Kelp farming being explored in research project off Cape Cod, USA

The Cape Cod Times reports, 9th October 2017: The marine farm of the future could look like this: offshore fields of kelp growing on a latticework of line 8 feet below the waves, each section tethered by a single line to an anchor hundreds of feet below.

The farmer only has to go out to tend his crop occasionally because it is watched over by a fleet of robots, autonomous underwater vehicles that use an array of sensors to monitor growth and detect problems with the lines or the crop, sending data and photos to shore.

In big storms, the buoys holding up the perimeter of each array lowers it deeper in the water column, out of harm’s way.

Woods Hole Research Institution (WHOI) researchers Scott Lindell and Erin Fischell are recipients of a $5.7 million grant from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency to help make that vision a reality. Through technology, they hope to reduce the cost of growing kelp from its current price of approximately a dollar per pound to just a half-cent.

Kelp is already being farmed as food for humans, but the low production costs will open other markets like animal feed. The ultimate goal is to produce kelp in amounts that can become a major source of the biofuel ethanol.

“We know how important it is to find carbon-neutral fuels to stay competitive in the global market and be self-sufficient,” said Lindell, a visiting investigator at WHOI and director of the aquaculture program at the nearby Marine Biological Laboratory.

The grant is looking to expand the harvest of seaweed from 25 million wet mt to 300 million dry mt, providing 10 percent of the national demand for transportation fuel.

Using corn and other crops to produce ethanol is fraught with expense and environmental impacts including high water usage, expensive petroleum-based fertilizers, a lack of crop diversity, and extensive tracts of land that are producing food, thus driving up the cost of what we eat.

Plus, the federal government pays out billions in subsidies to farmers to grow it.

The WHOI project has two components, with Lindell, seafood biologists and geneticists developing a breeding program to develop strains of kelp that are tolerant of environmental conditions, like a wide range of ocean temperatures, and are 25 to 30 percent more productive than current wild stocks.

Lindell cautioned that this is not genetic modification but more like traditional selective breeding techniques used by farmers, sped up by the use of genegene A string of the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecule that is the fundamental unit of inheritance, so it is variations in the make up of this molecule in the gene that controls variations in an organism's appearance and behaviour. Genes are found in the nucleus of the organism's cells.-sequencing and other genomic tools.

The other track is overseen by Fischell, a WHOI and MIT robotics and acoustics researcher, whose team will experiment with various sensors loaded onto REMUS autonomous underwater vehicles looking for the best configuration to help future seaweed farmers.

These robot torpedoes would cruise under the kelp farm array of plants growing from wires and use a combination of acoustic sensors that can estimate mass, a fluorometer that measures light wavelength intensity to determine chlorophyll levels in the plants, and split beam sonar to record the length of each plant.

Initially, her team will be gathering data on how various configurations of the array affect growth and how the farms themselves impact their surrounding environment.

If a problem is suspected, the robot could use a camera system to send images back to shore to determine if anything is wrong and whether the farmer needed to make a trip out to take a look or do repairs.

The test array resembles a 200 foot-long hammock of tightly stretched wires, fastened to the bottom by an anchor at either end. He hopes the first array will be in the water either this month or next, and will grow over the winter with harvest in the spring. Researchers will grow 400 to 500 plots of various strains and experimental breeds of kelp to find out which combination works best.

The first phase will be relatively small in size and take place at a site near the Cape Wind meteorological tower in Nantucket Sound, about four miles north-east of Martha’s Vineyard. But Lindell believes the real farming will likely be done offshore, in water a few hundred feet deep where there are less conflicting interests.

By next fall, Lindell hopes to expand the test site to cover 1.25 acres.

 

Source: Cape Cod Times, 9th October 2017. For further details see
www.capecodtimes.com/news/20171009/woods-hole-researchers-test-underwater-farming-methods

 


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