Watch: Scientists farm a superfood in the North Sea
In a region with limited daylight, Kelpinor relies on the technological tricks it has up its sleeve for growing seaweed.
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00:00 [ Music ]
00:03 My granduncle did kelp trawling from wild stocks
00:07 out in the banks along the coast from the 70s until the 2000s.
00:12 I had this vision around kelp and seaweed,
00:15 these beautiful plants dancing in the streams of water
00:19 and a lot of fish around.
00:21 When I grew up, I asked them, "So what can you use it for?"
00:25 They said, "Permit, it's everything."
00:29 My name is Herman Schibs.
00:32 We at Kalkinor are enabling the future through seaweed.
00:37 [ Music ]
00:45 We are farming seaweed to not only provide people
00:49 with a nutrient-rich source of food,
00:52 we want to change the world.
00:53 To change the world, you really need to find a niche
00:56 which is big and can become much bigger.
01:00 What are the bottlenecks of this industry?
01:02 What can we do to improve the sustainability
01:06 but also the efficiency of the industry?
01:09 So in this frame over there, we did an experiment
01:11 where we had more dense floaters.
01:13 So there's double the amount of lines in there.
01:16 And what we're working on is to grow more seaweed
01:19 in a smaller amount of space, which is going
01:22 to be really important because locations are one
01:24 of the limiting factors that we have.
01:27 [ Music ]
01:35 In general, farming of seaweed
01:37 or kelp farming is a super low-tech thing.
01:40 You have to be super careful
01:42 of the seedlings and with the seaweed.
01:44 If you look to the seaweed industry in Asia, it's all done
01:47 by a lot of hands and a lot of workforce.
01:50 The European seed industry is challenged.
01:53 We cannot afford to harvest a lot of times per year.
01:57 There's not technical revolution in all this work.
02:01 So what we are trying to do is automize processes.
02:05 [ Music ]
02:09 We are cultivating sugar kelp, which is one
02:13 of the most commonly produced seaweeds worldwide.
02:17 In the production cycle, you have different seasons.
02:20 In autumn, we collect fertile mother seaweed
02:24 and then transfer this fertile material,
02:26 the seedling material on our ropes, our growing substrate.
02:30 Then we pre-cultivate these little seedlings on our rope,
02:35 usually six to eight weeks in the lab
02:38 because we don't have too much light here
02:40 out in the winter and there's no way.
02:42 So we're cheating a little bit
02:43 and giving them all they want in the lab.
02:45 And then when they're big enough,
02:48 when the first sunlight is coming out again in spring,
02:51 we set them out into our ocean farm.
02:55 They grow from being only 15 millimeters to over one
02:58 and a half meters in six months.
03:02 When we had our first yield from the first batch,
03:04 I had tears in my eyes.
03:06 I was really proud.
03:10 Over the summer, harvesting vessels come
03:12 to our farm and harvest the seed.
03:15 We store it until we can process it.
03:17 Our innovation lies in the way
03:20 that we are now upgrading the hatchery for better
03:25 and more yield from the seedlings
03:27 and also having the systems for how to scale it
03:30 when it comes out to the ocean.
03:31 There was nothing that said that we should be able to do this
03:35 other than that we really wanted to.
03:37 The main focus for us now is that we need to collaborate more.
03:40 We're building it step by step by step
03:43 and actually being less fragmented, more oriented.
03:46 We now suddenly have this group, this ecosystem
03:50 for sharing ideas, problems, and of course also solutions.
03:54 One of the major problems with the climate crisis is
03:57 that we're continually adding new carbon dioxide
04:00 and greenhouse gases into the oceans and the atmosphere.
04:03 The idea is that you can use it also for carbon capture.
04:07 Kelp is a kind of plant.
04:09 So it uses carbon dioxide and sunlight to produce sugars,
04:15 to produce biomass, and it releases oxygen in the process.
04:20 As a plant, not using land area, not using fresh water,
04:25 we don't feed it, we don't use fertilizer or pesticides.
04:30 It's a very sustainable plant crop.
04:34 We can use seaweed.
04:36 It has so many of the building blocks for maybe even replace
04:40 our use of oil to make plastics and other materials.
04:45 We are looking in the direction of enzymes or pheromones
04:49 which stimulate, for example, plants to grow better.
04:53 Seaweed has a lot of exactly these bio-stimulants in it.
04:59 And if you mix it up and spray it over our crops
05:03 in the fields, they grow way better.
05:05 We are looking into the next year and using a lot
05:08 of our harvest for bio-stimulants in the European market.
05:12 Being in a climate startup which has a common goal is super cool.
05:17 You're not building only a company.
05:18 You're building a community.
05:20 We are colleagues, but we're also friends, and we want that.
05:25 This makes me motivated to work hour after hour
05:30 after getting the best people and the brightest mind
05:33 to work together in one direction.
05:36 And for what?
05:37 Well, to be able to tell our grandchildren
05:40 that we actually did something.
05:42 It's just going to grow and grow and grow,
05:45 because curious minds, they get it together,
05:48 exciting stuff will happen.
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