The post Without Federal School-Meal Support, Lunch Shaming May Be Back on the Menu appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Before the pandemic, Elizabeth Santamour dreaded seeing a certain stack of envelopes once a month in her mailbox. A third-grade teacher in Scurlock, North Carolina, she was tasked with handing out past-due cafeteria bills to her students.
“The kids knew what they were taking home to their parents and the reaction they were going to get. They knew,” Santamour said. “I had kids who left them in their book bags for days. When I handed them to some kids, they’d get upset. Others would refuse breakfast or lunch because of the expense they knew they were accruing.”
Prior to the pandemic, some schools that were determined to manage school meal debt had resorted to tactics that embarrassed kids, such as stamping their hands to remind parents of unpaid bills and substituting cold cheese sandwiches for hot meals.
Students and teachers nationwide had a two-year break from this pressure when federal pandemic waivers allowed free meals for all. That was followed by a transition year of higher per-meal reimbursements funded by the Keep Kids Fed Act. But those expired in July. Now the burden of school meal debt begins again, at a time when experts are declaring a kids’ mental health crisis as a broad array of stressors, from gun violence to climate disasters, roil their world.
The Education Data Initiative pegs the annual national public school meal debt at $262 million. What’s more, after free school meals for all ended, 67 percent of schools surveyed by the School Nutrition Association (SNA) reported an increase in stigma for low-income students who often depend on those meals as a key source of nutrition.
“Schools, families, and states really did not want to go back to having the complicated school nutrition operations where some kids have access to free meals and other kids do not, and they have to struggle with unpaid debt,” said Crystal FitzSimons, the director of school and out-of-school time programs at the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC).
And in a small handful of states, they haven’t gone back: Lawmakers in California, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Vermont have made universally free school meals permanent. But in the rest of the country, the return to paid school meals has also brought back a host of complications.
Prior to the pandemic, some schools had resorted to tactics that embarrassed kids, such as stamping their hands to remind parents of unpaid bills and substituting cold cheese sandwiches for hot meals. Sometimes meals were thrown out in front of the children. And while experts say that fewer districts have resumed these practices—often dubbed “lunch shaming”—they haven’t gone away entirely either.
A Vicious Cycle of Debt and Stigma
In general, schools have financed breakfast and lunch programs primarily through per-meal reimbursements from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). To receive those reimbursements, which vary based on family income, schools must provide meals that meet certain nutritional standards.
Children in households with incomes at or up to 130 percent of the federal poverty level can receive free meals; those whose households have incomes between 130 and 185 percent are charged 30 cents for breakfast and 40 cents for lunch.
“We certainly hear from school districts with large immigrant communities that there are lots of families who are uncomfortable filling out that application, but definitely need assistance.”
School meal programs are expected to be self-sustaining, according to the SNA. Districts attempt to cover expenses with the federal reimbursements, as well as cafeteria sales from both full- and reduced-price meals. But that’s been increasingly difficult as food and labor costs have risen. Plus, “many of the families who are eligible for reduced-price meals still struggle with that copay,” noted Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokesperson for the SNA.
And there’s another rub. Families must apply for federally subsidized meals if they are not automatically eligible through programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). “These applications for free meal service have always been a barrier for eligible families,” Pratt-Heavner added. For example, income information and the last four digits of a social security number are required. People who don’t have a social security number must check a box declaring that fact.
“We certainly hear from school districts with large immigrant communities that there are lots of families who are uncomfortable filling out that application, but definitely need assistance,” said Pratt-Heavner. And schools need the reimbursements to help cover the cost of the meals.
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols. Click to enlarge.
The application process can be a barrier for families in several ways. Juliana Cohen, an associate professor in the department of nutrition and public health at Merrimack College and an adjunct associate professor in the department of nutrition at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said that completing the form is effectively saying, “I can’t afford to feed my child.”
“Oftentimes these forms are on a brightly colored piece of paper. They say ‘Free School Lunch Form.’ And a parent has to give it to their child to bring back to the school to hand to their teacher. So, many parents are actually reluctant to even fill out the form. Additionally, there can be stigma for the child if they feel like they’re different.”
Since the pandemic reprieve from the application system, another challenge is that many families are now confused about what’s required. If they don’t apply, debt builds.
Laura Milliken, executive director of New Hampshire Hunger Solutions, believes that confusion is one of the drivers of the fast-growing meal debt among schools in her state. “As a result, we are hearing from schools that many of them have amassed quite high school meal debt from kids who eat and then families don’t pay.”
A Flurry of State Legislative Activity and Public Sentiment
There was a wave of media coverage related to lunch shaming prior to the pandemic. And it appears to have had an impact.
“People have a very visceral reaction to those stories, they get a lot of traction, and kids often have phones in school,” which allowed them to document and share the stories themselves, said FitzSimons. After the spate of publicity, experts say the overt actions diminished.
At least 20 states also have taken action against lunch shaming with specific legislation, according to FRAC. North Dakota is among the most recent, with a law signed in April that prohibits public identification or stigmatization of students whose parents have outstanding meal debt.
But some anti-shaming bills have failed. In January, for example, a New Hampshire state representative introduced such a bill, and it was killed the following month. Another effort by legislators there—a bill to raise the income threshold for reduced price lunches from 185 percent to 300 percent of the federal poverty level—made it as far as a Senate committee, which recommended delaying a decision until next year.
And despite the gulf between states with universally free school meals and those without, it’s clear that the pandemic put a spotlight on the importance of the role of schools in feeding the nation’s children.
“There have been a lot of changes in recent years, including the recognition of the value of school meals to students’ health and academic achievement. In most schools across the country, kids, even if they don’t have money in their accounts, are getting some kind of meal,” said Pratt-Heavner of the SNA. She added that she has seen a dramatic increase in unpaid meal debt, which is an indication that kids are being fed even if they don’t have money.
“We shouldn’t encourage philanthropic solutions to policy problems. We need to address the systemic issues that make this generosity necessary.”
There have also been a number of community-wide efforts to assist families that can’t pay for their school meals. In fact, over half of school districts have received charitable donations to help pay off meal debt.
People in Michigan and Virginia have started nonprofits focused solely on relieving school meal debt. Sometimes a local foundation, small business, or church provides the funds and makes headlines. Individuals have stepped in as well.
In August, a 14-year-old in Missouri raised $400 to give to his former elementary school because he remembered not having enough money for lunch when he was there. In May, the New Hampshire family of a retired cafeteria worker who had died of cancer sold her car for $3,000 and used the money to help pay off the school’s meal debt. And at the end of last year, a former North Carolina school superintendent donated $20,000 to help pay debts owed by low-income students.
That school superintendent realized something many others probably don’t. If debt remains, it must be paid out of the school district’s general fund. “This can be the difference between being able to hire another teacher, aides, and the like for the classroom. And so, this has a profound impact on education,” said Harvard’s Cohen.
But Morgan Wittman Gramann, executive director for the North Carolina Alliance for Health, says private donations are a “temporary fix” to a recurring problem. “We shouldn’t encourage philanthropic solutions to policy problems. We need to address the systemic issues that make this generosity necessary.”
‘Vague’ and Variable School District Policies
In conversations with food service directors and parents, advocates say they’re continuing to hear about lunch shaming. “It’s still occurring, but there’s just a lot of variation,” said Cohen, who has multiple grants to examine school-based policies and is also director of the Nourish Lab.
In an effort to measure the scope of the problem, a researcher at the University of North Carolina conducted an analysis of school district meal charge policies in the state. The policies posted online by districts were “vague” and “vary in their willingness to allow meal charges, punishments, and implementation,” according to the report. Forty percent of school districts had a policy to serve those students “an alternative meal,” typically without meat to reduce the cost.
“We’ve heard stories of some school districts that have created robocalls that call the parent every single night until the debt is paid off.”
A local news station reported that when an alternative meal is served in North Carolina’s Guilford County schools, for example, the district’s executive director of school nutrition said that it “looks similar to the daily reimbursable meal to avoid identifying that student.” But the question remains: How does that alternative meal make the child feel?
Some schools in the state have also singled out students who have a balance at the end of the year. In May, a middle school in Granville County, North Carolina, surprised parents with an email warning that students with unpaid meal bills would be excluded from certain end-of-the-year school events. “It’s just an effort to try to encourage our families to help us take care of these bills so that our local taxpayers don’t have to rely on clearing this up,” the county’s associate superintendent told a local ABC affiliate.
Another tactic: robocalls. “We’ve heard stories of some school districts that have created robocalls that call the parent every single night until the debt is paid off,” said Cohen.
In some places—including Douglas County, Colorado, and Knox County, Tennessee—debt collectors are even called in.
All of this is in stark contrast to the best practices FRAC has developed on how schools should engage with households about school meal debt. The group encourages contact to be made by “trusted school officials” and warns against “harsh tactics,” such as charging households added fees and withholding school records. According to FRAC, 20 states still have no legislation addressing issues such as unpaid school meal fees and outreach programs.
Mental Health Impact
Experts agree that one of the most important reasons to provide free school meals is to reduce overall food insecurity in households, both for school children and their families. When school meals are free, resources can be shifted to meals at home.
School meals are about more than nutrition. Food insecurity affects mental health—in fact, it can cause psychological distress. A 2019 study conducted by University of California researchers explored the awareness levels and feelings of 60 San Francisco Bay Area children (aged 7 to 14 years) whose parent had reported household food insecurity during the previous year. It yielded “eye-opening and impactful” results, said Cindy Leung, the lead author.
First of all, the children knew what was going on. “They know that their parents are struggling to put food on the table. . . . They notice when their parents are eating toast or cereal and they have eggs for breakfast. They know when their SNAP or WIC benefits are coming in and that’s when they can ask for something they want at the grocery store. They know if they get free or reduced lunch,” Leung said.
Second, they experienced psychological impacts beyond stress and anxiety. Kids felt anger and frustration at not being able to have the foods they wanted, concern about their parents, loneliness because they couldn’t talk to their friends about these problems, and embarrassment about how empty their refrigerators were.
“What we’re moving into now is wanting to call this a form of toxic stress,” said Leung. That’s a label that has been given to serious adverse events, like suffering from abuse, witnessing domestic violence, or experiencing a death of a family member.
The pandemic, however, shined a light on the policy levers that can improve food security. “We saw the swiftness and efficiency with which we were able to provide food and economic support to families. It has shown that we can prevent food insecurity in children,” said Leung, who is now an assistant professor of public health nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
What Free Meals for All Feels Like
In addition to the eight states that have made universally free school meals permanent, a few states have temporary policies in place. For the 2023–2024 school year, for example, no public-school student in Nevada will have to pay for meals. And in at least 20 other states, legislators are working to pass bills to institute free school meals, according to FRAC.
“There was also a huge increase in the number of schools providing free meals to all students through the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP),” FRAC’s FitzSimons added. After experiencing the benefits of universally free school meals during the pandemic, close to 7,000 more schools adopted CEP for 2022–2023, an increase of 20 percent over the previous year.
“Not only are we providing all children nutrients, but universal free school meals reduce the stigma of who’s accessing school meals.”
CEP allows a school or district to provide free meals if 40 percent or more of children are in a program such as SNAP or a category that includes homeless, migrant, and foster care children. With CEP, family members are not subjected to the stigma of filling out applications.
Massachusetts is the most recent state to adopt universally free school meals. When Governor Maura Healey signed permanent funding for the program in August, she called it “an investment in childhood nutrition that’s also removing a source of stress from our schools and our homes.”
During the 2022–2023 school year, Massachusetts had authorized a one-year temporary extension of free school meals. Nourish Lab, directed by Cohen, surveyed parents about what would occur if the policy ended. In a surprising insight, roughly two-thirds of households near eligibility for free or reduced-price meals and one-third of middle-class households said that they may not have enough food in their homes if school meals were not free.
Cohen said this reflects federal eligibility criteria that does not take into account the “incredibly high cost of living” in many places and the fact that many so-called middle-class families are also struggling.
The Nourish Lab study also found that 42 percent of families with children eligible for free or reduced-priced meals reported their child would be less likely to eat a school meal next year if it was not free for all children.
That’s because if school meals aren’t free for all, kids associate them with subsidized food for low-income families. But when the stigma is removed, kids are no longer embarrassed to eat them, and overall meal participation increases. That dynamic has played out in case studies around the world and is now being experienced by American kids in a growing number of states.
“There is so much movement in this area,” Leung added. “Not only are we providing all children nutrients, but universal free school meals reduce the stigma of who’s accessing school meals. There’s no more lunch shaming with the cheese sandwiches. So, how can we leverage this momentum?”
The post Without Federal School-Meal Support, Lunch Shaming May Be Back on the Menu appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Shell or High Water: Rebuilding Oyster Reefs Is a Climate Solution appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>On a recent spring evening at Crave Fishbar in New York City, the oysters resting on beds of ice hailed from Long Island, Virginia, Washington, Cape Cod, and British Columbia. But once they’d been slurped, all of their shells went to a single place: New York Harbor.
As a participant in the Billion Oyster Project, Crave Fishbar is in its eighth year of collecting shells to help restore the oyster reefs in New York Harbor. The restaurant’s servers, who include many aspiring actors, tell the origin stories of the daily array of oyster options—the better the story, the greater the popularity of that brand, said Jeremy Benson, general manager of the Upper West Side location.
But the best story the team tells is that of the Billion Oyster Project, a nonprofit founded in 2014 that has organized 15,000 volunteers and 60 restaurants to restore oysters at 15 reef sites across New York’s five boroughs.
The effort seeks to bring back the harbor’s oyster population—which was destroyed by overharvesting and pollution in less than 100 years—by collecting used shells, installing them in critical locations, and “seeding” baby oysters on top to form reefs.
In addition to donating shells, Crave Fishbar employees have learned about the bivalve’s ability to clean the water and make shorelines more resilient to climate change. Every year, they join other volunteers who remove plastic forks from shell piles, clean cured shell, and load cages destined for the harbor, a body of water that The New York Times has described as “once an open sewer.”
With 20 years of momentum behind them, the people and groups undertaking oyster conservation projects have garnered both funding and expertise. One thing that’s in short supply is the oyster shell itself.
“Now there are dolphins in the Bronx River. There are whales in New York Harbor. There are harbor seals underneath the Verrazano Bridge,” Benson told me during a recent visit, wrapping up his story with a happy ending also due in no small part to the Clean Water Act of 1972 and subsequent changes to wastewater handling.
When it comes to oyster reef restoration, the enthusiasm of the Crave Fishbar crew is not unusual, and that type of engagement is a driver of environmental activism that’s not to be underestimated.
“When the community is enthusiastic, the aquaculture community is enthusiastic, the conservation community is enthusiastic, then the regulators are sitting there saying, ‘Wow, this is great. Let’s go!’ So, this has been enormously powerful,” said Boze Hancock, senior marine habitat restoration scientist at The Nature Conservancy (TNC).
Though some oyster reef restoration projects, like those in the Chesapeake Bay, operate at unprecedented scale globally, others are small, community efforts. They have involved Rotary Club members, public school kids, nonprofits, community shellfish commissions, universities, federal, state, and local governments, even the lawyers who won the Deepwater Horizon oil settlement. (Baby oysters are now growing on some of the 33 reefs built along Florida’s Gulf Coast as a result of that payout.)
In addition to New York Harbor, Pew Charitable Trusts points to reef restoration efforts in the Chesapeake Bay, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas—and throughout the world.
With 20 years of momentum behind them, the people and groups undertaking these conservation projects have garnered both funding and expertise. But one thing that’s in short supply is the oyster shell itself. That scarcity has led to concerns about what to use instead, with disagreements playing out in heated meetings, court battles, and op-eds. And the challenges are often amplified because so many different players have a stake in restoration efforts.
“If you have five different people in a room, you’re going to have six opinions,” said Taylor Goelz, a marine scientist and senior program manager focused on the ocean and the climate for the Aspen Institute, who also hosts The Ocean Decade Show podcast. She was the lead author on a paper, “Alternative Substrates Used for Oyster Reef Restoration,” when she was a research associate at Virginia Institute of Marine Science. Although approaches may differ, Goelz said most people can agree on one thing: “They all want more oysters.”
Ecosystem Engineers
“Oysters are an incredibly carbon-, space-, and resource-efficient source of protein, which are really yummy,” said Hancock of TNC. “But they also provide ecosystem services.”
Like all bivalves, oysters are multitasking ecosystem engineers. They feed by filtering algae from the water—more than 50 gallons a day. That process removes excess nitrogen, which can create harmful algae blooms, and leaves cleaner water behind.
“Oysters are an incredibly carbon-, space-, and resource-efficient source of protein, which are really yummy. But they also provide ecosystem services.”
As they build their shells from calcium carbonate, oysters sequester carbon in a way that is cost effective and energy efficient. Clustered on reefs, they also help protect shorelines from erosion and storm surges. The reef itself provides shade and traps moisture during low tide, giving heat-stressed intertidal marine life a cool microhabitat that helps them adapt to rising temperatures.
The clearer water resulting from filter feeding also allows sunlight to penetrate and promote the growth of seagrass, “one of the other really important habitats that we are missing,” said Hancock. Ecosystem engineers themselves, seagrasses also clean the surrounding water and help take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, while sheltering a wide array of marine life.
An eelgrass bed in New Hampshire’s Great Bay. (Photo credit: Jerry Monkman Eco-photography)
Oyster reefs provide habitat for hundreds of species, a benefit TNC started to quantify as early as 2012. Mussels, barnacles, and sea anemones settle on reefs and provide food for many species. Crabs and fish also hide from predators in reef crevices. “These reefs pump out fish. It’s amazing,” added Hancock, who has worked in shellfish restoration in the U.S. since 2004.
The wallets of fishermen benefit—but so do community coffers. In Greenwich, Connecticut, for example, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fisheries study calculated that oysters provided the town with an annual financial benefit between $2.8 and $5.8 million. Without shellfish, the town would need to invest that much in wastewater treatment, septic system upgrades, and better storm water management.
Experts agree that the general public is increasingly aware of both these economic and environmental benefits. It’s one reason there has been such a boom in oyster reef restoration, Goelz said. Crave Fishbar’s Benson agreed. “In the restaurant, I have four or five in-depth conversations with people every week about oyster restoration,” he added.
Oyster Reef Restoration Also Spawns Controversy
Wild oysters grow by continually settling on top of other oysters or older shell, rocks, and piers and then reproducing. They fuse together, creating rock-like, three-dimensional structures. But overharvesting, pollution, disease, and dredging have destroyed more than 85 percent of oyster reefs globally. And now climate change poses an added threat.
The scale is enormous and because different locations have seen different arrays of impacts. But all successful reefs require two things: healthy oysters and strong foundations on which they can grow.
Generally, the reefs in the Southeast and Gulf of Mexico tend to have enough native oysters but not enough substrate for the babies to latch on to, Hancock explained. In other places, such as the West Coast and the northern portion of the East Coast, there are too few oysters left to settle a reef.
Tessa Getchis examines oyster spat at Ash Creek in Fairfield. (Photo credit: Griffin O’Neill)
“So, the process of restoration has to step back to [first] provide the substrate and then add the breeding oysters to provide the larvae to settle on that substrate,” he said.
The go-to substrate for restoration projects has traditionally been recycled, fossilized, or dredged native oyster shell. Some Chesapeake Bay watermen, along with the Maryland Department of Marine Resources, still advocate for dredging shell deposits in one place and moving them to another, although the stance is controversial.
As one example of a shell recycling program, New York’s Billion Oyster Project has collected 2 million pounds of shell (1,000 tons) since 2014. Meanwhile, a Florida quarry produced 112,000 tons of fossilized shell—enough for just a single Maryland tributary restoration. (As a point of reference, the landmark Chesapeake Bay Program has plans to restore native oyster habitat and populations in 10 tributaries by 2025.)
For the scale of restoration needed, there is simply not enough shell. “Alternative substrates have to become part of the equation when you get down to it,” said Goelz.
For the last two decades, oyster restoration projects have tapped non-oyster shell, non-calcium stone (such as granite and sandstone), and limestone, as well as manufactured materials like porcelain and concrete. Which one works best is a matter of how well it matches the needs of an individual project, including which ecosystem services are sought.
If oysters will be harvested, experts say, alternative substrates should be layered with natural shell that doesn’t interfere with commonly used fishing methods like dredging or hand-tonging. Oysters growing on chunks of concrete, for example, can be too heavy for a hand-tonger to lift.
Stone such as granite has often successfully fostered oyster growth, but its use was questioned in 2021 during a major restoration project in Maryland when watermen contended that it might snag baited lines. (A county lawsuit and then a court injunction followed, which was only lifted in February.)
Varying public perceptions have also come into play with manufactured materials. For example, porcelain can be recycled from toilets and other bathroom fixtures, yet it has been eschewed as “potty-reef.”
Concrete can also be recycled from demolished buildings or bridges, and because it can be mounted vertically, it has performed as well as—or better than—natural oyster shell in supporting oyster growth and attracting other species to the ecosystem. But recycled concrete can contain toxic substances that leach when flooded with water. Although numerous studies have found it to be safe when it is prepared properly, skepticism remains, with new incidents fueling concerns.
Last September, for example, the Virginia Marine Resources Commission ordered removal of three reefs from the Lynnhaven River, a Chesapeake tributary in Virginia, after tests revealed the presence of harmful polyaromatic hydrocarbons in chunks of concrete and asphalt.
“I’m a great advocate of limestone” as an alternative substrate, said TNC’s Hancock. Limestone is calcium-based, like shells themselves. Plus, it can be built upward to avoid being buried in sediment over time.
“[We can get] barge loads of limestone and do it on a pretty big scale,” he added. “We’ve proved around the world that you could actually make a difference to the ecology fast enough. We’ve beaten up the planet so badly that we don’t have time to muck around.”
A New Market for Oysters
Krystin Ward farms oysters in Little Bay at the mouth of Great Bay Estuary in New Hampshire. She also works as a research technician at Jackson Estuarine Laboratory, where her projects include mapping oyster reefs and restoring them.
New Hampshire has only 18 miles of coastline, but Great Bay adds 144 more miles of shoreline. Ocean water travels 15 miles inland to reach Great Bay, where it then mixes with fresh water from seven rivers. It bears the distinction of being one of the nation’s most inland estuaries, and it’s a treasured habitat for Ward. “It can feel like a little hidden jewel,” she said.
Like some other oyster farmers, Ward found that a number of perfectly healthy oysters weren’t making it to market because they had grown too large for diners’ tastes. “You’re cleaning bags, you’re raking ‘em up from the bottom. And then there are some places you just overlook or you can’t get to one year,” Ward explained.
She began wondering: “What can we do with these? How can we still get a decent price?”
The Nature Conservancy helped answer that question. In 2019, its team worked with Ward and a few other farmers to study whether larger, older oysters could be substituted for the baby oysters (or “spat on shell” grown in nurseries) that are customary in restoration projects. The pilot study found that, one year later, 70 percent had survived. It was an “overwhelming success” and well-timed, with results coming in just as the pandemic was shuttering restaurants, leaving farmers with no market.
“[Growers] are really excited about being able to provide an environmental benefit while they’re at it. We’ve even had growers who have said, ‘If all I do is produce oysters for restoration, that’ll be great.’”
In 2020, TNC launched a broader program named SOAR—Supporting Oyster Aquaculture and Restoration—in partnership with The Pew Charitable Trusts, NOAA, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
In two years, the program purchased more than 3.5 million live oysters and brought them to 25 sites to restore 40 acres of oyster reef. At the same time, it supported 125 shellfish companies and preserved more than 450 jobs, according to TNC.
In February, TNC and Pew announced the second phase of SOAR, with funding of $6.3 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Builders Vision. Later this year, growers who want to participate can apply to the program, which has set a goal of buying 2.5 million oysters and planting them at 12 restoration sites along the East and West Coasts.
“[Growers] are really excited about being able to provide an environmental benefit while they’re at it,” said Hancock. “We’ve even had growers who have said, ‘If all I do is produce oysters for restoration, that’ll be great.’”
What About Cost?
Scientists like Hancock are working on quantifying the benefits that people get from oyster reefs and asking big questions about whether the cost and effort are worth it.
In 2013, fisherman-journalist Bob Melamud was wondering much the same thing as he took the boat with a reef construction crew to the site of the world’s largest oyster restoration project on Maryland’s Harris Creek, a Chesapeake Bay tributary. Project managers were in the process of importing some $6.3 million worth of fossilized oyster shell from Florida because there wasn’t enough in Maryland.
Boze Hancock. (Photo courtesy of The Nature Conservancy)
“It takes a lot of work to build a reef. What I want to know is: will it work? And you should want to know, too. After all, you and I are paying for it,” Melamud wrote in Bay Weekly.
Altogether, with more than 200,000 cubic meters of substrate and over two billion oyster spat on shell, the project cost $52 million. But after just three years, comprehensive monitoring has already demonstrated a return on investment of $23 million annually through a robust increase in fishing revenues alone. “And there’s $11 million worth of blue crab produced by those reefs,” added Hancock. A model developed by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science also found that the oysters contribute more than $3 million a year in water purification services.
And all because they filtered the full volume of Harris Creek—350 acres, an area bigger than the National Mall—in less than 10 days in the summer. “It’s not just a bunch of tree-hugging greenies that wanna put these habitats back,” Hancock said.
Oysters: On a Reef or in a Cage
In Connecticut, where a law regulating oyster harvests appeared in the early 1700s, there hasn’t been the depletion of shellfish seen in the Chesapeake. Another difference: Connecticut has a growing aquaculture industry that values natural beds as a source of seed for its farming.
But extreme weather has been a problem. “Loads of sediment come down the rivers and then pile up on the beds, smothering adult or newly settled oysters,” said Tessa Getchis of the Connecticut Sea Grant and University of Connecticut Extension Program.
Last year the state began implementing a plan to restore and expand shellfish populations, and a 2021 law expanded Connecticut’s ability to acquire oyster shells for that purpose. It authorized the Commissioner of Agriculture to tap into federal, state, and private funding to support an oyster shell recycling program and conduct restoration. It also classified aquaculture as “farmland,” bestowing on shellfish growers key tax benefits.
As Boze Hancock said, “Oysters have those same [ecosystem] services, whether they’re in a cage or on a reef.”
Now, various shell recycling efforts—run by a private farm, town shellfish commissions, and university researchers—have been launched and a “state shell recycling coordinator” hired.
At restaurants, oyster festivals, and raw bars, “we’re seeing volumes of shell just thrown away,” said Getchis. But she knows that trend won’t be easy to reverse. “It takes a lot of work on the part of the restaurant,” ranging from training staff to sort out the shell to isolating it to avoid cross-contamination and rodent infestations. “While we’re optimistic, we’re trying to learn as much as we can now,” she said.
Undeterred, she added, “We want to keep the shell out of driveways and construction sites and incinerators. We want it in the water.”
The post Shell or High Water: Rebuilding Oyster Reefs Is a Climate Solution appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Insect Farms are Scaling Up—and Crossing the Atlantic—in a Play for Sustainable Protein appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>When they’re raised in indoor farms, black soldier flies (BSF) will only mate with the lights on. Each female lays 500 eggs and, after they hatch, the larvae also have a bit of a Goldilocks complex, preferring just the right levels of warmth and humidity.
But when it comes to their diet, the little maggots aren’t fussy. They crunch through any and all food waste, consuming twice their body mass daily. When they’re satiated, they crawl up the sides of their rearing bins toward a high, clean place, a behavior insect researchers enthusiastically refer to as “self-harvesting.”
What insect farmers collect is valuable biomass that contains as much as 40 percent protein and 30 percent fat. And all in about two weeks.
Now, some leading European insect-farming companies are betting on growing the opportunity to turn this biomass into feed for fish, livestock, and pets by expanding to the U.S. These companies run high-tech, commercial-scale operations in France and the Netherlands, and they’re coming to America amid a swarm of multi-year deals and big investments, such as the $250 million that the Paris-headquartered InnovaFeed raised in September.
The magnet drawing them across the Atlantic is not a market of 335 million people, though. It’s America’s waste. Instead of smoldering in landfills, the byproducts of the vast U.S. agricultural system can be given a second life—as feed for insects.
“We are interested in accessing the feedstock, rather than the market,” the newly announced general manager of Innovafeed’s U.S. venture Maye Walraven said on a recent phone call while in a cab to O’Hare Airport on her way back to Paris. InnovaFeed is on track to break ground in Decatur, Illinois, in January—just “over the fence” from the world’s largest corn processing complex, owned by Archer Daniels Midland (ADM).
“We risk creating an industry that replaces one environmental problem with another, as occurred with biofuel,” where the promise of plant-based fuel has been thwarted by the realities of using land, water, and fertilizer.
But while some see the black soldier fly as a more sustainable ingredient for aquaculture and animal feed—compared to soy and fishmeal—concerns about high energy use continue to hover over the fast-developing insect production industry.
“Are we going to use fossil fuels for heating and cooling the facilities where insects are grown? What about transportation?” Åsa Berggren asked in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation following a 2019 article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution that fixed a spotlight on unanswered questions about the right species to grow, feed options, use of insect waste, and more.
A professor of ecology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Science, Berggren and her colleagues called for more research and an “empirical measure of ecological impact and sustainability of production,” saying they were “critical” for the emerging industry.
“Otherwise we risk creating an industry that replaces one environmental problem with another, as occurred with biofuel,” where the promise of plant-based fuel has been thwarted by the realities of using land, water, and fertilizer, she added.
What’s happening now, especially as E.U. insect companies expand to the U.S., begins to answer some of Berggren’s clarion questions.
InnovaFeed and ADM: The Deal
ADM and InnovaFeed may seem like strange partners, but each has something the other wants. For the French biotech company, it’s a “very deep” supply of competitively priced feedstock, Walraven said. For the food processing and commodities trading giant, it’s the opportunity to burnish its image with new sustainability credentials and bolster its relationship with city and state officials by bringing in a new employer.
The two firms plan to “collaborate on the construction and operation of the world’s largest insect production site.” InnovaFeed will own and operate the facility, which will be co-located with ADM’s corn processing plant. ADM will supply corn byproducts to feed the insects, as well as waste heat, water recycling, and other utilities services, according to ADM spokesperson Jackie Anderson. Some 60 percent of the new plant’s energy requirement will be supplied by ADM’s waste energy, Walraven said.
An overhead view of the facility where InnovaFeed and ADM will colocate production of insect protein. (Photo courtesy of InnovaFeed)
The factory is scheduled to open in late 2024 and, when it’s running at full capacity, it will produce an annual volume of 60,000 metric tons of protein meal (a brown powder that looks like cocoa), 20,000 metric tons of oil (a source of essential fatty acids and energy), and 400,000 metric tons of fertilizer.
In a second deal, announced last February, InnovaFeed agreed to supply insect protein to ADM’s pet food division. But ADM will not claim all of the Decatur plant’s output.
InnovaFeed is also working with Cargill, and the two companies announced in June that they would extend their existing partnership from three years to 10 to supply insect-based feed for aquaculture, as well as for chicks and piglets. Hello Nature, an organic fertilizer producer operating in 80 countries, uses InnovaFeed’s insect frasse (excrement) fertilizer.
As all of this happens, InnovaFeed’s first commercial-scale factory in northern France, which opened in 2020, continues to pump out black soldier fly products. Located next to a starch plant that supplies its byproducts through a pipeline, it also operates under what Walraven referred to as the “symbiosis model” and yields 15,000 tons of protein annually.
The Circular Economy at Work
Like Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold, the black soldier fly is the bioconverter at the beginning of the circle that yields all of this.
Its frenetic eating could be part of a solution to daunting global challenges: feeding a growing world population, countering overfishing of wild stocks for fishmeal, and managing waste.
Much of the appeal of insect farming, in fact, is that the wastes of one process become the resources for another. And in the process of converting a low-value input to a high-value output, insect farms have the potential to use less land and water and emit fewer greenhouse gases than the production of the vast quantity of soy that goes into animal feed. It also means that consumers don’t have to grapple directly with the stigma of eating organisms that eat waste themselves.
“We care a lot about the impact our industry can have. The more we can replace other sources of protein and have a better environmental impact, the happier we will be,” Walraven said.
Scrutinizing Environmental Impacts
When Berggren and her Swedish research colleagues wrote their article in 2019, life cycle assessments (LCA) had only just begun to be applied to insect rearing systems. Now many such studies have been conducted to provide sustainability diagnostics by examining every stage of the insect production chain. Beyond capturing the environmental footprint, the LCAs compare findings regarding global warming potential and land and water use directly to benchmarks.
But there are many challenges. Even when an LCA isolates a single species, like the black soldier fly (mealworms, house flies, and house crickets have also been assessed), the complexity of the insect-rearing process and differences in products manufactured have yielded “uncertainties and variabilities” among studies, according to a 2022 paper by an Italian research team that examined more than 20 LCAs conducted during the last decade.
“Despite the numerous advantages of BSF larvae, there are several critical environmental aspects, particularly its global warming potential, that need to be considered before large-scale adoption,” the authors of the 2022 paper continued, echoing Berggren. They noted that CO2 emissions ranged from 1 to 4 kilograms of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) for every kilogram of BSF dry matter produced.
“Despite the numerous advantages of BSF larvae, there are several critical environmental aspects, particularly its global warming potential, that need to be considered before large-scale adoption.”
“Energy use is one of the major environmental concerns,” wrote the paper’s authors. That’s because heat, humidity, and other elements of a facility’s climate must be carefully controlled for optimal production and animal welfare. Lighting, production of feedstock, and processing insects into the meal and oil products also consume energy.
But when companies transitioned to alternative renewable sources, according to this recent paper, energy use improved significantly: switching to solar photovoltaic panels reduced their energy impacts by 25 to 46 percent.
When Protix, a Netherlands-based company that farms black soldier flies, built its new industrial-scale, technology-intensive plant that opened in 2019, it not only installed solar panels but also benefited from the Dutch government’s commitment to wind power. “In some cases, we cut utilities by some 70 percent,” said Eric Schmitt, research and development director at Protix.
Schmitt knows the energy requirements of the different systems intimately. He recently coordinated the development of an LCA with the German Institute of Food Technologies based on Protix’s operations at its plant in Bergen op Zoom.
The study found that the CO2 footprint of the Protix insect meal (at 1.1 kilogram CO2e) was 85 percent lower that of the soy protein concentrate (at 7.5 kilogram CO2e) commonly used in livestock and fish feed. Insect meal production also required much less water: 64 percent less than what was needed for the soy product.
These findings, along with some others, were announced in November and Schmitt says a full academic paper will soon follow.
“We definitely use energy, but it’s much less now than at the pilot plant,” he added. “I think it’s still more than we would like, but there are clear ways it’s coming down. We see opportunities for the next plant.”
Inside an Insect Farm
Protix, founded in 2009, has also been on scouting missions to expand internationally since it raised over $57 million in equity from impact investors last February. After a recent trip to the U.S., CEO Kees Aarts said during a Zoom meeting, “We see a big opportunity in the U.S. so it’s likely that we’re going to be there quite soon.”
Protix’s current (and only) facility in the Netherlands cost over $50 million to build. Within its 15,000 square feet, it is staffed by more robots than people. A few technicians are posted at central consoles who, among other things, ensure the very clean interior of the vertical farm feels more like the tropics (30°C/86°F) than the south of the Netherlands.
What is most striking, though, are thousands of columns of green crates, each more than 12 feet high and some 50 feet deep. Here, the black soldier fly larvae eat and grow under the watchful eye of image sensors and computers that count their number and size and collect data to identify which have the best hereditary characteristics.
Inside the Protix insect-protein vertical farm. (Photo courtesy of Protix)
All in all, the larvae consume more than 70,000 tons of food waste annually. Those feed ingredients are delivered daily by truck and turned into a proprietary puree in giant mixers.
“The diet formulation has been getting better, and we’re getting more sustainability from that,” said Schmitt, noting a decrease from roughly 5 to 3.7 units of food for every 1 unit of output.
The company said it has also invested in a genetics program to breed the most desirable traits. In two years, that has resulted in 39 percent heavier larvae, 32 percent more protein harvested per crate, and 21 percent more fat harvested per crate, according to a paper published in Frontiers in Genetics.
“Now we’re looking into how much energy [and] feed they use per kilogram,” added Schmitt. “I think genetics in general is going to cut the consumption of inputs and, in the long run, may be more significant than the technology. We’ll see.”
From Pet Food to Aquafeed
Up to this point, most of Protix’s output has been sold to produce pet food, but that is also changing.
In September, for example, the company unveiled a new partnership to produce feed for European land-based shrimp that replaces marine ingredients with insect protein. “Why are we feeding fish to fish if we can do it more sustainably?” Kees Aarts of Protix has said. “Insects are natural and make more sense.”
Rabobank, the Dutch bank that focuses on the global food and agriculture sector, estimates the insect protein market will increase from 120,000 metric tons in 2020 to half a million by 2030. The industry group International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed (IPIFF) cites an even higher “aspirational” target of 1 million tons.
Currently, over half of the insect protein that is produced is used as an ingredient in pet food, but that percentage is expected to decline during this decade as more insects go to feed farmed fish, industry watchers say.
“Why are we feeding fish to fish if we can do it more sustainably?”
Still, pet food is where InnovaFeed and ADM are starting. “Pet solutions is a strategic growth opportunity for ADM, with $100 billion in demand growing 4.5 percent a year,” Jorge Martinez, president, pet solutions for ADM, said in a press release. Consumers want pet food that mirrors what they look for in their own foods, including alternative proteins, traceability, and responsible sourcing.
And, from an environmental standpoint, it’s a good place to start because dogs and cats account for 25 to 30 percent of the impact of meat consumption in the U.S., according to a UCLA study.
When Protix director of product development Aman Paul spoke at an event called Petfood Forum Europe earlier this year, he also emphasized the health benefits of fat from the black soldier fly. For dogs and cats, he said, it provides high digestibility, strong antimicrobial activity, and brain health improvement.
As insect producers expand from pet food to aquaculture feed, they’re also finding a market that is 50 percent larger and growing. Globally, people are consuming more fish than ever before, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, and aquaculture will fill the gap between what wild fishers catch and what people want (and need) for protein.
To do that, though, aquaculture must find alternatives, such as insects, to feed its farmed fish. Over the last 20 years, it has lowered the fish-in-fish-out ratio for all fed species, increasingly relying on terrestrial ingredients. But it’s also faced intense pressure to source soy responsibly.
So, though insect protein currently costs more, the aquaculture industry is on the hunt for sustainable suppliers who can produce enough to deliver reliably.
Will U.S.-Based Insect Farmers Contribute?
The ascent of U.S. insect start-ups has zigzagged, though some companies took shape as early as Protix.
EnviroFlight, for example, was founded in 2009 in Ohio and opened its first commercial production center in Kentucky in 2019 with a capacity of 900 metric tons of black soldier fly protein meal. That will increase to 3,000 next year, according to Carrie Kuball, head of sales and marketing. Still, its volume will be dwarfed by InnovaFeed’s plans for 60,000 metric tons.
There has been something of a Gold Rush mentality in insect production, not confined to Americans. And, as in all Gold Rushes, the money is flying and the science can be murky.
Another U.S company, Chapul, launched when its founder appeared on Shark Tank and attracted an investment from Mark Cuban for the first U.S. cricket protein bar, a market the founder exited in 2019. This year, with a $2.5 million investment, the company has partnered with a construction/engineering firm and now focuses on building insect farms for others. One of their services is to customize co-located facilities based on different waste streams, signaling there will be others that mimic the InnovaFeed-ADM model.
French mealworm producer Ÿnsect is already following in their tracks. In early December, it announced that it would “explore potential synergies” with flour milling company Ardent Mills, a joint venture among ConAgra Foods, Cargill, and the farmer- and rancher-owned agribusiness CHS. Ÿnsect plans to construct its first large-scale farm in the U.S. next to one of Ardent Mills’ midwestern sites by the end of 2023, according to Reuters.
There has been something of a Gold Rush mentality in insect production, not confined to Americans. And, as in all Gold Rushes, the money is flying and the science can be murky. (The researchers themselves have called for efforts to “harmonize” data.)
“Lots of people get into the business because of the financial potential in it,” said Asa Berggren during a recent Zoom call. “Like flies to a piece of sugar.” But there have also been “heaps of initiatives” and substantial research moving the industry in positive directions.
And that includes what’s happening at some U.S. start-ups. Last summer, Beta Hatch, which was founded in 2015 by an entomologist, opened a 50,000-square-foot mealworm production facility in Washington state. Designed in collaboration with another construction and energy services firm, it derives 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources.
What Will It Take to Succeed?
Sonny Ramaswamy, an entomologist and agricultural scientist who headed the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture for six years under President Obama, calls the co-location model that is emerging as an important prototype a “win-win.”
“The bottom line is insect producers must have a reliable stream of the byproduct they can raise their insects on, and then they can scale and be a reliable supply,” he added.
To that end, the U.S. has a great deal to offer. “It’s a large economy. There’s a lot of waste coming from all those production and manufacturing conversion processes,” added Protix’s Aarts. “If agro-processors would become more circular, it would be very imaginable that a country like the U.S. could improve productivity in this sector by 15, 20 percent.”
And that is to say nothing of the environmental benefits that would accrue by keeping the peels, seeds, husks, hulls, stems, and trimmings from food processing out of landfills. After all, these leftovers are part of the food loss and waste that is the second-highest cause of greenhouse gas emission, according to the FAO.
What’s more, scientists see potential medical value in the black soldier fly’s “supernormal capacity” to survive in decaying waste by defending itself against pathogen invasion with antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). They are studying how these AMPs might act as substitutes for antibiotics in livestock farming—and for humans.
“My guess is this area will develop a lot because this could be a way to combat the problem of antibiotic drug resistance,” said Berggren. “We need a long-term study, but this shows a lot of promise.”
And while there is no one model for helping the insect farming industry become more sustainable, the focus on insects as a novel source of protein for the food industry clearly isn’t going away anytime soon. As Berggren sees it, all this interest “has increased the understanding of insects themselves and the value of the services they provide, beyond pollination.”
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]]>When food forecasters made their predictions for 2022, they told The New York Times that farmed kelp would move beyond dashi and the menus at high-end restaurants and into everyday foods like pasta and salsa.
Atlantic Sea Farms, the first commercial edible seaweed farm in the U.S.—founded in 2006 under the name Ocean Approved—is poised to take advantage of the moment. When Briana Warner, 37, took over as CEO in mid-2018, the Maine-based company was producing 30,000 wet pounds of seaweed a year. This spring, the company expects a harvest of 1.2 million pounds, making it the largest in the U.S.
“We need a model where we’re actually doing serious scale aquaculture, whatever that looks like. This cannot be a boutique industry to high-end restaurants.”
As CEO, Warner strives to create sustainable ocean livelihoods by building a business centered on the “virtuous vegetable” that’s good for people and the planet. (The company trademarked the term.) Sometimes on a straight-line trajectory and other times zig-zagging due to COVID, it has driven growth through nonprofit partnerships, added-value product development, and plenty of publicity.
“Kelp is everywhere,” says Warner, speaking via Zoom. Atlantic Sea Farms’ kelp is already an ingredient in cheese, veggie burgers, noodles, even dog treats, and will soon appear in plant-based fish, crackers, and dressings. The job of one team member is solely to sell kelp as an ingredient. “He’s on the phone right now with a sorbet manufacturer,” Warner says.
Briana Warner. (Photo credit: Daniel Orr)
But it’s not just trend-watchers who advise eating seaweed. Proponents mention numerous social and environmental benefits: it’s nutritionally dense; it provides fishermen an additional stream of revenue; it requires no land, fertilizer, or fresh water to grow; and it is environmentally low impact. Additionally, ongoing studies indicate it might also absorb carbon dioxide in the ocean and tamp down ocean acidification.
Still, for seaweed to fulfill its promise, the industry—and companies like Atlantic Sea Farms—must grow. To figure out how, analysts, governmental organizations like Sea Grant, and the players themselves are taking a cold, hard look at the many challenges still in the way. Among the levers to push, says the Island Institute, a Maine nonprofit, are expanding processing capacity, creating products that are different from imports, and building consumer awareness.
If the goals of climate and social impact are to be realized, the industry has to go “beyond the froth and the excitement,” says Bren Smith, the former fisherman and long time ocean farmer who, with a Cornell law degree, has advanced interest in aquaculture from the helm of GreenWave, a nonprofit that trains and supports sea farmers. “We need a model where we’re actually doing serious scale aquaculture, whatever that looks like. This cannot be a boutique industry to high-end restaurants,” he adds.
Building Domestic Demand for Seaweed
The U.S. has a long way to go. While worldwide seaweed production has soared to 80 billion pounds, 2019 U.S. farm harvests hovered under 1 million pounds, according to the latest available data from Sea Grant’s National Seaweed Hub, a third-party science-based resource for the domestic seaweed industry.
Most of the nori rolls and neon green wakame salads Americans do eat are made with imported seaweed. In fact, more than 95 percent of those edible seaweed products come from Asia, with China and South Korea accounting for over half. With high production volume, they also deliver at lower costs.
“If you think about Asia, seaweed is consumed almost daily. The volume produced there reflects their market needs and the products that have been developed to address those needs,” says Anoushka Concepcion, the principal investigator of the Seaweed Hub.
“It’s different here in the U.S. We don’t consume seaweed products in the same way. Plus, our species are different,” she continues. “Product developers need to come up with new, innovative ways to use sugar kelp, for example. That’s expensive. It takes time. And farmers aren’t inclined to grow this crop if they’re not assured someone’s going to buy it on an ongoing basis. It’s a Catch-22.”
Still, the not-fully-developed domestic demand hasn’t slowed the desire to start seaweed farms—nor has it slowed the number of permits being issued to people looking to build them. Smith’s team at GreenWave has calculated that there are 240 permitted seaweed farms in the U.S., though no centralized national database exists. “There is incredible social license,” he says.
Kelp grows faster than most terrestrial plants—up to two feet per day—meaning it absorbs more carbon, faster.
Not all permitted farms are growing seaweed yet or achieving optimal capacity, but over the last three years, harvests have soared in Maine and Alaska. Those two states now represent 85 percent of the total U.S. supply of edible seaweed, according to the Island Institute.
At this point, most of what’s farmed in the U.S. goes to consumer specialty foods, as well as some high-end cosmetics and pricey fertilizers, because production costs are so high. These product applications are “where farmers can get more bang for their bucks,” says Sea Grant’s Concepcion. Products that require more volume—such as the alginates or “seaweed gums” used in biomedical science and engineering—tap inexpensive seaweeds from Asia or wild varieties, according to a 2021 report prepared for the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation.
U.S. seaweed producers are still in search of ways to grow the market. “Farmers have told us, ‘We know we can grow it. But what do we do with it post-harvest?’” says Concepcion. That last mile between the farm and the consumer’s plate has proven to be a tough—and capital-intensive—challenge for the industry because fresh kelp is good only for a matter of days. So, how should it be stabilized—drying, fermenting, freezing? And in what food products is it appealing?
Collecting Data to Cut Through the Hype
Kelp grows faster than most terrestrial plants—up to two feet per day—meaning it absorbs more carbon, faster. It can sequester carbon when it floats out to sea and sinks to the ocean floor, where it tends to remain.
While the crop has gained the attention of consumers looking for climate solutions, scientists are still studying how both wild kelp forests and the growing number of farms fit into this puzzle. “On paper, it sounds great: Grow seaweed, sink it to a thousand meters,” Dr. Scott Lindell of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said in an article on the organization’s website last December. “But there are a lot of technical things in between to figure out.”
“So much of what is being said out there is hyperbole or just downright wrong,” adds Dr. Thew Suskiewicz, who joined Atlantic Sea Farms about a year ago to oversee their seaweed cultivation center, coordinate research and product improvement, and ensure the scientific accuracy of communications.
Dr. Nichole Price is immune to hype. The former project scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Price focuses on the eco-physiology of seaweeds at the Bigelow Laboratory, an independent, nonprofit research institute in Maine.
Price says one of her projects has yielded “promising” indications that seaweed carbon capture may alleviate ocean acidification and improve shell growth for shellfish. “We saw it happen three years in a row in Casco Bay, but can it be repeated?” she asks. With a new $900,000 grant from the World Wildlife Fund, the lab’s research on this question has now expanded beyond the first site—Bang’s Island Mussels, which grows kelp for Atlantic Sea Farms—into different ocean environs in Norway and Alaska.
Price is also leading the U.S. segment of the Seaweed Project of Oceans 2050, a global effort co-founded by Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. By taking samples from more than 20 farms off five continents, the 15-month study will quantify how much carbon seaweed sequesters in sediment on the ocean’s floor.
With a $10 million U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant announced last fall, Bigelow and a team from multiple universities are also addressing the cow burp question. Past research has found certain seaweed feed additives reduce methane-emitting burps. Researchers are also examining their impact on milk production. Price says, “If this methane reduction can simultaneously lead to a boost in milk yield and generate higher quality milk, then there’s a profitability possibility and it could be a win-win.”
Asked about nuggets of learning so far, Price says data must wait for the published paper—it’s a five-year study. But, she adds, “There’s hope and promise.”
Small Farmers, Big Output
Atlantic Sea Farms is building its business on that hope and promise. The company currently works with 27 independent partner farmers, primarily lobstermen, who already have boats and gear. Their leases dot the entire coast of Maine, which is even longer than California’s. Most are small, about four acres, but all together these farms add up to around 100 acres of sugar and skinny kelp production.
In his second year of kelp farming, lobsterman Bob Baines produced 42,000 pounds (a $25,200 paycheck), but he believes he can double that.
The company sees both its scale and the diversity of its network as a strategic advantage in reducing supply chain risk for large customers of kelp, like Whole Foods, Sweetgreen, and Daily Harvest.
Atlantic Sea Farms gives its farmers training and ongoing support, free seed (valued at nearly $10,000 per farm), and an iron-clad guarantee to buy their harvests each spring. In turn, the contract requires farmers to attend an annual meeting to share their experiences and exchange ideas. “Fishermen are better seaweed farmers than any of us will ever be,” Warner says.
The company’s current contract rate is 60 cents per wet pound, so most growers earn between $40,000 and $110,000 a season as supplemental income, she says. The amount depends on the size of the farm, their experience level, and less predictable elements such as the weather. It’s a good return on investment of both the time they put in and gear they already have, including boats that are underutilized in winter.
In his second year of kelp farming, lobsterman Bob Baines produced 42,000 pounds (a $25,200 paycheck), but he believes he can double that. “I’m still learning,” he says. He has applied for a larger lease of seven acres through the Maine Department of Marine Resources where he will be authorized to grow 10 different species of seaweed. As a signal of the future he sees for seaweed cultivation, he’s bringing his nephew into the business.
Baines estimates he has invested $20,000 to $25,000 in his farm’s infrastructure, a grid of 1,000-foot lines that are 13 to 15 feet apart and six to eight feet below the water’s surface. The kelp grows five to 10 feet long from these lines, hanging in the ocean like honey-colored laundry.
In November, it takes Baines about three days to seed the farm with spools of sporophytes from Atlantic Sea Farms’ nursery. Working on a 14-foot skiff, he runs the long lines through two-inch spools, unwinding the seeded twine as a partner maneuvers the boat. The less choppy the water, the happier they are. The springtime harvest will take about five days. In between, Baines checks his farm every week or so, untangling lines in frigid weather if a storm has stirred things up.
Once the farmers harvest their kelp, Atlantic Sea Farms trucks it back to its 27,000-square-foot facility 20 miles south of Portland, where it has been located since January. There it can process five times more kelp in an hour than it did in an entire day at the former location, says Warner. Depending on the product application, it can blanch, shred, freeze, ferment, puree, or dry it.
Under the same roof, the company also houses seed cultivation, product development, and final manufacturing, as well as business functions like sales. “It’s one of the most vertically integrated companies that I’ve ever been part of,” says Suskiewicz. “The only stage we don’t do is the actual farming, but we’re so closely integrated with our partner farms. I mean, we’re on their boats all the time.”
It audits the farms all winter so that Suskiewicz can track how each seed lot is growing. “We trace everything that we do back to its parents.” For the fall of 2022, he plans to produce 400,000 feet of seeded line, making Atlantic Sea Farms’ seaweed cultivation center the largest such hatchery in the U.S.
Not All Seaweed Farms Look Alike
In contrast to Atlantic Sea Farm’s network of many, small growers, business models that tap fewer, larger farms have been emerging in Alaska, which only began issuing kelp farming permits in 2016. For example, San Francisco-based Blue Evolution has partnerships with just two farms in Kodiak, Alaska, but they are geared to deliver 300,000 wet pounds of kelp in 2022. (Atlantic Sea Farms anticipates 1.2 million wet pounds of kelp from 27 farmers.)
Alaska is issuing huge leases compared to the so-called experimental leases that make up most of Maine’s industry. A single farm in the Gulf of Alaska can stretch as large as 132 acres, according to Melissa Good of the Alaska Sea Grant Marine Advisory Program. She adds that Alaska’s total aquaculture acreage could balloon 1.5 times to a total of 2,200 acres if all 23 pending permit applications are approved for seaweed farms and those that raise seaweed and shellfish simultaneously. That’s more than 1,600 football fields of ocean farms.
Lexa Meyer of Blue Evolution collecting kelp for seed cultivation. (Photo credit: Alf Pryor)
In addition to the structure of its farming network, Blue Evolution has veered from Atlantic Sea Farms’ vertically integrated model by emphasizing partnerships. For seed, it is collaborating with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries at the Kodiak Fisheries Research Center. And it contracts the Sun’aq Tribe in Kodiak to handle seaweed processing each spring.
Blue Evolution also works across the border: it grows 250,000 wet pounds of sea lettuce in tanks at a land-based organic farm in Baja Mexico. It had been producing pasta and popcorn with this seaweed but is discontinuing product manufacturing.
“We started with the intention of being vertically integrated and having our own retail brand and selling that product as Atlantic Sea Farms was doing, but COVID, frankly, made that tough,” says founder Beau Perry. For now, the company is focused on working with growers, processing, and wholesale opportunities.
A Pivot to Retail in Support of a Social Mission
Briana Warner studied international affairs at George Washington University before the U.S. State Department recruited her for the foreign service, sending her to Libya and Guinea and paying for a master’s at Yale along the way.
When she joined Atlantic Sea Farms almost four years ago, her food experience was limited to feeding pancakes to teenage boys from warring tribes in Guinea and running a pie company near Portland that only employed immigrants. Even so, she hurled the company into product development, creating pureed kelp cubes for smoothies and soups, raw kimchi- and kraut-style salads, and frozen ready-cut kelp.
Within a year of becoming CEO, Warner convinced Sweetgreen that her operation could supply the kelp for a new bowl which the mission-driven fast-food chain believed would tell an important climate story. Created by Chef David Chang, that salad surpassed sales goals by 50 percent—despite the closure of New York City offices shortly after the product launch in mid-February of 2020.
The spread of COVID forced Atlantic Sea Farms to completely rethink its business model. When restaurants and dining halls shuttered, “we lost 90 percent of our accounts overnight,” says Warner, and paying the farmers that spring depleted the company’s cash.
“Even if it put us out of business, we were going to show up at the dock,” says company CMO Jesse Baines (who is also Bob’s daughter).
To survive, the company secured a loan and pivoted to retail, and in less than two years, distribution grew from 40 small locations in New England to 1,400 stores, including Sprouts, Wegmans, and Whole Foods.
Today, a strong social mission underpins Atlantic Sea Farms business model. As Warner says frequently, “We can do well by doing good.” Like the Union of Concerned Scientists and many others, she believes the terrestrial farming model, in which the bulk of the food is produced by a small number of large farms, isn’t working. It has barred new farmers from entering the marketplace and led to the demise of many mid-size ones, who are historically the backbone of rural communities.
Bob Baines. (Photo credit: Atlantic Sea Farms)
Additionally, Maine’s coastal communities, whose main industries are lobstering and tourism, are facing the fact that the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, driving lobster populations north.
“Historically, lobstermen did different types of fisheries,” says Bob Baines, who started lobstering after college and today sits on the board of directors of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. A lobstering life might still include shrimping, scalloping, and ground fishing for cod, haddock, and pollock, though the other fisheries are minuscule today compared to lobster. In that tradition, though, kelp farming offers a supplementary income in the spring and the security of diversification.
Warner believes that independent farmers like Baines and the others working with Atlantic Sea Farms don’t need outside help, such as the government aid to land-based commodity farms or nonprofit price subsidies for new seaweed farmers. “Grant cycles live and die. Business doesn’t. The world is ready for seaweed. It doesn’t need to be subsidized,” Warner says.
She hopes the model resonates beyond kelp. “If you put the strength in the farmer and build guardrails around your business so that it is purely based on planet and people, you fundamentally undermine the broken system that everyone insists is the only way.”
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