Watch: Scientists farm a superfood in the North Sea

euronews (in English)

In a region with limited daylight, Kelpinor relies on the technological tricks it has up its sleeve for growing seaweed.

Transcript

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.

05:51 [MUSIC PLAYING]

05:54 [MUSIC PLAYING]

05:57 [Music]

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