In 1992, at the height of industrialized fishing in Newfoundland, the cod stocks collapsed and 30,000 people were out of work overnight. Boats beached. Canneries emptied. As a commercial fisherman, I was face-to-face with the reality that there would be no jobs on a dead planet, and went on a journey of ecological redemption.
After oyster farming on Long Island Sound for almost a decade, it all came to a screeching halt in 2011 and 2012 when Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy destroyed my farm. My farm and livelihood had become a canary in the coal mine for a climate crisis that arrived a hundred years ahead of schedule. Our fishing community needed another way forward.
Ocean farming is a trade both old and new, a job rooted in thousands of years of history, dating back to Roman times and Indigenous clam walls in the Pacific Northwest. It is also a way to synthesize the good and refuse the bad of industrial practices. We desperately needed a strategy based on one hard and fast rule: grow only zero-input species that won’t swim away and don’t need to be fed.
The design morphed into a vertical underwater garden: hurricane-proof anchors on the edges connected by horizontal ropes floating six feet below the surface. From these lines, kelp and other kinds of seaweed grow vertically downward, next to scallops in hanging nets, mussels held in suspension in mesh socks, oysters in cages on the seafloor, and then clams buried in the mud bottom.
Ocean farmers can partner with the ocean to simultaneously create jobs, feed the planet, and fight climate change.
These crops are regenerative—they breathe life back into the ocean. Shellfish and seaweeds are powerful agents of renewal. A seaweed like kelp is heralded as the culinary equivalent of the electric car. Oysters and mussels filter up to 50 gallons of water a day, removing nitrogen, a nutrient that is the root cause of the ever-expanding dead zones in the ocean. And these farms function as storm surge-protectors and artificial reefs, both helping to protect shoreline communities and attracting a range of aquatic species that come to hide, eat, and thrive.
This regenerative ocean farm design is replicable, affordable, and easy to build—it requires $20,000-$50,000, access to 20 acres of ocean, underwater rope scaffolding, and a boat. Once finished, it churns out a lot of food: up to 250,000 shellfish and 65 tons of seaweed on a mature 20-acre farm.
The regenerative ocean farm model is scalable. There are more than 10,000 plants in the ocean and hundreds of varieties of shellfish—we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of what we can grow. And the demand for these crops is not dependent solely on food; seaweed can be used as soil amendments, animal feed, biomaterials, and more.
These crops hit the climate sweet spot—requiring no fresh water, fertilizer, or feed while creating economic opportunities for coastal communities. Ocean farmers can partner with the ocean to simultaneously create jobs, feed the planet, and fight climate change. According to the World Bank, a network of ocean farms equivalent to less than 5 percent of US waters can have a deep impact with a small footprint, creating 50 million direct jobs, producing protein equivalent to 2.3 trillion cheeseburgers, and removing the carbon equivalent to 20 million cars.
In 2014, I co-founded GreenWave with Emily Stengel to replicate and scale regenerative ocean farming. GreenWave works to spur collaboration and innovation with a global network of farmers, entrepreneurs, and researchers, all hell-bent on building community-based climate solutions out at sea.
GreenWave works with ocean farmers to replicate the model throughout North America and beyond to build a blue economy that ensures we all make a living on a living planet. The goal is to train and support 10,000 ocean farmers by 2030 to build community-based climate solutions out at sea that yield positive environmental and economic impact at scale.
When more than 8,000 aspiring farmers signed up for GreenWave’s training program, the organization pivoted their strategy to expand their reach and jumpstart the industry. GreenWave launched the Regenerative Ocean Farming Hub in April 2022, a free online resource including a suite of seed-to-sale courses, more than 80 how-to videos, interactive farm design tools, and an online community for aspiring and active farmers to connect and propel the industry forward.
In addition to training and technical assistance, GreenWave supports small- and medium-scale seaweed farms through climate subsidies; market cultivation across food, agriculture, biomaterials, and other industries; as well as the development of farmer-owned kelp seed hatcheries, dock-side processing, and storage infrastructure.
With ocean agriculture still in its infancy, we have an unprecedented opportunity to build a food system from the bottom up. Together we can avoid the mistakes of industrial agriculture and aquaculture, farm for the benefit of all, not just the few, and weave economic and social justice into the DNA of the blue-green economy, all while creating millions of jobs and feeding the planet.
