Greenwave…
Bren Smith is an ocean farmer and Greenwave is fisherman-run organization dedicated to building a new blue-green economy that creates jobs, mitigates climate change and grows healthy food for local communities.
I live in Morro Bay and it is located right next to the Pacific Ocean in California. When I learned that I can lease ocean land for cheap and grow seafood and kelp in it, it starting me daydreaming. It’s like something you fantasize about doing but would never…or would I.
At the bottom of this post are over 100 links to some of the most reputable news organizations sharing that Greenwave’s future is bright. No one is trying this 3D ocean farming here. So maybe I will be the first.
The GreenWave Mission
Greenwave supports a new generation of ocean farmers and innovators working to restore ecosystems, mitigate climate change, and build a blue-green economy. And how do they do it?
3D Ocean Farming
Greenwave has created a polyculture vertical farming system grows a mix of seaweeds and shellfish that requires zero inputs. This makes it the most sustainable form of food production on the planet, while sequestering carbon and rebuilding reef ecosystems. These farms sit below the surface and leverage the entire water column. They produce high yields with a small footprint. Their crops are used as fertilizer, food, animal feed and more. The Greenwave farms are open source, so anyone with 20 acres, a boat, and $20,000 can have their farm operational within one year.
Greenwave Creates Jobs
3D Ocean Farms are designed to be replicated. So each new farm requires a low capital cost and a minimal initial skill set. The Greenwave Farm Startup Program exists to support new farmers from permitting to purchase, and from seed to harvest.
Sequester Carbon
Kelp and other sea vegetables, known as “the Sequoias of the sea,” absorb up to five times the amount of carbon as land-based plants. Click here to learn more about Carbon Sequestration.
Rearrange the Seafood Plate
With over 10,000 edible plants in the sea with more of the United States underwater than above, this should be our opportunity to rearrange the seafood plate and reduce the pressure on fish stocks, with sustainable sea-greens in the middle and wild fish at the edges.
Build Infrastructure
These restorative hatcheries, seafood hubs, and online resources create a foundation for this emerging blue-green economy. Greenwave provides the land-based infrastructure necessary to ensure sustainable growth for their new farmers.
Build Reef Systems
3D Ocean Farms rebuild natural reef systems, by using native and restorative species, that once protected coastal communities from violent storms. This will result in enhancing our resilience to climate-related weather events.
Zero Input Farming
This is my favorite part…the crops that grow require zero fertilizers, freshwater, or antibiotics. This makes 3D ocean farming the most sustainable form of food production on the planet.
Market Research
So they work with large-scale institutional buyers and incubate social entrepreneurs to create new and stable markets for our farmers’ crops.
Prevent Deadzones
Oxygen depleted dead zones are a major global crisis. The main perpetrator is the nitrogen coming from our farms, home,s and factories. 3D Ocean Farms sequesters the nitrogen runoff. This enable us to capture this valuable resource for use in fertilizer and animal feed.
Protect the Commons
3D Ocean Farms are designed to be community spaces where anyone can fish and boat. This is critical because we must ensure that our oceans remain beautiful and pristine spaces, and communal sources of food.
The Invention Stories Podcast Episode 47…Bren Smith and Greenwave Recap
Bren Smith was a rough and tumble kid drawing up in the small fishing village of Petty Harbor, Newfoundland in Canada. Bren believes he has a number of learning disabilities that led to his dropping out of high school at the age of 14. Bren believes he made the right decision and dropping out to lead a self-directed life as a fisherman on the high seas.
Bren’s fished the Georges Banks and the Grand Banks for lobster and tuna before heading to the Bering Sea to fish for crab and cod. He felt pride helping his country feed his people.
I asked Bren what is most different between Canada and the US. Bren believes Canada is much more of a civilized country having healthcare for all, believe in diversity and in good environmental policy. He sees the USA is a place where you fend for yourself.
In the early 1990s, the cod stocks crashed in Canada and many fishermen lost their jobs. Bren ended up in Northern Canada working on an aquaculture farm, which was thought as the solution to overfishing. Bren found they polluted the water with pesticides and pumping fish full of antibiotics. This resulted in terrible tasting fish. He describes it as an Iowa pig farm at sea.
Bren made his way to southern New England where he learned to become an oyster farmer and that was the beginning of the realizing that he could grow food in the ocean. What Bren would ultimately develop a system that required zero input, no feed no pesticides no fertilizers, and it would restore ecosystems.
After starting with oysters he started adding different species and trying out new ways of growing and wound up with a 3-D ocean farming.
Questions I ask
The interview continues as I ask the following questions:
Do you go about leasing part of the ocean?
I asked him about large fishing boats with mile long trolls (nets) that drag along the bottom of the ocean…
I asked Brian what’s the biggest obstacle Greenwave faces and how do they overcome it?
What the challenges of starting your own farm? Do the owners need to know how to dive?
Why wouldn’t you replicate this system on land?
What was it like to learn that you’re were to be featured on the time magazine’s 25 best inventions of 2017?
Was there a noticeable increase in website traffic once the issue was available?
What would you like to see happen in the next five years what are your goals?
What is advice would you give someone with an idea for an invention who does knows little about the patent process?
The Invention Stories Podcast
on YouTube and More…
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and here for Women Inventors and the 7 Percent.
To watch more Invention Stories on YouTube, please click here.
If you are new to inventing, we invite you to visit Episode 1 with Forbes Riley.
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Finally, we invite you to sign our Guest Book.
Greenwave on Facebook and Twitter
Greenwave Articles
Just a few months ago, there was no Long Island Sound seaweed industry at all.
Oystering on Long Island Sound is not always a large enterprise.
In a first for Long Island Sound, 120 pounds of kelp farmed in waters near the Thimble Islands has made its way to the plates and soup bowls of New York City restaurants
We Can Feed the World with Kelp Forests
I met folks from the Yale Farm, one night at a dinner and started talking to the farm manager.
Bren Smith: growing plants and protein in the sea
Vertical Ocean Farming Creates Healthy Ecosystems
It’s a delicacy Asian cultures have enjoyed for centuries but is more commonly thought of as the slippery – and sometimes slimy – brown stuff that grows naturally in area waters and then washes up on beaches
An excerpt from the book
Ocean-bound entrepreneur envisions ecological restoration and economic revival
Sea to Campus: Connecticut Colleges Explore Culinary Uses For Kelp
The Seas Will Save Us: How an Army of Ocean Farmers are Starting an Economic Revolution
Opinion: These 2 projects are exploring the potential of underwater farming
More Articles…
Kelp is the New Kale
Bren Smith’s op-ed piece
Experts are working to make seaweed the next kale
Ocean farming goes in a new direction
The Seas Will Save Us: How an Army of Ocean Farmers Is Starting an Economic Revolution
Kelp Is the Ocean’s Most Underutilized Power Ingredient
Future Farming: The Gateway Drug of Sea Vegetables
The Next Kale
How the Oceans can Save us.
It’s a growing trend in the U.S., the farm to table movement. Restaurants team up with farmers, filling menus with fresh local meats and produce.
My story is the story of ecological redemption.
The number of businesses supporting the local food movement is continuing to expand in Connecticut. WNPR’s Nancy Cohen reports on the state’s first community supported fishing venture.
The Water Brother’s stop by Bren’s farm.
Shortly after noon on a blustery Saturday, Bren Smith parked his Toyota in the bike lane of a leafy side street in the West Village. Smith, the owner of Thimble Island Oyster Company, had been up since 4 A.M., when he’d gone out on Long Island Sound to harvest kelp, oysters, and claims on his forty-acre plot
With 3D Ocean Farming, We Can Eat Sustainably While Restoring Our Oceans
Bioneering a Sustainable Sea Change with Ocean Farmer Bren Smith
Bren Smith: Vertical Ocran Farming
When Bren Smith became an “ocean farmer”
Interview with Bren Smith
Could Underwater Farming Feed The World?
American Food Heros
“It makes all these foods the most sustainable on the planet, and I will even argue that it will also be the most affordable food as land and water get more expensive,” said Bren Smith.
‘Ocean farmer’ helps tackle climate change
How Underwater 3D Farms Could Revolutionize Food Production
The Cleanest Line
Sustainable Seafood
Is Vertical Farming the Key to Sustainable Seafood?
Eat Kelp.
Tricky Waters: How do we meet the demand for fish without depleting our oceans?
Ecological Redemption: Ocean Farming in the Era of Climate Change
Last year, we supplied the first domestically produced seaweed ever served at a White House state dinner.
An Army of Ocean Farmers: On the Frontlines of the Blue-Green Economic Revolution
Beyond Sustainability: GreenWave’s Regenerative Ocean Farm
Could 3D seaweed farms save our climate and heal our oceans?
Worried about the effects of overfishing, climate change and the acidification on our oceans?
Connecticut’s ‘Vertical Ocean Farmer’ Wants To Change World’s Food Supply System
The world’s oceans are experiencing a tough time. Overfishing, acidification from climate change, pollution, and dead zones have all become major challenges to the health of aquatic ecosystems around the globe.
Bren Smith is no ordinary waterman. He’s out to revolutionize fishing, fight climate change, create jobs – and get you to eat seaweed.
I can’t swim. A lot of fishermen where I’m from never learn. The water’s cold and we have a saying that it just prolongs your death. People can’t believe it, but, if you go down in the Grand Banks, just calm down and say goodbye.
“So, it’s food production, eco-system restoration, and then growing the green economy and education,” says Bren.
Bren Smith is a shellfish and kelp farmer in the Thimble Island community of Branford. Smith has developed a unique shellfishing method for harvesting oysters.
Bren Smith’s innovative kelp farming may be the future of food.
Goodbye, tuna. So long, cod. Hello, pangasius and kelp! These are the seafoods – and sea organisms – we are likely to be eating in the future.
More than three billion people on the planet depend on seafood for a critical portion of their diet’s protein.
Drones, Data and Insects: How Innovation Can Make the Food System More Sustainable
Connecticut’s Shoreline Threat: How Vulnerable Areas are Responding to a Rising Ocean
How the Long Island Sound is Becoming Home to a Healthier Seafood
Though regional cash crops are typically cultivated on land, aquaculturists are pushing state and county lawmakers to permit the growing and selling of sugar kelp, or seaweed.
Bren Smith, executive director of GreenWave, shares his vision for a day when there are thousands of ocean farms contributing food, fertilizers, and energy while lifting struggling coastal communities out of poverty.
Kelp farmer seeking to expand the Stonington Harbor
Bioneers Conference Sparks Rea Change
“I’m on the Front Lines of this Crisis”
A fisherman’s plan to feed the world and reduce climate change
Life Down on the Kelp Farm
This Former Fisherman Is Now Farming the Most Sustainable Food on Earth – Underwater
Seaweed, niche health food to haute cuisine
He Made Kelp the New Kale, but This Seaweed Farmer Isn’t Done Yet
Natural Aquaculture: Can We Save Oceans by Farming Them?
The Underwater Farms That Could Help Stop the Death of Our Oceans
The Yale Sustainable Food Project
Along the shores of New York Harbor, scientists are investigating whether this ubiquitous bivalve can be grown in urban areas as a way of cleansing coastal waters of sewage, fertilizers, and other pollutants.
Stony Creek Harbor, in the southeast corner of Branford, Connecticut, quietly looks out on the rocky shores of the Thimble Islands in Long Island Sound.
This form of aquaculture replenishes the environment, rather than degrading it. “Oysters are these incredible engines of sustainability,” Mr. Smith said. “They filter 50 gallons of water a day and pull nitrogen from the water, all with zero input of freshwater, fertilizers and animal feed.”
From sorbet to oysters, there is a bumper crop of food startups that hit the streets just in time for summer.
Bren Smith, owner of Connecticut-based Thimble Island Oyster Company, and director of the organization GreenWave started growing kelp and shellfish as a reaction to several crises he faced in his own life: overfishing, climate change, and rampant unemployment in the fishing industry.
Bren Smith, owner of Connecticut-based Thimble Island Oyster Company, and director of the organization GreenWave started growing kelp and shellfish as a reaction to several crises he faced in his own life: overfishing, climate change, and rampans unemployment in the fishing industry
Brendan Smith sidles his small fishing boat, Mookie, alongside a row of basketball-size black buoys, bobbing barely a mile off Branford in the Thimble Island section of Long Island Sound.
“Kelp is a game-changer,” said Bren. “It is so resilient, fast-growing and does all of these powerful things.”
Stories From Main Street: Connecticut Ocean Farmer Hopes To Make Kelp The New Kale
Branford man is taking his farm underwater
More Greenwave Articles (15 more links)
The Guardian.com- GreenWave ocean farming model scoops $100,000 sustainability prize
The NewYorker.com- A New Leaf- Seaweed could be a miracle food—if we can figure out how to make it taste good
Rolling Stone.com- 25 People Shaping the Future in Tech, Science, Medicine, Activism and More
Huffington Post.com- How Underwater 3D Farms Could Revolutionize Food Production
CNN.com- ‘I’m on the front lines of this crisis’
National Geographic.org- Restoring the Urban Sea by Farming It
