“There are not people knocking down our door trying to buy kelp,” Heifetz observed. Heifetz and her husband, Matt Kern, founded Barnacle in 2016. This season, Sea Quester harvested a total of 8,025 pounds, most of which it sold to Barnacle Foods, a Juneau-based business that helped kick-start the state’s kelp industry. The kelp’s flexible stem, or stipe, trails downward as Lia Heifetz examines it. And it’s on fire.”Īntoni pulls the bull kelp from the water by attaching a long metal hook to a buoy and then grabbing the rope it’s attached to hand over hand. “The concern that we have about the mariculture industry is that there’s no plan for Alaska, America and the world, for that matter. “It’s one of the first regenerative industries based on restoration, conservation and mitigation, rather than extraction of finite resources,” said Lankard, who is Eyak Athabaskan. In the process, the oceans could become more industrialized - and there could be more competition among locals, and with outsiders, for waters off its shores. But Alaska’s nascent kelp industry also shows that growing the infrastructure and market for a new crop is not going to be easy, with everyone involved, including Lesh and Lankard, charting the path as they go along. It’s the kind of reinvention that has to take place if the agriculture industry is to shed its carbon-intensive ways. “There is a new seaweed economy that can be created,” said Dan Lesh, deputy director of the Southeast Conference, a regional business group in Alaska that’s helping distribute tens of millions of federal dollars to help develop the industry. The green dots are active kelp farm permits in Alaska (Molly O'Halloran For The Washington Post)
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