Spend any time speaking with fisherman-turned-local-seaweed-farmer Bren Smith and he’ll surely plant two ideas in your head. First, he’ll make a clear case that Connecticut has become the epicenter of the swiftly growing seaweed farming movement on the East Coast, if not the country. Second, he’ll convince you that we should stop calling it seaweed.
One of the most exciting things about the farming of sea greens, as I like to call it, is that it’s reviving a core industry that goes back for centuries and generations in Connecticut, namely making a living from the water, but with an added twist, says Smith, who is considered the Johnny Appleseed of the new push for seaweed farming, both because of his passion for the field and due to the fact that he’s leading so many others to join him in growing it, cooking with it, eating it and finding other new ways to use it.
And who would ever have thought that Connecticut would be the ground zero for both ocean farming and for what I expect to be a sea greens revolution, but it is, and it’s growing more and more into that role every day, Smith says.
There are certainly signs that Smith is not alone in seeing seaweed farming as a wave of the future, with even bigger impacts to come. In addition to the increasing number of seaweed farms launched in the past few years in Connecticut alone, Smith’s innovative approach to ocean farming was recently recognized by both Time and Rolling Stone magazines as inventions that will help shape the future.
One part of getting more people to appreciate the myriad ecological, economic and nutritional benefits of seaweed, Smith says, is to get people to drop the name seaweed.
I think the weed’ in seaweed turns people off, because we generally think of weeds as a problem, a useless pest, if you will, Smith says, speaking by phone from the 1870s oyster captain’s home he shares with his wife in the Fair Haven section of New Haven. The exact opposite is true, so I try to get people to call it sea greens, which is a much more fitting name for all the positive stuff it does and can be used for.
As a food, kelp and other sea greens are packed with nutrients, low in calories and carbs, and extremely versatile in how it can be incorporated into a meal far more than as the paper-like wrap in sushi most Americans associate seaweed with. It can also be turned into biofuel, and used as organic fertilizer, as is the case with some of Smith’s annual crop at a farm operated by Yale University. It’s the second-fastest-growing plant in the world, yielding about 25 tons per acre of aquatic farmland every six months, he says.
These days, Smith happily has his sea-weathered hands full at the helm of his own underwater farm in 20 acres of water he leases from the town of Branford, and as the executive director of GreenWave, a nonprofit based in New Haven that promotes sustainable ocean farming, mitigates climate change and creates jobs. With assistance and support from GreenWave, eight new kelp farms have been established in Connecticut waters over the past two years, with plans in the works for about 10 more in Long Island Sound.
Smith’s operations include a kelp-processing plant in eastern New Haven that makes kelp noodles and other foods from freshly harvested sea greens and distributes them to an expanding number of restaurants in Connecticut and New York City. For the most part, we grow sugar kelp, which has a unique, mild, slightly sweet flavor and when it’s blanched in hot water, turns a really beautiful, appealing green, Smith says. Right now, the demand for it is about 10 times what we’re able to grow. Kelp is the next kale. Ten years ago, nobody really heard of kale or was cooking with it or eating it, and now it’s in so many homes and all over restaurant menus. That’s what’s happening now with kelp.
Connecticut Magazine