Taking the ‘ew!’ out of seaweed, one dish at a time

Slimy and sometimes smelly seaweed is not stuff most consumers dream of eating and Steve Backman of Magellan Aqua Farms gets that. So he plans to win North American taste buds over to this nutritious yet misunderstood crop one dish at a time.

Backman farms scallops, sugar kelp and sea lettuce in New Brunswick’s Passamaquoddy Bay. The farm started out farming just scallops but bio-fouling on the shellfish led him to add sea urchins to the mix. “The urchins actually helped keep the cages clean. They were like little ‘scrubbing bubbles,’ and that was our first foray into IMTA,” says Backman.

The farm’s progression to integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA) led  to conversations with Backman’s longtime friend, Dr Thierry Chopin, an IMTA advocate with the University of New Brunswick and founder of Chopin Coastal Health Solutions. Previous IMTA efforts had largely focused on fish farms. In their first year working together, they were mostly exploring kelp’s suitability to the site. The second year was spent finding the optimum depths for growing. Now, on their third year, they’re ready to expand.

“We’ve been putting in more lines,” says Chopin. “It is growing gradually, but that’s the right approach. Rather than saying, ‘oh yeah, let’s put in some lines.’ We experimented and we’re scaling up.”

 “We are using the existing scallop lines so the scallops are growing below the kelp, and the buoys that  mark the scallop lines actually become the attachment points for the sea vegetables,” says Backman. “We capitalized on the efficiency of the physical assets that are out there. We never had to add any new equipment or any new infrastructure to grow the kelp, we just incorporated it into the existing scallop long lines.”