leaned over the edge of the boat. He grabbed this big rope that was attached to one of those buoys, cut it loose, and he started dragging it onto his boat and attached to the rope for these long vines of kelp. So I'm just hauling a warm. a kelp up onto the boat so I can

cut it and weigh it and then put it in these barrels. I can totally picture this like you and Bren with your masks on

you with like your boom microphone being like what is coming out of the ocean. Yeah. And like

he's dragging these huge lines with this rope and the kelp it sort of like grows down from the rope. So if you were like

underwater scuba diving around, you would see these rows of kelp just sort of going the opposite way, growing down. Like curtains hanging down. Yeah, like curtains hanging down. And that is the harvest. That is what Brand is farming. So this is a wall of kelp.

This is sugar kelp. It's what we grow. Here it's native to Long Island Sound. And you can see the blades are I don't know. Some are like probably 10 feet. long, we've got these beautiful stipes. I don't know if you've ever tasted a stipe before.

Or if you want to. Stipe is like the stem of a cow plant. If you think about like a kale leaf, you know, the stem from the kale leaf that attaches it to the stock, there's like that sort of, I guess, sort of the stipe. And he basically hands me this. He snips one off with his knife and hands it to me. And so, you know, I'm a good guest. I'm not going to refuse. use an offer of food. Intrepid. Intrepid taste tester. I mean, it's a plant. That's right.

It's not like organ meats or something. Yeah. I lowered my mask and I tried it. Oh. That's really good. Yeah. It's right. Who would have guessed? It's like salty and it's like a salted carrot or something. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so now I'm going to weigh it. You always weigh your own stuff because you never trust a processor. Learn that in fishing. Brent takes this big barrel filled with kelp that he's pulled up and hefts it onto the scale. And then he radios back to his coworker on shore and reads off the numbers. Hey, Jill, you there? I'm going to give you some weights.

So first tote is 48 pounds. Did she just say 48? Yeah. Okay. Is 48 pounds a lot of kelp? I have no idea. It's like a big barrel. It's like an oil drum size, just the worst analogy.

But, you know. Yeah, one of these big plastic barrels. How many pounds of it had you eaten before he waited? Did you really like make a dent in the harvest? I was not going to, I didn't want to cut into his margins. But speaking of margins, like, Wren actually sort of went over the finances. And, you know, it's hard to make a living as a farmer. But, like, one advantage of 3D farming is that like the startup costs, like, how much?

much it takes to get set up, it's not that much. It's actually really affordable. Don't have to go out that far. My land's cheap. Out here, it's cheap. You know, $20,000 to start a farm. You can see, it's just ropes, buoys, string, and some acres, right? I don't have to fight gravity. I don't need gigantic structures because everything just floats. It's cheap to do, makes it replicable, makes it scalable. I have such low overhead. I got like almost no fuel. I'm just floating around. and no inputs like fertilizer feed, things like that. How did you buy your farm? Yeah, so we don't own this water.

We lease it from the town or the state, depending on where it is. This plot is $50 an acre. I've got another plot that's $25 an acre, so it's really cheap, which is incredible. But anybody could boat, fish, swim. $50 an acre per year? Right? Right? This is why just a regular guy who lived in a trailer for a decade can do this.

By the way, when he's talking about the regular guy who lived in a trailer for a decade, he's referring to himself. That was him. Yep. Yeah. He tried to do aquaculture in that trailer, too, with, like, plastic bins or something crazy like that. He was, like, living in an airstream, trying to grow fish in Walmart bags. He's, like, tried everything. Okay.

So, seaweed farming? Yeah. Affordable? Check. Check. Check. Tasty and nutritious. Check.

Climate solution. Check. For techs, for the different ways. Check. Check. Yeah, I'm into it. So there's only one problem. Here in the United States, there are not a lot of people who want to buy it. Oh, that.

Yeah, kind of a snag. The domestic market, as they say, is not very mature. Indeed. Not yet anyway. There's certainly a robust intrast. national market, though. But Bren's goal is to build a bigger industry here in the U.S. We've got one of the largest ocean jurisdictions of any nation, and Bren sees a domestic kelp industry as a big solution that needs to scale here, too. Right. Like if we could get kelp farms like his all up and down the coasts of America, it would help with climate. It would make coastlands

more resilient. It could create livelihoods for tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. And it would help move us as a society to a more sustainable method of food production. And so like lots of good things, but in order for all of it to happen, a lot more people have to want to buy seaweed here. Yeah. Like there has to be a domestic market. And that is the pretty extreme task that Brand has set for himself. Nothing less than... Flacker. Exactly. Nothing less than exponentially scaling a domestic seaweed industry. And so when Bren started growing his first kelp crops, he was also at the same time starting the work of creating a market for what he was growing. And initially the way he did that, he was like, you know what I need?

I need some people who actually know how to cook to start telling people like what they can do with this stuff. And so then Bren did this crazy thing, which I think you'll love. And so you know how Bren's a great storyteller. He's got a flair for creating Buzz. he was doing these tours of his kelp farm for students from the Yale Sustainable Food Program. And he figured, you know what, these fancy Ivy League kids, they're probably going to know some famous people. And he started asking all these tour groups if they knew any famous chefs who he could enlist in his kelp marketing efforts. Of course he did.

And the Yale kids, they came through for him. I mean, I had the top 10 chefs in the world out here. I had Renee Rzeppe, David Chang. Alex Sotillo, they all came out the farm. And the thing that they said was, oh, this doesn't, we haven't tasted something like this before. And, you know, Atlantic Sugar Kelp did eventually

start showing up on fancy restaurant menus. But Brent says that as a strategy for actually addressing climate change, courting fancy Brooklyn foodies, he was like, that's never going to get us there. Too niche. It's like, it can't be this cute thing, right? We've got to scale the right way.

We need to scale the right way through networked production. They got to sell to McDonald's. Exactly. Well, McDonald's had a seaweed burger in the early 1990s called the McLean sandwich, and it became the official burger of the National Basketball Association. Wow. They didn't mention the seaweed, but it was an ingredient. So anyway, so I got kind of soured on the boutique restaurants. It was fine, but we just obsessed with scale because once I started doing seaweed, I was like,

okay, I'm now a climate farmer, right? And this is my piece of the puzzle. Let's figure it out. So scale became key. scale in order to make this, like, not just a thing that one guy's doing in Connecticut, but, like, millions of people could be doing up and down the eastern seaboard. Yeah, like, we should be getting just out of this 100-mile acres, we should be getting about 2 million pounds of kelp.

Like, you know, what I think of as a reef, right? 50 small to medium-sized farms, processing off a hatchery, rings of buyers and entrepreneurs, and then you replicate that, right? All right. Mm-hmm. And that brings us to today. where brand is today, he is like actually trying to fully scale kelp. He says that like a lot of people are kelp gardening and he wants people kelp farming. That's right. I get it. And I think you know this.

You've done it longer than I have, but just from my my short time hanging out with him, you become very aware that like he's a very savvy marketer. Like really, really impressively so. And so he's had originally when he was like sort of pitching kel. He was like, it's the new kale, you know, this formerly forgotten vegetable that now shows up in recipes and menus everywhere. Yeah, one of their slogans was kelp is the new kale. Well, he's got a new slogan now. You know what he wants kelp to be now? The new new thing? I do know because I read Brent Smith's book called Eat Like a Fish. And he wants seaweed to be the new soy. Exactly. Just like in everything as a base, as a substrable. As a substrate. as the sort of neutral but very nutritious thing that you're putting in stuff.

Yes, and soy is one of those foods. Like, almost all of us are consuming soy all the time without really knowing it because it's an ingredient in so many things, like processed foods, animal feeds, vegetable-based packaging, and all this stuff. And Bren wants kelp to be that. He wants kelp to go far beyond what it is in the U.S. today, beyond this specialty item that you can find in Asian grocery stores and occasional artisanal hipster spots, he wants to turn it into something that is everywhere.

And not even just in food, but an ingredient in cosmetics and sustainable packaging and bioplastic everywhere. But, you know, without all the problems that soy has that have led to it being sort of the poster child for big ag and the way that it degrade soil and overuses pesticides and all that bad stuff. Exactly. He just wants the market to be the same size

as the market for soy and soy products. That is how big he thinks the market for kelp has to get to enable the transition he imagines. And so he is working

with people to figure out how can we make kelp into the new soy, which is essentially asking the question, what can we do with this stuff? Right?

What is kelp good at? Yeah. And he's enlisting other folks in trying to find the answer to that question. What else is kelp good for? So Brin harvested all this kelp, right that day. He came back. He had like five huge plastic barrels, packed full of kelp, over 500 pounds of it, and he rolled the barrels off the boat, up onto the dock, where there

are these two dudes waiting to pick it up. Their names were Casey Emmett and Craig Wilson, and they were with a group called The Crop Project. So you guys are the next, uh, next The link of the chain. We're right the next link of the chain. So we've got a pickup truck filled with five barrels of about 579 pounds of Atlantic sugar kelp and farmed from Brensmith's farm. So, Ianna? Alex. Do you want to know what these guys have to do with building the massive domestic industry for kelp that will allow Brenn Smith to unleash this climate saving plan on the world?

I mean, how could I resist? Good. You have to wait till next episode. A two-partner, everyone. Our first cliffhanger. This is so exciting. And so in the next episode, we'll follow Casey and Craig as they try to figure out what to do with five barrels and 579 pounds of Brenzmith's just-farmed sugar kelp. How are they going to create a new industry and demand? for this product in the U.S., like, what are we going to do with all this kelp?

And actually, we at the staff of How to Save a Planet, we get in on some of that R&D action ourselves and start experimenting in our own research facilities, aka our kitchens. Come join us in our test kitchens. To see what we can do with kelp. And in the meantime, while you're waiting for that next episode to drop, here are some calls to action. So you can check out Bren Smith's book, which is called Eat Like a Fish. I read it. I loved it. Pick it up from your local bookstore.

Also, you should check out Bren's organization called Greenwave. It's a nonprofit devoted to fostering a domestic seaweed industry, and it's got lots of really cool resources on the site. Perhaps you want to learn how to become a seaweed farmer yourself or sponsor a farmer or just learn more about seaweed farming. Also, there is a way to support the work that is happening on Greenwave on that site if you just want to sort of contribute and help. All of that is at Greenwave.org. And I should, for full disclosure, say that I am on the board of Greenwave. I am that big of a fan of seaweed and their vision of, you know, hundreds of ocean farms dotting the coasts and providing all these great local jobs in this nutritious, environmentally friendly food that I've like literally volunteering my time. to help make this dream come true.

And if you're excited about this burgeoning industry of ocean farming and you want to start your own hatchery or farm or underwater garden, we'll have a link to some do-it-yourself materials in our newsletter and in the show notes. Right. And we get a bunch of emails here at How to Save a Planet from listeners who are really engaged in climate topics and are young and trying to figure out what they want to do to start off their careers in climate solutions. So for those of you thinking about what even to study in college, you can actually get a degree in aquaculture. You could study ocean farming, whether that's the science side or the policy side or the economics of it.

You can be a part of this. For links to resources, more information about all of this stuff, that's all in our newsletter, which you should sign up for. You'll get a little treat in your inbox every week. You can sign up at how to save a planet. com. Show. And if you take any of our suggested actions, let us know about it. Send us an email or better yet record yourself on a voice memo and send us that. We're at How to Save a Planet at Spotify.com.

You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram, How to Save a Planet. That's how the number two save a planet. Oh, and if you like the show and a bunch of you, we know are coming back week after week to see, like, what else are we going to talk about? Please make sure to give us a review, like shower us with stars and maybe a few nice words. And don't keep us a secret. Share us with your friends. All right. Should we do the credits? I'm ready. Take it away.

How to Save a Planet is a Spotify original podcast and a Gimlet production hosted by me, Dr. Ianna, Elizabeth Johnson. And me, Alex Bloomberg. Our reporters and producers are Kendra Pierre-Lewis, Rachel Waldholz, Anna Ladd, and Felix Poon. Our intern is I-O-O-T. Our senior producer is Lauren Silverman. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Sound design and mixing by Sam Bear and Peter Leonard with original music by Peter Leonard and Emma Bunger. Our fact checker this week is Sarah Craig.

Special thanks to Leanna Covielo, Jill Pagnateiro, Chrisel Soriano, and Sam Garwin. Sea, weed. You're next week. Am I allowed to fire you for that? So bad. Help, Manusir. That was an episode of Gimlet's How to Save a Planet. For part two of Brenz-Smith's story and many more episodes of the show, go join Alex and Diana on Spotify.

I will be back on Friday with the final part of our TED Radio Hour Ocean series. If you've ever been confused about what kind of seafood you should and shouldn't eat, well, this one's for you. I go shopping at the fishmongers, and Ayanna sets me straight. For now, I'm a new Somerode. This is NPR, and thanks so much for listening.