Maine Seaweed: The Next Super-Food?

[Islander]

Fred Bever
April 22, 2016

A growing cadre of entrepreneurs think seaweed could help Maine lead a new revolution in American farming. Move over kale – there’s a new super-food on the scene.
It requires no fresh water or soil. It’s packed with fiber and micro-nutrients, and cleans the environment as it grows.
On a recent and chilly spring day, Peter Fischer is hauling macro-algae from the floating farm he’s helped to establish just off the coast.
Fischer and Peter Arnold, one of his partners in a new startup called Maine Fresh Sea Farms, run a skiff around the Damariscotta River, making their weekly harvest of three different types of seaweed - kelp, alaria, and dulse.
They winch up a rope that’s heavy with waving fronds of filmy, glistening kelp. They first set tiny starter plants near the surface of their two-acre lease here back in September. they marvel at the the plants’ speedy growth – including their stalks, or stipes.

Keep reading: http://news.mpbn.net/post/maine-seaw...-food#stream/0

[megan49]

Wow, that's cool. I noticed in the last two years when i went to harvest seaweed for my garden that the place i go is close to picked clean nearly every day. I think a local company is harvesting what washes up and it drying and selling it. I know it's plentiful but i can't help thinking that you don't pick a place clean. You always leave something in reserve.

[Islander]

Are you near the Maine coast, Megan? I'd eagerly go harvest some for me or my garden but I can't think of a place that isn't rockbound and inaccessible, or on private property, and I don't have a boat. And you're right: any wild crafting should leave a portion to regenerate.

Would you go to the New Members forum and introduce yourself so we can give you a proper welcome?

[megan49]

Oh, yes, i'll head over to the New Members forum now. Yes, i'm about five minutes from the coast, and like to pick my seaweed at one place that turns to a lovely muck at low tide.

[Julieanne]

Happening in Connecticut too:

http://www.hawkeshealth.net/communit...hlight=seaweed

We are no longer allowed to collect seaweed from the beach in Oz. Some environmental reason, but I never found out exactly what it was. I used to collect it for my garden.