Bull Kelp Farm as Wild Bed Support

Project Overview

Sea Quester Farms was established in 2022 to experiment with different techniques of growing bull kelp in Southeast Alaska. They are working in tandem with Barnacle Foods, a producer of sauces, relish, and pickle, made from wild, mature bull kelp harvested from the healthy beds near Juneau. As Barnacle Foods’ products have gained traction in the marketplace, and as ocean stewards intent on understanding the organism their products depend on, they encouraged Sea Quester Farm to explore techniques for growing bull kelp by guaranteeing their harvest a market.

Most efforts to farm bull kelp have produced skinny, short bull kelp nothing like what grows in the wild. So Sea Quester’s task is unique: to grow bull kelp to Barnacles’ size specifications by mimicking how it grows in the wild. Southeast Alaska has some of the best conditions for bull kelp anywhere along its range and generally, the wild beds are healthy and continue to produce the large, mature bull kelp with the inch-plus diameter stipe needed by Barnacles foods.

The goals for Sea Quester are to:

1. Promote Ocean Stewardship – Develop techniques to grow bull kelp to mimic its wild compatriots and thus better understand how it grows. Share knowledge widely and in collaboration with the BKRS (Bull Kelp Research Squad) group out of Kodiak so these techniques can be used to develop best practices to meet the market and, hopefully, protect wild beds and encourage resilience and restoration in declining beds. Provide data to NOAA and other monitors on kelp farm and fish interactions.
2. Create a Resource – Bull kelp can produce the highest per-pound output of biomass of any kelp farmed. It can be used for numerous applications from fertilizer components to food resources. While other farms might grow bull kelp for pure biomass, Sea Quester’s goal is to reproduce wild-sized, reproductive bull kelp.
3. Support the Local Community – Develop economic benefits and employment pipelines through kelp farming to provide food products and support kelp restoration.

Implementation

It is important to remember that mariculture of bull kelp is lightyears behind agriculture on land as well as other more typical kelps farmed in the ocean. There is so much basic stuff to figure out. Sea Quester is designing arrays of seeded line set relative to the benthos, or ocean bottom, as opposed to the surface (like the more commonly grown sugar kelp), thus it is hard to monitor  and harder still to experiment with different depths to find the optimal one. The spore density for bull kelp is also different than sugar kelp and, while it has been established that the spores need to be much more diluted to avoid massive tangling, Sea Quester is also experimenting with models where sections of line have no spores, allowing the bull kelp to grow in clusters with greater current flowing between them, perhaps allowing larger growth. The timing of seeded line deployment in late winter or early spring relative to Alaska's daylight and seasonality is also a factor.

Like some other regions, Alaskan regulations require the wild sori used to create the cultured seed must be collected within 50 miles of the farm site.

Sea Quester is also farming sugar kelp (Sachharina latissima) and split kelp (Hedophyllum nigripes) and ribbon kelp (Alaria marginata). They believe developing a kelp farm with multiple species is a healthier system overall to maintain the ocean’s biodiversity. And, like other regions whose economies depend in large part on the oceans, the season for kelp farming is complementary to commercial fishing. Most kelp farmers are also fishers, taking pressure off the kelp farm as a revenue generator. Kelp farms, such as Sea Quester, are exploring financing models from grants as they find their place in the market.

Key Findings

Kelp of a size acceptable by Barnacle Foods has been grown to reach the surface. This is a remarkable achievement. Experimentation with array design and knowledge sharing continues. The Bull Kelp Research Squad is an active group sharing nursery and cultivation findings as well as array design and timing experiments, whether growing bull kelp for pure biomass, or to match wild bull kelp phenotypes.