The slow-moving harbor plan is just the beginning of a long reconciliation process that may or may not come. During the early stages of the plan, in February 2023, Fisher told Civil Eats she felt strongly that the opening of access points would be a good-faith gesture to restore trust between Wampanoags and the town—though not without significant hurdles. “It’s going to be a tough sell,” she said. “There’s going to be some angry people, because our waterfront is landlocked.”

Her ambition to partner with the tribe on the harbor plan has at least materialized, though. Pocknett said he and some other tribal “old-timers” met with Fisher this summer to identify access points on a map from their personal memories of “how it was.” There were maybe three or four existing access points acknowledged by the town, but the group was able to identify close to 100 more along the Popponesset and Waquoit bays.

Fisher worried that memories and hearsay wouldn’t be enough to reopen the access points, so she asked the tribe’s natural resource team to search their archives for documentation demonstrating that the areas had been used as “historic passage” for multiple generations. While the team continues its hunt for that documentation, consultants at the Urban Harbors Institute are working to revise the first draft of the plan after an extensive public comment period this past spring and summer.

Avis said his team has “sort of formed a partnership” with the tribe and its aquaculturists, including Pocknett. “If they need something, they call us. If we need something, we’ll call them. It’s been a tremendous relationship with those guys as to utilizing their resources and our resources to pool together to get as many animals in the water to help clean the water,” he said.

Traditional Knowledge Will Shape the Future

Joshua Reitsma, a marine chemist at the nearby Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, says this effluent is responsible for 80 percent of the Cape’s “nutrient pollution,” leading to algal blooms that blanket the surface in summer and fall to the bottom in winter. The algae smothers keystone species like eelgrass, and coats the sand in muck that can’t support the oysters, quahogs, and soft-shelled clams that would naturally grow there.

The tribe has always protected and cultivated species like oysters and quahogs, in part because of their role in filtering Mashpee’s waterways. By eating nitrogen-rich phytoplankton and incorporating the protein into their tissues, the bivalves maintain the stasis of their aquatic home. First Light farm is the tribe’s attempt to rehabilitate Popponesset Bay in an era of unprecedented wreckage. (The town of Mashpee runs its own separate aquaculture projects, which have anchored its water-quality strategy for decades.)

Hard-shelled clams, known as quahogs, freshly caught off Cape Cod. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)

But no amount of shellfish alone can revive waterways strangled by such heavy pollution. At one of the town’s recent Shellfish Commission meetings, aquaculturist and chair Peter Thomas likened the lopsided reliance on shellfish to “putting a Band-Aid on someone who needs to be med-flighted.” For years, tribal leaders and environmental advocates have raised similar warnings about the quality of Mashpee’s watersheds.

For the Pocknetts, this pollution is personal. The 16th-century settlers who claimed the shores of present-day New England were met by people with a vibrant social order, language, and trade network, shaped by the surrounding natural world. Clan identities are just one example: CheeNulKa’s family is part of the wolf clan. There are no wild wolves left in Massachusetts. The eel clan, too, got its name in honor of once-thriving animal relatives.

“Without the eels, you can’t have the eel clan,” CheeNulKa said. “Without the eel clan, you can’t have an eel dance. That’s how you lose that culture. It’s something as small or as monumental as this, depending on how you look at it.”

As Indigenous concerns are increasingly heeded, change is creeping in. The town recently broke ground on a wastewater treatment plan to introduce centralized sewering for the first time, part of a Cape-wide effort that will take roughly 30 years to fully implement. The first phase, which involved the $54 million construction of a wastewater collection system and treatment facility, is underway. The second phase, which would begin in spring 2025 at the earliest, is earmarked for $96 million, according to Cape News. Over time, the two phases are expected to reduce nitrogen levels in the Popponesset Bay by 42 percent.

Indigenous environmental expertise and traditional ecological knowledge are also getting overdue recognition in Mashpee’s Conservation Commission, which oversees wetland building permits and other environmental conservation projects. The commission recently proposed a plan for the town and tribe to co-steward conservation land, a partnership that Wampanoag Chief Earl Mills, Sr., has said would be a “win-win.”

These efforts reflect a pattern emerging worldwide. At the 2022 UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, Indigenous delegates lobbied successfully for a plan that honors the rights of Indigenous peoples, who make up less than six percent of the world’s population but protect nearly 80 percent of its biodiversity.

In an unprecedented expression of partnership, President Joe Biden’s cabinet, including Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Pueblo of Laguna), proposed that dozens of tribes co-steward ancestral lands from Virginia to Idaho, working alongside the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And in November this year, in nearby Bristol, Rhode Island, Brown University confirmed the transfer of 255 acres to the Pokanoket tribe to “ensure appropriate stewardship and management of this unique, historical, sacred, and natural resource for generations to come.”

Generations of Knowledge 

Each privately developed access point contributes to the water’s decline. Re-opening whatever is outlined in the harbor management plan won’t heal the waters or bring back the fish. But it would send a message from Mashpee—a municipality that proudly proclaims “Wampanoag land” on signs on its town line—that its Indigenous residents are vital to the success of its ecosystems.

In July, Buddy Pocknett lumbered down a footpath on Mashpee’s Monomoscoy Island, past a flurry of metal signs that declared, “Spohr’s Private Beach.” His scraggly gray ponytail grazed the neckline of his T-shirt, above the words “Aboriginal Rights” printed in blue script.

A private-property sign near Spohr’s Beach on Monomoscoy Island, Cape Cod. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)

He shuffled by a big house and a couple of canoes drying in the shade of the leaning pitch pines, toward an old quahog-digging spot that has gone from public to private in his lifetime. He planted his sturdy brown boots on the sand. The new wave of interest in tribal knowledge makes him cautiously optimistic, he said. But the town has just scratched the surface of collaboration. Moving forward, Pocknett wants Wampanoags to be consulted before the approval of any new developments.

“For years, the tribe has been kind of sleeping and not going to these meetings,” he said. “[Townspeople] have been kind of pulling the wool over our face for a long time, just doing whatever they want.”

With more Indigenous representation at town meetings and in big projects like the harbor plan, Pocknett predicted more checks on overbuilding, more strategic and effective resource management, and better environmental advocacy across the board.

After all, non-Indigenous control of Mashpee is very new, compared with the 12,000 years that the Wampanoags managed the land. Within Pocknett’s father’s lifetime, the tribe had much more say in resource management. One particularly prominent steward was Pocknett’s grandfather, Will, who kept a fishing camp on the edge of the scrubby woods near Waquoit Bay.

Will was a respected fisherman, whose knowledge of the bay was widely trusted. At that time, in the mid-20th century, Mashpee was still considered a Wampanoag town. Every bay and fishing ground was run by a tribal member, Pocknett said—someone familiar with its particular quirks, like Will was with Waquoit Bay.

“If you went fishing in Waquoit Bay when my grandfather was alive, you asked him and he would tell you where to go,” he said. “It wasn’t just ‘go fishing.’ Each tribal member had a bay. And they would say, ‘There’s more over here today, come fish over here.’ It was equally important to Indian people to recognize the areas that had less fish and leave them alone.”

But even with his influence, Will never claimed to own the bay or the surrounding area, Pocknett said, eyeing the metal signs that stuck out of the reeds and laid claim to the beach beneath his feet. He smiled and said, “Because no one can own the land.”

The post The Mashpee Wampanoag Work With a Cape Cod Town to Restore Their Fishing Grounds appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2024/10/31/op-ed-blue-foods-may-not-save-the-world/ Thu, 31 Oct 2024 09:00:32 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=58718 And some, it seems, have attempted to cast just such a spell: “Blue foods” is the way to save the world.  Blue foods—food like fish, shellfish, and seaweeds obtained from bodies of water—and farmed blue foods in particular have been promoted by researchers, industry, NGOs, and the World Economic Forum alike as the way to […]

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When it comes to food, the world faces a tangle of seemingly impossible choices: Increase agricultural land-use to address food insecurity and you drive deforestation and risk biodiversity collapse.  Industrialize meat production to bring prices down and you set the stage for new pandemics and imperil the welfare of billions of farmed animals. Feeding the world’s growing population without worsening parallel catastrophes has become the defining challenge of the 21st century. One could be forgiven for attempting to conjure a portal to a future that would avoid tradeoffs entirely.  

And some, it seems, have attempted to cast just such a spell: “Blue foods” is the way to save the world. 

Blue foods—food like fish, shellfish, and seaweeds obtained from bodies of water—and farmed blue foods in particular have been promoted by researchers, industry, NGOs, and the World Economic Forum alike as the way to feed the world; as a solution to hidden hunger and malnutrition; as the path to achieving global food system transformation; and as the fix for multiple global challenges. A common refrain in these circles: “The future of food is not just green—it’s blue.” 

But as researchers studying aquatic organisms, their ecosystems, and their welfare, we are compelled to say: not so fast. And not like this. 

Blue foods do have benefits, and they certainly have a role to play. For example, as a source of protein, farmed shellfish have a smaller carbon footprint compared to beef. And seaweed farming may increase carbon sequestration, ameliorate ocean acidification, and lead to socioeconomic gains. But the details matter, and so does the scale. 

Mariculture dewilding can impact the environment, wildlife, captive animals, and humans’ view of each. (Credit: Emma Bautista)

For most of human history, the world’s oceans have been largely free of intensive farming. There have been myriad overfishing crises, but cultivation of the oceans has been limited. That may soon change. 

Marine and coastal aquaculture production has soared since 1990, reaching a record 78.4 million tons in 2022. This expansion includes the growth of resource-intensive industries like salmon farming. It also includes attempts to rapidly domesticate hundreds of species. Such attempts have accelerated in recent decades, subjecting countless wild animals to captive conditions that are incompatible with their welfare. And yet, production is projected to increase for all major farmed species in the next decade.  

In short, the rise of “mariculture”—farming in the ocean—is poised to dramatically alter our marine footprint. But, as we write in a new paper published last week in the journal Science Advances, the full suite of risks from mariculture are incompletely mapped. 

To date, some potential impacts of ocean farming have been well studied. For example, mariculture’s potential to pass bioaccumulated pollutants to consumers and facilitate antibiotic resistance have been well documented and received media attention. But, as we found, the potential for grave and irreversible harms to animals and marine ecosystems have either been studied in isolation or remain unacknowledged. 

The risks are broad and varied, but add up to an alarming concept we call “dewilding,” the process of privileging human interests, perspectives, and sovereignty at the expense of other interests and considerations. Maricultural dewilding impacts our oceans and marine life in four major ways. 

First, marine farming poses environmental risks, threatening to permanently change seascapes. In addition to fish waste and refuse pollution, for example, mariculture generates antibiotic and plastic pollution. Expanding maricultural infrastructure would also contribute to “ocean sprawl,” which degrades ecological systems and wildlife habitats.

“For most of human history, the world’s oceans have been largely free of intensive farming. That may soon change.”

Second, mariculture endangers wildlife species and the welfare of individual wild animals. By disrupting marine habitats and increasing demand for wild fish used as feed, mariculture can contribute to wildlife population decline. Critically, it can also compromise the wellbeing of individual wild animals: for example, mariculture equipment and infrastructure can entangle and even kill seabirds, seals, dolphins, and whales.  

Third, and very poorly understood, are mariculture’s captivity effects. These can include high rates of deformities, parasite infection, and disease. Moreover, slaughter methods can be inhumane, failing to stun fish prior to slaughter and using painful and stressful methods like asphyxiation. Captivity also drives physical and behavioral changes in farmed species. These changes become more pronounced and potentially harmful when animals are selectively bred or otherwise altered for desired production traits—for instance, fish who are modified to be sterile can suffer from higher rates of deformities. 

And lastly, the rush to farm our oceans is changing the very nature of how humans view the marine world. Scanning the ocean for new areas to cultivate or new species to domesticate represents a shift in how we see the ocean, reducing a once wild and powerful place to yet another resource to be tapped, another set of production units to be quantified. And just as land-based farming has contributed to human-wildlife conflict—ranchers killing wolves for threatening cattle, for example—ocean farms have already generated similar conflicts, including between humans and seals attracted to the easy meal of a farmed fish.

Given all of this, one of our most surprising findings was the inevitability with which the scientific literature has discussed this massive expansion into the oceans. The assumption of expansion is just that: an assumption. Evidence-based reasoning requires looking at all available options, including the possibility of not expanding or of expanding in some areas but not others. Our findings don’t discount the promise of blue foods as part of the solution to global food and environmental challenges, but they do suggest myriad reasons to slow down, get specific, and proceed with caution. 

Backed by nearly 800 scientific papers documenting the harms we call dewilding, we urge an evidence-based approach to mariculture, particularly as it relates to impacts on animals, environments, and our relationships with both. We need a different path forward—one that assesses the effects of farming in the ocean and questions the logic of expansion until we know more about what is at stake. Blue foods may yet prove to be part of the solution—but not like this. 

The post Op-ed: ‘Blue Foods’ May Not Save the World appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/10/01/the-case-for-seafood-self-reliance/ Tue, 01 Oct 2024 09:00:45 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57867 The U.S. is the world’s second-largest seafood importer, despite the fact that U.S. fishers catch 8 billion pounds of seafood each year. Much of the fish landed here is eaten elsewhere. That conundrum makes it harder for American fishermen to sustain their operations and forces fish to be shipped thousands of miles before it reaches […]

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Scan the seafood case at your local grocery store and you’re likely to see the same staples, no matter where you are: shrimp, salmon, tuna, tilapia, cod. Most of it crossed international borders to reach you.

The U.S. is the world’s second-largest seafood importer, despite the fact that U.S. fishers catch 8 billion pounds of seafood each year. Much of the fish landed here is eaten elsewhere. That conundrum makes it harder for American fishermen to sustain their operations and forces fish to be shipped thousands of miles before it reaches the dinner table. Climate change and global crises disrupting the international market only add to the complications.

“It’s not a law of gravity that 90 percent of the seafood we consume in the U.S. has to be imported.”

Fisheries would be healthier and more sustainable if fish caught locally were consumed locally. But the discrepancy is by design, says Joshua Stoll, associate professor at the University of Maine and founder of Local Catch Network, a hub of seafood harvesters, businesses, researchers, and organizers that supports the growth of community-based seafood.

“We’ve built roads around the world that don’t have exit ramps to our local communities when it comes to seafood,” Stoll says.

A healthier system more reflective of the diversity of U.S. seafood is attainable, Stoll says, if we invest in connecting harvesters and consumers at the regional level. In a paper published in Nature in June, he and his colleagues found that seafood independence—the ability to meet the country’s consumption needs through its own production—is “within reach” for the U.S.

From 2012 through 2021, U.S. fishermen caught 76 percent of the country’s seafood needs on average, Stoll and his colleagues found. As recently as the 1990s, the average was 98 percent. Those numbers are based on the federal recommendation of eight ounces of seafood per week per adult, or 26 pounds annually; Americans currently eat about 20 pounds each per year.

Community supported fisheries (CSFs), where consumers buy shares of fresh seafood through pre-paid memberships, similar to the community supported agriculture model for produce, can help bridge the existing gap between what we catch and what we eat, Stoll says.

Currently, 12 percent of U.S. fishers sell directly to consumers, according to the first national survey of seafood harvesters, which he helped lead; the findings were published in Marine Policy in July. By avoiding middlemen like distributors and processors, direct sales allow harvesters to build relationships with the people eating their fish, mitigate shipping-related climate impacts and costs by keeping what they catch closer to home, and, typically, make more money in the process.

Civil Eats spoke with Stoll about why seafood self-reliance matters, where CSFs fit into the conversation, and how climate change is making these issues all the more urgent.

What are the benefits of seafood independence that make it a goal worth targeting?

Fishermen are really struggling to make their livelihoods work. We hear from people in the Gulf of Mexico, where prices are so depressed for shrimp that they’re tying up on the docks [rather than going out to fish]. We’re hearing about the price of salmon and the markets being flooded. A lot of that has to do with global trade dynamics.

At Local Catch Network, we’re working at the local harvester level, thinking about how to transform this system based on high volume and low value to one that’s deeply rooted in low volume and high value. Part of the way we get there is by localizing and working toward seafood independence.

This country is also facing a health epidemic. Something like one in 10 Americans is experiencing food insecurity on some level. That blows my mind. Seafood doesn’t fundamentally solve that, but there is a real opportunity to better integrate seafood into policy discussions around food systems that change our country’s health.

Part of that is thinking about self-reliance. The objective isn’t full self-reliance. I don’t think that’s realistic. The point of this paper was to stretch the boundaries of what is possible, because right now, we’re almost the opposite. It’s not a law of gravity that 90 percent of the seafood we consume in the U.S. has to be imported.

What stands in the way of our country’s seafood self-reliance, and how can we overcome those obstacles?

Almost everyone in the fisheries space can roll that 90 percent figure off their tongues. That figure has actually been challenged in the literature, but most of the seafood we eat is imported. And that narrative creates a vacuum for imagining alternatives. What if everyone knew that we could achieve seafood independence and that’s what everyone was talking about?

There are real policy barriers as well. We’ve seen massive consolidation in our fishing fleet at the harvester level, at the processor level, at the distribution level. We’ve made investments, both for better and for worse, in supporting a global seafood distribution system through trade policy agreements, trade missions, and marketing and promotion boards that are focused on moving product away from the places where it’s harvested and produced.

That’s come at the cost of investing in the infrastructure that we need to keep a product local and regional. We’ve lost public infrastructure—working waterfront infrastructure, small-scale community-based ice machines. We also need federal investment in processing and distribution. We’re trapped in this model: Catch it and get it out of here. [Also,] it starts in the water. Who has access to fishing? We need to find ways to support new entrants, whether it’s in wild-capture fisheries or aquaculture.

Which regions are in the best and worst position to reach seafood independence?

Alaska drives the bus. Alaska is a dominant player nationally in seafood production and plays an important role in the potential for seafood independence. But I don’t think that lets other regions off the hook. All regions make an important contribution.

New England has witnessed a relative decline [in seafood harvests], but I’m hopeful for the innovation that’s happening there and the investment in the seafood sector, especially in a place like Maine with oysters and kelp. The wild-capture fisheries continue to be anchors of coastal communities there, too, and unlike most places I’ve been, they’re still part of the fabric of daily conversations. When you get to the point where seafood is an afterthought and not part of those conversations, that’s when you’re in slippery territory.

Beside policy, consolidation, and lack of infrastructure, what accounts for the discrepancy between what we catch and what we eat in this country?

The average consumer doesn’t understand seafood as a protein and struggles with knowing what to do with it. Then you offer some species they’ve never heard of, and it’s end of story. Part of it is education. We need to invest in people understanding different species and what is seasonal and local. Researchers have found that today, while there is some regional variance in seafood consumption, it’s awfully similar no matter where you are—you’re going to get salmon, shrimp, and tilapia or some other white fish.

Where do community supported fisheries and other harvesters selling directly to consumers fit into the future of these conversations?

CSFs will likely never be the dominant mode of distribution, and that’s OK. But diverse supply chains are critical to the functioning of a vibrant seafood economy in the U.S. Sometimes it makes sense to distribute globally, but you can’t just rely on that, [especially] with increasing global shocks. Our research [for the Marine Policy paper] was the first attempt at documenting the number of people participating in the sector. The USDA has been collecting similar data [for agriculture] for decades, and seafood, except for aquaculture, has been sidelined from that process. When you see that one in 10 harvesters are involved in direct sales, that changes the dynamic. It’s a sector worth investing in. This is part of the off-ramp infrastructure.

How did the pandemic influence direct-to-consumer sales by harvesters, and what policy changes emerged there that could bring the U.S. closer to seafood self-reliance?

One change was around permitting for direct sales. There’s always been this narrative that seafood is a little bit fishy, it will make you sick, and therefore it needs to be regulated in a different way than ag commodities. There’s some reality to that, but it’s often been a red herring used [by regulators] to thwart these types of activities. During the pandemic, we saw policies relax. And guess what? People weren’t getting sick. Harvesters were able to connect with consumers. And now those emergency rules have been institutionalized and continue to exist. A place like Rhode Island [where a new law allows fishers to obtain permits for docksides sales] is a good example of that.

Our survey of seafood harvesters was done in partnership with the USDA and the National Marine Fisheries Service. If we’d gone to either of those departments pre-pandemic, I’m not sure we’d even have gotten a meeting, let alone been able to co-lead this national effort. The funding we received and the support from leadership in both agencies reflects a recognition that diverse supply chains are really important.

How is climate change impacting the seafood system and both our need and ability to become more self-reliant?

Climate change has a whole range of effects, and one is the level of uncertainty it brings. Many of our management decisions are based on stock assessment science. I often hear people in stock assessment say, anything they thought they knew before, they’ve had to throw out the window and admit, ‘We don’t know what the future is going to look like.’ That has massive ripple effects in setting annual catch limits, policies, regulations, and [ultimately] business decisions like whether to participate in fisheries.

We’re also seeing a spike in major weather events. In Maine this past winter, we had massive storm surges that had absolutely devastating effects on our working waterfront. We’re still grappling with that. Climate change adds layers of stress to a sector that is already struggling with competition from foreign imports, with decline in the industry, with aging fleets—a whole suite of compounding issues. That creates a lot of anxiety for what the future holds, and it affects self-reliance by introducing uncertainty.

If you’re eating a menu of seafood that reflects global production, you are undermining your ability to understand how climate change is affecting an ecosystem, because the production system can hop between climate disasters. It can dodge those effects by saying, “Oh, there’s a failure here? We’ll source seafood over there.” It’s harder to do that when you’re sourcing seafood from the Gulf of Maine to support New England or from the South Atlantic to support the Southeast. It really connects people to their source of seafood and makes them better positioned to be engaged consumers and to engage in change.

How can the average person play a role in supporting a healthier seafood ecosystem?

Know your fisherman. If you can trace your food back to the source, inevitably you will gain an understanding of the context in which that food is produced. That’s a luxury, though. Many people don’t have the privilege to be able to choose where their food comes from. It’s up to policymakers, funders, and decision-makers. They need to recognize the disconnect between [reality and] an idealized food system where an idealized consumer knows their fisherman—and implement policies that create access to that food.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/09/30/weathering-climate-shocks-how-restaurants-survive-supply-disruptions/ https://civileats.com/2024/09/30/weathering-climate-shocks-how-restaurants-survive-supply-disruptions/#comments Mon, 30 Sep 2024 11:00:28 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57887 This is the second article in a five-part series about restaurants and climate-change solutions, produced in collaboration with Eater. “We’re just not going to offer it,” he says. “It’s either unavailable or too expensive for the quality. . . . climate has a lot to do with it.” With all the challenges restaurants have faced […]

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This is the second article in a five-part series about restaurants and climate-change solutions, produced in collaboration with Eater.

When Peter Platt was in Newport, Oregon in 2018, visiting Local Ocean Seafoods to bring them on as a supplier, he spoke with some of the fishermen docked outside the waterfront fish market and restaurant. “All the salmon fishermen were like, ‘We don’t even bother to fish off the coast here anymore. Everyone heads to Alaska,’” says Platt, founder and owner of Portland’s high-end Peruvian restaurant Andina. “‘There’s just no fish.’” The dearth of Pacific salmon, he learned, was partly due to warming waters in salmon streams and drought-fueled water shortages, which are lethal to salmon eggs and juvenile fish. Platt, who is in charge of sustainability initiatives at Andina, did the only thing he could: He and his staff took salmon off Andina’s menu.

Climate on the Menu

Read the stories in our series with Eater:

• Beyond Farm to Table: How Chefs Can Support Climate-Friendly Food Systems As global warming bears down, some restaurants are forging stronger bonds with regional food systems and regenerative farms.
• Weathering Climate Shocks: How Restaurants Survive Supply Disruptions To overcome ingredient shortages and high food costs, some restaurateurs are rethinking their staple ingredients and strengthening their relationships with suppliers.
• Battling Meltdown: If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Work for Change in the Kitchen As climate change drives temperatures up, restaurant staff face uncomfortable, even unsafe conditions with no heat regulations to protect them. Some workers are taking matters into their own hands.
• ‘Invisible’ Waste: For Restaurants, Composting Food Scraps Is Just the Beginning Cooking, refrigeration, air conditioning, water use, and packaging contribute to greenhouse gas emissions too. These restaurants try to tackle them all.
• Table to Farm: Can Restaurants Serve Climate Education? For climate-conscious restaurants, helping customers understand the benefits of sustainably sourced food (and why it costs more) is key. But is tableside storytelling the way to go?

“We’re just not going to offer it,” he says. “It’s either unavailable or too expensive for the quality. . . . climate has a lot to do with it.”

With all the challenges restaurants have faced in the past five years—COVID, inflation, price gouging—the impact of climate change on their supply chains has often been overlooked. Yet global warming is steadily affecting fisheries and farms around the world and the foods they yield.

Here in the U.S., extreme climate-related events like forest fires, floods, and drought ruin crops and harm aquatic life. They also cause power outages and disrupt transportation and distribution, which increases the price of all goods, including food.

For many restaurant owners and chefs, the impact is a real, daily challenge, causing a shortage of quality ingredients and sudden fluctuations in price. All of this makes it harder to keep menu prices consistent and run a profitable business. “There’s a lot of topsy-turviness right now,” Platt says.

Staple Ingredients in Short Supply

Climate change has affected the supply of other foods, too. Cocoa yields have already fallen due to changes in rainfall patterns, an uptick in pest and fungus infestations, and increased droughts. Half the suitable land for coffee will be gone by 2050. And there’s mustard: Prices skyrocketed in 2021 due to a severe drought in Canada, the world’s largest producer of brown mustard seeds.

Salmon is just one of the menu problems Platt has had to deal with recently. Citrus is another. Andina requires a steady supply of key limes for leche de tigre, the marinade that’s used for ceviche, Peru’s flagship dish. Andina sources them mostly from Mexico, where a perfect storm of colder weather, floods, and price manipulations by drug cartels caused prices to fluctuate between $37 and $67 per case from July 2023 to July 2024. Nevertheless, Platt and his brother, Victor, who leads the chef team, did not raise the price of ceviche. “Like most restaurants, we have simply had to decrease or even forgo margins on certain dishes to avoid passing on the sticker shock to our customers,” Platt says.  “You just have to suck it up, you know?”

The croque madame at Mabu Kitchen, a French and Southern–inspired restaurant. Photo by Grace Cavallo.

Ayad Sinawi, chef-owner of Mabu Kitchen in Philadelphia, has had no choice but to suck up the cost increases, which are crippling for a small operation like his. A beloved French restaurant serving bistro classics and Southern comfort food, Mabu has paper-thin margins and no liquor license to bring in extra cash from the bar.

“Prices tend to take a weird roller coaster ride on a weekly basis,” he says. “I get 15 dozen eggs for $25 one week and then $52 the next.” Last winter, when there was a national egg shortage, that price shot up to $89. The shortage was caused in part by farmers culling millions of birds due to an outbreak of avian flu, which, experts increasingly believe, is worsening as climate change alters the migration patterns of wild birds that spread the disease. Other factors are at play as well, like the rising costs of fuel, feed, and packaging.

Mabu’s brunch is tremendously popular, filled with eggy specialties like a French omelette, croque madame and fried-chicken, and waffles Benedict. “We had to charge a little more for our eggs for a while,” Sinawi says. But he did so with extreme reluctance, wanting to abide by his principles of offering excellent yet affordable food. “The business plan was always about being a local bistro, catering to the neighborhood, keeping prices within the parameters that will encourage people to be impulsive [with their orders],” Sinawi says. “The minute I start making it a ‘destination,’ I’m going to lose all my locals. It’s not worth it to me.” When prices went back down to $52 for 15 dozen, he lowered menu prices accordingly. “But that’s still 29 cents [per] egg. That’s a lot for a restaurant!” he says. During the worst of the egg shortage, that added roughly $500 to his monthly costs.

When factoring in rising inflation and hikes in other costs besides food, the financial environment feels increasingly insurmountable for many restaurants. Everything from internet connections to waste removal services has gotten more expensive. For example, Sinawi had originally contracted with a garbage removal service that charged $129 a month. The business was bought out by a bigger company that increased his bill by $40 without warning, meaning he was now expected to pay $169 for the same service with no time to negotiate or plan. (This happened at the same time as the egg shortage.) Three months later, his bill rose again, to $228.

Given these combined financial pressures, it’s no wonder that small independent restaurants often go out of business. According to a report released in February 2024 by the Global Food Institute, 26 percent of single-location, full-service restaurants fail in the first year. Mabu Kitchen is still going strong after two years, but Sinawi admits he doesn’t know how much longer he’ll be able to make it.

A Surge in ‘Unnatural Disasters’

Scully, who is also director of curriculum development for the Global Food Institute, says that the most alarming part of the report to her is the data about global climate incidents. In just the past three years—2020 to 2023—storms have increased by an annual average of 19 percent, floods by 23 percent, and wildfires by 29 percent, according to the International Disaster Database. “I literally called up my colleague and said, ‘you are not going to believe this!’” She hopes this panic-inducing statistic will serve a purpose. “It should be a total wake-up call,” Scully says.

Whether extreme heat, hailstorms, flooding, or forest fires, these unnatural disasters lead to a plethora of correlated financial crises for restaurants. These can range from power outages, air-conditioning breakdowns, delivery delays, and loss of food quality to ingredient shortages that lead to the unpredictable price spikes both Platt and Sinawi are experiencing. Also, crop shortages are directly tied to inflation, the report found, taxing restaurants further. A study from the European Central Bank estimates that by 2035, inflation will increase U.S. food prices by an additional 0.4 to 2.6 percent in a best-case scenario—if emissions are drastically decreased. If they are not, inflation could rise as much as 3.3 percent over its current values.

A Pivot to Local Sourcing—Mostly

For the past two decades, Platt has sourced ají chiles from Peru, which was the only place you could find these flavorful peppers so essential to Peruvian cuisine. But over the past 15 years, he’s been collaborating with a farm in Corvallis, Oregon called Peace Seedlings. “They’ve been patiently hybridizing varieties [of ají] and finding out which seed varietals grow best in this climate,” Platt says. “To my knowledge, we’re the first growers of this product locally.”

Now Andina has diversified its sources of ají: their Peruvian supply is vacuum-sealed fresh organic ají paste, supplemented with fresh ajís—several hundred pounds this fall—from Peace Seedlings. They also purchase frozen ajís from GOYA and other mainline importers. One of Andina’s major ingredient suppliers, Charlie’s Produce, is also experimenting with growing ají chiles in its fields in California. Expanding their domestic farming partnerships gives Andina a more reliable source than Peru, which is facing its own set of climate-change challenges.

However, local sourcing isn’t always a guarantee of supply. In 2011, 90 percent of Texas—one of the U.S.’s largest agricultural producers—was classified as being in “exceptional drought.” The drought was devastating, causing $7.6 billion in losses and lowering the agricultural GDP in the state to a mere .8 percent. According to Tara Scully of the Global Food Institute, it’s highly likely we will continue to see an increase in extreme weather, and ultimately U.S. restaurants will have to start importing more ingredients from other countries. “We’ll have no choice,” she says.

Adapting to Change as the New Constant

Being nimble, quickly finding answers to problems like these, makes all the difference. Buying in bulk is one solution. Andina buys so many limes—50 cases per month—that Platt was recently able to negotiate bulk purchases on an annual basis.

Platt has also staved off price volatility by precontracting with suppliers. That’s what he did with shrimp. He signed a purchasing contract at the beginning of the year to lock in a price for a given number of pounds. “Oftentimes that would save us a lot of money, because they would have some kind of hurricane or another algae bloom or something along those lines that would wreak havoc on the fishery there,” Platt says.

George Frangos, co-founder and president of Farm Burger, resolves supply-chain issues by developing strong, personal connections with a wide network of local sources. The Georgia-based restaurant chain has 11 locations throughout the Southeast, and serves 100 percent grass-fed (and grass-finished) beef burgers, pasture-raised pork burgers, seasonal salads, and, in the summer, peach compote with local goat cheese.

Frangos says he’s learned to avoid surprise price fluctuations by knowing each of his suppliers by name and relying on them to give him and his team a heads-up when prices head south. “We try to work together, so it’s not just an overnight thing of, ‘Our prices are going up 50 cents a pound.’”

One of Farm Burger’s main beef suppliers is Hickory Nut Gap, a fourth-generation family-owned regenerative ranch based outside Asheville, North Carolina, that is a network itself, partnering with 22 ranches across the South. In Hickory Nut, accredited by the Savory Institute, Frangos feels he’s found a resilient partner for his key ingredient. In addition to the animal welfare benefits of most grass-fed beef, there are also likely climate benefits. Another perk: its relatively consistent price. “When there is a shortage of feed from drought or other climate related hardships, the price of grain-fed beef increases, whereas the price of grass-fed beef is very resilient to climate forces,” says Frangos. That said, even grass-fed beef prices have gone up in recent years due to ranchers’ increased operating costs, labor costs, and the cost for hay and silage (reflecting slower grass growth due to heat waves).

In Philadelphia, chef Sinawi resolves the high price of beef through his relationship with his customers. He’s broken his unspoken rule to keep entrees under $30 with only one item: steak au poivre, which he’d been selling for $29. The dish, which Sinawi makes with USDA Choice New York striploin, is seared to order with cracked peppercorns and comes with a Cognac cream sauce that gives it an umami richness. “I had no choice. I took it off the menu for a month and people were asking for it,” he says. Ultimately, he put it back on the menu and raised it to $36. Having conversations with his customers, sharing his pricing challenges with them so they have a context for the increases, is key to their acceptance of the cost.

Plant-Based Alternatives

Quinoa salad with cucumber, corn, olives and cotija cheese at Andina. Photo courtesy of Andina.

Andina has several vegetarian main courses on the menu, and has always offered quinoa, a Peruvian mainstay grain, as part of several dishes. Victor Platt (Peter’s brother), who leads the chef team at the restaurant, will soon be launching a quinoa risotto (“quinotto”). Peace Seedlings is beginning to grow quinoa domestically, but quantities are small, so Victor Platt sources bulk organic quinoa mostly from Bob’s Red Mill (who in turn sources it from Peru and Bolivia—also a climate consideration).

Quinoa has an auspicious climate future, says Peter Platt. “It’s incredibly adaptive. It’ll grow in sub-standard soil, in conditions that wheat won’t,” he says. “It’ll grow wherever you plant it. And it’s one of the world’s most nutritious foods.” He points out that quinoa, like meat, contains all nine essential amino acids, and is delicious when well prepared.

Tara Scully says that many of the chefs she interviewed for the GFI report were reducing the portion size of protein, because it’s now so much more expensive. She heard echoes of this refrain at a Food Tank discussion this past week in New York City about how restaurants can take action on climate change. “Plants are more climate-friendly and they cost less,” Scully says. “So if you’re looking to reduce your costs and also deal with climate change as a chef, it’s a win-win.”

She also thinks consumers—especially younger ones—are willing to pay for vegetable-based dishes because they’re healthier, better for the planet, and taste amazing. Meat seems simplistic, almost too easy to make taste good, while vegetables can showcase a chef’s skill and creativity: “You can transform a portobello mushroom into something that’s over-the-top umami.”

The post Weathering Climate Shocks: How Restaurants Survive Supply Disruptions appeared first on Civil Eats.

Still in its research phase, the 86-acre project is operated by Ocean Rainforest, a company that aims to fight climate change by growing seaweed at scale: 1 million tons a year by 2030. Although an 86-acre terrestrial farm would be considered boutique, the Ocean Rainforest plot, floating in sight of the Channel Islands, represents a significant leap in size from the average U.S. seaweed farm of 1 to 4 acres—and a new frontier for ocean farming.

Supported by $6.2 million in Series A funding, for a total of $22 million from U.S. and European governments, grants, and venture capital, Ocean Rainforest also operates seaweed farms in the Faroe Islands and Iceland that supply the animal-feed, fertilizer, and cosmetic industries. The company’s goal of substantially decarbonizing these industries—with seaweed, instead of petroleum feedstocks, as raw material—depends on the success of this farm. Growing seaweed in the open ocean, with room to exponentially expand, means the Ocean Rainforest team is tackling how to anchor crops in hundreds of feet of water, withstand intense weather, and monitor a farm that lies many miles from shore.

As Ocean Rainforest continues its research, the wider U.S. seaweed industry, still in its infancy, faces significant challenges. Several years of steady investment and scientific breakthroughs have helped it advance, but since 2023, funding has dropped precipitously, and so have retail prices for seaweed-based foods. In the meantime, a lack of government guidance by means of regulation and legislation makes it difficult for farms to gain traction. Seaweed is an extraordinary crop, offering multiple benefits to planetary and human health along with an array of business applications. But it’s fair to say that right now, the industry is having growing pains.

The Investment Slowdown

“We are in what I call the ‘valley of disappointment,’” says Steven Hermans, who founded Phyconomy. American investors have become more sophisticated about startup investments, including in seaweed, he says. A few years ago, he adds, “They didn’t know anything, and they were like, ‘OK, we’ll toss a couple of million into this.’ Then, Everyone kept their money in their pockets during high inflation . . . [and] people realized . . . it will take a long time to build a market for American-grown kelp. Now they’re asking better questions, and that will ultimately lead to better investments.”

But for some companies, that won’t matter. Since Civil Eats began this reporting project nearly a year ago, two of the largest and most well-known American kelp businesses have gone under: Running Tide, a carbon capture company, and AKUA, maker of kelp burgers.

Founded in 2017 by Marty Odlin, the Maine-based Running Tide was one of the most well-funded kelp companies in the U.S. before it shut down abruptly in June 2024. As its website stated, Running Tide aimed to build “humanity’s operating system for the ocean,” drawing down carbon via seaweed-inoculated wood chips. Seaweed naturally absorbs carbon as it grows, but unless it is harvested, it decomposes and releases carbon back. The chips, on the other hand, would sink to the deep ocean to decay, storing the carbon there for thousands of years, according to Odlin. Running Tide’s revenue goal was to sell carbon removal credits to companies interested in decreasing their carbon footprint.

Running Tide garnered $54 million in Series B investments, including from Lowercarbon Capital, in 2022. In June of that year, an article in the MIT Technology Review questioned Running Tide’s farming and business practices. Meanwhile, the company prepared to relocate to Iceland, having persuaded the Icelandic government to approve its wood-chip sinking.

In fall 2023, Running Tide sank 19,000 tons of wood chips into the ocean, selling the world’s first marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR) credits to Microsoft and Shopify as part of a voluntary carbon market not regulated by government. In less than a year, the company shut down as criticism about its practices continued to swirl; Odlin cited a lack of American government support for the voluntary carbon market as the reason for the closure.

Although $54 million represented a fraction of the $380 million overall investment in the seaweed industry, some think the carbon-sink goal was too narrow, and overlooked all that seaweed could offer. “The long-term [carbon sink] potential attracted a swarm of speculators that took the industry in the wrong direction,” says Bren Smith, founder of GreenWave, a forerunner in the ocean farming movement. GreenWave received roughly $6 million in 2021.

Smith believes that the dip in carbon-fueled funding will encourage the industry to embrace seaweed’s many uses—as a good food for humans and animals, as a game-changing alternative to chemical- and carbon-intensive industries like fertilizers or plastics, and for its proven ecosystem benefits. Also, seaweed doesn’t need arable terrestrial land, likely to diminish as wildfires and extreme weather events like drought increase. “I don’t know if it’s 100 years or five years, but we’re gonna be growing huge amounts of food underwater,” he predicts.

Lack of Federal Funding

“The E.U. has spent . . . . hundreds of millions of euros on R & D related to seaweed, in a way that the U.S. has not. And many startups have benefited from those E.U. projects,” says Tardiff, pointing out that Ocean Rainforest, a for-profit entity, has received extensive E.U. funding. In China and Korea, where seaweed farming first developed into a larger industry, governments provide kelp seed to farmers for free or at a subsidized cost. The lack of state support in the U.S., says Tardiff, also means the American seaweed market is more tied to market fluctuations than its Asian and European competitors.

The paucity of both private and government funding makes it harder for seaweed companies to handle the high cost of farming and processing. “The ocean is uniquely expensive to operate on,” says Tardiff, who also serves as the Lighthouse Lead of 1000 Ocean Startups, a global coalition of incubators, accelerators, competitions, matching platforms, and VCs that have pledged to back at least 1,000 “transformative” startups by 2030.

Basic seaweed farming equipment, like a boat, costs anywhere from $30,000 to $500,000; a single seaweed-line anchor—and a farm needs multiple—can cost $1,000. Also, because kelp is unusually perishable, it requires million-dollar investments in infrastructure equipment, like specialized dehydrators and freezers, to render it shelf-stable. Much of it is custom-built for this new food business.

Retail Slump Meets Inflation

Describing the current CPG market as “brutal,” Courtney Boyd, founder of AKUA kelp burger company, closed her operation this August. Boyd founded her kelp company in 2016, supported by GreenWave, and for a while it was thriving: She raised $4.5 million in funding from 2020 to 2024, according to Phyconomy. Looking back, Boyd regrets not having invested in farming, instead buying kelp wholesale from middlemen. She eventually began working directly with farmers in 2023, but it was too little, too late.

“With an inflationary environment, if you are a consumer-package company and you don’t have a lot of oversight in terms of what’s happening with the supply chain, you’re in trouble when times are challenging,” says Julia Paino of Desert Bloom Foods, a food investing firm.

Boyd’s company will be taken over by the Maine Family Seafarm Coop, run by Ken Sparta, one of Boyd’s partner farmers. The co-op plans to focus on direct-to-restaurant sales and piggyback off their existing oyster-selling infrastructure, avoiding the cost and complication of grocery-store sales entirely.

A Patchwork of Regulations

Unlike terrestrial farming, no federal laws govern or guide ocean farming. Nor is there any federal tracking of seaweed landings, despite the edible seaweed business being worth nearly $2 billion in the U.S. This stands in stark contrast to terrestrial farming: At any given time, a citizen can look up exactly how much of a crop is grown, to the acre, on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) website, going back to the 1900s. This information is intimately tied to subsidies like the farm bill, which provides support to American farming industries like corn, soy, or pork. Without the clear picture that tracking provides, it’s harder for money to flow.

In the case of seaweed, four federal agencies touch seaweed, but only lightly: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, whose regional offices are responsible for permitting every single seaweed farm in the U.S., but not for following up once those farms are established; the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which funds seaweed projects and education and tracks landings for fish and aquaculture, but not seaweed; USDA, which helps fund seaweed farms, on a limited basis, but doesn’t regulate them; and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates imported seaweed products and domestic seaweed—but only if it’s part of a pharmaceutical product. The U.S. Coast Guard, responsible for mapping fisheries and other structures in the water, does not yet map seaweed farms.

With no single federal agency having oversight, and few guidelines on either the state or federal level, seaweed companies and farmers are left in limbo.

Sunken Seaweed, one of California’s two commercial seaweed farms, has dealt with limbo for years now. Farmer Torre Polizzi raises dulse—a rich, meaty-tasting red seaweed favored by health-conscious consumers for its nutritional properties—in tanks on Humboldt Bay, in Northern California. California has no permitting process for seaweed farms in state waters, which extend anywhere from 3 to 12 nautical miles from land—an unsurmountable distance for most farmers. So, Polizzi is unable to grow his seaweed in the ocean, although dulse is native to the nutrient-rich, cold Pacific.

“That is where 99.9 percent of companies hit a wall in this industry in California,” says Polizzi, the rush of pumped seawater humming in the tanks behind him. Each of his 10 tanks holds 1,200 gallons of constantly bubbling seawater, which tumbles the seaweed so it photosynthesizes more evenly.

Polizzi considers himself lucky to have found a home for his seaweed at all. He and his wife spent five years trying to find a location in California for their farm. They are able to pump saltwater from the ocean, crucial for a land-based seaweed company, through a relationship with Hog Island, the Northern California oyster restaurant and market, which already has a salt-water pumping permit for its oyster operation.

The California Coastal Commission, which oversees the permits, has not issued any new pumping permits in many years. In exchange for the seawater, Polizzi helps oversee a research bull kelp site for Hog Island, Greenwave, and The Nature Conservancy (permitted in the bay because it not commercial).

Even selling his fresh dulse and dried seaweed flakes at the local farmers’ market was a battle: It took Polizzi six months of petitioning California’s legislature to allow seaweed as a “cottage food,” saleable at farmers’ markets.

“We are here in California. We have some of the best marine science institutions in the world,” says Polizzi. “We have the ability and tech to create the cleanest [seaweed farms] in the world. But we can’t implement them.”

Seaweed at Scale

As a research farm, Ocean Rainforest is testing various seeding methods, grow depths, and length and spacing of lines to create a model that’s efficient, economical, and replicable. They need to be able to monitor the site from shore and created an intricate buoy system so that they can see from the coast if anything disturbed their seaweed lines overnight or after bad weather. The company is also developing a harvesting machine that will reap the seaweed “using minimum cost and time.”

If this project, set in a federal Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)—a strip of water that can stretch from 3 to 200 miles offshore—is successful, other farms could begin putting buoys in EEZs as well. The U.S. boasts the most EEZs in the world, a whopping 3.4 million square miles. That’s a lot of ocean to potentially cultivate.

“There is no silver bullet when it comes to climate change, but seaweed can be part of that solution,” says Eliza Harrison, until recently the director of California operations at Ocean Rainforest. Proponents of open-ocean farming say large-scale operations in EEZs could fulfill sustainability goals that smaller farms closer to shore can’t: namely, substantial water bioremediation and enough raw material to supplant petroleum products in plastics and fuel. “Can you take this biomass that is naturally growing, can you cultivate it and then use it as a food and feed product, or use it as a way to improve people’s well-being?” says Harrison.

While smallholder seaweed farms can boost maritime economies and provide job alternatives to commercial fishing, the lower quantities they yield makes it difficult to justify millions of investment in infrastructure. Additionally, seaweed from smaller farms wholesales at around $1 to $2 a pound, according to industry experts, a price that’s not competitive in industries like plastics or textiles, where raw materials can start at $.70 (for PET polyethelene) or $.67 (for cotton) per pound. Large-scale farmed U.S. seaweed has yet to be marketed, but experts say that larger, automated-harvest farms could price their raw kelp more competitively, hitting below the $1 mark.

Replacing fossil fuel–derived plastics, a major contributor to global warming, with a climate-positive material like seaweed seems like a no-brainer. But some scientists have serious concerns about scaling up kelp farms. For one thing, huge kelp monocultures could threaten native kelp forests, responsible for drawing down a large portion of the world’s carbon—around 56 million tons annually, according to a new study by Plymouth Marine Laboratory. That’s equivalent to taking nearly 13 million cars off the road a year. Even more staggering, marine algae produces 50 percent of the world’s oxygen.

That threat has already surfaced in China, which farms most of the world’s kelp. In 2021, seaweed farming in the Northern Jiangsu Shoal, combined with warmer waters and human pollution, helped create green tides that sucked up oxygen and suffocated marine species for 81 days. Pests and bacteria infections are concerns, and so is the introduction of non-native seaweeds that could crowd out the native ones, or introduce new, disease-causing microorganisms. If the U.S. were to allow thousands of acres of farms in the EEZs, could that affect already suffering kelp forests in states like Maine and California?

These kinds of questions, and the fact that the industry is still new and evolving, say some experts, may explain why state and federal agencies and policymakers have been taking their time with guidelines. Rules laid down now could protect—or jeopardize—seaweed in U.S. waters. Those rules could also determine whether small seaweed farms will play an important and valued role in America’s future, or begin to vanish, replaced by ever larger farms, repeating the history of farming on land.

The Beginnings of a Roadmap for Kelp

There’s action at the federal level, too. A bill proposed in Congress in 2023, the Coastal Seaweed Farm Act, would direct the USDA and NOAA to establish an Indigenous seaweed farming fund to help Native Americans continue cultivating a food that has sustained them for thousands of years. The act would also create a joint study on how to responsibly scale seaweed in the U.S., and implement regulations based on those findings that would protect marine environments, measure the impacts and benefits of seaweed farming, and establish guidelines for monitoring farms.

Another bill, the Sustaining Healthy Ecosystems, Livelihoods, and Local Seafood Act—known as the SHELLS Act—proposes that the USDA create an office of aquaculture to promote funding, create regulations to guide the industry, and more. “The SHELLS Act is a crucial step toward enhancing U.S. food security and environmental sustainability through responsible aquaculture practices,” said co-sponsor Congressman Nicholas LaLota (R-NY) in an email. His district is home to the state’s first commercial seaweed farming operation and a thriving Indigenous seaweed farming co-op.

If passed, the SHELLS Act would create a federal body that could help seaweed farming evolve responsibly; the Advisory Committee, according to language in the bill, would “acknowledge the history, use, and preservation of Indigenous and traditional aquaculture practices and ecological knowledge.” Mapping of seaweed farms—critical for maritime navigation and, potentially, wildlife corridors if large swaths of the country’s EEZs are cultivated—could become a requirement.

The bill might incentivize a new round of investors, since seaweed harvest could be tracked just as simply as corn or soy. And it might give small farmers a boost. “Shellfish harvesters and seaweed farmers play an essential role in our food supply, but historically they haven’t received the support they need to reach their full potential,” said Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), the bill’s lead sponsor, in a press release. The SHELLS act, she said, “will help shellfish harvesters and seaweed farmers grow their small businesses while expanding blue carbon ecosystems that help address the climate crisis.”

The past two years have been undeniably difficult for the seaweed industry, says Julia Paino of food investor Desert Bloom Foods. However, she sees promise in this ocean crop; it reminds her of how tofu came the U.S. in the 1980s. She would know—that’s when her father brought the unknown food to American shores with his company Nasoya, convincing thousands of Americans to try a very healthy, unfamiliar food that was immensely popular in Asia, and ultimately to build the platforms and infrastructure that enabled its success.

“There’s a lot of similarities . . . You have something that’s been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, right? This is not a novel ingredient source that was just created in the lab. This isn’t cultured meat. This is something that is steeped in significant cultural history, [with] a lot of tremendous health benefits, and now we know, also planetary benefits. It’s a matter of helping educate consumers, right?” says Paino. “So, there’s even more opportunity, I think, around what can be done with kelp. You’ll continue to see excitement across a lot of investors—hopefully coming from a more informed place of, ‘What is it? How is it grown? What’s the type of infrastructure you need for it to thrive and be successful?’”

This series was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.

The post The Future of Seaweed Farming in America appeared first on Civil Eats.

“She knows me and doesn’t like me,” Pocknett said, casting a half-hearted wave in her direction. Pocknett, a member of the Wampanoag tribe, is a regular here on Mashpee’s  Little River, a stretch of Cape Cod ringed by multi-story homes, each with its own private dock. He knows all the good fishing spots—or at least, what were once good fishing spots—along the murky perimeter.

Pocknett steered down a gravel driveway and parked between two wind-worn wooden houses, unfurling his 6’7” frame from the driver’s side, boots first. He hefted a 50-pound rake and stack of plastic baskets from the bed of his truck and tramped toward the river, ignoring the “private property” warnings staked around the backyard. Like his ancestors for 12,000 years, he had come to this river in search of a hard-shelled clam known as a quahog, and no amount of anti-trespassing signs could keep him away.

Pocknett sloshed through the shallows, waders dredging up brown clouds of mud. “This is nothing like ‘black mayonnaise,’” he said, referring to other areas where once-sandy bottoms are now thick sludge. “Here it’s actually not so bad.”

Low-lying Mashpee is carved from water: from mosquito-bogged marshes, pine-shrouded ponds, and rivers that wind in brackish ropes past condos and golf courses. Since the 1970s, much of the town’s waterfront has been privatized and developed by nonmembers of the Wampanoag tribe.

The manicured and serene landscape above the waterline belies tremendous damage below, where shellfish and finfish have thinned—and in some cases disappeared—due to nitrogen pollution emitted from multi-million–dollar developments and their septic tanks. Stripped of land and resources, a dwindling group of Mashpee’s Wampanoag is committed now more than ever to asserting their rights to hunting and fishing.

These “Aboriginal rights,” as they’re legally known, are reflected in treaties between the U.S. and sovereign Indigenous nations, and grant unlimited harvests, even from private property. But not everyone on Cape Cod respects these rights, sometimes resulting in screaming matches and 911 calls. Wampanoag fishers, like Pocknett, are forced to shrug it off. Their work, they say, is to both triage a dying ecosystem and continue an essential expression of their heritage, sovereignty, and lifeways.

Under the April gloom, Pocknett waded deeper into the river, the current pulling at his knees. With a grunt, he plunged his rake into the water and dug in.

People of the First Light

When he isn’t raking for wild quahog, Pocknett manages the tribe’s shellfish farm, using modern aquaculture practices that are a footnote in the Wampanoags’ millennia-old relationship to the waterways of the Cape. Generations before Pocknett’s great uncle founded the First Light Shellfish Farm on Popponesset Bay, in the 1970s, Pocknett says it’s likely the tribe cultivated bivalve species and maintained the shallows with ancient clam gardening techniques, constructing “reefs” out of rocks in the sandy bottoms of the bays and rivers. The abundant eelgrass that once grew in those same waters fostered eels, scallops, and fish species like striped bass, all important elements of the Wampanoag diet, culture, and worldview.

CheeNulKa Pocknett reached down to grab the handle of a 50-pound bull rake used to dig quahogs on the Monomoscoy Island beach along Mashpee’s Little River. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)

The natural abundance of the bay, however, has been severely diminished by development and nitrogen pollution. Today, Pocknett and his cousins receive funding from U.S. Fish and Wildlife to raise the tribe’s quahogs and oysters in that pocket of the Popponesset, a small body cradled on the Cape’s southwestern arm. Instead of clam reefs, the farmers use oyster cages and clunky steel rakes to manage their crop.

This helps the local ecosystem somewhat, as shellfish remove nitrogen from the water by absorbing small amounts into their shells. But the eelgrass is already gone from this bay, as are most of its wild fish. And First Light is not nearly big enough to replace what’s been lost, Cape-wide.

Off the farm, other bays and rivers that sustained past generations with abundant wild shellfish have been radically transformed, too. Areas that were once quahog hotbeds are now so mucky from nitrogen-fed algae that they’re inhospitable to growth. Aboriginal rights allow Wampanoags to cross public and private land to fish, but they don’t guarantee that there will be any fish in the water once they arrive.

Those sites that remain viable have limited fishing access. Many have been blocked by private developers, fences, or overgrown brush. But there are psychological deterrences, as well. The prospect of aggravated non-Indigenous neighbors is enough to keep some Wampanoags out of the water.

One of Pocknett’s cousins, Aaron Hendricks, worries that for Wampanoag youth, the once-proud practice of fishing is now entangled with shame. He recently recalled a day from his childhood when he was about four. His Aunt June took him fishing in Simons Narrows, down a dirt path that had previously “always been a way to the water.” A strange woman burst out of the property, “cussing, yelling, screaming that you can’t park here.”

Now 42, Hendricks has his own children to teach—except instead of taking the well-worn paths “my people showed me as a puppy,” he said, they sneak through “a briar patch and a thousand mosquitoes and poison ivy” to avoid confrontation. “Half the kids don’t even want to go because they hear the stories,” he said. “I don’t want to show them that. It scars them, type shit.”

Pocknett’s fishing trips can also devolve into ugly confrontations, pitting his tribe’s ancient claims to fishing grounds against the rights of property owners in newer developments. Pocknett often live-streams these encounters on Facebook, as he did four years ago, when a homeowner reported him and his brother for trespassing on a Monomoscoy Island driveway.

In that encounter, Pocknett accused the Mashpee police and natural resources officers of impeding his rights. In the footage, Pocknett’s voice throbs with rage: “We fish every day, they don’t care. They tell us that we’re nothing but a bunch of dumb Indians.” When asked about the incident, he was only slightly more measured. “They’re preventing us from practicing our culture, our right of ways, our livelihood,” he said.

The beach at Punkhorn Point on Popponesset Bay, where the First Light aquaculturists load their boats. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)

Such confrontations are likely to continue. As of April, the tribe has 321 total acres of reservation land, designated by the Supreme Court when it ended a protracted legal battle that began in 2015. All but one of those acres, however, are landlocked. To fish as they’ve always fished, Wampanoags have no choice but to assert their Aboriginal rights on private property. So, Pocknett walks through yards.

Legal Precedent

A few months later, minutes show that the commission discussed a statement issued by Wampanoag police claiming the tribe “has the right to access water to fish through any property.” The Commission’s response was firm: “The town manager has notified both the police and the tribal council that this is not where the town of Mashpee stands,” those minutes say. “No-one [sic] can access the water through private property.”

Legal experts on Indigenous affairs disagree. A landmark 1999 appeal in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court favored the Mashpee tribe’s extensive Aboriginal rights and forever clarified the state’s stance, according to a New England–based lawyer who is working with the tribe on current litigation and asked not to be named to avoid appearing biased.

The 1999 case, Commonwealth v. Maxim, determined that Aboriginal rights supersede a town’s shellfish bylaws, which set rigid standards and limits for non-Indigenous hunting and fishing. The decision relied primarily on protections outlined in the Treaty of Falmouth, signed in 1749.

Other cases, including the 1974 “Boldt Decision” in Washington State, have firmly set legal precedent for sovereign fishing rights. In Massachusetts, in 1982, the state House of Representatives adopted a resolution recognizing “the ancient and aboriginal claim of Indians” to “hunt and fish the wildlife of this land for the sustenance of their families.”

Matthew Fletcher, director of Michigan State University’s Indigenous Law and Policy Center and member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, spent seven weeks as a visiting professor of Federal Indian Law at Harvard Law School this spring and sits as a judge on the Mashpee tribe’s appellate court. In an interview, he said anyone who claims Wampanoag fishing rights are unclear is willfully overlooking decades of precedent. Aboriginal fishing rights are property rights and should be understood as such, he said.

“Putting up a bunch of fences and denying somebody access to a parcel of land or water that they have a property interest in” goes against fundamental rules of law, Fletcher said. The property interest of the Wampanoags in this case is their Aboriginal fishing right, which extends to those lands and waters.

“Under every rule of law, going back to England before there was the United States, people have a right to access, within reasonable limits, other people’s property in order to get to their property,” Fletcher said. “You learn that in the first year of law school. And Indian people are denied that basic right every single day.”

The denial of rights in Mashpee can be subtle, as with “No Trespassing” signs, or overt, as when local homeowners involve police. Attitudes vary, but the town is marred with distrust.

On a summer day at Mashpee Neck Marina, I took a walk down a residential street crowded with large homes, each with a neatly trimmed yard and picture windows looking out on the Santuit River, where a fleet of chrome yachts and speedboats winked under the midday sun. At one home, I met a seasonal resident named Kathy, who declined to give her last name, but said she tries to keep Wampanoag fishers from crossing her yard. She and her husband had stapled “No Trespassing” signs to the pitch pines that gird a narrow path from the front of the house to the river in the back.

“They’re tribal people, and they carry buckets down there and take oysters in bulk,” Kathy said, standing in her doorway, a small dog drooped over her feet. “They think they own the land. They think it’s theirs.”

Nearby, in another doorway, an older man said the Wampanoag have “always been respectful” of him and his property. His wife, who joined him at the door, was less amiable. “We won’t say anything about the Wampanoags in any newspaper,” she said angrily, motioning for her husband to come inside. “We don’t want any trouble,” she said, then slammed the door.

The Meaning of Sustenance

Nearby, Pocknett measured out bolts of hazard-orange mesh, a cigarette affixed to his bottom lip. He pulled a few bull rakes from his truck and dragged them to a small motorboat in a clatter of steel, tossing them in the boat along with plastic baskets, a coil of rope, and enough cigarette packs for each of his three cousins, who had also come to work.

In 2022, the tribe was awarded an aquaculture grant of $1.1 million through the Economic Development Administration, part of the American Rescue Plan’s Indigenous Communities program. The cousins were preparing for the arrival of Pocknett’s uncle, Buddy, who was driving in with a truckload of baby quahogs. They would plant the clams out near a sandbar in Popponesset Bay, knowing that each mollusk would clear out some nitrogen, if only a little, as it grew.

Two million baby quahogs sat in sacks in the back of Vernon “Buddy” Pocknett’s truck, ready to be seeded into the Popponesset Bay off Punkhorn Point. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)

When Buddy arrived, the men transferred a dozen sacks containing 2 million baby quahogs into the boat, and cast off for where the murky water ran clear.

Here, Pocknett dropped anchor. The men disembarked, water up to their knees. A couple of them set the mesh in a giant rectangle in the bed of the bay, then sprinkled the tiny shellfish over the water like seeds. As his cousins scattered the new crop, Pocknett attached a rake to his waist with a rusty chain and shuffled to the side a few feet to dig for larger clams. The rake’s cage allowed small clams to slip through the bars, giving the next generation a chance to grow.

In legal terms, the Mashpee tribe’s traditional hunting and fishing rights are protected acts of “sustenance.” The state understands that to mean pure calories. But Fletcher, of Michigan, argues the Indigenous interpretation honors full livelihood. “It is deeply cynical and cramped for non-Indians to say sustenance is merely calories,” he said.

To Pocknett, true sustenance means much more. Out on the sandbar, he leaned back 45 degrees, driving his rake into the mud with coordinated thrusts of hips and arms. Sustenance means to “provide life,” he said. “Not just food.”

The post On Cape Cod, the Wampanoag Assert Their Legal Right to Harvest the Waters appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2024/08/05/17-food-and-ag-approaches-to-tackling-the-climate-crisis/ https://civileats.com/2024/08/05/17-food-and-ag-approaches-to-tackling-the-climate-crisis/#comments Mon, 05 Aug 2024 09:00:57 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57161 But as Civil Eats’ reporting has shown, the food and agriculture system is full of examples of how farmers, ranchers, fishers, chefs, restaurants, grocery stores, and consumers are addressing climate change, with strategies that sequester carbon, slash emissions, save water, reduce plastics, and open new markets. Farmers, for example, are experimenting with the wild seed […]

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Although the food system generates one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, it has largely been excluded from the climate agendas of most governments. Only last year did the food system become a major topic of international debate, during the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

But as Civil Eats’ reporting has shown, the food and agriculture system is full of examples of how farmers, ranchers, fishers, chefs, restaurants, grocery stores, and consumers are addressing climate change, with strategies that sequester carbon, slash emissions, save water, reduce plastics, and open new markets.

Farmers, for example, are experimenting with the wild seed relatives of domestic crops that may be able to withstand extreme weather. Researchers have also discovered that kelp growing alongside mussels and oysters can act like a sponge, soaking up excess nutrients while increasing critical oxygen levels in surrounding waters. And lawmakers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are crafting policies that support local food systems and regenerative agriculture.

Here are some of the most important and promising climate solutions stories we published this year.

As Saltwater Encroaches on Farms, Solutions Emerge From the Marshes
In the Mid-Atlantic, sea level rise due to climate change is already changing what farmers can grow.

These State Lawmakers Are Collaborating on Policies that Support Regenerative Agriculture
Progressive state legislators often find themselves in a David-and-Goliath battle against the conventional ag industry. One organization is equipping them with resources to support producers using regenerative practices instead.

Investment Is Flowing to US Grass-fed Beef Again. Will It Scale Up?
Rupert Murdoch’s Montana ranch is at the center of an effort to get grass-fed beef into mainstream grocery stores; others are using investments to build new markets entirely.

At Climate Dinners Hosted by Chefs Sam Kass and Andrew Zimmern, The Meal Is The Message
To create awareness and inspire action, their carefully curated meals feature coffee, chocolate, and other foods that will become costlier and more difficult to produce due to climate change.

Micro Solar Leases: A New Income Stream for Black Farmers in the South?
EnerWealth Solutions wants to bring the benefits of renewable energy to Black farmers and landowners in the Carolinas.

Can Taller Cover Crops Help Clean the Water in Farm Country?
In Minnesota, a local water quality program might serve as a model for incentivizing the next steps in regenerative farming.

Regenerative Beef Gets a Boost from California Universities
The U.C. system is using its purchasing power to buy grass-fed meat from local ranchers for its 10 universities and five medical centers.

Fungi Are Helping Farmers Unlock the Secrets of Soil Carbon
By tapping into underground fungal networks, farmers are learning how to build lush, spongy soil that supports healthy plants and stores carbon underground.

Florida Banned Farmworker Heat Protections. A Groundbreaking Partnership Offers a Solution.
The Fair Food Program offers the strongest, legally binding protocols to keep people safe when politicians fall short.

Vineyards Are Laying the Groundwork for a Regenerative Farm Future
A new study finding that regenerative practices build more soil carbon in vineyards points to a path for the industry to create broader models for agriculture.

Seeds From Wild Crop Relatives Could Help Agriculture Weather Climate Change
The hardy wild cousins of domesticated crops can teach us how to adapt to a hotter, more unpredictable future.

New School Meal Standards Could Put More Local Food on Students’ Lunch Trays
USDA’s nutrition standards aim to support farmers by increasing the number of schools getting fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats from nearby farms.

Changing How We Farm Might Protect Wild Mammals—and Fight Climate Change
Nearly a quarter of U.S. mammal species are on the endangered species list. Researchers say farming with biodiversity in mind may help stave off further decline.

Climate Solutions for the Future of Coffee
Farmers, researchers, and coffee devotees are refocusing on agroforestry and developing hardier varieties and high-tech beanless brews to save our morning cup of Joe.

Can Seaweed Save American Shellfish?
Seaweed farms on both coasts are beginning to take hold, tapping into decades of painstaking science, and could help shellfish thrive in waters affected by climate change and pollution.

Zero-Waste Grocery Stores in Growth Mode as Consumers Seek to Ditch Plastic
Food packaging is a significant contributor to the plastic pollution crisis. These stores offer shoppers an alternative.

Rescuing Kelp Through Science
Breakthrough genetic research at a Massachusetts lab could save the world’s vanishing kelp forests—and support American kelp farming, too.

The post 17 Food and Ag Approaches to Tackling the Climate Crisis appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/08/05/17-food-and-ag-approaches-to-tackling-the-climate-crisis/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/07/31/the-hard-work-of-bringing-kelp-to-market/ Wed, 31 Jul 2024 09:00:37 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57122 “Anything you do on a boat is a long day,” says Scott. Especially if you’re a kelp farmer, trying to make the most of a short, 12-week season. That day, they’d been out to their 4-acre farm and back twice, harvesting a total of 6,300 pounds. The wind had whipped the rubbery, golden-brown kelp fronds […]

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It was nearly sunset on a breezy May afternoon when Scott Lord and his wife Sheena pulled into Port Clyde, Maine, on the Eva Marie. The hull sat low in the water, weighed down by 2,500 pounds of sugar kelp. The Lords had been out on the water since 5 a.m.

“Anything you do on a boat is a long day,” says Scott. Especially if you’re a kelp farmer, trying to make the most of a short, 12-week season. That day, they’d been out to their 4-acre farm and back twice, harvesting a total of 6,300 pounds. The wind had whipped the rubbery, golden-brown kelp fronds across Sheena’s face as she hand-cut the seaweed from the lines raised up from the water onto the deck.

Scott Lord pictured in Port Clyde, Maine. (Photo credit: Alexandra Talty)

She and Scott had worked quickly to stuff the kelp ribbons into giant bags. Now those bags were ready to be offloaded into a waiting truck and driven 100 miles southwest to their processor, Atlantic Sea Farms (ASF), near Portland, where many of the state’s kelp companies are based. Maine is the heart of America’s farmed seaweed industry, supplying half its harvest—well over a million pounds—last season.

Largely developed in Asia, seaweed farming is a new venture on American shores. One type in particular, kelp—a large brown algae with many species, including sugar kelp— has been hailed as an ecologically beneficial, nutritious superfood that can be farmed on both U.S. coasts—and could help fight climate change. These remarkable characteristics have helped the seaweed industry attract roughly $380 million in investments since 2018, from government, venture capital, and nonprofits.

Kelp’s Tangled Lines

Read all the stories in our series:

• The Promise and Possible Pitfalls of American Kelp Farming An overview of our four-part in-depth series examining the growth of the U.S. seaweed industry. With little regulatory oversight and skyrocketing funding, how will this industry evolve?
• Can Seaweed Save American Shellfish? Seaweed farms on both coasts are beginning to take hold, tapping into decades of painstaking science—and could help shellfish thrive in waters affected by climate change and pollution.
• Rescuing Kelp Forests Through Science Breakthrough genetic research at a Massachusetts lab could save the world’s vanishing kelp forests—and support American kelp farming, too.
• The Hard Work of Bringing Kelp to Market As seaweed farms develop on both coasts and begin to contribute to America’s blue economy, much depends on infrastructure.
• The Future of Seaweed Farming in America The outlook has seemed bright for this crop of multiple uses, including mitigating the impacts of climate change. But major obstacles remain for the seaweed industry.

However, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the global $9.9 billion market. And, according to farmers and kelp companies, the U.S. investment doesn’t yet address a range of logistical issues that challenge—some might even say threaten—the success of seaweed production.

A Highly Perishable Food

Scott Lord became a seaweed farmer five years ago to potentially help his other harvests—oysters and lobsters—adapt to rising ocean acidification in Maine; kelp has a remarkable ability to lower the water’s pH. What he calls “kelping” also gives him an additional income stream.

But for small farmers like himself, he says, kelp farming “wouldn’t be possible for us if we didn’t have a good business to deal with.” Atlantic Sea Farms, the largest seaweed aquaculture business in the country, has solved several challenges that seaweed farmers face in Maine and other states.

Transportation is one. For Lord, trucking kelp to Portland would be cost- and time-prohibitive. Obtaining the reliably productive, inexpensive kelp seed for the farm is another. But as part of the ASF co-op, he is one of 40 farmers that the company provides with kelp seed string—nylon or cotton strings inoculated with kelp spores—at the beginning of the season, in early winter. Farmers grow these out in the water, strung between buoys, until the fronds reach maturity in springtime. Then they sell the harvest to ASF, which picks up the kelp on the dock.

The second problem: Compared to other ocean harvests like oysters, lobster, or fish, kelp is infinitely more complicated to get onto store shelves. After reaching maturity, it must be harvested within three months, before the water becomes too warm and the seaweed begins to degrade. Harvested kelp is also incredibly perishable. Immediately after leaving the water, it begins to ferment, so must be chilled and processed to extend its shelf life—through freezing, fermenting, pickling, or drying—within a few days. And that requires space and expensive, specialized equipment that can resist the corrosive effects of salt water.

Frozen sugar kelp at Atlantic Sea Farms. (Photo credit: Greta Rybus)

To date, leading American kelp companies–including ASF and Ocean’s Balance, also in Maine—have poured millions into equipment like industrial freezers and dehydrators. Coastal Enterprises, a nonprofit and lender in Maine, says that most of their loans to the kelp industry are for working capital operations and equipment. Other states with less-developed but emerging kelp businesses—like Alaska, Connecticut, and New York—need processing help even more urgently.

According to a recent paper by Connecticut Sea Grant, a national network of university programs dedicated to marine resources, kelp’s “use as a food product in Connecticut and in other parts of the U.S. is limited, because there is a need for post-harvest and marketing infrastructure.”

Maine: Building a Vertically Integrated Business

Docked at Port Clyde, Sheena Lord stays on the boat, securing the gigantic seaweed bags to a winch while Scott operates a forklift that hauls the 1,000-pound bags off the boat and onto dry land. The bags are then weighed and loaded into ASF’s 18-wheeler.

“This is the moment that they become inventory. Every bag has an individual tag that says the Julian date, weight, farm, kelp type, and farmer,” says Liz McDonald, seaweed supply director at ASF. Driving her 18-wheeler across New England to reach partner farmers, McDonald lives out of Airbnbs for the majority of harvest season and is a familiar sight at small docks and quaint harbors across the coast.

Once the Lords’ bags are all on board, McDonald drives nearly three hours to ASF’s building in Biddeford, Maine, tucked off I-95 next to defunct railway track. At the loading dock, workers immediately haul the bags of seaweed from the truck, moving rapidly and efficiently. During kelp harvest season, the scene is a little like the Olympic Village during the Games: Everyone’s been training for this singular stretch of time.

The Biddeford facility includes a fermentation room, closed to outsiders, as it contains proprietary machines; storage freezers; a packing room; a cultivation room for breeding kelp; a kitchen for recipe development; and offices upstairs for the marketing and communications teams.

Workers unload sugar kelp from Bangs Island Mussels at the Portland Fish Exchange in Maine. (Photo credit: Greta Rybus)

“It’s not Instagram beauty like, ‘Look at this beautiful kelp harvest,’” says Briana Warner, CEO of ASF. But she’s visibly proud of the space, beaming as she gives me a tour of the newly built $2 million processing center. At every turn, the air is filled with the briny, spicy smell of the company’s signature Sea-Chi, a seaweed-based kimchi made with fresh kelp.

Atlantic Sea Farms CEO Briana Warner. (Photo credit: Greta Rybus)

A former diplomat specializing in economic development, Warner knows that her company’s success is built on nitty-gritty details. “The reality is: Machines break. Every machine downstairs we had to create from scratch, because it doesn’t even exist in Asia . . . because they’re eating dried kelp,” she explains. “Every safety protocol, we’ve had to come up with.”

Early on in Warner’s tenure as CEO, the company almost went under due to processing issues. In February 2020, a deal ASF had reached to supply Maine-grown kelp to Sweetgreen, in a collaboration with celebrity chef David Chang, evaporated as the pandemic shut down the chain’s business. Back then, ASF had limited storage space and needed somewhere to store 240,000 pounds of kelp pouring in from its farms when the deal fell through. Warner tapped into her network of Maine businesses, and Bristol Seafood, a fish wholesaler based out of Portland, came to the rescue.

“They froze almost every bag of kelp,” says Warner, getting teary. Bristol gave her a bill for $3,000—far less than the true cost of their services—at the end of the season.

The event was clarifying for Warner. She plunged into fundraising for an ASF processing center and worked on consumer marketing. Now, the company has four products in every Whole Foods in the country, foods in national supermarket chains like Sprouts and Albertsons, and 20 ingredient partners like Thorne and Navitas.

For the 2023–2024 season, they harvested a record-breaking amount of kelp: 1.3 million pounds. “You can’t have this incredibly positive impact on the environment, on the food chain, on our partner farmers . . . unless you run a really good business,” Warner says.

ASF’s dedication to infrastructure also pays off for the consumer. When a shopper buys one of the company’s burgers, they can look up where the kelp grew, who harvested it, and when. This is a markedly different situation than with seafood writ large, where one-third of grocery store labels have been found to be wrong.

Traceability is the cornerstone of a larger shift toward the blue economy, a movement among coastal and ocean nations that equally supports workers’ rights, environmental concerns, and sustainability goals. It is a huge selling point for the millions invested in American-grown kelp.

For seaweed growers outside Maine, the logistics still have a long way to go.

Alaska: Dealing With Distance

After Maine, the next biggest kelp-producing state is Alaska. It’s also the most productive state on the West Coast, harvesting 871,000 pounds in the 2022–2023 season. With more than 33,000 miles of shoreline and 41,000 people directly employed in seafood industries in 2022, according to the state’s Department of Labor, as well as access to marine science institutions like the University of Alaska, many here expected seaweed farming to boom when it was first legalized in 2016.

Kodiak Island in the summer. Alaska’s thousands of miles of coastline could help the state develop a booming seaweed-farming industry.

Federal officials also bet on Alaska’s rapid transition to seaweed farming. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) announced $49 million to jump-start the state’s seaweed and shellfish industry, with a quarter of those funds earmarked for Alaska Native communities.

But for farmers and companies, the kelp boom hasn’t quite happened yet. In 2016, one of the first seaweed companies to open after legalization here went on a hiring spree and immediately started putting buoys into the water. According to former employees, they were expecting to hit 1 million pounds of harvested kelp in a few years. Instead, they’ve significantly reduced operations since then, although they do maintain a farm in Alaska. As for the EDA’s 2022 funding, it is still being allocated, and to an industry that’s just beginning to take shape.

Alaska’s mammoth size presents the biggest hurdle: At 663,268 square miles, it’s much larger than any other state and even most countries. Kelp-producing regions can be thousands of miles away from one another. Many of these coastal communities aren’t connected by road, and the only way to haul kelp from farm to processor is by boat. Even after kelp is made into a final product, it still has to be shipped to Seattle, 2,000 miles south.

“We’ve looked at chartering an Alaska Airlines plane,” says Lia Heifetz, laughing. Heifetz is the co-founder of Barnacle Foods, a vertically integrated kelp company known for its Bullwhip Kelp Hot Sauce. She isn’t kidding; in its early days, her company explored flying thousands of pounds of fresh kelp from Kodiak to its headquarters and processing facility in Juneau, a distance of 500 miles. Heifetz admits that the plan wasn’t cost effective—and came with quite a carbon footprint—so they dropped the idea.

Now in its eighth year of business, Barnacle Foods works only with farms within a 70-mile radius. The company still ships everything by boat, relying on commercial fishing vessels, thanks to relationships with fishers that Heifetz has built over the years. To process their kelp, Barnacle has slowly constructed a 3,000-square-foot production floor and additional warehouse. While Heifetz wouldn’t disclose how much they’ve invested in the facility, she points out that one machine, a “capper” for jars, cost $40,000. Other equipment includes container freezers, container refrigerators, and two forklifts.

“Some level of primary processing or stabilization needs to happen at any port [where] there’s a kelp farm,” she says, adding that a single processing company—and there are only a few others in the state—is unlikely to be able to serve thousands of miles of coastline.

“Most of the profit is coming from having farms double as grant-funded research.”

Farmers and kelp companies say that a cohesive strategy at the state level, particularly around what types of kelp products to initially focus on—food, fertilizer, or bioplastics, for example—could help farmers and kelp companies build infrastructure more efficiently.

As the $49 million in federal EDA funds are being dispersed through the Southeast Conference’s Alaska Mariculture Center, up to $10 million will go toward infrastructure-related projects; other funds include the Native Regenerative fund, aimed at providing money for permitting, equipment, and lease fees for Native Alaskans; a Kelp Climate fund operated by GreenWave, a kelp nonprofit; and the Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant, which can help address processing issues.

An additional challenge for Alaska kelp processing is the cost of energy, which varies widely. Each coastal community is isolated, often operating on its own electrical grid and using a variety of energy sources. Juneau has hydropower, which means Barnacle Foods has relatively low electricity costs, according to Heifitz. In other parts of Alaska, diesel generators can be the only source of electricity, a high-cost option that could deter some types of processing, like freezing.

Because of these expensive bottlenecks, farms have to make money in creative ways. “Most of the profit is coming from having farms double as grant-funded research,” says Brianna Murphy. A former commercial fisher, Murphy and her co-founder, Kristin Smith, created Mothers of Millions in 2021 to do just that, funded by a $30,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Their mobile kelp hatchery, built on a repurposed fishing vessel, means they can navigate straight to farms with spore-laden kelp ready for propagating, instead of waiting for the kelp to come by cargo plane and then working frantically to revive it. Murphy and Smith are kind of a one-stop shop for seaweed farmers: They also offer on-water processing capabilities, shredding harvested kelp directly from the water.

There’s no shortage of interesting and valuable kelp-farming projects in Alaska, including the Native Conservancy’s kelp program, founded to support Indigenous people in starting their own farms. (Native Conservancy founder Dune Lankard was recently featured in the PBS docuseries Hope in the Water for his traditional Eyak kelp cakes.)

Over the next several years, as the EDA grants begin to bear fruit, Alaska could edge closer to realizing the farming potential of its thousands of miles of coastline.

New York: Starting from Scratch

For other coastal states trying break into this nascent blue economy, commercial processing often doesn’t exist. Most kelp companies are based in Maine or Alaska, so farmers elsewhere must rely on themselves to harvest, process, and create end products.

Sue Wicks lifts a line of sugar kelp. (Photo credit: Cam Burton)

One determined New York oyster grower came up with her own solution.

“This is my bay, a tiny piece of a world that is besieged on every side with climate change and pollution,” says Sue Wicks, the founder of Violet Cove Oysters. Each day, Wicks motors 20 minutes from her house to her 2-acre farm on the Great South Bay, using a Pickerell clamming boat that was designed specifically for this body of water.

“With this little spot, I feel an opportunity, a space to do something tangible,” she says, looking out at her acreage, oyster cages bobbing in the distance as she checks the growth on her kelp lines. She plucks off a furl of young sugar kelp and chews it, enjoying its briny sweetness.

Sue Wicks’ sugar kelp in its initial drying phase. (Photo courtesy of Sue Wicks)

A former Women’s National Basketball Association star, Wicks became an oyster entrepreneur after retiring from professional sports, inspired to work on the waters that her family has fished for more than 10 generations.  Her ancestors could harvest shellfish by hand, but wild stocks have plummeted in Wicks’ lifetime, a consequence of warming waters and nitrogen pollution. After witnessing the decline of her families’ livelihood and pastimes—the traditions of clamming, oystering, fishing, and scalloping—she wanted to restore the waters that surrounded her house and hometown. In 2019, she began growing seaweed as part of a research project with Stony Brook University.

After receiving the state’s first commercial kelp farming lease for the 2023–2024 season, Wicks began construction on New York’s first processing center, a dehydrator. Supported by Lazy Point Farms, a New York-based nonprofit, the center cost around $50,000 to build, says Wicks, and is part of a public-private partnership with Suffolk County and the nearby town of Brookhaven. She’s already started using it for this season’s haul.

Wicks first dries her kelp near the water, on racks in the open air, where it shrinks to 20 percent of its original size. Then she moves the racks to a shipping container equipped with a heater exhaust fan and dehumidifier to finish drying completely. Everything is powered by solar, bringing the whole process as close as possible to net-zero emissions.

The shipping container can be converted into a mobile unit, she says, and it’s easily replicated. As for the dried seaweed, Wicks is experimenting with a hot sauce and a seasoning mix, in collaboration with Lazy Point Farms and available through the nonprofit’s website.

“We don’t have working waterfronts on Long Island anymore, and that makes it very difficult,” says Wicks. She hopes her processing center encourages other oyster growers to try kelp farming, since it gives them a way to create their own shelf-stable product, right after harvest. “The fisheries are part of our heritage. It is who we are. Our biggest success is getting other farmers in the water.”

This series was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.

The post The Hard Work of Bringing Kelp to Market appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/07/17/rescuing-kelp-through-science/ Wed, 17 Jul 2024 09:00:48 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56953 What he’s looking for: kelp blades streaked with sorus tissue, a dark band teeming with millions of spores. A wiry man in his 60s, Lindell has developed relationships with homeowners and researchers across hundreds of miles of New England’s coast so he can access the kelp integral to his work—and, potentially, to the future of […]

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Just off the shore in Casco Bay, Maine, marine scientist Scott Lindell descends into an underwater kelp forest, his ears filling with frigid water as he swims down to the seafloor. Lindell’s mission: to find sugar kelp, a golden-brown, frilly-edged seaweed—and, more specifically, sugar kelp in its reproductive phase. Peering through his mask in the swirling, murky water, Lindell can only see a few feet, so it’s not an easy task.

What he’s looking for: kelp blades streaked with sorus tissue, a dark band teeming with millions of spores. A wiry man in his 60s, Lindell has developed relationships with homeowners and researchers across hundreds of miles of New England’s coast so he can access the kelp integral to his work—and, potentially, to the future of seaweed farming in the United States.

After several dives, Lindell has filled his mesh collection bag with cuttings and swims to shore. He stores the prized tissue in a cooler to keep it damp and cool for the five-hour drive, and then sets off for his laboratory at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Here, over the next 45 days, the spores will be carefully cultivated into seed for farmers and scientists to outplant in the ocean.

Scott Lindell checks a seaweed bioreactor in his lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. (Photo credit: Alexandra Talty)

Every year, every ounce of any kelp variety farmed commercially in the U.S.—now approaching millions of tons—begins with this process. Many growers see it as a bottleneck: Propagation from wild-harvested seaweed is costly, lengthy, and ties rural coastal communities to laboratories that are often hours, if not days, away. It also shortens the seaweed growing season, as sorus tissue can only be harvested for a few months of the year. And, most frustrating to farmers, relying on wild stocks for farmed kelp means that growers have very little control over the final product. What could look underwater like a yummy blade may turn out to be a varietal better suited to feeding snails than pleasing the human palate.

Kelp’s Tangled Lines

Read all the stories in our series:

• The Promise and Possible Pitfalls of American Kelp Farming An overview of our four-part in-depth series examining the growth of the U.S. seaweed industry. With little regulatory oversight and skyrocketing funding, how will this industry evolve?
• Can Seaweed Save American Shellfish? Seaweed farms on both coasts are beginning to take hold, tapping into decades of painstaking science—and could help shellfish thrive in waters affected by climate change and pollution.
• Rescuing Kelp Forests Through Science Breakthrough genetic research at a Massachusetts lab could save the world’s vanishing kelp forests—and support American kelp farming, too.
• The Hard Work of Bringing Kelp to Market As seaweed farms develop on both coasts and begin to contribute to America’s blue economy, much depends on infrastructure.
• The Future of Seaweed Farming in America The outlook has seemed bright for this crop of multiple uses, including mitigating the impacts of climate change. But major obstacles remain for the seaweed industry.

Lindell’s eponymous lab at Woods Hole may look humble, with low ceilings and cement floors, but it’s meticulously organized, with hundreds of seaweed varietals catalogued and floating in refrigerated containers. As ferry horns punctuate the rushing sound of seawater piped into scores of tanks, a team of scientists toils away at an ambitious project: revolutionizing kelp propagation. They have just mapped a single sugar kelp genome for the first time, and the results are about to be publicized through the Joint Genome Institute in Berkeley, California. Next, they plan to map a genome for the entire species. The project is supported by a $5.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy MARINER program, part of more than $66 million that the agency has invested in American seaweed production since 2018.

If successful, their work will put Americans at the front of seaweed science globally, making it possible for laboratories like theirs to select wild kelp with ideal traits and create new kelp “seeds” in two weeks. This breakthrough in selective breeding would be the biggest advance in mariculture in the past hundred years, akin to Punnett’s Square, which revolutionized plant breeding in the early 1900s.

A Keystone Species in Decline

The largest vegetative biome in the world, kelp supports the bottom of the marine food chain, nourishing species like snails and lobsters. Humpback whales play with floating kelp, while sea otters wrap themselves in its wide brown blades. Some kelp can stretch as tall as a 15-story building, with fronds that dance in the ocean’s currents, creating an underwater habitat for species as varied as otters, sharks, and octopus. These underwater forests cover a third of the world’s coastlines, providing a buffer for terrestrial species as well by protecting coastlines from the full impact of hurricanes and monsoons.

Different varieties of kelp have thrived in the world’s oceans for more than 100 million years, along the equator and up toward the poles. In 2023, scientists estimated that kelp forests suck up about a third of the world’s atmospheric carbon; kelp also supports fisheries and removes nitrogen pollution. Together, these benefits are valued at as much as $500 billion annually.

Now, this complex, ancient species is in jeopardy. Globally, kelp forests are receding at a rate of 1.8 percent a year, due in part to climate change and human impact. In 15 years, marine scientists say there may not be enough wild stock for farmers to rely on, especially in states like Maine, where kelp forests are rapidly declining. On the West Coast, kelp loss has been even more extreme, with 96 percent of forests from San Francisco to northern Oregon dying off over the past decade, according to The Nature Conservancy. Beginning in 2013, a series of cascading events wreaked havoc: First, a massive heat wave plunged the kelp into stressed conditions at the same time that purple sea urchins—which feed on kelp—lost their biggest predator, the sunflower sea star. Without sea stars to keep them in check, the urchins multiplied and, in a behavioral shift, left their customary nooks and crannies and began devouring the kelp forests.

Scientists believe Lindell’s work could help save the future of seaweed. By mapping sugar kelp, Lindell is creating a Rosetta Stone of kelp traits and corresponding DNA that can then be used by researchers globally to better understand, and protect, their wild kelp populations.

“We can’t go and remediate 350 kilometers of coastline, but we can certainly create oases along the way.”

For example, for a kelp forest stressed by increasingly warmer waters, conservationists could identify and plant strains of kelp that are more heat tolerant. Tristin Anoush McHugh, kelp project director at The Nature Conservancy, monitors California’s remaining forests regularly, and believes that Lindell’s advances in seaweed reproductive technology could bolster restoration efforts. Scientists could isolate kelp that survive mass die-off events, propagate them in the lab, and then plant them in the open ocean, creating kelp refuges. “We can’t go and remediate 350 kilometers of coastline, but we can certainly create oases along the way,” she says.

A Market Worth Millions

If kelp forests disappear, so would wild-harvested seed for farmed kelp. Investment in American-grown seaweed—roughly $380 million to date from the U.S. government, venture capital, and private investors—would have been for naught. Lindell’s work could benefit U.S. kelp farming by helping restore wild seaweeds—but also through reducing costs.

For decades, China has led the industry, valued at $643.4 million in 2022, a slice of the larger $5.6 billion global seaweed market. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, China produces 89 percent of the world’s farmed kelp; the U.S. produces less than .01 percent—what one hatchery specialist in Maine calls a “rounding error.”

“I don’t know any other agricultural or aquaculture industry where the cost of seed can be as much as 50 percent of the farmer’s revenue.”

Many kelp companies in the U.S. cite America’s small appetite for seaweed as an impediment, especially compared to Asia, where seaweed is consumed regularly and in many forms. But minimal demand is only one reason for the low market share. The high cost of farming is another.

American farmers can expect to pay about $1 a foot for string inoculated with kelp seed. The yield is an average of 4 pounds of mature kelp per foot, which nets about 50 cents a pound, according to Lindell. “I don’t know any other agricultural or aquaculture industry where the cost of seed can be as much as 50 percent of the farmer’s revenue,” he says with a scoff.

Compared to other seaweed-farming countries, America is an outlier. Korean seed string is sold for 5 cents a foot and yields 30 pounds per foot, according to Jang K. Kim, a professor in the department of marine science at Incheon National University in South Korea. In China, the seed string cost-to-yield ratio is similar, because the government subsidizes that industry, according to scientists there.

Selectively Bred Spores, on Demand

Once the sorus tissue arrives at Lindell’s laboratory in Woods Hole, the cuttings are scraped with a razor blade, dipped in iodine and isolated in sterile seawater. Every seaweed hatchery in the U.S.—there are about a dozen—practices a similar sanitization process, which is costly for small businesses; one technician estimates that she incurs between $3,000 and $5,000 in annual sanitation costs.

Illustration credit: Nhatt Nichols

When the sorus tissue is clean, Lindell’s scientists dry it overnight and then immerse it again in sterile seawater, prompting the tissue to release its spores. These develop into gametophytes—tiny, feathery clumps, male and female—that are selected for desired traits and then bred to create zygotes (fertilized eggs) that develop into kelp seed (or, technically, juvenile sporophytes). Using gametophytes for seed instead of wild-harvested sorus tissue would greatly decrease the costs, since using gametophytes requires no sanitizing and they can be bred for multiple seasons.

“[Gametophytes] allow us to do what animal breeders and plants have been doing for millennia now—make a single-pair cross that we can then ascertain some value to,” explains Lindell. “We can measure—how long is that blade? How sweet is it? Does it resist high temperature?”

Every harvest season for the past five years, his lab has measured these crosses for 30 to 50 traits, creating a tremendous amount of information for breeding commercially attractive future generations—and for potentially restoring wild kelp one day. The lab publishes all of its breeding information on Sugar Kelp Base, an open-source website for global seaweed researchers.

In Asia, selective breeding is common in mariculture, and is why yields can be four to six times larger than on American farms. But in recent years, Asia’s yields have flatlined, possibly due to a lack of genetic diversity after 50 generations of breeding the same genetic lines of kelp.

Instead, Lindell’s genomic selection approach allows his team to conserve genetic diversity while still selecting for specific traits. They’ve also worked closely with Cornell University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, borrowing crossbreeding techniques from terrestrial agriculture. “In the last five years, we’ve been able to make achievements that took the Asian countries 30 or 40 years to accomplish,” says Lindell.

What is the No. 1 thing they’re breeding for? “Yield. And No. 2 is yield. And No. 3 is probably yield,” says Lindell, laughing. “Every farmer’s business plan and projections are based on yield. Every 10 percent improvement in yield produces probably a 5 percent improvement in their bottom line.”

Increasing yield is part of the focus of the MARINER grant. Currently, the average U.S. farm yield is about 4 pounds per foot. So far, Lindell’s team has been able to triple that yield on average, with hopes of isolating a strain that can produce 25 pounds per foot, approaching the yields of China and South Korea. Lindell is also looking at kelp traits like a strong umami flavor, or thicker blades that make them easier to use as wraps for food, or an ability to resist predation by other marine organisms.

“Every farmer’s business plan and projections are based on yield. Every 10 percent improvement in yield produces probably a 5 percent improvement in their bottom line.”

Creating gametophytes, says Lindell, allows seaweed farmers to become “the orchestrator of your own symphony when it comes to the seaweed planting season. You could start it as early or as late as you choose.” Growers would be able to time their own planting, instead of waiting for wild kelp to mature and produce sorus tissue—and they would have a longer growing season and therefore a larger yield.

Gametophytes also mean less nursery time. Currently, beginning with wild-harvested sorus tissue requires around 50 days to produce kelp “strings”—strings of kelp seeds grown out in a nursery until ready to deploy on a farm. With gametophytes, that time is cut to around 30 days. Additionally, farmers can choose varietals based on their traits, similar to the way apple growers select for flavor, color, juiciness, or other qualities.

The Near Future of Seaweed Farming

Perched at the top of New England and patched with miles of working waterfronts, Maine is the heart of America’s farmed kelp industry. Over the 2022-2023 season, the state pulled in nearly 1 million pounds of kelp—nearly half of America’s farmed output. With its deep, cold waters and naturally occurring kelp beds, the state is home to the country’s first commercial kelp farm and boasts world-class scientists at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, in addition to a marine workforce. For kelp farming, it is a near-perfect location.

Except for the warming waters. The Gulf of Maine is warming 99 percent faster than the rest of the ocean, with devastating repercussions for all marine life, from kelp to finfish to lobster. “It’s harder and harder to find reproductive kelp in September to have ready by, say, Halloween,” says Thew Suskiewicz, a seaweed scientist at Maine’s Atlantic Sea Farms, the largest seaweed aquaculture operation in the country. The company provides seed to partner farmers to outplant. For the 2023-2024 season, Atlantic Sea Farms pulled in a record-breaking 1.3 million pounds of kelp for its line of foods.

Suskiewicz operates the farm’s hatchery after a career of studying algae, including at the seaweed food company Monterey Bay Seaweeds. “I’ve been looking at how kelp assemblages have changed in the Gulf of Maine in the last 30 years—and we’ve seen profound changes. Most of the species here have some life stage that is very dependent on the kelp,” he says, noting lobster as an important example. Lobstering is a nearly $400 million annual industry in Maine alone, according to NOAA. Wild kelp’s decline, he predicts, “is going to have a lot of cascading effects.”

Many of Maine’s lobstermen and commercial fishers are already experiencing huge shifts in the marine populations they harvest. That has led some to get into the farmed seaweed industry to diversify their incomes and businesses in the face of warming waters. Establishing gametophyte cultures would make kelp seed string cheaper, offer more predictability, and make kelp farming less dependent on wild kelp beds. Suskiewicz is working closely with Lindell’s lab, and next season will begin raising gametophyte-spawned kelp in Maine’s waters.

“Next year will be the first year we put them out, and we’ll just measure performance—including, how much did they grow? How do they taste? What is their blade length?” says Suskiewicz.

Suskiewicz believes that the American seaweed industry is at an inflection point, and that selective breeding is arriving at the perfect time. Five years ago, Atlantic Sea Farms seaweed salads were available only in specialty food stores. Now, they’re found across the country, thanks in part to the company’s intensive marketing efforts to introduce the average American to kelp.

Now that seaweed is a bit more familiar, Suskiewicz believes that if the cost of kelp seed drops through widespread adoption of gametophytes, the industry will be able to scale up and finally compete with Asia. “People can purchase their kelp from the U.S., from known monitored waters, by farmers in their community, rather than stuff that primarily comes over from China through [South] Korea—dried, dyed, and then shipped over,” he says.

As for Lindell, he sees enormous potential not just for sugar kelp, the species his lab is mapping. His team’s work could help regenerate other kelp species, too, including giant kelp in California and bull kelp in Alaska. And the kelp-farming industry could be the driver. More funding goes into farming kelp than preserving it in the wild, but the science applies equally: “All the learnings of the industry around resilience, growth, health, and disease resistance is going to carry over to conservation.”

This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.

The post Rescuing Kelp Through Science appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/06/27/can-seaweed-save-american-shellfish/ Thu, 27 Jun 2024 09:01:57 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56676 This article was produced as a radio story by our media partner Public News Service, reaching millions of listeners. Now, she says, “it takes us a while to even get a couple of dozen clams. That’s not right.” She points out that most of the shellfish she harvests these days have been seeded manually by […]

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This article was produced as a radio story by our media partner Public News Service, reaching millions of listeners.

Rebecca Genia walks out into Shinnecock Bay at low tide with a few of her great-grandchildren, using her feet to find hard-shelled quahogs buried in the sand. As a kid, she could fill a trash can with the blue-lipped mollusks in less than an hour—and could also gather other shellfish like oysters, mussels, or scallops, depending on the season.

Now, she says, “it takes us a while to even get a couple of dozen clams. That’s not right.” She points out that most of the shellfish she harvests these days have been seeded manually by the town of Southampton and local universities, “almost like a science project,” she says. “The natural way has been contaminated and polluted by mankind.”

Kelp’s Tangled Lines

Read all the stories in our series:

• The Promise and Possible Pitfalls of American Kelp Farming An overview of our four-part in-depth series examining the growth of the U.S. seaweed industry. With little regulatory oversight and skyrocketing funding, how will this industry evolve?
• Can Seaweed Save American Shellfish? Seaweed farms on both coasts are beginning to take hold, tapping into decades of painstaking science—and could help shellfish thrive in waters affected by climate change and pollution.
• Rescuing Kelp Forests Through Science Breakthrough genetic research at a Massachusetts lab could save the world’s vanishing kelp forests—and support American kelp farming, too.
• The Hard Work of Bringing Kelp to Market As seaweed farms develop on both coasts and begin to contribute to America’s blue economy, much depends on infrastructure.
• The Future of Seaweed Farming in America The outlook has seemed bright for this crop of multiple uses, including mitigating the impacts of climate change. But major obstacles remain for the seaweed industry.

What’s also not right: the quality of the quahogs. “The shells are so brittle,” she says. The increasingly acidic water in the bay makes it hard for the clams to build strong shells. She points to her necklace of wampum—mollusk-shell beads that are integral to Eastern Woodland Native American culture. Hers is a single large indigo-and-white pendant, half an inch thick, the way shells used to be.

Genia, a member of the Shinnecock Nation, has lived along these waters on the South Fork of Long Island, New York, for most of her life. Shellfish are a traditional food source for the Shinnecock; they were also once the backbone of Long Island’s robust commercial fishing industry. Her tribe witnessed the crash of the clam and scallop fishery in the 1990s and then another crash in the 2000s, which further depleted shellfish stocks and threatened the nascent farmed oyster industry. Both were caused by massive blooms of harmful algae.

In 2020, after watching the decline of Shinnecock Bay—a body of water that has fed her tribe for some 13,000 years—Genia worked with Tela Troge, a tribal lawyer, to form the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, a group of five Indigenous women who grow kelp to fight climate change. The group hopes to heal their afflicted bay and inspire a new generation to adopt more regenerative practices on the water. “We want our children to be able to go out there and clam and collect oysters and scallops and mussels like we used to,” says Genia. Plus, Shinnecock women are water protectors, she says, and being out on the bay is “in our DNA.”

Recent scientific studies show that as the ocean becomes unfriendly for shellfish, seaweed could offer a solution—in particular, the large brown algae called kelp.

The women’s move toward seaweed as a solution is emblematic of a shift across the country as the world’s oceans change faster than scientists ever expected. Since the 1990s, ocean acidification—caused by more carbon in the atmosphere dissolving into the sea, among other factors—has increased at alarming rates; in the U.S., the West Coast is especially impacted. Increased acidification means crustaceans in their critical larval stage cannot pull enough calcium carbonate from the water to create shells.

By 2015, acidification had become so significant globally that the United Nations addressed the crisis as part of its Sustainable Development Goal 14: Life Below Water. Their guidelines have spurred government investment, university research, and private interest to tackle acidification ever since.

Nitrogen-rich wastewater, another byproduct of rapid human development, feeds huge blooms of algae (known as “red tides” or “brown tides,” depending on the species) that starve other marine life of oxygen. Some algal blooms produce toxins that make shellfish unsafe to eat. The blooms are a particular problem in shallow waterways like Shinnecock Bay.

Volunteers help to hand-harvest the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers 2023-2024 sugar kelp haul on New York’s Shinnecock Bay. (Photo credit: Rebekah Phoenix)

These twin phenomena of acidification and algal blooms are deadly for all crustaceans, including shellfish. And they can spell disaster for coastal communities, as 3 billion people globally rely on “blue foods” from the ocean, including shellfish, as a primary source of protein.

But recent scientific studies show that as the ocean becomes unfriendly for shellfish, seaweed could offer a solution—in particular, the large brown algae called kelp. Wild kelp forests form the most extensive marine-vegetated ecosystems in the world. They grow on every continent except Antarctica and provide habitat and food for the ocean’s smallest creatures to its largest.

Rich in minerals, kelp grows quickly and doesn’t require fertilizer. It isn’t seriously affected by acidification or algal blooms, and in some cases, it can even mitigate their impact on shellfish, because kelp soaks up excess nutrients like nitrogen and increases oxygenation in the waters around it. What’s more, the fibrous plant, which can grow two feet a day, also pulls anywhere from five to 20 times more carbon from the atmosphere than any terrestrial crop, something that leading marine scientists are working to quantify right now.

Because of these beneficial properties, kelp is being hailed as a miracle, a panacea for the climate crisis. Scientists, coastal governments, and private industry alike think it could be the cornerstone of a new, blue economy that allows coastal communities in the United States to transition from extractive industries into more sustainable ones.

Bolstered by roughly $380 million in investments since 2018, kelp farmers have proliferated from around zero in 2012 to 108 active farms in 2023, according to Connecticut Sea Grant, part of a national network of university-based programs dedicated to encourage stewardship of marine resources. Seaweed farming, a longstanding tradition in Asia for more than a hundred years, is now gaining a place on U.S. shores.

The Scientists Who Kickstarted American Kelp Farming

The science behind this boom in seaweed cultivation began in New England nearly 50 years ago.

Charles Yarish holding Saccharina japonica seaweed offshore of Wando, South Korea, in 2023. (Photo courtesy of Charles Yarish)

Charles Yarish, now a visiting scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, is considered the father of American seaweed farming. Gregarious and welcoming, Yarish can talk kelp nonstop. In 1976, as a new assistant professor at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and also its Department of Marine Sciences, Yarish became increasingly fascinated by kelp’s ability to pull nutrients from the water column. He suspected that farming kelp and other seaweeds could help alleviate water quality issues.

Toiling away at his Connecticut laboratory and conducting experiments in the Long Island Sound, Yarish spent the next few decades proving this hypothesis, focusing mostly on how kelp can pull nitrogen from waterways. “The farming of seaweeds such as kelp not only has business applications but is terribly important for ecosystem services, removing [excess] nutrients from ocean waters and lowering pH,” he explained.

Those early studies have impacted the growth of mariculture studies globally. At UConn, Yarish established an internationally known Seaweed Marine Biotechnology Laboratory, and was tapped to advise the Department of Energy’s current MARINER Program, which has invested $66 million in seaweed aquaculture since 2018.

Charles Yarish looks over recently collected kelp with a student in a lab at the Stamford campus in 2013. (Photo credit: Peter Morenus, University of Connecticut)

In 2016, scientists in Maine, alarmed by their state’s warming waters and increasing acidification, and inspired in part by Yarish’s early work, began studying whether kelp could provide a sanctuary for shellfish. Using the country’s first-ever commercial kelp farm in Casco Bay and funded by a constellation of government, nonprofit, and academic groups, the effort was led by Nichole Price and her team at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences.

After three years, they determined that co-growing blue mussels with sugar kelp—Saccharina latissima, the go-to variety of farmed seaweed for colder North American waters—led to increased oxygenation in the water. The scientists also documented kelp’s ability to locally raise seawater pH, which allowed the mussels to build thicker shells despite the acidic waters.

Price dubbed this the “halo effect” of kelp. She plans to continue monitoring outcomes to see how farms will fare in the future, since Maine’s waters are predicted to be too acidic for shellfish to calcify for most of the year by 2030.

An illustration showing the kelp halo effect, how it can absorb carbon and nitrogen and release oxygen to support shellfish growth. (Illustration credit: Nhatt Nichols)

Price said evidence is growing to support the idea that co-growing shellfish and seaweeds can offset the impact of climate change. The scientific field is tackling some big questions that could benefit the kelp farming industry. Including, she said, “Is it a consistent halo effect, or is it only in these protected bays? Or does it depend on the size of the kelp farm? If it’s a really big kelp farm, can it still create a halo even in exposed areas?”

While scientists race to understand the best growing methods for seaweeds with shellfish, the co-growing concept has been widely marketed by Bren Smith of GreenWave, who was first introduced to kelp by Yarish in 2013, after Smith’s oyster farms on Long Island Sound were decimated by hurricanes. Smith’s brand of co-growing focuses on a polyculture ocean farming model that combines shellfish with seaweed, an idea that he propagated in a book, Eat Like a Fish, and in GreenWave’s instruction manuals for “regenerative ocean farming,” which the group said thousands have used.

Although scientists on both coasts are still studying the effects of co-growing kelp with shellfish species like oysters—which fetch higher market value but generally grow in different environments than kelp—Smith promoted the idea of growing shellfish and oysters together, and is widely known in the industry for popularizing this approach.

“We’ve learned the seaweeds can inhibit harmful algal bloom and even represent a direct food source for the bivalves as they slough off microbial cells.”

Growing shellfish alongside seaweeds or finfish is a practice long used in Asia, especially China. However, it has been slower to catch on in the U.S., in part because of the lack of trials here. Inspired by the Asian approach and by Price’s work in Maine, in 2018 marine scientist Chris Gobler began focusing on kelp’s potential to heal his local waterways in New York, where algal blooms posed a bigger threat than acidification.

Eastern Long Island in particular was burdened with aging, failing septic systems that leached nitrogen into groundwater and ponds, lakes, rivers, streams, and bays. That excess nutrient runoff, combined with warmer waters, essentially fertilized the growth of harmful algal blooms yet again that year. Large swaths of open water were closed to shellfish harvesters by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

Although Price was studying the co-raising of kelp with mussels to offset acidification, there was no scientific evidence yet to show how kelp could help shellfish during algal blooms. Gobler, working out of Long Island’s Stony Brook University laboratory, thought that kelp might benefit oysters. Aided by Michael Doall, a former commercial oyster grower–turned scientist who’d devised a way of growing kelp in shallow waters, Gobler launched a three-year study in 2019, hoping to find a solution for Long Island’s troubled waters that could be applied on both coasts.

By 2022, he had his answer: “We’ve learned the seaweeds can inhibit harmful algal bloom and even represent a direct food source for the bivalves as they slough off microbial cells.”

An illustration of the life cycle of sugar kelp, showing how it grows and develops over time. (illustration credit: Nhatt Nichols)

What’s more, Gobler’s lab had proved that raising kelp with oysters led to faster-growing, healthier shellfish. Gobler dubbed the phenomena the “halo effect”—a nod to Price’s studies—noting that the kelp around oyster cages provided a “halo” of increased oxygenation to the oysters as the kelp grew. At the same time, the kelp removed excess nitrogen from the water column. Backed by Gobler’s studies and studies from Price at Bigelow Labs in Maine, the idea of raising shellfish with kelp is now spreading across the country, including to the West Coast, where acidification is even more pronounced.

A Kelp-Farming Breakthrough

In 2018, seaweed experts believed that sugar kelp, a large brown seaweed with furled, silky tendrils, could only be farmed at depth—as it was in Maine, the center of the seaweed industry. If sugar kelp could only grow in deep water, it couldn’t be deployed for oyster farms, which are often tucked into shallower nooks of rocky coasts or set up in shallow bays.

Michael Doall, a scientist at Gobler’s laboratory, solved the problem. A former oyster grower, he saw the business potential for a crop that not only had ecosystem benefits but could be harvested in winter, opposite the main harvesting time of summer for oysters—providing two income streams from the same patch of water.

To pave the way for a kelp-meets-oysters business model that would work on Long Island, Doall decided to try growing kelp in shallower waters. In December 2018, accompanied by oyster farmer Paul McCormack, Doall began an experiment on Long Island’s Great South Bay. The two men sank metal screw anchors into the sandy sea floor and strung long nylon lines, inoculated with kelp spores, between them. And then they waited.

Over the next few months, the kelp not only grew, but outperformed their predictions. Doall and McCormack were ecstatic. “It worked really freaking great,” recalled Doall. Gobler, using the findings, then put sugar kelp to work in his breakthrough kelp-and-oyster co-raising study.

Using Doall’s growing techniques and the science from Yarish and Gobler’s laboratories, at least 10 sites across New York are now using sugar kelp to pull excess nutrients out of the waterways. They are also collaborating on a recently proposed $700 million project at Governor’s Island that relies in part on seaweed farming to help prepare New York City for climate change.

Although seaweed grown as a bioremediation strategy cannot be used for human consumption—in some cases, as with RETI Center’s project in the Gowanus Canal, the kelp harvested showed high traces of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a known carcinogen—scientists are experimenting with other potential uses for it, such as a kelp-based concrete.

Kelp Farming for a Tribe’s Future

The first group to raise seaweed using Doall’s shallow-water technique were the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers. In 2020, led by Tela Troge, the women began growing kelp in the bay that surrounds Shinnecock Tribal Territory Nation, roughly 900 acres of low-lying sandy land. For millennia, the tribe has lived, fished, and harvested shellfish on this bay. Mitigating climate change and rising water is crucial to their survival, and seaweed offers a way to do that.

“We are a frontline community and we have nowhere else to go,” said Danielle Hopson Begun, communications director and hatchery manager for Shinnecock Kelp Farmers. Hopson Begun is equally comfortable out on the bay or giving public talks, where she spreads the climate-saving mission of the group.

“When you’re hearing on the news about sea rise and acidification and you’re able to move yourself from Southampton Village to higher ground—good for you. It is not good for us,” Hopson Begun said. “For us, it [is] a moral imperative to preserve our way of life.”

Danielle Hopson Begun hand-harvesting kelp in New York’s Shinnecock Bay. (Photo credit: Rebekah Phoenix)

To start their nonprofit, Shinnecock Kelp Farmers worked with GreenWave and Doall, who provided sorus tissue, the reproductive area of the kelp blade, for propagation. They found a home for their hatchery in a wooden cabin at the nearby St. Joseph’s Villa, a summer retreat for nuns. The wooded estate overlooks Shinnecock Bay, which now holds their kelp lines. For the 2023-2024 season, the farmers planted 30 lines at 100 feet each, a crisscross of golden-brown algae ribbons dancing beneath the water. As a sovereign nation, the Shinnecock did not need New York State’s permission to begin farming, and in 2020, they became the first seaweed growers in the state.

The group dries and processes their kelp by hand, turning the slippery curls of seaweed into hundreds of pounds of nitrogen-rich soil amendment that they use for gardening, sharing it with the local community at farmers’ markets. They lay the kelp out in donated screens, or along the pool fence at St. Joseph’s Villa, first washing the salt off the seaweed and then waiting for the sun to bake the kelp down.

Eventually, the heat crumbles the kelp into a dry, brown powder that plants love. Through this process, the nitrogen sequestered from the water column returns to the soil, a closed-loop nitrogen cycle now in vogue with organic farmers—although Shinnecock have been growing crops using seaweed as fertilizer for thousands of years, said Hopson Begun. Seeing the decline of seaweed in the bay in recent years, and knowing its benefits to shellfish, prompted them to start farming seaweed themselves.

While satisfying, the work is demanding, sometimes requiring the women to get up and work in frigid waters at dawn. For a recent November planting, they waded into 38-degree water during the first snow of the season, unspooling their kelp string as a hushed snow fell. But Hopson Begun wouldn’t trade it for anything. She said, “I love seeing something so small grow into something really incredibly powerful that potentially can make a big difference.”

Is Kelp the Answer for West Coast Shellfish?

On the West Coast, nitrogen pollution poses less of a problem, a benefit of the Pacific coast’s deeper water and colder ocean temperatures. But acidification episodes are much more acute here than in the East: Since the 1990s, it’s been rising precipitously, owing to a combination of increased carbon in the atmosphere and upwellings of deep waters that are rich in nutrients, but also relatively acidic. Many shelled creatures have been suffering as a result, unable to form thick, protective shells.

In 2007, this reached a crisis: Oyster businesses were devastated up and down the West Coast because baby bivalves simply could not grow.

Visualization: Alexander F More, University of Massachusetts/Harvard. (Data source: NOAA, Jiang et al. 2023)

“When it came time for our [oyster seed] orders to come in, the hatchery said, ‘We had a complete crash. If anything survived, we are going to be supplying our own farms, not you,’” recalled Terry Sawyer, co-founder of Hog Island Oyster Co., a Northern California favorite for its shellfish-focused restaurants. “We were sitting there, flapping in the wind.”

Trained in marine biology, Sawyer is an entrepreneur and lifelong ocean lover. When he and his co-founder, John Finger, realized how catastrophic the situation was, it spurred them to embrace a whole new outlook on marine conservation. Hog Island now regularly hosts marine scientists to study the effects of warming waters on nearby marine life. The company also collaborates with the Central & Northern California Ocean Observing System, providing real-time data from their farm on ocean acidification as part of a global effort to understand why the ocean is changing so fast.

Acidification led Hog Island, based on Tomales Bay, just north of San Francisco, to establish their own hatchery further north in Humboldt Bay, so they could ensure their whole line of production, from larvae to finished oyster. The process took about three years, and cost $125,000 in permitting fees alone, paid to the California Coastal Commission. Sawyer said the decision was the only way they’ve survived a situation that is cyclical for West Coast waters. Hog Island buffers the water at their hatchery by adding soda ash to make intake seawater less acidic, allowing the larvae to grow. The technique is now common practice; West Coast farmed bivalves cannot grow in the open ocean anymore.

Hog Island Oyster Company workers supervising a operation in Tomales Bay. (Photo credit: Remy Hale)

“I love to say, ‘If we have a problem, we have to figure out how to eat it,’” said Sawyer, pointing out that seaweeds are a “winner” crop if ocean acidification continues to rise. “We are going to need to look at organisms that aren’t as impacted by pH change.” For now, though, Sawyer has to wait to unfurl kelp lines in Humboldt Bay, as the California Coastal Commission has no regulatory process for inshore commercial seaweed operations.

Instead, Hog Island has been collaborating with GreenWave and The Nature Conservancy on a non-commercial research pilot study since 2021, growing bull kelp at the Hog Island hatchery in Humboldt Bay. The waters are notably less acidic near the kelp lines—a promising result as the Hog Island team waits for California’s permitting structure to change for a commercial kelp farm.

The Promise of Seagrass

Tessa Hill, a professor of marine science at U.C. Davis and author of the book At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans, has dedicated her life to understanding how climate change is affecting the ocean. Hill conducted a study in Tomales Bay and found that seagrass “meadows” there also offset acidification, and could increase shell growth by up to 40 percent. She sees the same value in seaweed. “There is a lot of potential for co-culture of seaweeds and shellfish” in the bay, she said.

However, wild West Coast seagrass meadows and kelp forests are declining, and that makes Hill very worried. Subjected to stress from marine heat, acidification, pollution, predation by sea urchins, and human encroachment, these water-based ecosystems may lose their power to help fight ocean warming. “The more we protect habitats like seagrass meadows and salt marshes, the better chance we have at climate mitigation,” said Hill. She sees promise in seaweed farming for the same reasons.

Helpful marine organisms—like sugar kelp, bull kelp, and seagrass—could help reduce some of the worst climate impacts that scientists are documenting on the U.S. coasts. Raised in quantity, they could bring at least some stretches of shoreline back into balance, allowing marine life to thrive again in our waters.

The Shinnecock Kelp Farmers are starting to see it happen, bit by bit. “The most darling was a little tiny scallop that took up space on one of our lines. They’re endangered,” said Danielle Hopson Begun. “To see that little guy holding to and finding a place in our farm was very satisfying.”

This series was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/06/27/overview-promise-and-possible-pitfalls-of-american-kelp-farming/ Thu, 27 Jun 2024 09:00:50 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56672 Today, consumers can find burgers, chips, and even a cannabis gummy made from domestic farmed seaweed, and a recent Nielsen report estimated the value of the edible seaweed industry  to be $1.87 billion in the U.S. One particular type of seaweed, kelp, has come to the fore: More than 2 million pounds were pulled from […]

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Five years ago, the American farmed-seaweed industry barely existed. Wild seaweeds had been harvested for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples on both coasts, for a range of uses including insulation, medication, and fertilizer. Later, seaweeds were then harvested from the wild for agricultural fertilizers and the cosmetics industry. As for kelp farms, though, there were only a smattering of them in Maine, selling products to restaurants or natural-foods stores. Most farmed seaweed available in the U.S.—including the familiar sushi nori sheets—came from Asia.

Today, consumers can find burgers, chips, and even a cannabis gummy made from domestic farmed seaweed, and a recent Nielsen report estimated the value of the edible seaweed industry  to be $1.87 billion in the U.S. One particular type of seaweed, kelp, has come to the fore: More than 2 million pounds were pulled from coastal U.S. waters during the 2022-2023 season, and experts predict that the 2023–2024 season will be even larger.

Kelp's Tangled Lines

Read all the stories in our series:

• The Promise and Possible Pitfalls of American Kelp Farming An overview of our four-part in-depth series examining the growth of the U.S. seaweed industry. With little regulatory oversight and skyrocketing funding, how will this industry evolve?
• Can Seaweed Save American Shellfish? Seaweed farms on both coasts are beginning to take hold, tapping into decades of painstaking science—and could help shellfish thrive in waters affected by climate change and pollution.
• Rescuing Kelp Forests Through Science Breakthrough genetic research at a Massachusetts lab could save the world’s vanishing kelp forests—and support American kelp farming, too.
• The Hard Work of Bringing Kelp to Market As seaweed farms develop on both coasts and begin to contribute to America’s blue economy, much depends on infrastructure.
• The Future of Seaweed Farming in America The outlook has seemed bright for this crop of multiple uses, including mitigating the impacts of climate change. But major obstacles remain for the seaweed industry.

What’s driving this growth? The answer goes beyond seaweed’s industrial applications or the fact that Americans are developing a taste for kelp as a nutritious, low-calorie food. Scientists say this seaweed also offers a multitude of ecosystem benefits. Kelp can pull excess carbon out of the atmosphere—with some estimating that it sequesters at least 10 times more carbon than a terrestrial crop. It reduces ocean acidification, too, and removes the excess nitrogen that feeds massive algal blooms, a threat to other marine life.

This scientific proof of kelp as a regenerative crop that could save our seas has helped the industry attract rapid investment—according to our estimates, roughly $380 million since 2017, from sources including the federal government, corporations, venture capital funds, coastal state spending, and nonprofits. Kelp could also help climate efforts on land, in industries ranging from textiles to plastics to beef.

As Silicon Valley and others turn their sights to this remarkable seaweed, the time is ripe to ask critical questions about the future of an industry that could be rapidly expanding. Will smallholder farmers, whose work has been pivotal in setting up domestic seaweed production, reap the benefits of the industry’s growth? Or will multinationals move in, growing seaweed at scale—potentially boosting ecosystem benefits, but perhaps also introducing the environmental repercussions of monocropping? And will federal money flow to small farms as well as large?

Regulations are at issue as well. Small coastal growers now navigate a tangle of legislation, with no one entity claiming oversight. The country’s first seaweed bills now sit in Congress, with the potential to unleash a new round of investment in an industry that is still not tracked by the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Could large investors leapfrog to offshore farms, where the regulatory environment may be more permissible?

In this series, we’ll ask those questions and more. For context, we’ll trace the rise of seaweed farming in the U.S. and profile small farmers who are using kelp to both mitigate climate change and adapt to its impact. We’ll explore how scientists are creating more efficient ways of growing kelp while also protecting the future of wild kelp forests.

Tightening our focus, we’ll look at the main issue vexing kelp producers today—laborious processing—and a company that’s trying to solve that problem. Our final story will go macro, with a view of the venture-funded pilots that may shape a future of seaweed driven by corporate investment.

The stories in this series provide a framework for how we might guide the future of kelp, and how it may—or may not—fulfill its potential as a climate solution.

This series was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.

The post The Promise and Possible Pitfalls of American Kelp Farming appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/04/17/the-shrimp-on-your-table-has-a-dark-history/ https://civileats.com/2024/04/17/the-shrimp-on-your-table-has-a-dark-history/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2024 09:00:17 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55969 “These peeling sheds aren’t supposed to be there. They’re not supposed to be used by anybody,” Farinella told Civil Eats. “There are 20,000 pounds of shrimp per day going through these peeling sheds that are landing on U.S. grocery store shelves.” The high temperatures in the shed could easily lead to pathogen growth, he warned. […]

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A few months ago, along the coast of Andhra Pradesh in eastern India, Josh Farinella drove 40 minutes out of his way to visit workers who peel shrimp for Choice Canning, where he worked as a shrimp factory manager. He didn’t travel to the rural area for any of his job responsibilities; he was there to document injustice. He observed a crew of local women quickly peeling shrimp along rusty tables in 90-degree heat, wearing street clothes and flip-flops. They worked for long hours in a shed in a dirt field, far from the main work site, easily escaping the notice of auditors.

“These peeling sheds aren’t supposed to be there. They’re not supposed to be used by anybody,” Farinella told Civil Eats. “There are 20,000 pounds of shrimp per day going through these peeling sheds that are landing on U.S. grocery store shelves.” The high temperatures in the shed could easily lead to pathogen growth, he warned.

Farinella started his work for Choice Canning in 2015 at a production facility in his hometown of Pittston, Pennsylvania. In 2023, when the company offered him a high-paying managerial position at a new facility in Andhra Pradesh, he accepted. But four months into the job, he decided to come forward as a whistleblower, exposing what he says are the deplorable and unsanitary conditions in one of India’s largest shrimp manufacturers.

According to the company’s website, Choice Canning sells shrimp in more than 48,000 retail and food-service locations in the U.S. This includes major retailers like Walmart, Aldi, ShopRite, Hannaford, and HelloFresh, which advertise to consumers their commitments to sustainable seafood sourcing on their websites.

As Farinella was driving back to the town of Amalapuram, he recalled receiving a text from his wife with a photo of officers with machine guns outside their apartment. It was unusual timing. “It was one of those heart-beating-out-of-your-chest moments, like, does somebody know?” he said, worried that the company had caught on to his gathering dirt on its bad practices.

Soon after, Farinella quit his job, filed a complaint with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and flew back to the U.S. He took with him thousands of pages of documents, photographs, and videos, which have since been published by The Ocean Outlaw Project, alongside a vivid, reported account of his experiences at Choice Canning over the course of a few months of employment. According to the Project, this includes text messages that reveal that when Farinella informed the company’s vice president that shrimp had tested positive for antibiotics, which are banned in shrimp by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he was told to “ship it” to the U.S. anyway.

Choice Canning is far from an isolated bad actor in India’s $8.4 billion shrimp industry. Farinella’s whistleblower account coincides with a three-year investigation, “Hidden Harvest,” published in March by the Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL), exposing the human rights abuses rampant across India’s shrimp sector. The report documents how India’s shrimp is farmed and processed by a highly exploited workforce, rife with horrific abuses, including child labor, sexual harassment, debt bondage, and forced labor—to then be sold to many of the largest U.S. grocery retailers, often with a sustainability promise.

Building on the CAL’s report, the Associated Press (AP) traveled to Andhra Pradesh, the center of India’s farmed shrimp industry, visiting growing ponds, hatcheries, warehouses, and even the hidden peeling sheds. They observed women “barehanded or wearing filthy, torn gloves,” peeling shrimp crushed in ice for 10 hours per day. A local dermatologist told the AP that he treats “four to five shrimp peelers every day” for infections and frostbite on their fingers—at times, severe enough to require amputation.

“I am like a ghost worker,” a worker for Satya Sea Food, one of the many employees working without a contract or pay slips, told CAL. The workers are often recruited in groups and charged a steep fee, which they pay over time through paycheck deductions, forcing them into debt bondage. Surveillance cameras and security guards are often used to monitor the facilities and the shared housing, preventing workers from leaving the premises.

These findings reflect the shortcomings of corporate social responsibility in bringing meaningful reform to supply chains. As Civil Eats has reported, the Walton Family Foundation’s philanthropic commitments to regenerative agriculture and sustainable fisheries is undermined by Walmart’s business model, aimed at “squeezing suppliers and foisting the costs of production onto the small-town landscapes”—in this case, according to the Ocean Outlaw Project, rural India and the women risking their health to bring cheap shrimp to Walmart’s shelves.

This is obscured to even a discerning reader of food labels. Choice Canning, one of Walmart’s suppliers, misrepresented its practices to receive a Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) certification, as the Ocean Outlaw Project reported. Likewise, many of the retailers named in CAL’s report, including Kroger, Aldi, and Whole Foods, work with the Conservation Alliance for Seafood Solutions (CASS), which recently released new guidance to inform their approaches to sustainable seafood commitments.

When asked about this apparent contradiction, a CASS representative replied: “Many companies are making progress in prioritizing ‘the human factor’ but the industry has a ways to go before social responsibility goals are fulfilled. All companies, even the current best performers, have more work to do.” The representative noted that CASS is not a regulatory agency, but rather focused on educating its members on best practices.

“It’s become increasingly clear that environmental and social responsibility are two sides of the same coin,” said Ryan Bigelow, CASS project director, in a separate statement emailed to Civil Eats. “If a company is treating people poorly, they most likely don’t care about the environment—and the reverse is also true.”

In the case of the Indian shrimp industry investigation, Bigelow said, low pay and inhumane working conditions coincided with environmental contamination from shrimp farm runoff. “This interconnectedness underscores the importance of companies embracing a holistic approach to sustainability, addressing both the well-being of workers and the health of the planet.”

The reports’ findings could have major implications for the domestic U.S. shrimp market, which imports around 90 percent of its shrimp. India is by far the largest supplier of U.S. shrimp, accounting for 40 percent of shrimp imports. The AP investigation concluded that the conditions they documented violated laws in India and the U.S. In March, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Natural Resources inquired into the issue, asking for further evidence from Farinella of violations of U.S. laws.

For years, U.S. wild shrimp harvesters have been calling to curb imported shrimp, which undermines their shrinking industry. Last year, shrimpers in Louisiana staged a protest at the state’s capital building, protesting their “starvation” wages. “We’d have to catch millions of pounds to survive with these shrimp prices,” a 51-year-old Louisiana shrimper told Civil Eats last spring. The shrimpers pointed to how they are struggling because they are competing with shrimp produced through highly exploited labor, as recent reports confirm.

“It’s absolutely our government’s responsibility to make sure what they’re permitting to come into this country is not being handled by slave labor,” said Kindra Arnesen, a Louisiana shrimp harvester and advocate for the domestic shrimp industry.

Under international trade law, the U.S. can only ban imports from locations that have violated U.S. human rights and environmental standards. “If India’s labor standards do not meet the U.S. labor standards, then yes, [the] U.S. could ban imports,” said Petros Mavroidis, a lawyer at Columbia Law School and former member of the World Trade Organization’s legal division. This has historically been a challenging bar for the U.S. shrimp industry, given the lack of transparency and limited testing of imported seafood supply chains.

“I hope it helps the U.S. industry,” Farinella told Civil Eats. “So much of this product is coming in from overseas at much lower prices. Part of that has to be with all the corners you’re cutting, with food safety and your basic human rights laws.”

Read More:
Cheap Imports Leave US Shrimpers Struggling With ‘Starvation Wages’
The US Is a Dumping Ground for Illegal Seafood. Some Lawmakers Want to Clean Up the Market
Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster

Avian Flu Spreads to Cattle. A highly pathogenic strain of the avian flu, known as H5N1, has spread to 16 cattle herds across six states. It’s the first time that the virus—which has been circulating in wild birds and poultry the U.S. since late 2021—has spread to cattle, according to the Center for Disease Control. This recent outbreak also marks the second time the virus has spread to a human in the U.S.: A Texas dairy worker contracted the virus after coming in contact with infected cattle. Fortunately, his only reported symptom was eye inflammation. Experts fear that the flu could have been transmitted through “poultry litter,” a type of cattle feed that contains poultry excrement, spilled feed, feathers, and other waste scraped off the floors of poultry barns.

Read more:
The Field Report: A Deadly Bird Flu Resurfaces
How Will Bird Flu Affect Backyard Poultry?

The Bankrollers of Methane. Major U.S. banks have been accused of undermining their “net zero” climate commitments by financing the livestock industry, the largest source of anthropogenic methane emissions in the world. Between 2016 and 2023, U.S. banks provided the livestock industry with $134 billion in loans or underwriting services, according to a new report by Friends of the Earth and Profundo. The Big Three lenders, as designated in the report, are Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup.

Read more:
Methane from Agriculture is a Big Problem. We explain why.
How Climate Policy Gets Obstructed by the Meat Industry
From Livestock to Lion’s Mane, the Latest From the Transfarmation Project

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/04/17/the-shrimp-on-your-table-has-a-dark-history/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/02/28/walmart-heirs-bet-big-on-journalism/ https://civileats.com/2024/02/28/walmart-heirs-bet-big-on-journalism/#comments Wed, 28 Feb 2024 09:00:14 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55440 This article was co-produced and co-published with Nonprofit Quarterly. The Waltons aren’t the only philanthropists pumping money into the news industry, and the family, America’s richest, gives even larger sums to other interests. But with increasing emphasis over the past decade, the Walton Family Foundation and individual family foundations have directed tens of millions of […]

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This article was co-produced and co-published with Nonprofit Quarterly.

From vast riparian watersheds to fisheries to croplands, few corners of the nation’s—and the world’s—food systems have escaped the eyes of the Walton family. The children and grandchildren of Walmart co-founder Sam Walton have long embedded their interests, and, more importantly, their money, among industry groups, policymakers, academics, activists, and NGOs active in the future of food. Now, they’re expanding their philanthropy to news organizations that report on food, agriculture, and the environment and, in turn, amplifying the family’s other efforts.

The Waltons aren’t the only philanthropists pumping money into the news industry, and the family, America’s richest, gives even larger sums to other interests. But with increasing emphasis over the past decade, the Walton Family Foundation and individual family foundations have directed tens of millions of dollars to support journalists, newsrooms, and journalism organizations whose coverage overlaps with subjects about which Walton family members are passionate—and passionately funding.

Aside from the Walton Family Foundation, Walton family members also give to causes and to journalism through other foundations including the Catena Foundation, Builders Initiative, the Penner Family Foundation, the Wend Fund, and the Zoma Foundation.

Walanthropy: Walmart and the Waltons Wield Unprecedented Influence Over Food, Policy, and the Planet.

Read all the stories in our series:

• Overview: The Long Reach of the Walmart-Walton Empire
  In this ongoing investigative series, we take a detailed look at Walmart and its founding family’s influence over the American food system, over the producers and policymakers who shape it, and how its would-be critics are also its bedfellows.
• Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape’ Walmart’s efforts to redefine itself as a regenerative company are at odds with its low-cost model, and combined with the Walton family’s vast investments in regenerative agriculture, have the potential to remake the marketplace.
• Walmart and EDF Forged an Unlikely Partnership. 17 Years Later, What’s Changed? We talk with Elizabeth Sturcken for an up-close look at the sustainability alliance between the environmental nonprofit and the retail behemoth.
• Op-ed: Walmart’s Outsized Catch: Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation have relied on a debatable definition of “sustainable” seafood that allows it to achieve its sourcing goals without fundamentally changing its business model.
• Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster: The Walton Family Foundation invested in a Honduran lobster fishery, targeting its sustainability and touting its success. Ten years later, thousands of workers have been injured or killed.
• Walmart’s Pandemic Port Squeeze: While most retailers dealt with congested ports and unprecedented shipping prices, Walmart chartered its own ships, increased sales, and used its market gains to sideline competitors. Then it weighed in on shipping reform.
• Walmart Heirs Bet Big on Journalism: A wash of Walton family funding to news media is creating echo chambers in environmental journalism, and beyond. Are editorial firewalls up to the task?

Journalism is welcoming the new infusion of philanthropy. Since the decline of the industry’s ad-driven business model was hastened by the Great Recession, more than half of newspapers have shuttered across America and the industry has shed more than 20,000 jobs. Thirteen years ago, fewer than a dozen digital news nonprofits led the charge to shift news to a nonprofit model. Now, there are more than 400 digital news nonprofits nationwide, supported by an ever-growing coalition of philanthropies that include the Walton charities.

It’s not just digital news nonprofits that benefit from their giving; the Waltons also give to legacy newspapers, websites, magazines, radio stations, and trade journals covering such subjects as agriculture, water policy, fisheries, conservation, and climate. That giving has grown even as the family has increased its funding of groups that discuss, study, or promote policy related to these subjects and often drive the news that Walton-funded outlets cover.

There’s more. As Civil Eats has documented, Walmart, the family business, has over the past two decades used its economic and political muscle to lower the bar for what qualifies as “organic” foods and “sustainable seafood” and the Walton Family Foundation has also supported seafood sustainability projects that didn’t ensure safe practices for Central American lobster divers.

Notably, Walton family journalism philanthropy is focused in overlapping areas. The foundation board is legally independent of Walmart. And grants are promised with no strings attached. Nonetheless, with journalists accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in Walton philanthropy, it is important to consider how news coverage may be affected.

Indeed, Walton family funding is so widespread that environment-focused reporters working for nonprofit news organizations funded by Walton philanthropy often cover, interview, or analyze organizations and individuals who are also grantees of the family’s foundation and/or family members’ individual foundations. As the field of potential sources not supported by the Waltons narrows, reporters risk tilting discussions about sustainability, resource management, conservation, or other subjects toward solutions favored by the family’s philanthropies.

“The Walton Family Foundation works from the belief that fact-based, independent journalism is essential to making sure communities have the information they need on the issues that matter most,” said Walton Family Foundation spokesman Mark Shields in a statement to Civil Eats. “Journalists and outlets—including Civil Eats—who receive support from the foundation have full editorial control over their content.” (Civil Eats does not accept grants and donations from the Waltons or their associated charities, although Civil Eats has indirectly received such funding through its work with other partners.)

Observers of the industry, however, are concerned about a new era in journalism in which a limited class of grantmakers is defining narratives and the flow of information.

Will Sennott, a staff reporter with the nonprofit Massachusetts newsroom The New Bedford Light, said reporting on fisheries in New England is complicated because “the world of fisheries policy of today is one that was molded by the Walton Family Foundation.” He said the foundation’s prior grants to NGOs enabled its priorities to seep deep into policymaking through the appointments of its grantees to the regulatory councils that govern American fisheries.

Now, “it’s hard to even extract their influence from fisheries policy,” Sennott said. “When it comes to groundfish especially, all fisheries policy today is based entirely on the kind of policies they peddled about 10-12 years ago.”

The Walton Family Foundation and some individual Walton family members’ own foundations continue to support organizations and media, including trade journals and industry newsletters, that target agriculture and fisheries. They have made engagement on “restorative aquaculture” one of their philanthropic planks, funding numerous ventures on both sides of the notebook.

“When it comes to groundfish especially, all fisheries policy today is based entirely on the kind of policies [Walmart and the Walton family] peddled about 10-12 years ago.”

For example, Lukas Walton chairs the family foundation’s environmental program and, since 2021, has supported journalism-related nonprofits—such as Chicago Public Media, Grist, Sentient Media, and the Reader Institute for Community Journalism—through his private foundation, Builders Initiative. Builders Initiative also gives extensively to seafood and ocean conservation related programs.

Much of Builders’ grantmaking in these areas also supports Walton Family Foundation beneficiaries like the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund for programs focused on such subjects as “market-based solutions for Kelp Recovery” and “Seaweed and Mollusks aquaculture,” as well as the “aquaculture media strategy” of seafood advocacy organization, Stronger America Through Seafood, Inc.

The Walton Family Foundation also supports SeafoodSource, the leading industry publication for seafood news. It’s hard for SeafoodSource, or anyone discussing sustainable seafood, to ignore the Walton Family Foundation and other Walton family organizations and interests and the perceptions readers might have about their influence on SeafoodSource’s coverage.

“That’s a really tough one because Walton has their fingers in almost every nonprofit in sustainable seafood,” said Ned Daly, who is a contributing editor at SeafoodSource and a sustainability strategist for its parent company, Diversified Communications. Daly manages grants made by the Walton Family Foundation in support of SeafoodSource’s “Seafood2030” platform. “I think it would be hard to not engage with those groups or work with those groups but in terms of special treatment, I think it’s really more what’s newsworthy and what’s going to drive interest in stories.”

Daly, who writes about sustainability, says the Walton Family Foundation doesn’t have a say in the publication’s coverage, much like other funders of Diversified Communications’ products as well as advertisers in SeafoodSource. But foundations and nonprofits in general, Daly said, do occasionally benefit from blurred lines in Diversified’s content, if to a lesser degree at SeafoodSource.

For the perennially underfunded business of journalism, the idea of using editorial firewalls has served as the best defense against funders seeking to influence reporting. But in the case of Walmart, the Walton Family Foundation, and its family members’ many individual foundations, the funding can saturate an entire region or subject, meaning that reporters doing their jobs simply can’t avoid the Walton family’s influence.

For the perennially underfunded business of journalism, the idea of using editorial firewalls has served as the best defense against funders seeking to influence reporting.

“It’s a sin of omission, not of commission,” said Joel Dyer, the former editor of The Boulder Weekly in Colorado. Dyer spoke to Civil Eats at length about the challenges of reporting on water issues in areas where the Walton family and their foundations have extended their philanthropic nets.

“It’s problematic,” Dyer said. “It’s beyond problematic. In essence there is evidence of oil companies paying for energy coverage, the Waltons paying for water coverage. Nothing actually sort of pisses me off more. Journalists of all people know better than to say, ‘Well, hey, it doesn’t influence what I write.’ We’ve been covering academics that take money from Monsanto and good lord everybody, and we know how much it influences what they do. And journalism is no different.”

Louisiana-based photojournalist Julie Dermansky shares the view that editorial firewalls don’t sufficiently prevent meddling by newsroom funders. Fishermen and others in the Mississippi Delta’s seafood industry have lost all trust in local media, she said, because Walton-backed media and the NGOs working in the area, including many backed by the Waltons, combine to amplify narratives that drown out and marginalize fishermen’s views and avoid reporting that is at cross-purposes with Walton aims.

“I think it’s naive to think you could take massive amounts of money from an organization and then write about other organizations it gives money to,” Dermansky said.

She said fishermen are at odds with a Mississippi River diversion project that’s supported by the Waltons and environmental groups in the delta. In an article published last year in DeSmog, Dermansky notes local fishermen’s belief that the Walton Family Foundation and Walmart’s interests align with the oil and gas industry in the Gulf: By implementing the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project, independent fishermen’s livelihoods will be destroyed, they say, while also removing a check-and-balance their presence has on offshore oil and gas drilling in the same region, she said.

“I think it’s naive to think you could take massive amounts of money from an organization and then write about other organizations it gives money to.”

The Louisiana fishing industry is one of the last substantial, competitive, independent fishing industries in the world, she said, a dynamic that challenges Walmart’s market dominance. “So you get rid of them, and then they’ve got the market,” said Dermansky, referring to Walton family interests. “There’s an overlap with the desire of oil and gas and the Walton foundation in the case of the Mississippi River because fishermen are a pest for the oil and gas industry because they’re the eyes and ears” on the waterway, she said.

Striking a balance between funding journalism and continuing to use that journalism to hold the powerful accountable is an ongoing struggle. Sara Shipley Hiles, executive director of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, a reporting project based at the University of Missouri that is funded in large part by the Walton Family Foundation, said concerns about the Waltons’ involvement are a reality for newsrooms.

“These issues are not new and they’re not exclusive to nonprofit journalism,” Shipley Hiles said. “Every business, nonprofit or for-profit, have funding sources. We all have to answer for that. Civil Eats has to answer for that.”

“The Walton Family Foundation has been an outstanding funder,” said Shipley Hiles. “From the beginning we were clear that we had to have editorial independence and they did not push back against that. They’ve funded journalists enough now and I think folks who came before us were very clear on that. I can thank all the previous grantees as well for making it very clear that this is how journalism works. Without editorial independence, we have no credibility. We absolutely, fundamentally, must have editorial independence.”

Journalism produced by Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk reporters includes disclosures of Walton Family Foundation funding in part to address concerns about funder influence on reporting.

But what are the impacts on public understanding of complex issues, and on the availability of reporting on important topics, when one interlinked set of funders is so omnipresent? If a reporter can’t find a reputable source without ties to Walton money, how does that inform what news gets published?

History Repeats, in New Ways

Jim Friedlich is executive director and CEO at the Lenfest Institute, a philanthropy that exclusively supports local journalism. He says the tension between journalism and its funding is not at all new. He said, when done well, nonprofit journalism is “non-partisan, inclusive, and reflective of a broad array of voices across the political spectrum or field of ideas.”

Friedlich said Lenfest works to support multiple news organizations in one place to promote a diversity of ideas and concepts, and points to two examples: Spotlight PA, a nonpartisan statewide news organization in Pennsylvania, which distributes government accountability journalism for free. And Every Voice, Every Vote, which covered recent city elections in Philadelphia through grants to 25 different news organizations from nearly every neighborhood, ethnic, and racial group or political affiliation. “The effect was a broad and echo-free journalistic exploration of the issues at hand,” Friedlich added.

Most philanthropy in journalism doesn’t fit that profile, instead funding issue-based work in areas where foundations and donors also concentrate their giving.

“If your first initiative is education, then your second should be news and information around those topics,” said Tyler Tokarczyk, a senior program officer at the Inasmuch Foundation, which focuses on journalism and education. “You should be looking to elevate the conversations around issues in your community that are important to the foundation. I think that’s very common. The need for news and information in nonprofit journalism is pretty overwhelming across the country.”

Indeed, the need for support for local journalism is so acute that a coalition of philanthropies recently came together to seed a $500 million effort called Press Forward to put more reporters in underserved communities.

It is in funding-saturated areas where the sheer volume of giving presents new challenges. In the case of the Waltons, seafood and watershed programs are densely packed with Walton-backed initiatives, as is the attending journalism.

For example, the Walton Family Foundation has had a years-long relationship with the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), an organization that has long attempted to mirror news outlets’ “church and state” separations between editorial and business operations. Those separations have become more complicated as SEJ funders, including the Walton Family Foundation and groups to which the family has heavily donated, have become more visibly involved in the organization’s events and publications.

Civil Eats is a member of SEJ, and while Civil Eats has striven to not accept funding from the Walton Family Foundation or the individual family foundations, it has been the recipient of grants that might have been funded by Walton Family Foundation donations.

For example, in partnership with Earth Island Journal, Civil Eats produced this story, which was supported by an SEJ grant, and was likely originally sourced from Walton Family Foundation funding, unbeknownst to Civil Eats. Despite some newsrooms’ stringent efforts to avoid Walton Family Foundation funding, it remains widespread in nonprofit news.

Since 2013, SEJ has received more than $1.8 million from the Walton Family Foundation to help develop specialized environmental reporting initiatives and support conferences and other events. SEJ’s former executive director, Meaghan Parker, insisted on a stark line between the fundraising that she oversees and editorial operations, like the content of its conferences and publications, which is managed by member volunteers.

“I talk with the money people,” Parker said, who stepped down from the executive director position at the end of 2023 and is now a senior advisor to SEJ. During her time as executive director, she added that she turned down “huge” sums from potential funders, and that every grant SEJ receives has clearly spelled-out stipulations about its strict firewalls. “In every grant agreement that SEJ has with any funder, we have a line in there that says the donor and the funder have no right of interference or the review in editorial decisions made by the SEJ,” she said.

The Walton Family Foundation’s Shields confirms that journalists who receive support from the foundation have full editorial control, and that the foundation’s priority is fact-based information on important topics.

“For example, in the early phase of the pandemic, the Walton Family Foundation contributed funds to the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Rapid Response emergency story grants,” Shields said in a statement. “Those funds were especially important for environmental journalists at a time when an unprecedented number of jobs were being cut, leaving fewer reporters to cover critical issues.”

Flooding the Colorado River with Walton Funding

Time will tell how much journalism—and the public—will benefit from philanthropic support, but the public relations benefit for donors is clearer. Philanthropic support of newsrooms and reporters is an explicitly stated piece of the Walton Family Foundation’s strategic planning since 2021, and the foundation has been laying the groundwork for this strategy for the better part of a decade.

Perhaps nowhere is the strategic intent more evident than in the family’s myriad investments in the Colorado River Basin, whose waters and surrounding lands are—and have long been—among North America’s most prized and, increasingly, most imperiled, natural resources, and in reporting about the basin. The Walton Family Foundation, Catena Foundation, Wend Foundation, and the Penner Family Foundation (the family foundation of Carrie Walton Penner and her husband, Greg Penner) have all funded journalism in the basin.

These foundations, as well as Zoma Foundation and the Rob and Melani Walton Foundation, have all philanthropically supported other non-journalism initiatives in the basin, and many of the Walton family’s associated businesses have invested in the region.

Since 2016, the Walton Family Foundation has directed more than $200 million in funding to grantees both inside and outside journalism with emphasis on the Colorado River. They’ve been a crucial part of the conversation about the future of the river and the water it provides to the 38,900 farms that generate about $47 billion a year in economic impact.

The Waltons aren’t alone among large grantmakers interested in the Colorado River. For example, in 2016, the Walton Family Foundation formed the Water Funder Initiative in collaboration with six other philanthropies. That collaboration began with these philanthropies committing $10 million over five years to support restoration and management of California’s Salton Sea, an imperiled inland water body in California near the terminus of the Colorado.

Since 2016, the Walton Family Foundation has directed more than $200 million in funding to grantees both inside and outside journalism with emphasis on the Colorado River.

Since at least 2017, the Walton Family Foundation has given millions of dollars to the Water Funder Initiative by way of an Arabella Advisors-managed fund, the Windward Fund, which described its mission at the time as advancing “public awareness about conservation, climate, and environmental issues, sustainable food systems, and the protection of land, wildlife and natural resources.”

Arabella Advisors guides the philanthropy of other Walton family members’ foundations, often through such funds. At least three other members of the Water Funder Initiative gave through the Windward fund. (In 2022, Civil Eats received a $5,000 unrestricted grant from New Venture Fund, which is also managed by Arabella Advisors.)

The same year as the Salton Sea donation, the Water Funder Initiative published Toward Water Sustainability, which it summarized as a “Blueprint for Philanthropy.” This blueprint outlines six “funding action plans” for future water-related giving. One of these plans focused on “Communications and Political Will” and aimed to “identify near-term opportunities, such as expanded water journalism, to improve the field’s communications capacity, build political will, and cultivate diverse constituencies needed to support water reforms.”

The Waltons’ support of SEJ and their seeding of the Colorado River Basin and Mississippi reporting hubs suggest serious interest in how the public discusses the interplay between the human and natural world in the 21st century. One of the goals for the Walton Family Foundation’s most recent giving cycle: learning “how our journalism support could help us better serve communities that may not have access to trusted, accurate, and relevant information.”

That focus has continued through this year, as Walton Family Foundation Communications Director Daphne Moore wrote this November in a report reflecting on a year of community journalism grantmaking.

“We want to learn the most innovative and cost-effective ways to reach diverse sectors of communities through journalism and the news,” Moore wrote.

“I joked about it with a colleague that every time I do an interview, now my last question is, ‘We disclose funding relationships in our reporting, is any of your current work receiving funding from the Walton Family Foundation?’” said Luke Runyon, whose reporting on the Colorado River has been funded by Walton family money since 2017.

That year, Runyon launched the Colorado River Reporting Project at KUNC, a public radio station and NPR affiliate in Greeley, Colorado. Grant money from the Walton Family Foundation funded the position. In leaving KUNC in 2023 for his current position as co-director at the Water Desk, he joined an environmental journalism initiative that the Waltons played an integral role in launching.

Based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the desk provides focused, ongoing coverage of water issues in the Western U.S., especially the Colorado River Basin and provides grants to reporters to execute that work. It was launched with a $700,000, two-year grant from the Walton Family Foundation, which made additional grants of $600,000 and $900,000 to the Water Desk in 2021 and 2023.

The Walton Family Foundation always respected the editorial control Runyon insisted on, he said. “There was never really an instance where I felt any sort of undue pressure on what to cover as a reporter.” He also made it a policy to disclose as best he could if a source took funding from the foundation as well.

Now that he’s out of the KUNC position, Runyon believes the transparency improved his reporting, after asking about the family’s involvement so regularly became his “running joke.” He told Civil Eats that there’s no avoiding the Waltons’ presence in the Colorado River Basin, whether through the Walton Family Foundation, individual Walton family members’ separate private foundations, or their business or personal interests, like rafting.

“I feel like I knew the landscape pretty well, but that was something that we felt was really important to tell people,” Runyon said. “Not just our relationship to this particular foundation, but also that some of the sources that we’re talking to also have this relationship.”

The ubiquity of Walton-related funding can muddy the waters for reporters covering the beat. A November 2023 article by Annie Ropeik in the SEJ’s online digital news magazine on approaches for reporting on environmental solutions and equity within watershed-level stories shows how pervasive this funding is.

The article itself is based on reporting for a day-long workshop Ropeik moderated before 2023’s SEJ conference in Boise, Idaho. It is a straightforward, thorough survey of the challenges facing watershed managers, conservation groups, and the reporters who cover these beats. However, the article features multiple perspectives from groups extensively funded by the Walton Family Foundation, from photography to quoted sources.

These include the Nature Conservancy (which also receives funding from multiple individual Walton family members’ philanthropies), the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiatives, which has received more than $1.1 million from the Walton Family Foundation since 2016, and the Colorado River Sustainability Campaign (CRSC), which is partially backed by the Walton Family Foundation and is also managed by Arabella Advisors.

Sources whose organizations receive significant Walton Family Foundation funding supplied nearly every comment in Ropeik’s piece while example coverage cited links to articles produced by Ropeik’s news organization, as well as the Walton-backed Colorado Water Desk, and their partner newsrooms. The piece’s accompanying images were also supplied by Lighthawk, a Grand Junction, Colorado-based organization that coordinates volunteer pilots and photographers to provide aerial photography to conservation groups. Lighthawk has received at least $300,000 from the Walton Family Foundation since 2018. Its photos have also frequently appeared in both Walton-funded news operations.

How can newsrooms track, much less disclose, all these connections in an era of shoestring budgets and widespread layoffs?

Shipley Hiles, of Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, said her organization has a robust fact-checking operation and constantly discusses ideas over Slack and other venues. “We have put our effort into good reporting, wherever that takes us,” she said. While the network fact checks every piece, she said it has not spent extensive time investigating how subjects of its coverage are funded.

“That would be a very difficult process to do if we had to investigate the funding of every source, unless it becomes a question or an issue,” she said. What matters more, she said, is diverse sources who have something unique to contribute to environmental and agricultural coverage.

When the Water Desk launched in 2019 amid a flurry of activity surrounding the Colorado River’s fate—and a flood of philanthropic investment from the Walton Family Foundation and other major donors—it continued a model for grantmaking toward environmental journalism the Walmart fortune’s heirs have been honing since at least 2013, when it began its support of coastal reporting initiatives focused on the Mississippi River Delta with grants supporting a coastal desk at WWNO and The Lens.

Mitch Tobin, a former consultant who edited the 2016 “Blueprint for Philanthropy” and helped the Water Funder Initiative identify how to deliver funding to journalism through interviews with newsrooms and journalists, took the helm when the Water Desk launched, with Runyon joining the team at the end of 2023. Tobin told Civil Eats that the Water Desk and other philanthropy-supported initiatives present a lot of opportunity to support public service journalism.

“It’s a win-win. They get to support something they think is important, journalists get to do the work that they want to do without any control by the funder or anyone breaching the editorial firewall,” he said. “There are innumerable examples, innumerable Pulitzer Prizes that you can point to that have been funded by philanthropy. And so clearly it works, provided there are guidelines and people are thoughtful and mindful of what they’re doing.”

Tobin said the Water Desk guarantees editorial transparency to its grantees, and vets grant applications from reporters and news organizations through review committees that have included fellow journalists and the Director of the Center for Environmental Journalism (CEJ), where the Water Desk is based. The work is then edited by the publications that accept the journalists’ stories. (Civil Eats, for example, received funding from the Water Desk to produce this story, which was not funded by Walton family donations.)

“Journalists, all journalists, decide on the proposals. We cut a check and we wish people well,” Tobin said. The Water Desk began producing its own reporting only after Runyon’s addition to the staff last fall.

Since its inception, the Water Desk has awarded 113 grants totaling $638,704 to journalists and newsrooms. Tobin said any reporting proposal related to water within the coverage area is eligible for funding. The Water Desk highlights its funders when seeking requests from proposals, and Tobin said he expects grantees will be mindful of who is funding the publications and sources they cite in their work as they report, and to be thoughtful about conflicts. “That’s basic journalism,” he said.

A Problem Bigger than the Waltons, and Bigger than the Colorado River

The influence of the Walton family on the food system is both ineffable and hard to understate—throughout our Walanthropy series, Civil Eats has shown how their philanthropy and business practices are shaping the food system. But stepping back puts the concern in a new light: The Waltons are among a class of billionaires who are reshaping the social, economic, and political landscape.

“We have a barbell class of these super rich tech billionaires who are funding media and influencing how we consume and share news without having any inclination to ensure that journalists are paid a living wage,” said Heidi Legg, a former fellow at the Future of Media Project at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, whose research deeply documented funding in the news media. Legg has not conducted specific inquiries into Walton-related giving, but said that, in general, giving trends in nonprofit news are worrisome.

She points to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Laurene Powell Jobs, Google, and Facebook as among the largest emerging media donors, competing with forces like Bloomberg, Sinclair, and Rupert Murdoch in a polarized media environment. While at Harvard, Legg created indexes to help readers navigate media ownership transparently in an era defined by large donors.

Legg says it is increasingly important for journalists to be transparent about funding in an era of influential donors. She echoed Runyon in saying that thoroughness in transparency is the best defense against conflicts of interest, or the appearance of such conflicts, when journalists accept philanthropy or source information from similarly financed networks.

“The Waltons have no intention of buying water rights so that the river can have more water. The only thing they’re trying to save is the economic vitality and the profit that can be made from the Colorado River.”

“The country has lost almost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists—43,000—since 2005,” Mark Shields, the senior communications officer at the Walton Family Foundation, told Civil Eats. “If philanthropy doesn’t support reporters who independently cover environmental issues, how will these stories get told?”

In the Colorado River Basin, Shields says, that means “promoting conservation and nature-based solutions that keep more water in the river. In the sustainable seafood space, that work focuses on supporting healthy ocean ecosystems and the communities that rely on them.”

Dyer, the former editor of The Boulder Weekly, said reporting on the Waltons’ influence on the future of the Colorado River is the most important story in the region. He said Walton philanthropy supports efforts to convert water rights into a market-based system and he believes Walton funding in journalism chills reporting on their initiatives. The effect is that it’s compromising newsrooms and journalists in the same manner that agribusiness dollars, such as from Monsanto, have compromised ag science and undermined academic research, he said.

“The Waltons have no intention of buying water rights so that the river can have more water. The only thing they’re trying to save is the economic vitality and the profit that can be made from the Colorado River.” He points to Imperial Valley farmers, crops grown along the river, and cities like Las Vegas that depend on Colorado River water as among those that will be impacted if water markets take hold.

While Walton money flows to journalism, “the journalists who say it’s not influencing their work aren’t lying in a sense. It’s not influencing the good work they’re doing on whatever tiny part of the Colorado River problem they’re doing,” Dyer said. “I have friends who are getting money from the Water Desk. Good lord, they are doing great work and they wouldn’t be surviving if they weren’t getting it. But none of them can do the story on the Waltons.”

“They’re just not addressing the biggest threat to the river,” he said, “which is turning it into a commercial stream of water. That’s the story that can’t be told.”

Bill Lascher was a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists from 2010-2017. Lee van der Voo, also a member of SEJ, contributed reporting. Lisa Held contributed research.

Civil Eats is a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, which receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation. Civil Eats participates in News Match, an annual grantmaking INN program, but has not accepted offers of individual grants from the Walton Family Foundation via INN.

This article was updated to clarify when the Walton family began funding coastal reporting initiatives in the Mississippi River Delta region.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/02/28/walmart-heirs-bet-big-on-journalism/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2024/02/26/a-circular-economy-for-fish-this-icelandic-company-has-a-plan/ Mon, 26 Feb 2024 09:00:38 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55332 Founded in 2007, the Icelandic company Kerecis has developed fish-skin soft-tissue regeneration products that can be used to protect the body’s tissues and create an environment that facilitates tissue regeneration. Kerecis has transformed the lives of many people with persistent injuries, enabling burn victims from the wildfires in Maui and California and a 2019 volcanic […]

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The slippery, scaly skin of the Atlantic Cod is usually thrown out when the fish is harvested. But in a remote settlement on Iceland’s northwestern coast, a group of scientists is turning fish skin into human skin grafts.

Founded in 2007, the Icelandic company Kerecis has developed fish-skin soft-tissue regeneration products that can be used to protect the body’s tissues and create an environment that facilitates tissue regeneration. Kerecis has transformed the lives of many people with persistent injuries, enabling burn victims from the wildfires in Maui and California and a 2019 volcanic eruption in New Zealand to heal and generate new skin.

In addition to supporting burn victims, the Icelandic company is part of a larger transformation of the fishing industry, an effort to cut down on waste by using a larger percentage of the fish that are grown and caught there. As part of its management of a sustainable fishery, Iceland enforces strict quotas, and so Icelandic fishermen, limited in how many fish they can harvest in a year, have had to innovate to find profits from a smaller quantity of fish.

The Iceland Ocean Cluster—of which Kerecis is a part—is a collection of marine-focused startups operating out of Reykjavik, founded in 2011 by entrepreneur Thor Sigfússon. One of the founding principles at Iceland Ocean Cluster is the 100% Fish Project, which aims to create high-value products—like supplements and medical and design products—out of previously wasted parts of the Atlantic Cod. In Iceland, over 237,269 tons of cod was harvested in 2022, giving companies like Kerecis plenty of material to work with.

Thor Sigufsson (Photo courtesy of Iceland Ocean Cluster)

Throughout human history, every part of the fish has been used—Indigenous tribes still embrace the use of the entire fish. But in modern industrial fishing, 20 to 80 percent of fish harvested worldwide is wasted during the harvesting process.

Fishing boats throw bycatch fish overboard, but they often do not survive, and processing plants sometimes discard everything besides the filets—from skin and bones to blood and guts.

The global industrial fishing industry wastes more than 10 million metric tons of fish proteins and byproducts every year, according to Sigfússon. And disposal of large quantities of fish waste leads to the introduction of disease, unpleasant smells, and pollution that damages existing fisheries.

Sigfússon’s vision for the 100% Fish project does not end on the coastlines of Iceland, however. His book The New Fish Wave: How to Ignite the Seafood Industry, released in 2020, explained the premise and success of the Iceland Ocean Cluster Project, and he has promoted the project at speaking events around the world in the intervening years.

Some entrepreneurs, environmentalists, and fishermen have been intrigued and have found the model of the ocean cluster to be highly exportable.

Since the establishment of the Iceland Ocean Cluster, Sigfússon has been involved in the creation of similar clusters in Connecticut, New York, Alaska, Maine, and the Great Lakes region, as well as in Denmark and Namibia. All of these marine clusters foster small businesses that are leading innovation, promoting economic development on the waterfront and prioritizing the reduction of waste in the fishing industry.

Fish liver has long been a valuable source of Omega fish oil, Sigfússon says. Before he started the first cluster, Icelanders were drying fish heads and exporting them to Africa for high prices to be used in traditional fish soup recipes. “From there, we started to work on the skin—so we started to make fish leather,” he said. “The fish skin then through our projects is developed into collagen, which is a protein good for the joints and the skin. One of our biggest businesses in Iceland is collagen and the products coming from collagen.”

Kerecis scientists have discovered that fish skin’s properties make it an ideal complement to human skin. “Fish skin is homologous to human skin,” explains a press release from Kerecis. “When applied to the human body, the fish skin provides the ideal environment for the body to recruit its own cells in the regeneration process.” Because there is no known disease transfer risk between Atlantic cod and humans, the release explains, the Kerecis fish skin only has to be gently processed, and it retains its similarity to human tissue.

The project does not stop with fish, Sigfússon points out. “We have quite a long history in developing products from the so-called waste from the prawn industry.”

Even though zero-waste projects have gained popularity in recent years, there are challenges to taking the 100% Fish project international, Sigfússon says.

“Here in Iceland, we are lucky that fishermen have been really open to all these innovations,” Sigfússon continues. “Still, so many fishermen around the world that I talk to say, ‘We need to catch more.’ We are actually saying you can catch less and create more value.”

Bringing the Vision to the Great Lakes Region

David Nafzger, the executive director of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Governors & Premiers, collaborates with political leaders in the U.S. states and Canada provinces that border the Great Lakes to protect the freshwater bodies and grow the region’s $6 trillion economy. The group has recently adopted the 100% Fish program.

“I visited the Iceland Ocean Cluster, and we were just amazed with the fish leather lamps and all the products on the table,” says Nafzger, sporting a stylish fish leather belt that, to the uninformed eye, is indistinguishable from traditional leather. “Talking with Thor was really inspiring in terms of the success that they’ve generated in Iceland.”

The Icelandic Ocean Cluster’s zero-waste model

Some states and provinces involved in the Great Lakes Ocean Cluster have robust fishing industries while others have smaller lake borders. Nevertheless, Nafzger says they are equally invested in the program.

“We created a 100% Fish pledge and invited companies involved in the fishing industry to sign on,” he says. “This is a commitment that they’re taking voluntarily to use 100 percent of the fish productively by 2025.” They have already had more than 20 companies sign the pledge, which Nafzger says represents the lion’s share of the fishing industry around the lakes.

In addition to the leaders of the states and provinces, Nafzger also works with the Indigenous communities in the region, whose tribal fisheries have embraced the project and suggested new fish species for Nafzger’s team to study uses for.

“The focus in Iceland has been almost exclusively on cod,” says Nafzger. “Here we see product diversification as a real opportunity to maximize the value of every white fish that is taken, but we also look at other species and ways to generate more value and employment through the fishery as a whole.”

The collaborators have found new applications for by-products from species including white fish, walleye, perch, lake trout, and white sucker. They have created prototypes for multiple collagen products as well as fish leather from multiple species.”

The 100% Fish Project in the Great Lakes region is still young, with the official collaboration beginning in 2022. According to their press releases, the group believes that the value of a single fish can be raised from $12 to $3,500 by creating new products from parts currently wasted.

“Our ultimate goal is a more sustainable fishery, more economic activity around the fishery, and more employment in rural economies,” Nafzger says.

In New England, Expanding the Effort

On the rocky coast of the Atlantic in Portland, Maine, the New England Ocean Cluster has also embraced both the 100% Fish Project and Sigfússon’s model. Founded in 2014, the New England group’s is the oldest cluster outside of Iceland.

Patrick Arnold, who worked as the director of operations for the Maine Port Authority before founding the cluster, met Sigfússon after seeing him speak on marine economies. “He approached me,” Arnold remembers, “and he said, ‘Hey, this is simple. Patrick, we can just sign a paper and partner and do this in the United States.’ And that’s what we did.”

A lobster boat in Maine’s Boothbay Harbor. (Photo by Chris Cary)

At their cooperative office space “the Hùs” in Portland, the New England Ocean Cluster hosts blue economy businesses from around the world. Some provide business solutions, like Ocean Farmr, a company out of Australia that offers financial technology for aquaculture, and some provide adjacent services like Maine Standard Biofuels, a homegrown company that uses plant oils and grease to create diesel fuel. The start-up environment helps international companies gain a foothold in the United States, helps to fund local ocean-based research, and incubates new business ideas.

The leadership at New England Ocean Cluster is also quick to reiterate that 100% Fish is a return to some of the oldest and most traditional ways of fishing. “Talking about zero waste or a circular economy should not be a net new thing,” Arnold says. “We are not bashful in saying that, because if we just focus on Ocean Cluster and 100% Fish, it misses the ancient history of the seafaring cultures on the coast of Peru, [where they] are fully utilizing their ocean species, or the same in Asia, or just about everywhere in the world. There’s a lot for us to learn from Indigenous cultures.”

Arnold points out that with lobster, Maine has a monoculture of sorts. The cluster’s flagship company is Marin Skin Care, started by Amber Boutiette and Patrick Breeding. The two were graduate students at the University of Maine studying biomedical engineering when their professor, Dr. Bob Bayer, introduced them to a glycoprotein in lobsters that helps the marine crustaceans to heal wounds and regenerate their signature claws.

The lobster glycoprotein is part of the invertebrate’s circulatory fluids and is usually flushed away when the creature is harvested. Today, Marin Skin Care uses that glycoprotein to create a skin product that soothes eczema and irritated skin.

Harvesting lobsters with Luke’s Lobster in Tenants Harbor, Maine. Luke’s Lobster works with Marin Skincare, collecting waste lobster fluid during processing for use in making skincare products. (Photo by Chris Cary)

The New England cluster has found ways to work with several ground fish and shellfish species, including oysters and mussels, as well as lobster. It has also expanded beyond aquatic life, says Chris Cary, the cluster’s chief operating officer.

“It is far, far more inclusive than 100% Fish because there are things that aren’t even biogenic that are being used with the same mindset, like old fishing gear being upcycled, ocean plastics being upcycled,” Cary says. In fact, he says, “I think that should be a part of the 100% Fish project.”

Two examples of the expanded vision are Opolis Optics, which turns ocean plastics into ski goggles and sunglasses, and Rugged Seas, which transforms shoreman’s bib overalls into tote bags.

Though the global cluster projects have only made a small dent in the spectacular waste of the world’s fishing industries, Sigfússon is hopeful that in a few short years, they will take a large chunk out of global waste. “We have an opportunity to create value from hopefully two to three million metric tons in the coming five years,” he says. “It’s a big challenge.”

While the project might be too big for one country, company, or community to address, Sigfússon hopes that the combined efforts of many small and mid-sized entities can start moving the global fishing industry closer to the ultimate goal of once again using the entire fish.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/02/20/the-last-front-in-the-battle-to-save-the-most-important-fish-in-the-atlantic/ https://civileats.com/2024/02/20/the-last-front-in-the-battle-to-save-the-most-important-fish-in-the-atlantic/#comments Tue, 20 Feb 2024 09:00:45 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55334 It’s a rousing success story for a species that American settlers greedily netted for fertilizer, oil, and animal feed starting as far back as the 1800s, until once-teeming coastal waters were nearly emptied, and the larger fish and birds that depended on menhaden suffered in their absence. According to an interstate regulatory agency’s recent assessment, […]

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Off the rocky coast of Maine, small, silver Atlantic menhaden are now so abundant that harbor seals, bluefin tuna, and bald eagles chase them into harbors, delighting fishermen. Along the sandy shores of Long Island and New Jersey, the return of massive schools are contributing to an increase in predators such as striped bass, dolphins, and humpback whales, which propel their giant bodies out of the water into the air, inspiring local artists and driving a sightseeing economy.

It’s a rousing success story for a species that American settlers greedily netted for fertilizer, oil, and animal feed starting as far back as the 1800s, until once-teeming coastal waters were nearly emptied, and the larger fish and birds that depended on menhaden suffered in their absence.

According to an interstate regulatory agency’s recent assessment, the region’s menhaden are no longer overfished. But a happy ending is not yet guaranteed for the creature dubbed “the most important fish in the sea” or the ecosystems it supports.

“In the last 10 years, [menhaden’s] range is expanding and the population is growing . . . but these fish are very vulnerable to exploitation and they could definitely be locally depleted or eliminated,” said forage fish expert Ellen Pikitch, the executive director of the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University in New York.

Further south, in Virginia’s coastal waters, recreational anglers, conservationists, and others worry that the menhaden population may be waning.

“[Menhaden’s] range is expanding and the population is growing, but these fish are very vulnerable to exploitation and they could definitely be locally depleted or eliminated.”

Inside the Chesapeake Bay, the last remaining industrial menhaden fishery on the Atlantic coast is still operating at a massive scale: A single company, Omega Protein, partners with Ocean Harvesters’ fleet of purse seiners to take about 250 million fish annually from the Chesapeake Bay and 500 million more from the ocean just beyond. Omega Protein processes the fish into oil and meal that is used to feed pets and farmed fish, chickens, and pigs.

Virginia’s catch—which makes it the second-largest fishery of any kind in the country by volume, second only to Alaskan pollock (of fish-stick and Filet-O-Fish fame)—is controversial because it represents about 75 percent of the menhaden caught along the entire coast. And despite the bay’s unique ecosystem and role as a nursery for young menhaden, there has been no comprehensive evaluation of whether or not local menhaden stocks are being overfished.

Fishermen who have spent decades on the water chasing striped bass argue the predators aren’t getting enough to eat, and new research suggests the magnificent ospreys that spawn in the lower bay can no longer snag enough of the oily prey in their talons to keep their young alive.

Efforts to protect the menhaden, and the larger Chesapeake ecosystem, are coming from a wide range of groups and span legislation, litigation, and scientific research. Conservation groups and anglers especially want to rein in Omega’s haul or evict them from the bay altogether.

According to Omega Protein and Ocean Harvesters spokesperson Ben Landry, if advocates succeed at forcing them to only net fish outside the bay, it would shut down the company entirely. And it would be based on claims about local depletion that are speculative, he said, given the lack of conclusive data.

“This large-scale depletion of the forage base year after year after year is obviously having some kind of impact, but we don’t know exactly what it is because of so many years of political pressure by the industry to not answer those questions,” said Jaclyn Higgins, a forage fish program manager for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP), one of several groups that organized a petition in 2022 to move the fishery out of the bay at least until more data on localized impacts is available.

More than 10,000 people signed the petition, which was delivered to Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin a little over a year ago. Last year, with little to show for that effort, TRCP shifted its focus to supporting legislative attempts to fund and complete a study focused on the menhaden fishery’s impacts on the bay.

“Something needs to be done,” Higgins said.

Managing the Fishery

Biologist-turned-lawyer David Reed agrees with that general sentiment, but he’s tired of the government moving at a snail’s pace. Case in point: In February 2023, state legislators passed a law that required the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) to lay out a plan to evaluate the health of the bay’s menhaden population and the fishery’s impacts.

In October, VIMS researchers released the plan, with a $3 million price tag. In December, Governor Youngkin failed to include funding for executing the plan in his budget. In January, legislators introduced a new bill to fund it.

Reed calls the drawn-out, inconclusive process “a proposal to make a plan for a study,” especially since VIMS estimates that completing the research will take at least three years.

As the process drags on, he said, a single company could harvest a billion menhaden.

Reed is the executive director of Chesapeake Legal Alliance (CLA), a Maryland-based nonprofit that provides legal services to organizations working to protect the Chesapeake Bay watershed. CLA regularly takes on cases that tackle issues like industrial pollution and stormwater runoff. But last year, Virginia’s management of the menhaden fishery rose to the surface, when Reed filed both a lawsuit against the state agency tasked with regulating fishing in Virginia and a petition for rulemaking.

“The jewel of an estuary that is the Chesapeake Bay dies by 1,000 cuts. Runoff from municipalities, agricultural operations, industrial sectors—it all adds up,” Reed told Civil Eats. “Within that, you have this keystone species. The charismatic megafauna eat it, not to mention it’s a filter feeder. So, it’s one of the most important species we have locally, and it’s essentially just being ignored.”

Menhaden (also referred to as bunker, pogie, and other names) belong to a category called forage fish. In 2012, Stony Brook’s Pikitch led a task force that defined, for the first time, the critical importance of these fish within marine ecosystems and outlined recommendations for managing forage fisheries with a different, more precautionary approach than is used for fish further up the food chain.

“Forage fish are so critical from an ecological and ecosystem health point of view that we recommended that if you don’t already have a fishery going on a forage species, don’t start one,” said Pikitch. To her surprise, that recommendation took hold, and some states, including California, Washington, and Oregon, passed laws banning new forage fisheries.

Menhaden’s star power is its ability to convert energy from the sun into food for a wide swath of ocean creatures. The small, oily fish fatten up on phytoplankton (and zooplankton) as they travel in dense, sprawling schools, creating a concentrated food source for bass, bluefish, dolphins, and whales. Further below, crabs nibble on menhaden scraps from other creatures’ meals that fall to the bay floor. Above the surface, ospreys, cormorants, and bald eagles dive into the fray to participate in the feast.

Their schooling behavior also makes them a prime target for purse seiners, boats that drop nets the size of three football fields below the water and then encircle the schools, cinching their “purses” closed. Since the middle of the 20th century, companies have used spotter planes to locate the schools, dramatically increasing the ships’ efficiency.

Based on growing evidence of their importance, the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) began setting an annual catch limit in 2012. In 2020, it took another step, incorporating what are called “ecological reference points” into its assessments. That means it considers impacts on some other species before determining whether menhaden are overfished.

But advocates and researchers say there are still big, problematic limitations at play.

First, the “total allowable catch” (TAC) is set for the whole coast, but about 75 percent of the allocation is given to Virginia, since the surrounding states have all banned menhaden reduction fisheries—a term that denotes a catch that is reduced into other products, like fish oil and fish meal in the case of menhaden. (Most allow smaller catches for bait.) ASFMC also sets a cap, currently at 51,000 metric tons, for how many menhaden can be taken from the bay alone, but that number is based on historic catches, not menhaden stock data.

ASMFC fishery management plan coordinator James Boyle said that since the commission has found no evidence of overfishing, the bay cap represents a “precautionary” approach. But he acknowledged that the ASMFC’s evaluation cannot point to how the local menhaden population is faring. “There’s no way to say from the models, the surveys, and data that are available, ‘this is the exact abundance in Chesapeake Bay.’”

That’s the issue, said Higgins at TRCP. While she gives the commission credit for using what she calls “cutting-edge” fisheries management along the coast, she adds, “We need to add the spatial component into the model.”

What’s at Stake

Local fishermen and researchers are most concerned about potential impacts of menhaden depletion on striped bass (also called rockfish) and ospreys.

Last year, Virginia and Maryland regulators both recorded a major decline in young striped bass. But while fishermen who spend time on the bay say menhaden are sparse and attribute some of their disappearance to the decline of their food source, regulators say the science points to the bass fishing industry as the main culprit. For example, Boyle at the ASFMC said the commission set the menhaden catch based on what is needed to adequately support the striped bass population.

Of course, all of the threats are interconnected, and if menhaden availability is not at the top of the list, that doesn’t mean more of them wouldn’t help more bass make it. “There can be more than one reason that a species is in trouble, just like there can be more than one reason a person can be sick,” said Pikitch. And when you look at the overall research, “as the forage fish go, so do their predators.”

While the ASFMC does consider striped bass in its assessment of how many menhaden should be netted, it doesn’t consider the health of ospreys.

Michael Academia has been studying those striking sea hawks alongside other researchers at William & Mary’s Center for Conservation Biology for several years. “For millennia, humans have been using birds to help us locate fish,” he explained. “The ospreys are definitely telling us a sad story here.”

During the breeding season, which starts in April, Academia and his colleagues steer their boats next to the large nests and use a mirror pole to peer inside. They look to see if the nests are active, if the adults are feeding their young, and if the young survive.

An osprey in flight with a freshly caught menhaden in its talons. (Photo by Abeselom Zerit, Getty Images)

In recent years, they’ve noted low reproductive rates in breeding areas in the lower bay, near where the menhaden reduction boats operate. In 2023, he said, they monitored 167 nests and only 17 were successful in producing 21 young ospreys. At 0.13, the reproductive rate is far below the 1.15 the population needs to sustain itself.

Last year, they published the results of related research into ospreys’ access to forage fish. They provided extra menhaden for some birds to feed their young and found that the nests that did not receive supplemental menhaden had a reproductive rate of .47— less than half of what they need to be sustainable—while the rate for those that received extra fish increased to 1.13.

While osprey populations are doing well globally, Academia said, the bay’s position as a breeding ground for the migratory birds shouldn’t be underestimated. “If fishing pressure on menhaden within Chesapeake Bay persists, osprey productivity rates could decline precipitously, threaten population stability, and eventually lead to widespread population collapse,” he and his colleagues concluded in the study.

The Path Ahead

“It’s always, ‘Well, we need more data! But we don’t have the data!’” he said, with exasperation.

In February, despite what appeared to be unanimous support for the study that would help solve for that, state lawmakers shelved the bill to fund it, meaning it won’t be considered again until 2025.

As Reed sees it, something needs to move the ball forward, and legal action is a sure path. Both the lawsuit and petition for rulemaking filed by CLA hinge on Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC)’s responsibility to not only “prevent overfishing” in its waters, but to also manage its fisheries’ “conservation and management measures” based on sound science.

But each year, VMRC simply confirms the Chesapeake cap on menhaden set by the ASMFC, which is not based on population data at all. “They haven’t managed below that ceiling by one fish,” Reed said. “They go right up to the absolute maximum every year.” In other words, how could they be doing the due diligence that the law requires? VMRC did not respond to requests for an interview.

On February 5, VMRC closed public comments on the petition, which requests a moratorium on commercial menhaden fishing in the bay until up-to-date, localized data on the menhaden population is available. It also asks VMRC to require Omega Protein to permanently shift more of its catch further offshore into federal waters, with exceptions for stormy weather.

More than 1,000 people have commented on the petition, with significantly more in support of the moratorium than opposed.

CLA expects VMRC to issue an official response in a couple of months. Reed is also waiting to hear on the latest ruling in the legal case, in which Omega Protein recently moved to intervene.

That’s no big surprise, because while conservationists and recreational anglers have been pushing for more regulation of the menhaden fishery for decades, they say Omega Protein generally pushes back and comes out on top.

Owned by Canadian seafood giant Cooke Seafood, Omega spends liberally to represent its interests in Virginia’s halls of power. Currently, the Virginia Public Access Project lists seven lobbyists hired by the firm, six of whom work for McGuireWoods, a firm so powerful with the local political class that it has been called “the shadow government” of Richmond.

Since 2020, the company donated $25,000 to Youngkin’s Super PAC and $25,000 to his inaugural committee. (It also donated $8,500 to Youngkin’s Democratic opponent before he lost the election; Omega’s annual donations, in general, don’t follow party lines.)

In 2022, after TRCP and its nearly two dozen ally groups, including the Virginia Saltwater Sportfishing Association, Tidewater Charters, and the Coastal Conservation Association, delivered their petition to Youngkin, the governor’s office finally began to pay attention. This was at least partially spurred by the fact that during the previous year Omega’s fishing boats had spilled hundreds of thousands of dead fish in two separate incidents, leading to dead menhaden and red drum fish washing up on local beaches.

Youngkin proposed a slight increase in regulations, including 1-mile buffers along the bay’s coastlines where purse seines would not be allowed to operate. It was far from the moratorium the coalition was asking for, but they supported it a positive step forward.

Then, at the public meeting when commissioners were scheduled to vote on the regulation, the buffer plan was introduced as a “memorandum of understanding” rather than a regulation. “Now, it’s just a gentlemen’s agreement with no enforceability,” said Higgins.

When asked if Omega was behind the change in plan, Landry said, “We participated in the public process just like they did, and our opinion was that if you make this a memorandum of understanding, it could be adjusted a lot easier than regulation.” He was adamant that because of constraints posed by rough seas, pushing the company out of the bay would mean its ruin. “A 145-year-old fishing company ceases to operate if that happens,” he said. Omega and Ocean Harvesters employ about 260 people in Virginia, some in union jobs, and one estimate put the economic value of the fishery at $57 million in 2020.

Reed said the jobs are important, but he and others believe the local economic impact is overstated, especially given how profits flow out of the country. Plus, as the petition for rulemaking argues, if the reduction fishery is also reducing predators and therefore impacting recreational fishing, the negative economic impacts could be significant.

In 2020, a federal agency estimated Virginia’s recreational fisheries supported close to 3,500 jobs and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in direct income and added value. And while CLA estimates Omega Protein pays tens of thousands of dollars in fees to the state to operate its fleet, recreational fisherman add more than $1 million in fees each year to state coffers for conservation.

“It’s not just the fishermen and charter boat captains. You’re talking about everyone that goes out. You’re talking about hotels, motels, restaurants, marine supplies, bait and tackle . . . that are all reliant on a healthy bay and fisheries,” Reed said. “The economics around all of that are astounding.”

Now, many sport fishing groups are holding their breath, waiting to find out the outcome of the lawsuit and how VMRC will respond to the petition.

Last year, Ocean Harvesters debuted two brand new boats, and ASMFC raised the quota for the coast, allowing the company to catch more menhaden. But when asked if change will come to the Chesapeake as the fishing season begins this spring, Reed doesn’t hesitate. “We’re counting on it,” he said.

Meanwhile, further north, where menhaden don’t get ground into meal and oil, Ellen Pikitch points to an often overlooked factor. While other Atlantic states did pass laws banning reduction fisheries one by one, regulation was not originally what kept menhaden out of the industry’s grip. “The original reason the reduction industry stopped [in those places] was purely economic. There were no fish,” she said.

In fact, Reedville, Virginia, where Omega Protein is based, is named after Captain Elijah Reed (no relation to David at CLA). He was a menhaden fisherman who, after the fish disappeared from Maine, left home in pursuit of the storied abundance of the Chesapeake Bay.

Today, the tables could be turning as advocates like Higgins look to the resurgent ecosystems in the north for inspiration. “It’s a telling case study for what the Chesapeake Bay could be and what it likely was 100 years ago,” she said.

The post The Last Front in the Battle to Save the ‘Most Important Fish’ in the Atlantic appeared first on Civil Eats.

Since childhood, during the eight-month lobster season from July to February, Marcelino would wake at dawn with 20 Miskito divers, slip out of his tomb-like bunk on a 40-foot dive boat, and gather the diving equipment: rusty air tanks, cracked fins and goggles, hammers, and the metal rods with hooks used to pry lobsters from their lairs. He would hand the equipment to a friend, who waited in a cayuco, a canoe carved out of a tree trunk. The cayucero, usually a family member or friend, paddled the cayuco with the diver and gear and waited for Marcelino to surface between dives to throw the lobsters into the dive boat. All around it, cayuceros paddled in a constellation of effort, positioning divers to descend to lobster lairs.

The sea, a deep blue from above, was darker 70 to 130 feet below where the lobsters hid in lairs. Marcelino navigated swift, cold currents and poor visibility to reach them. They used their sharp spikes to anchor themselves in their lairs. He pulled them out with a hook, putting them into a bag. Hooking the lobsters by their tails was easier, but dive boat captains discouraged divers from leaving marks on the lobster that would indicate how it was caught. This allowed captains to sell their lobster as if it were trap-caught and for that lie to be told all the way through the supply chain, until it was comingled at processing facilities.

Honduran spiny lobster is a $46.7 million industry, exported almost entirely to U.S. markets. While some of the lobster is trap-caught, it is cheaper to rely on divers. But dive boats and the processors that buy their catch do not invest in training or equipping divers. In the remote region with few jobs, the owners of the lobster boats save money at the cost of the divers, paying poverty wages, offering no protective gear, demanding an unsafe number of dives per day, and sometimes offering divers drugs to increase their tolerance for pain and weariness. When divers are injured, most dive boat owners do not want to pay for their care.

Marcelino, like most divers in the region, always dove without a wetsuit, air gauge, or depth gauge. If his air ran out and he had to ascend quickly or he dove beyond the 130-feet limit for single-cylinder diving, he could get decompression sickness, also called the bends. Of the 9,000 divers in the region, 97 percent have suffered from the bends after ascending too quickly and breathing compressed air that contains nitrogen gas, which can accumulate in the diver’s body tissue, according to the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), a nonprofit human-rights organization that has worked with the divers and their families. Trained divers make safety stops while ascending, the length of which are usually calculated by their dive watch, taking into account their maximum depth. If divers are not taken to a decompression chamber within 24 hours of getting the bends, they can suffer numbness, impaired coordination, paralysis, and cerebral disorders.

The U.S. companies that import spiny lobster and the U.S. organizations that are active in fisheries in Honduras try to avoid the labor rights issues inherent in lobster diving. They say that they only source from and work with trap-caught lobster. Some, including the Walton Family Foundation and Darden Restaurants, the former owner of Red Lobster, have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to turn this lobster into a success story. For the people that live here, it isn’t.

When sharks circled too close, Marcelino would hit them with his air tank. He completed 12 to 18 dives per day for 12 to 14 days in a row, although experts recommend a maximum of three dives per day. He dove for many years, an Olympian athletic feat, surviving conditions that few could, until he could not.

Marcelino perhaps believed, like many Miskito, that when the sickness struck them, they had seen Liwa Mairin, the mermaid spirit of the sea. Liwa Mairin punished them for taking too many lobsters. And yet, to dive or work in the lobster industry was the only way for many of the 78,000 Miskito to make a living. Like their fathers and grandfathers, many Miskito divers end up paralyzed, disappeared, or dead. Like Marcelino.

Marcelino died in 2003. His death occurred in the fishery that conservationists funded by the Walton Family Foundation later called a “success story.” Ten years ago, the foundation announced, to much fanfare, that it would create a fund to improve Honduran lobster management with Darden, the world’s largest full-service restaurant company. Announced at the Clinton Global Initiative, a gathering where world leaders discuss global challenges, the effort received a steady stream of congratulatory press coverage, including from preeminent seafood publications like Intrafish, Undercurrent and Seafood Source, as well as from mainstream press like GreenBiz and Yahoo Finance. All celebrated the news as corporate do-goodery.

Walton and Darden put hundreds of thousands into a fund for Honduran fisheries, managed by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF). About $220,000 was used to execute a fishery improvement project (FIP), intended to improve fishing practice or management, in this case to benefit the lobster. Over the next several years, grantees tasked with addressing overfishing of the lobster undertook work under the FIP to slow the catch to an ecologically sustainable rate. It eventually turned spiny lobster in Honduras into the first fishery in the world with the potential to trace seafood from boat to plate.

A report about the work later described how it “achieved significant results,” noting a “full digital traceability system is now installed in 80 percent of the packing plants and 60 percent of the commercial fleet—not only for lobster but for all commercial fisheries.” The FIP encouraged trap use. However, while investing in a landing data collection system and vessel monitoring system to prepare the fishery toward an eventual sustainability certification from the Marine Stewardship Council, the FIP also licensed boats in the program, including the ones that demand 12 dives a day, day after day, from workers like Marcelino. Thousands ended up paralyzed or dead.

The Walton Family Foundation has since distanced itself from the FIP, writing in an email to Civil Eats that it only contributed funds—$300,000 to Honduran fisheries generally, a rough third of that to the lobster FIP—and that the purpose of the fund was to “encourage corporate actors to make sure their seafood was more sustainable,” according to a statement from spokesperson Mark Shields. “NFWF had ultimate control over the selection of all subgrantees of the fund,” Shields said. When searching for a pilot project to attract more corporate actors, he said NFWF and Darden recommended spiny lobster “because of Darden’s interest and offer for matching funding at the time.” Darden contributed $125,000, according to Rich Jeffers, a senior communications director at Darden Restaurants.

Families of fallen lobster divers, including Marcelino’s, had already filed a lawsuit against the Honduran government for failing to protect the divers through labor law before the FIP began—a lawsuit they would eventually win. Today, the Miskito community is one where paralyzed former divers can be seen from house to house, lying in outdoor hammocks, unable to move, and former divers walk the streets with crutches because of partial paralysis. But while the fishery is widely recognized for its horrific labor conditions, the money invested in improving conditions for the lobster in Honduras wasn’t directed at improving conditions for the divers that catch them. The situation underscores how investments in sustainability, and the attending publicity, can obscure significant labor problems, sometimes to the detriment of workers.

Thousands Disabled, Hundreds Dead

Lobster lairs were deceptive, often looking closer than they were, which caused Marcelino to take risks. He needed to deliver as much lobster as possible since he was paid by the pound. And when he ran out of air, he had to speed to the surface. He did not know to make safety stops along the way.

His life unfolded against this backdrop. In 1975, nearly 10 years into lobster diving, he met and married Melvia Cristina Guerrero. They lived in Puerto Lempira in the Gracias a Dios region and had six children. His diving was their only source of income.

On March 30, 2023, Guerrero, now 65, met me at the door of her home, her eyes dark and sad. She wore a gray and white head wrap and a dark blue dress. She ushered me into the house and said of lobster diving, “There are many boats and divers, each with 40, 30, or 25 divers. In Gracias a Dios, most men live from this work; there is no other work. . . . This work is so difficult that my husband never slept well.”

In 2003, Guerrero—who, like many women in the area, never finished elementary school—was home when she answered a knock on the door. She opened it to find the sacabuzos, a woman in the community who recruited divers, standing before her. The sacabuzos said, “I came to see how you were doing. All the men are fine, but your husband is slightly sick.” The sacabuzos said nothing more. Panicked, Guerrero decided to search for her husband by the dock and found eight men putting his body into a car. “That is when I fainted. My husband was already decomposing. I felt half dead, half alive,” Guerrero said. In recent years, roughly 4,000 Miskito divers have been disabled; many are paraplegic or quadriplegic. At least 400 have died.

As divers and their families do, I had traveled to Puerto Lempira by motorboat to meet her. Although the city can be reached by tiny plane, the cost is out of reach for divers. To get there, photographer Jacky Muniello and I boarded a motorboat in Brus Laguna, on the same route as the divers take, to Puerto Lempira. The motorboat was small, a piece of tinfoil compared to the ocean we needed to cross. We sat with a dozen people spread across wooden planks. Several large tires weighed down the bow.

When we reached the open ocean, the waves were higher than the boat. The captain, his boyish face looking out to the horizon, sped into the waves. The boat went almost vertical as passengers gripped the sides. And then there was a moment at the top of the wave when we all felt a pause. We fell, and the boat smacked the water. The next wave loomed over the boat, covering us in water. Someone, probably the captain, threw a black plastic tarp over us to protect passengers and their goods from getting soaked, surrounding us in darkness as gasoline fumes became our air.

Over seven hours, passengers screamed, cried, and prayed. Muniello passed out and vomited, and I held onto her limp body. I don’t know how much time passed before she opened her eyes and squeezed my hand. The captain removed the tarp, and we found ourselves in a tangled mangrove forest. We made our way slowly through the narrow waterway to the Caratasca Lagoon. Arriving in Puerto Lempira, originally called Ahuya Yari in Miskito, near the dock, we saw men hobbling on crutches, paralyzed from the waist down, their eyes vacant. To travel in the region to access the hospital or clinic, injured divers had to take these same boats, limiting their access to medical care.

There are other limits to surviving here, mostly economic ones. There is no road to Puerto Lempira, which feels abandoned. The region is vast and wild, the territory of drug traffickers like Juan Mata-Ballesteros, an infamous Honduran trafficker who moved cocaine in this region, and who appeared in the Netflix series Narcos.

The Miskito inhabit the area from Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast to Honduras. Christopher Columbus encountered them in Honduras in 1502, and the myth is that he was so thankful to reach the land he said, “Gracias a Dios.” Gracias a Dios, known by locals as la Mosquitia, has 94,450 inhabitants, mostly Miskitos, who speak their Indigenous language, and often Spanish, English, and Garifuna.

Of those, 22 percent, like Marcelino and his wife, live in extreme poverty and cannot read or write. Honduras has invested little in the region, leaving the Miskito with poor schools, no universities, and few options for work aside from diving for lobster, sea snails, and sea cucumbers. Puerto Lempira, the site of the region’s only hospital and a hyperbaric chamber that helps divers recover from decompression sickness, has 6.5 inhabitants per square kilometer. Of the deaths in the area, 37 percent are due to diving accidents.

Guerrero, whose house was bare except for a bed and a couch, held up her phone to display a photo of Marcelino, inscribed with the message: “We can’t see you or touch you, but we miss you.” After his death, she spoke to divers who worked with her husband. They said that when he surfaced from a dive, he felt the sickness, and “he told other divers that he felt almost dead. He said that when he died, he didn’t want the boat owner to abandon his children.”

Eighty-six percent of Honduran spiny lobster still lands in the U.S. market, according to trade data from the United Nations, capturing imports between 2018 to 2022. The lobster is imported by a handful of customs brokerage firms in America. Among the largest are Concept Brokerage, Inc. of Miami, which did not respond to inquiries about which restaurants and grocers buy the lobster, and All Ports Air & Ocean Consolidators, also of Miami, whose spokesman said they did not know who buys the lobster. A man who answered the phone at a third brokerage firm that also imports the lobster, New York Customs Brokers, Inc., said their work is akin to filing taxes, and that by law they could not discuss the imports unless authorized.

Despite the continued risk of injury to lobster divers—the pursuit for Honduran lobster maimed more than 100 divers last season—early efforts at improving the fishery did not address the safety of divers. Jeffers, the senior communications director at Darden Restaurants, said in an email that a year after the company donated $125,000 in 2013 to help create the fund for Honduran spiny lobster, Darden sold Red Lobster and ceased involvement in the lobster work. Jeffers said the company had never been involved in implementing projects, but confirmed the fund had been intended to improve management of trap lobster and did not address dive-caught lobster.

In a request for proposals, NFWF instead sought to work with local buyers and other supply chain participants “to implement a traceability system that distinguishes trap-caught from dive-caught lobsters.” Potential grantees for the $220,000 in projects were asked to acquire traps best suited to protect the area’s habitat and “provide incentives to fishermen for their use.”

The Walton Family Foundation is a long-time supporter of such FIPs, arguing that they shift government’s management of fisheries “to ultimately ensure a sustainable global seafood supply for future generations.” In 2013, when it announced the Honduran fund, the organization estimated that more than 400 FIPs were needed to meet buyer demand for seafood worldwide.

“To protect fisheries and the communities who rely on them, there needs to be long-term, large-scale support. This grant was an attempt to attract other funders and corporate partners to the table,” said Teresa Ish, the senior program officer and oceans initiative lead at the Walton Family Foundation. She later told Civil Eats that the fund never attracted other corporate partners, however, and that it fizzled after Darden sold Red Lobster and no other corporations showed interest.

The Walton Family Foundation has since become involved in dozens more FIPs, which foundation spokesperson Shields said account for millions in spending. “We have found fishery improvement projects to be most effective when communities, governments, and supply chain partners all work together over time,” he said. He added that it takes years to be effective.

Katrina Nakamura, a responsible seafood advocate who runs the Sustainability Incubator and is a planner at the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, however, characterized FIPs as a market tool that allows retailers and grocers to call seafood products “sustainable” to satisfy corporate sourcing policies. “A FIP is just something the retailer needs, the supermarket needs, to sell fish,” she said.

‘Wretched, As If They Were Dead’

“The captain was evil, and he would withhold food, scold them, and insult them,” Guerrero said of her husband’s boat captain. Some captains put injured men in row boats, saving gas money but ensuring the divers would be paralyzed, dead, or their bodies decomposed by the time they reached the shore. Stories abounded of boat captains who abandoned divers in the ocean to punish them or gave them drugs to make them more apt to endure abusive conditions.

Guerrero remembered one captain who, upon seeing a paralyzed diver who had worked for him, yelled, “I wish you had died!” Boat captains often resisted pressure from families to provide money to injured divers, but had to live with the constant reminder of their actions when they saw the paralyzed divers.

Guerrero recommended we visit the Puerto Lempira hospital to understand the situation better. It was painted bright yellow, and a concrete entry walkway led to a small blue and white rehabilitation room littered with used exercise equipment. A dozen partially paralyzed divers worked on different exercises in the afternoon heat.

A diver paralyzed from the waist down gripped two rails, moving forward as his legs hung limp. Porfirio Valeriano Carrington, 32, had experienced partial paralysis in his legs after a diving accident. During lobster season, he spent six to seven hours per day below the water, saying, “I had no watch, nothing to mark the air levels in the tank, no wetsuit.” He lived on a boat with 47 other divers.

When diving, he said, “You don’t know where you are going or where you are,” adding, “That is how I got sick. I thought I was at 115 feet, but I was at 137. The pressure got to me. The company doesn’t provide food for me or anything. The day after I got sick, another guy died. He was very young. And the next day, another died.” The doctor told Carrington that if he dove again, he would die. But he had no other way to support himself, so like many other injured divers, he would return to the sea.

Dr. Henzel Roberto Pérez, the deputy director of information management at the hospital, sat at a large desk, sweating. He said, “Sadly, we don’t have a diving school here. There is no training.” The hyperbaric chamber at the hospital, which fits up to four divers simultaneously, costs $100-$300 per session. Each session lasted 20 minutes to four hours, allowing the diver’s tissue to degas the nitrogen slowly by simulating a very slow ascent. Divers often needed multiple sessions to recover. Although boat captains were supposed to cover those costs, they often didn’t.

Pérez explained that when a diver was injured, “The person who delivers the injured divers is the sacabuzos. Sometimes, they tell us the captain’s name; sometimes, they don’t.” Many divers knew their captains by their first names only and were afraid to talk about them for fear of retaliation. Pérez noted that many young divers became paralyzed and lost sexual function, and their wives left them. The hospital couldn’t afford to provide follow-up care to paralyzed divers, many of whom lived in communities that were hours away by boat. For those divers who recovered, “Even though you tell them that they can’t dive again, they always do,” said Pérez.

Today, Chris Williams, a fisheries expert at the International Transport Workers Federation, said that dive-caught lobster is still sold as trap lobster in Honduras to avoid those labor concerns. Williams spent a year and a half working on a project about lobster divers in Honduras. He said dive and trap-caught lobster is still commingled at processing facilities, and captains continue to pressure divers to avoid hooking the lobster, which marks it as dive caught.

Following the FIP effort, a 2016 report to NFWF co-authored by Smithsonian and World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) said grantees had nevertheless been optimistic about what they’d achieved. “Our science-based approach combined with sustained commitment to problem solving has catalyzed a sea change in the lobster fishery in Honduras, which has dominoed into other sectors. Honduras is now positioned to be the first country globally to have all its marine fisheries fully traceable from boat to consumer,” reads the report.

According to the report, 80 boats from eight plants had been brought into the traceability system and numerous vessels had been licensed. Grantees had also outlined a reserve network of cays around the Miskito area, where fishing would not occur to help support lobster habitat, and pushed for a rights-based fishery management system that would privatize the fisheries.

The privatization policy is controversial for its potential to deepen social inequities and empower the wealthiest actors on oceans, no matter their treatment of resources and workers. Many philanthropies and supply chain entities support it, however, in part for its ability to make it easier to predict the catch of wild fish and stabilize prices. The policy had passed Congress and was awaiting ratification by the executive office of Honduras at the time of the report. The work stalled, however, for lack of support from the Honduran government.

Grantees in the Walton/Darden-funded FIP had had other hopes. At the close of their round of projects in 2016, the NFWF report said that the project had a “strong partnership with the government of Honduras” on lobster, and that the FIP had led to sustained engagement and “truly important outcomes for the sustainability of Honduran lobster and the fisheries sector as a whole.” The Honduran government was drafting legislation to make the traceability system mandatory at the time, the report said, and a committee for the control and monitoring of fisheries had been established with better coordination between the fisheries department, navy, and port authority in Honduras.

Lobster importers in America were optimistic enough that 10 businesses signed a pledge to adopt the tracing system for Honduran lobster in the seafood supply chain as a result of the FIP, including Red Lobster and Chicken of the Sea. At LobsterPledge.com, all said they supported efforts to transition the fishery toward fishing techniques other than diving and were using their buying power to “provide an incentive to establish and maintain high standards for environmental and social welfare.”

Despite those words, dive-caught lobster remained in the supply chain, and practices to exploit divers continued. “The vast majority of the landings do still come from diving,” said Williams, with divers delivering lobster to those larger, 40-foot boats whose captains can claim to have caught it in traps. He emphasized that Honduran factories are aware of the practice.

While the supply chain continued to obscure dive catch, and divers continued dying, Guerrero had more success than many widows of divers. A widow at 46, she had limited education, no job, and six children to support. She requested financial support from her husband’s boat captain, who gave her 40,000 lempira ($2,365). She survived her husband’s death and educated her children so they would not follow in their father’s footsteps and become divers. Now, she runs into injured divers daily when she leaves her house. “How many men are walking with crutches in the street, wretched as if they were dead because they can’t do anything?” she lamented.

One Village, 60 Paralyzed Divers

Landing in Cauquira, we walked down sandy lanes through a village of tiny wooden homes, past porches with one or more wheelchairs visible. Rosendo Teodoro Calderón, 60, wearing jeans and a striped shirt, sat in a wheelchair outside his one-room house. As he spoke, an injured diver in a wheelchair could be seen in the distance. Arias, who had treated Rosendo, greeted him and began translating from Miskito to Spanish.

“I spent my entire youth in a wheelchair,” said Calderón. When he was 25 and working on a lobster boat, he experienced decompression illness. He was over 100 feet down, and something blocked his air supply. Calderón had to reach the surface quickly, and although he could have done that by dropping the lobsters in his hand, he didn’t. He said, “There was no hyperbaric chamber at that time. The captain threw me away like a piece of trash. The owner was named Kenny. The company did nothing.” Calderón’s twin brother sent him money to build a house and help him survive.

Calderón wheeled inside his home, his face half in the shadows, and said, “I don’t have hope of walking again. I’m completely paralyzed. We never receive money; we never receive help. The government should do its part to aid the injured, poor, and suffering.” His house was spare with concrete floors, a bare mattress in one corner, and a bathroom in another. As we left, Calderón said, “I felt good being a diver because it was how I supported my family.”

From his father’s experience, Arias knew the difficulties of lobster diving. He said, “The physical force required to hook the lobster, kill it, and return to the surface with damaged fins and masks and without a wetsuit is incredible. I don’t know how those men survive. They work like mules and have to go deeper and deeper to find lobsters.” Arias said, “The death of a diver here is nothing; it is normal. The state has to prevent this from happening.”

Years before, others had tried. In 2004, Guerrero, wanting to convert her pain into justice, joined the families of 41 divers who had been injured or died and filed a case against Honduras at the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. They argued that the Honduran state had shown indifference to dangerous working conditions for divers and permitted labor exploitation by national and international fishing enterprises. In 2007, CEJIL, a nonprofit human-rights organization, began working with the divers and their families to present the case before the court.

Though the lawsuit was headed to court as the Walton/Darden-funded FIP got underway in Honduras, the work wasn’t structured to benefit the health and safety of the divers in the lobster industry, only the health of the lobster and buyers’ ability to avoid the divers’ labor issues.

“FIPs were first created to address environmental issues, but that has changed significantly in the last five years,” Walton Family Foundation’s Shields said in a statement to Civil Eats. “There is no evidence that [FIPs] worsen labor issues in supply chains. However, it is clear that programs designed to address environmental issues often fail to address, or even catch, labor issues.”

He said the Walton Family Foundation is now working to remove forced labor from seafood supply chains, supporting fishing communities and Indigenous fishing groups building co-management programs, and supporting research “to understand the value that small-scale fishers retain (or don’t) in global supply chains” in other regions. He added that vessel monitoring, enforcement, and a credible traceability system would address the comingling of dive-caught and trap-caught lobster in Honduras. “Companies sourcing from Honduras should be insisting on this level of transparency to ensure that they’re not buying fish that harms workers,” he said.

No such insistence continued, however. Chicken of the Sea and Red Lobster did not respond to requests for comment. The effort they joined to improve conditions in Honduras, LobsterPledge.com, became a defunct URL. Circumstances for the divers have since been left to the litigation.

“They’re doing a dangerous job without the right training, the right kit, out of desperation, basically. And their misery is used to produce a luxury product for American diners, and that is wrong,” said Williams, the fisheries expert. “The supply chain and the government should be investing in those regions and making sure that people are trained properly and that the law is followed and that they have rights at work and that they are not dying and paralyzed and then just left to rot.”

The lawsuit wound its way through the court for years. As it did, the most severely injured divers, who had paraplegia and lived in remote fishing villages like Cauquira, didn’t have the financial means to participate in the case.

Nixon González Flores, 55, a diver paralyzed from the waist down, lived in a wooden house on stilts surrounded by trees upriver from Calderón. He lay on a hammock below the house when I visited, and his youngest son sat in Flores’ wheelchair. Flores became a diver because “there is no work here in La Mosquitia. The only thing is to work in the fishing industry. Diving is dangerous and terrible work.” He was paralyzed at 37 after a 150-foot dive in which the pressure got to him. After the injury, the fishing company didn’t provide financial support. He said, “I have many problems. My body needs a lot of care. I need food, soap, and Pampers. I urinate on myself day and night.”

On the muddy banks nearby sits the house of Nixon’s brother Martín González Flores, 61. Walking up the steps to the porch of his house, I saw Martín lying in a hammock, his body stiff, his hands gnarled but shaking. His wife exited the house, reached down, and smoothed his clenched fingers. It was a gentle, practiced gesture. He spoke in a whisper, his lips barely moving, his eyes on the ceiling. At 45, after a deep dive, he experienced a brain hemorrhage. “He took me to the shore and left me,” said Martín of the boat captain. His wife had become his full-time caregiver since the accident. The couple had two children, but one had died in a diving accident.

Martín’s son-in-law, Jony Anisal, 36, sat quietly nearby, his feet dangling off the porch. He looked into the distance as he talked about working as a lobster diver. He said of the Miskito community, “We don’t have work. We have to feed our children, our wives.” He got up, went inside the house, and returned with a small, rusted hammer and a rod with a hook—the tools for catching lobster and nearby snails. In addition to his father-in-law, he knew many divers who had been disabled or died, including his own father. Anisal’s brother was a diver, and they often worked together. Their boat captain called them cowards if they got sick and offered them injections, pills, and drugs to keep them diving. “Why did you come if you don’t want to work?” Anisal remembered the captain shouting at him.

In the village where Martín and Nixon lived, Arias said there were 60 paralyzed divers “without counting the dead, the many dead.” Martín wanted to tell the lobster companies they shouldn’t have abandoned him after so many years of work. He wished he could have formed a part of the legal case with the other injured divers, but his level of paralysis and lack of resources prevented him from doing so. Arias said, “As a person, human, and Miskito, I think this lawsuit must change things.”

Men in Crisp Suits

In 2022, the Miskito divers won their case against the Honduran government. The Inter-American Court on Human Rights declared that Honduras was responsible for the lack of prevention, supervision, and oversight of working conditions for the Miskito divers, which had resulted in injury, disappearance, and death for many. It was the first case before the court in which a country was held responsible for the labor conditions of companies working in its territory. The court held Honduras accountable for providing monetary compensation to the families of the 42 divers and for creating training and regulations for diving conditions.

On the afternoon of March 30, 2023, in the heat of the day, Guerrero walked 10 minutes from her house to Pawaka Auditorium, a series of circular concrete benches around a dusty, red patch of ground. I accompanied her to the ceremony in which Honduran authorities apologized for their role in the divers’ injuries, deaths, and disappearances. Walking down the dirt road, we saw a man in a wooden wheelchair, his hands gripping a gear to move it forward. I asked him his name, looking over his wheelchair, built from wood scraps. He introduced himself as Filemón Cesión Gómez, a former lobster diver. “I was injured in 1980 at 25. Many men are dead or disappeared at sea,” he said. As we spoke, another injured diver limped by on crutches.

Government officials who flew to Puerto Lempira that morning stepped out of an air-conditioned building, the men in crisp suits and the women in thick layers of makeup and heels. Officials from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Human Rights took their place on a raised podium.

In compliance with the 2021 Inter-American Court of Human Rights judgment, Honduran officials vowed to adopt legislative measures to prevent further human rights violations, strengthen regional public health programs, create a program to inspect and supervise diving and fishing, and identify victims and prosecute those responsible. Among the officials was Ítalo Bonilla Mejía, a biologist at the General Directorate of the Merchant Marine of Honduras. I wanted him to tell me what none of the divers or their widows could: Who was still buying all the lobster?

“Darden,” he said. After selling Red Lobster, Darden still supplies 1,900 restaurants in the U.S., including Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, and Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, generating over $9.63 billion in annual sales.

Darden’s Jeffers disputed it was the buyer. “It is entirely possible that Red Lobster is the buyer and the person said Darden since Darden and Red Lobster were synonymous for so long. There are still people today who believe Darden owns Red Lobster, even though we sold the brand nearly 10 years ago.” Red Lobster, which was bought by private equity firm Golden Gate Capital in 2014, did not respond to requests for comment.

Guerrero, who had never heard of the Walton Family Foundation or Darden Restaurants, sat among rows of disabled divers, many resting quietly in their wooden wheelchairs. One of them held a sign that read, “There are more than 1,982 injured divers, not just 42,” referencing that only 42 divers formed a part of the lawsuit but many more deserved justice. Guerrero sat for hours as the sun beat down, listening to the government officials, remembering the day she married her husband when he was lean and strong, untouched by the pursuit of red gold.

The post Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster appeared first on Civil Eats.