People feel connected to NOFA because of our shared love of the land and farming and because we’ve gotten to know each other over the 50 years we’ve been around - from gathering at conferences to sharing best practices on farm tours to reading about each other’s farms. We at The Natural Farmer want to highlight the people who make up NOFA and hope we can feature at least one interview in every issue.
Want us to share your story? Have a farmer you’d like to interview? Contact TNF@NOFA.org if you’d like to be interviewed or interview somebody and get published in TNF.
I spoke to Sean Barrett earlier in the spring, as the spring migration of birds was obvious to anybody who works outside and on the land. The bird songs were easy to hear in the distance behind him. Not sure if they were gulls, but it sounded like he was near the ocean. We spent the first part of our conversation talking about birds and their calls, our shared appreciation for these species and their epic migration patterns (Sean is a self-proclaimed “bird nerd,” and if you haven’t geeked out with the Merlin Bird App, you should). The migration patterns of birds are changing because of climate shifts, and Sean says the same is being seen with fish. Both birds and fish that have never been spotted where Sean works, in and around Montauk, NY, are now arriving there regularly. As the waters warm, he’s seeing one species after the next shifting their migration path to the north. Even iconic species like Long Island lobster, once abundant in the Mid-Atantic region, are now heading to northern New England and Canada en masse, seeking cooler waters. Brown Pelicans, Roseate Spoonbills, and various other species of birds from the south are also arriving, to the shock of many naturalists who have never seen them here before. It’s bellwethers and alarming indicators of climate change such as these that inspired Sean to get into the local community seafood movement in the first place, founding the Dock to Dish program a dozen years ago that served as New York’s first Community Supported Fishery (see the article in this issue). And it’s that same concern over the changing climate that keeps him following his passion on a mission to find ways to decrease and capture carbon.
Sean founded Montauk Seaweed Supply Company on Long Island in 2021. It was created to support small-scale kelp farmers in selling their products and organic biostimulant products made exclusively from U.S. kelp crops. He’s also a consultant for Atlantic Seafarms in Biddeford, Maine and serves on the Board of NOFA-NY.
TNF: Briefly tell us about your farm or business. Where is it? Why you got started?
Sean: I am not a kelp farmer. There are quite a few folks out there pretending to be kelp farmers, I am not one. The real kelp farmers in our area were getting stuck with these kelp crops year after year because there wasn’t a market for them. I wanted to be a peripheral support mechanism for authentic kelp farmers so they could sell their harvest directly and create an economy to buoy these farmers. I got excited about kelp because of my interest in carbon capture and climate change. Kelp requires no fresh water or fertilizer to grow during any phase of their life cycle. Instead, they capture vast amounts of valuable marine nutrients from the surrounding water column while aggressively sequestering carbon, which the kelp then uses as structural building blocks for rapid growth at sea. The habitat kelp farms provide support tremendous fish populations. A recent Nature Conservancy study estimated that if sustainable bivalve and seaweed farming operations in the US scale to three times their current size by 2050, these nutrient and habitat values could provide value worth $17–$56 billion USD annually.
Once harvested, the kelp is converted into dry kelp meal. The refined kelp biomass becomes a pure and potent biostimulant that can be used to strengthen the soil in gardens, farms and landscapes. After application on land, the kelp meal rapidly improves soil health, supplies valuable micronutrients to vegetation, works to increase crop yields, improves soil water retention, and serves as a natural deterrent to many unwanted pests and insects.
It was important to me to create a marketplace for kelp in the business sector of aquaculture. There’s so much education and nonprofits in this sector - which, of course, is important, but I saw my role as an aggregator of the product really needed in order for small-scale kelp farmers to thrive in the marketplace.
TNF: What's the process to get the kelp to the customer?
Sean: People tend to be most familiar with “seaweed”. Kelp is a subcategory of seaweed. There are more than 10,000 species of seaweed. Here on Long Island, there are about 250. Right now, we grow Sugar Kelp, which is a fast-growing species that has impressive carbon capture capacities, but it also likes cold water temperatures and the mid-Atlantic region is getting warmer. So now, kelp farmers are beginning to explore a polyculture system and are experimenting with different species of kelp that are better adapted to warming waters.
There is a huge international commodities marketplace for seaweed, but hardly any is produced by US farmers. Around 99% is imported from outside the US and faces very limited regulations, so by trying to grow kelp locally, we’re really doing something different here. With most of the kelp coming into this country and the seaweed you know and see in your grocery stores or fertilizer supply shop, the origin is untraceable. There are frequently a lot of artificial colors and preservatives added to most of it. (I wouldn’t let any of my friends or family eat the imported stuff!) But consumers are often seeking cheap healthy products at a massive scale. As we know well with terrestrial crops, this is a formula for dangerous marketplace products, and that’s what the marketplace in this country looks like right now. Unfortunately, it probably won’t be until a big outbreak or sickness happens that something changes and heavier regulations are brought in. At that point, it will become clear and obvious why all this work we are doing to get a local kelp farming movement started will make sense.
So for now, at both Atlantic Seafarms and Montauk Seaweed Supply, we work with farmers across the Northeast and produce clean, wholesome, and heavily regulated kelp products. We make food products like veggie burgers and seaweed salads, which are available in most grocery stores and probably your local coop - as well as dried kelp powders for consumption and to use as biostimulants and fertilizer. Most of the kelp turned into food is harvested in Maine and New England while the kelp used for biostimulants and fertilizers is harvested in the Mid-Atlantic and Long Island region. Lots of facilities are needed to produce value-added foods and here in NY, with such high labor and real estate costs, we don’t and won’t have the facilities we need for large-scale kelp for food. So we make fertilizer products here, but because of our work at Atlantic Seafarms, you can find good, healthy, safe and delicious lines of organic seaweed in the marketplace, too. But it’s been a long journey to get here.
To work with us, first, a farmer needs access to water rights - they need to have a lease to the ocean or a bay. This is difficult to navigate, and there are a lot of restrictions, especially for farmers who haven’t been doing this for a while. Most kelp farmers in New York are also oyster farmers or lobster fishermen if they’re in Maine, so they have water access, equipment and leases already. Then, they also need the knowledge and know-how to grow and harvest kelp and to use and access equipment. We are able to go out and find the raw biomass from anybody who is growing it and we try to make ourselves accessible. Come mid-May, all the farmers will have a ton of products. This is when it can be dried, preserved, or fermented. (There’s also a very small market for fresh kelp with chefs.)
Drying it is pretty easy. We’ve been able to partner with the hemp industry here on Long Island, which has the same drying equipment we need for kelp. Since our busy season is their off-season, it works out great. They dry, grind, and mill the kelp, and we pay them a processing fee.
I’m really proud of our fertilizer product. We’re using sugar kelp, which is very sustainable and by using it, we’re not destroying fish habitat, which a lot of other similar products on the market cannot claim because almost all use rockweed - an essential fish nursery habitat. Just as important, the carbon sequestration potential of our product is far superior to any other on the market. Lastly, we sell it dried. It’s aquaphyllic, so a customer can mix it with water when they’re ready to use it. This means our price and cost to ship is nearly four times cheaper than some of our competitors who sell liquid extracts. We’re still really small but are continuing to run proofs of concept and slowly grow the business.
TNF: I keep hearing that the policies around kelp farming are tricky. Can you speak more about this and about the Kelp Bills that passed in 2021 - 2022?
Sean: The Kelp bill would allow farmers to access state bottomlands in Peconic and Gardiners Bay in Suffolk County, NY, to be leased for commercial kelp cultivation. This would greatly enable the kelp industry to expand for projects related to the conservation, restoration, or management of kelp forest ecosystems.
Overall, policy is messy. While I think we’re still at an intersection in this industry where we can either create a truly small-scale, horizontally structured industry or make the same mistakes that Big Ag did 60 years ago and “Go Big or Go Home” and vertically integrate, there’s tons of corporate interest right now. We’re fighting legislation designed to open public waters to widespread factory-farm-style raising of fish. And we’re fighting back against Big Ag behemoths like Cargill and Congressional members who stand to profit from policy like this. Don’t Cage Our Oceans, a coalition nonprofit now directed by the former NOFA-NY ED Andriana Natsoulas, is one of the leading organizations working to stop the development of offshore finfish farming in the US and uplift seafood systems led by local communities.
Of course, Indigenous folks are fighting for water rights, and we always support them whenever and wherever we can.
More locally, NOFA-NY recently made it an official policy of NOFA to support Indigenous Kelp farming.
This policy “ensures that kelp farms are in appropriate locations, of an appropriate size, and protects biodiversity, prioritize local, source-verified, organic kelp farmed from U.S. waters, including kelp produced by Indigenous farmers themselves working in this industry today and carrying on their ancestral techniques from which we all benefit and encourages organic certification through the development of strong standards that protect health and the environment.
TNF: What do you love most about the work you do at NOFA and why?
Sean: Getting to work with amazing people in this network. The more I learn, the less I realize I know. And there’s so much knowledge in the room in all the different places and in the NOFA meetings. Having my mind blown by passion and knowledge and experience, is powerful every time.
TNF: If somebody wants to get into kelp farming, what would you tell them?
Sean: (laughs) Call me and let’s talk first.