Are Underwater Farms the Future of Food? | Our Frozen Planet | BBC Earth

how will climate change influence our food choices in the future it's thought our food industry is responsible for 37 of our Global greenhouse gas emissions from the wavy farm and use our land to the waste we create in the process what if we could nurture nature at the same time as getting our food could something as simple as seaweed revolutionize the way we consume and actually help our planet to recover and heal regenerative ocean farming is about moving beyond sustainability it's about actually how do you farm to breathe life back into the ocean so we're growing food we're growing shellfish and seaweed but wall also capturing carbon nitrogen phosphorus the idea is to put fishermen like me to work restoring rather than depleting the oceans my name is Brett Smith and I'm the founder of Green Wave and I'm a regenerative ocean farmer and I'm based here in Long Island Sound regenerative motion farming has been happening for thousands of years in different ways I think its moment has really come the question is what is agriculture what does the sea going to look like I was born and raised in Newfoundland Canada [Music] and all I ever wanted to be was a fisherman they were my heroes so at age 14 I dropped out of school and headed out to sea and I fished the globe Cod crab herring tuna you name it I fished it and I loved it but then while I was fishing in Alaska the Cod stocks crashed in Newfoundland very real crisis in the inshore fishery The Fishery is dying it's just about dead on its feet along the entire Northeast Coast thirty thousand people laid off it was the largest layoff in Canadian history boats beached calories empty just like fishermen walking the streets as hungry ghosts that's where I realized like this is a jobs issue they're not going to be any jobs or food on a dead planet after the card stocks crashed I went into salmon farming and salmon farming was supposed to be the great solution of feeding the planet and transitioning fishermen into a new type of food production the problem was it was industrial food production out at Sea it was you know growing salmon pesticides antibiotics all this sort of stuff it just wasn't sustainable at the time so dissolution I kept searching and I ended up here in Long Island South and here there was a long tradition of shellfishing and so I remade myself as a oysterman after seven years at building my business my farm was destroyed Two Times by hurricanes Hurricane Irene Hurricane Sandy came in wiped out 90 of my crop that was my second moment working on the ocean where I realized wow like I'm a canary and a coal mine for a climate crisis that's hit a hundred years earlier than we expected if I wanted to stay at Sea and I wanted to continue growing food I really needed to figure out a new way to to start doing ocean farming our ocean covers around 70 percent of our planet but only two percent of Global Food production currently comes from our ocean grain waves Innovative approach to farming takes into account issues that have Arisen from traditional agriculture to pave the way for a healthier future it's really important we don't make the same mistakes that were made on lab I mean you look at lamb and it's about a couple companies just try to get as much food as possible from the land at any cost instead we need to go out and read life back into the ocean that's what's exciting right the farming system is really pretty simple imagine this underwater Garden from the surface you see a collection of buoys if you were to look under the waves you'd see ropes going vertically down to Anchor systems and then horizontally you just see those acre lines connected it's sort of a rope scaffolding system underwater and from there we're growing all our crops kelp seaweeds growing vertically downwards next to muscles and muscle socks you got scallops and Lantern debts oyster cages down at the bottom and then clams down at the mud the idea is just to grow as many species in the water column as possible kelp is almost ready to produce that's what we're looking for I've been farming the same patch ocean for 20 years but when I started farming seaweed especially I was just getting laughed off the docks like it was just this ridiculous thing kind of embarrassing to grow plants underwater honestly when I started it was kind of boring but over time I just grew to love it I'm actually proud of this that moment when you start the seed is just a microscopic and then four months later you come out and you lift a wall of plants out of the ocean it's a pretty stunning uh feeling [Music] four months for crops to be where they then have uses for the entire food and diet industry one of the things I did was to say kelp is the new kale you know kale was a rabbit food the famous chefs got it that they made it delicious and then it became this middle class food and kelp is just not that it's something I think way more powerful it could have a way bigger climate impact and what we've adopted is a whole Leaf strategy what part of the plant is used for artisanal products like kelp mustards and pickles and stuff the next part of the plant goes to get to the plant-based food sector products like kelp mushroom burgers and other things in that plant diet sector but then as you move down there are all these other Industries like fertilizer of biostimulates farmers would be using seaweeds as fertilizer for hundreds of years those nutrients from the oceans are so important in building healthy soil there are incredible companies that are using help for bioplastics and that's just amazing that someone like me where there's a Plastics issue in the ocean that I can actually be growing a crop that replaces Plastics with almost 8 million tons of plastic being thrown into a ocean ichio the use of seaweed as an alternative packaging is a clever solution as is the potential for its use in land-based agriculture traditional farming on land involves almost 1.5 billion cattle globally a major source of the powerful greenhouse gas methane a study found adding just one percent of seaweed to the feed cow seed can decrease myth introduction by a mighty 58 people are coming to Green Wave to get into the solutions economy and really start a sort of tackling climate change our goal is to trade 10 000 regenerative ocean farmers in the next 10 years greenwave Works in four areas one we have an online farmer trading and support program with over 3 000 people on there learning to farm together [Music] we have the kelp climate fund where we're actually subsidizing paying Farmers to plant kelp every year and in return they're using the my kelp app to collect data to track climate benefits environmental benefits on their Farms the third is Market development we're working up and down the supply chain with all different companies entrepreneurs to grow markets for kelp and to connect Growers at buyers and the last piece is infrastructure where we're out helping Farmers build hatcheries Dockside processing so that farmers own part of the supply chain to get prices for their crops we've put together the foundation to make sure that you know farmers are benefiting rather than being left behind according to the World Bank farming seaweeds in just one percent of our ocean could create 50 million jobs a mature 20 acre region rate of ocean Farm is capable of producing one hundred thousand dollars worth of products green waves model shows the potential for economic change at scale and it's not only people that are able to benefit from regenerative ocean farming nature benefits too my 20 acres was a patch of desert right it was just mud everything had died from silt running in and now it's an artificial Reef so you got seals Ducks tons of fish sea horses all this sort of stuff that come in and hang out on the farm as a fisherman turned ocean farmer my job is to shift from depleting the ocean to breed life back into our Waters a shellfish and seaweed do that an oyster for example filters 50 gallons of water a day pulling nitrogen out of the water column kelp soaks up up to 20 times more carbon than land-based plants we could grow all these restorative species that are rebuilding ocean ecosystems while putting people to work doing it and the ocean returns to its core role of balancing the climate and coming one of the main engines of mitigation if you were to take four percent of U.S Waters and farm shellfish and seaweed you could offset the entire agricultural missions of the State of California and create a protein equivalent of three trillion cheeseburgers so this is something that we could scale that we could have Major Impact that isn't just about small is beautiful but is actually could sit squarely in this set of solutions to the club crisis give people the power to be able to start their own Solutions and be part of it and really have Network production that's what the future is that Network production that hive mind where it's not about a few of us but it's actually about everybody regenerative ocean farming matters at this moment in history because as our food system gets pushed out to sea as the Water Crisis becomes more intense as hurricanes and droughts we're going to need more food from our ocean and if we could have ten thousand people out there farming doing hatcheries doing new products that's where really The Hope comes from this space where there's sort of an army of climate Warriors out there that aren't activists they're actually out there doing building and growing [Music] I was a young person again deciding what I wanted to do the climate solution space is just like a beautiful productive exciting space to be in because it's not just ocean farming the climate crisis is going to demand bundles of solutions if there's any way you could go to work every day with people to solve this crisis I think it's a you know it's a it's a life well spent foreign foreign [Music]

Channel: BBC Earth

Views: 147,216

Keywords: bbc documentary, bbc, bbcearth, bbc earth, underwater, farming, underwater farming, kelp, seaweed, greenwave, food, food industry, farming methods, sea, ocean, ocean farming, regenerative farming, greenwave farming, revolutionise food, future of food, farms, ocean farms, sea farms, kelp farm, seaweed farm

Id: 93nk2xIRcbk

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2023