Towards seaweed crop domestication: 3 innovations for a better, more reliable seed supply

Also: seaweed investment H1 data snapshot: slowing or growing?

“The bottleneck for large scale kelp farming is still crop domestication. Without proper domestication, cultivation remains unreliable and expensive.” Thus spoke Alexander Ebbing from Hortimare at the recent Seagriculture conference, adding: “Total control is the only way for large-scale kelp aquaculture to become successful.” To allow for that total control over reproduction and attachment,  Hortimare is looking to Multi Annual Delayed Gametophytes, which are able to grow vegetatively for prolonged periods of time.

Within kelp aquaculture there is no such thing as standardization at the moment. Every university has its own way of researching/propagating seaweed, every farmer has its own way of farming kelp. Open-source and built for around $2500, the SeaCoRe bioreactor chain is Ebbing’s attempt to bring the MAD gametophyte revolution within reach of farming operations of all sizes, and make the production process of kelp farming standardized and quantifiable for the first time.

Over in the US, Industrial Plankton also understood that reliable seed supply and selective breeding to improve crop yields will be key to making seaweed farming profitable. Their bioreactor system for continuous gametophyte production could turn out to be an important step to speed up that process of selective breeding.

The SeaCoRe system in action - via ResearchGate

A kelp database to kickstart selective breeding

Selective breeding is set to switch to a higher gear with last week’s unveiling of WHOI, UConn and Bigelow Lab’s 1200-sample strong kelp germplasm collection.

Creating the kelp germplasm collection with associated gene sequences and reference genome is like having an open-source road map for crop improvement,” said Scott Lindell. Seaweed living legend Charlie Yarish added: “This kelp culture collection will be essential for the preservation of heirloom strains, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem restoration and mariculture.”

The collection is part of Sugar Kelp Base, a database for advanced methods in kelp breeding.

H1 seaweed investment: slowing or growing?

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Looking at investments in seaweed startups in the first 6 months of 2022, we can see there have been a few less deals and only a third of the money invested compared to last year, but more deals than in 2020 (the amount was pushed up considerably at the end of June thanks to two Series A rounds for American startups: $7M for Symbrosia and $13M for Algiknit).

If asked to analyse the data, we’d say that 2021 will likely prove to have been a bumper year, but that the comparison with 2020 suggests that the longer-term trend is pointing upwards. Is there less deal-making than last year because there are too few investors, or too few bankable deals? Probably both.

Furthermore, the large amount of seed stage deals shows that the seaweed industry outside of Asia remains in a nascent stage.

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Bankruptcy news! Seamore, the seaweed pasta brand, is no more. The company was growing again after Covid, according to CEO Sodderland, but lacked the scale to continue carrying its debts. The Seamore mission continues, though: their product range has been taken over by Dutch organic food brand De Smaakspecialist.