On a clear March afternoon, John Smet shut off the engine of his workboat as he approached his go-to wild kelp bed. It was high tide, so less kelp was pooling on the surface of the water, making it harder to see.
As the boat drifted ahead, his business partner Nick Stern noticed a kelp strand within reach. Using a gardening rake, he pulled it on board, cut off a few feet and threw the rest back. As Stern held up the shiny seaweed for a photo op, Smet explained the basic anatomy of Macrocystis pyrifera, the species known as giant kelp.
“So you have the blade, pneumatocyst, which is the little air pocket, and then stipe,” Smet said.
Giant kelp is probably what you picture when someone says “kelp,” those flowing golden-brown towers that fish dart through and sea otters like to sleep on top of. And this species is what brought the two entrepreneurs to Ketchikan.
After working several years in New York finance, the college friends decided to quit their jobs and start a company that could be both profitable and good for the planet. Stern grew up working on a garlic farm, so Smet said they wanted to focus on agriculture.
“We looked at a lot of different businesses, things like spirulina, or on-land-aquaculture, mushrooms, greenhouses, vertical farming,” Smet said. “And we thought that kelp was by far the most environmentally beneficial. And we thought, ‘Oh, there could really be a business here.’”
They settled on giant kelp because it’s one of the world’s fastest growing organisms, at up to two feet per day. That means their new company Pacific Kelp Co., can grow more biomass in a given area, making for a more efficient business model. They just got permitted to start a giant kelp farm in the waters off of Duke Island, and they plan to begin planting this summer.
Kelp farming is still a young industry in Alaska, but one that’s created a lot of excitement. Farmers throughout the state’s coastal communities can grow high quality kelp, a type of seaweed, but they’ve been hampered by a lack of local processing and insufficient demand for their products.
The Pacific Kelp founders think they can help address both of those issues.
They’ve been refining giant kelp into a liquid extract that they think can have big implications for the terrestrial farming world. They just received a grant to work with two universities, studying the benefits their extract has on growing wine grapes and grass. If it’s proven to work as they hope, it could drive up demand for kelp throughout Alaska.
And Pacific Kelp Co. will soon have something else to help their industry neighbors: a processing facility. Back on dry land, Stern stood inside a warehouse just south of downtown Ketchikan.
“With the equipment we have today, we can do about 1,000 kilograms or 2,200 pounds of raw kelp per day,” Stern said, pointing to their shredder and other machinery.
The company is sharing the space with local dive fishermen, but says it has plenty of room to process kelp from other regional farms and their own. Alaska currently has very few kelp processors, which makes it difficult and expensive to get the cumbersome raw product to markets in the Lower 48. Stern said that’s an industry gap they’re trying to fill.
“We’ve had talks with kelp farmers up in Kodiak and Juneau, over in Prince of Wales,” Stern said. “So once we’re up and running, (we can) buy their product, process it for them, and distribute and sell it into markets that we have been spending the better part of the last two years trying to cultivate and build.”
Part of that market cultivation process is proving that their liquified kelp extract can be an effective biostimulant, a specialized type of fertilizer. Kyle Wickings is one of two researchers the company has partnered with to conduct field trials to demonstrate the value of their product. He’s a Cornell biologist who studies grass (officially called “turfgrass”) and he thinks Pacific Kelp’s fertilizer could help make grass, or any number of other plants, more resistant to stressors like drought and pests. And as bans on certain insecticides go into effect, Wickings said this extract could help farmers replace them.
“When you’ve got the potential for a product like a seaweed extract to sort of up regulate those defenses and stress tolerance of the plant, that’s, I think, what drives a lot of the interest across the whole range of different agricultural sectors,” Wickings said.
The $500,000 research grant comes from the Southeast Conference, a regional economic development organization. The goal of the project is to strengthen Alaska’s mariculture industry while contributing to broader agricultural sustainability efforts. Stern hopes the research will stir up demand for kelp products by showing that they can save farmers money on things like irrigation and synthetic fertilizer.
“If every school in the country is spraying kelp on their turf grass, they’re using a lot less water and fertilizer, but they’re also using a lot more Alaskan kelp,” Stern said.
Pacific Kelp plans to get their extract certified as a basic fertilizer and onto shelves in the next few months. The research project over the next two years will help the company complete the much more rigorous process to register as a specialized biostimulant.
