Farming the Water

(birds squawking) (soft music) (pepper grinder) - I live on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine, in a little town right on the sea.

I've learned a lot about shellfish from the local oyster farmers here.

Mmm, they're so tender.

Fresh seafood has always been a big part of my life.

- Welcome aboard.

Just watch your step up.

We're excited to take you down the bay and show you the farm.

(soft music) - Dad fancied himself a fisherman.

When the blues were running off the coast of New Jersey, we would get in the car about 3:00 AM, get on a party boat down near Asbury Park.

We would be pulling them in like amazing numbers.

One day, we brought home 95 large bluefish.

But those were different times.

Our climate is changing, and the way we harvest seafood is changing too.

Oh, look at this.

I think it's really important for us to grow food in a sustainable, useful, and exciting way.

Ooh!

Hello.

(chuckles) - She's talkative.

- I'm Martha.

(both chuckle) (soft music) (soft music) It's our only home.

And our oceans are its greatest resource.

(birds squawking) They cool our warming planet.

They help feed our growing population.

But we are asking more of our oceans than ever before.

(birds squawking) (soft music continues) (moves to gentle music) Around the world, we're eating twice as much seafood as we did 50 years ago.

Many of our most popular species have been overfished, some to the brink of collapse.

(gentle music) Feeding more people while also saving our oceans may seem impossible.

But aquaculture, the farming of seafood, is already providing a way forward.

- Aquaculture is growing really, really fast.

It's becoming more important in our food sector, and could hold all sorts of other beneficial aspects that people are starting to uncover.

The challenge then is can we do it better?

Because we're gonna be doing it more, it is going to fill the gap as population continues to increase and people are demanding more seafood products.

It's good, it's, like, sweet and salty and crunchy.

- There are people working to make aquaculture more sustainable in more places than ever before.

(leaves rustling) (soft music) (combine engine roaring) - It's nice you got the field opened up and headlands off already for the day.

Farming in general, it's very challenging, extremely challenging.

The margins are so narrow, we've gotta turn a lot in order to make a living.

It's always been a family farm.

My grandpa and grandma started on raising beef cattle.

(cow mooing) (gentle bright music) In '79 and '80, my mom and dad built a dairy operation.

I suppose we got 2, 2.5 days of combinin' soybeans left.

My dad has had some health issues, and back in 2015, the doctor more or less made the comment that either the cattle need to go or dad's gonna go.

That was a pretty simple decision that it's time for the dairy to move on and start a new chapter in life.

We had the dairy sale, the dairy cattle left the facility, and then one day, my mother had stumbled across an article about raising saltwater shrimp.

We all laughed about it, we joked about it, because, you know, who in the right mind would raise saltwater shrimp in the state of Minnesota?

Looking back, what a blessing in disguise.

I put an order in for, I think it was 21 swimming pools.

And of course, I did have a few neighbors that stopped up on the place and asked, "Did you bump your head, Paul?"

(gentle bright music) (water gushing) I can remember it was like yesterday when I got my first batch of babies, post-larvae, or PL, babies in.

They're the size of an eyelash, with two little eyeballs.

Yeah, and that looks pretty doggone good.

Or it looks good.

Let 'em go into a swimming pool, all of a sudden they disappear.

To take that leap of faith and to be raising shrimp in the state of Minnesota, was I successful?

(soft bright music) Yes.

(determined music) The only thing is, the shrimp industry here in the United States, the success rate is not the greatest.

Like any other business, I mean you've gotta be able to produce X amount of units in order to be profitable.

And one of the biggest challenges is getting your babies.

(wind gusting) We had hatcheries down in Florida, but they keep getting wiped out by the storms.

All of a sudden, it was eye-opening that this is a problem.

I think being in agriculture, I don't wanna say we're stubborn, but we don't give up.

I knew that coming forward, we need to have a hatchery.

I just needed a little bit more help.

(birds chirping) (dog barking) - I grew up on a farm.

I always wanted to farm.

It was what I wanted to do.

So, I built a poultry operation in 1980.

The industry seemed to be going really well, and then, boom.

(brooding music) Avian influenza was in 2015, the first round of it.

(truck engine roaring) By the middle of June, we'd killed 40 million birds in the Midwest.

40 million.

And it was that one shutdown barn with me looking at it, saying, we gotta figure something out here because I can see the handwriting on the wall.

This is gonna get worse.

I read articles in the paper about Paul's shrimp operation, and I went to visit Paul.

He gave me the business plan for a hatchery, and thought if anybody can do it, this guy can, so I put money in it.

- And the rest is history.

There's a nice one.

The broodstock room.

That's where all of our mating males and females are at.

- Playin' hard to get today.

- Yeah.

Once the females have spawned, we transfer the babies there in the tank for roughly 21 days, and that's when other shrimp farmers take 'em into their facility.

- So this room will be our next step.

- We've got six tanks in here currently.

We do have capacity or capabilities of putting two more in here.

- Our goal would be first to do a million baby shrimp a month.

But right now, we just wanna put out 30,000 just to prove we can do it.

(soft music) - Now in the hatchery, it's a steep learning curve, and we've had a few hurdles that we didn't foresee, and we're losing- We're losing...umm You know, we lose a tank of babies... We're just collecting the baby nauplii from last night's spawn.

- It's an always battle to have it clean enough for them in here.

(soft music continues) There is nothing out there that tells you how to breed and spawn and raise the baby shrimp.

And it has been a trial-and-error learning process.

- We're trying to reproduce the ocean environment to the best of our ability right here in the state of Minnesota.

- I do not know what pieces we're missing right now.

We really need help from the outside.

(soft music continues) (shopping cart rattling) - [Martha] Shrimp is one of the most popular seafoods on the planet.

Nearly 2/3 of all the shrimp we eat are farmed.

- There's this kind of perception of wild is better and farmed maybe is bad in these westernized contexts.

But like all food systems, there are better producers and there are worse producers.

(vehicle engines roaring) (vehicle horns honking) - [Martha] Vietnam is one of the world's largest shrimp suppliers.

That output has come with problems.

- In aquaculture in the last 50 years, we are recreating what we did for 5,000 years with terrestrial agriculture: domesticating aquatic plants, aquatic animals, just like we farm land plants and land animals.

As the industry has grown, there've been some false starts: overuse of antibiotics, effluents that weren't treated properly.

Then again, just like we have terrestrial farmers, we have some who are very environmentally conscious and some that take shortcuts.

- [Martha] The shrimp industry in Vietnam shows how aquaculture can go wrong, and how it can be done right.

- Vietnam has a very rich culture of eating seafood starting from thousand of years ago.

(pole thudding) (people chattering) This is four pounds for $12.

(people chattering) Shrimp farming is a very young business.

I think the first modern shrimp farming happened about 40 years ago, but is a very big industry.

Vietnam is producing roughly about 1 million tons of shrimp that result in an export turnover of over $4 billion and creating millions of jobs.

(people chattering) (gentle music) My father has been a professor in the university, teaching how to farm fish and shrimp.

And he brought back a lot of fish and shrimp to feed the family, so I started to love seafood.

I got a PhD at the University of Arizona on shrimp pathology and environmental science.

During the time of my PhD, a new pathogen caused a lot of panic for the industry.

Thousands of farmers lost their income.

There was a very big team of experts all over the world, including the University of Arizona, and I was very lucky to be part of the team.

- At the time, we didn't know if it was environmental pesticides, toxic algae blooms, viral, bacterial.

We didn't know.

And so, Loc got some samples, came back to America, worked on them there, then he went back to Vietnam, and finally figured out it was actually two pathogens kinda working together.

He solved the problem for the industry and able to address it not only in Vietnam, but Thailand, and China, and other countries as well.

Best guesstimates were a billion to $2 billion in losses for the industry in Southeast Asia when it hit.

So the ability to have that technology right there in Vietnam is critically important.

- I returned to Vietnam to build a laboratory in early 2014.

But then, I received more and more requests from farmers, "Hey, Dr. Loc, how can we farm shrimp more successfully?"

And that was why we built a farm.

(boat engine roaring) So we're heading to our farm, ShrimpVet Farm.

This area is considered as the lung of the city of Ho Chi Minh, 'cause it has 70,000 hectares of untouched mangrove conservation.

Mangrove is considered one of the most vulnerable but most important ecosystems in the world.

(gentle music) - In the 1980s, '90s, demand for shrimp was increasing around the world.

We had already maxed out the wild harvest of shrimp, and so shrimp farming came on just very, very quickly.

Shrimp farmers bulldozed mangrove areas and started building ponds.

Mangroves are incredibly important nursery areas for shrimp, and fish, and crabs.

They're also really important for protection of seacoast and water quality.

Within 20 years, we were finding a lot of abandoned shrimp ponds, we were having disease problems.

So Vietnam was one of the early countries that made mangrove destruction illegal.

- [Loc] Watch out.

(chuckles) - Yeah.

- I think we can do our culture, but at the same time, we can protect the environment.

- [Loc] Oh, here.

- [Farmer] Yes, here.

- About 30 years ago, this farm belonged to a group of my father's friends, and then the farm got wiped out because of one viral disease, and then they abandoned the farm.

So let's go have a look.

Eight years ago, my father and his friends all agreed, let's give that farm to that idiot and see what the hell he can do.

(chuckles) (soft music) (water gushing) Disease is the consequences of wrongdoing at the farm.

Nowadays, we use plastic-lined shrimp ponds, and then treating the water, treating the waste, and ensuring the food safety is very important.

So this is a wastewater treatment pond, but you may not smell anything because the water has been treated with probiotics in our pond.

And that is why the water is good enough to release already.

But we don't do it.

We still pump it into the fish pond and let the fish treat it again.

- There's plenty of fish that actually eat the fecal matter from shrimp and can use that as nutrients.

Tilapia is one of them.

And so, having this polyculture system, where the waste from one animal is nutrition for another animal, has become very important.

- The water, after being treated by the fish, then at some point, it will overflow to the canal going through the mangrove that we reforest.

(Loc grunts) (soft music) Fresh shrimp.

They are antibiotic-free.

And you can also see the color, the firmness of the shrimp.

So these are healthy, beautiful animals and ready to eat.

(shovel scraping) - We had almost two months with no live babies on this place.

(soft brooding music) We have done everything we can think of to figure out why we tend to lose them or why we tend to have contamination.

- Yeah.

- Actually, I wouldn't even count those.

(laughs) - That was a failure.

- I mean, you know what I mean.

Maybe 100 or a couple.

- [Paul] This hatchery has been a extremely steep learning curve.

- We actually have long looked for somebody to help us, but the industry is that closed.

(soft music) - There's days where I wanna throw the towel in.

You know what?

Next tank.

- Yeah.

I mean, how long are we gonna keep doing this?

- I had calls from roughly 60 shrimp farmers here in the United States saying if we don't have babies, we're not gonna make ends meet.

It weighs on me because financially, this has put a lot of people in jeopardy.

(soft music continues) - Farmers are the one that create the most value for the entire food production chain, but they are the most vulnerable.

(motorbike engine roaring) (soft music) I've been visiting shrimp farmers in Vietnam a lot, and other countries as well.

We learn a lot from them.

We also understand we need to do something in order to help them.

- This farmer has about three hectares.

But this land does not belong to him, he rent it from an owner.

And the problem is, because the pond is poorly constructed, it was very difficult for him to farm.

In two months, we could make about roughly $400.

Yeah, just to make a living for his family.

- In Vietnam, the vast majority of shrimp are mom and pop type family operations.

And many times, it's just like a lot of American farms, where they have another job on the side.

This is supplemental income for the family.

And so, they do need some training on the best way to farm their shrimp and protect the environment.

- What we are trying to do is to create a business model that allows farmers to farm shrimp a lot more efficient.

And with that, we need to be able to produce clean post-larvae.

2015, we started with a humble hatchery.

At that time, the hatchery business was very exclusive.

They want to keep their own secret recipe.

But it was really tough for us at the beginning, but then after a little while, we could expand our hatchery to the size of today.

One tank like this can accommodate about half a million baby shrimp.

So from this little tank, it's enough to serve for dinner of 100,000 people later.

So this is the power of science.

Yummy shrimp.

(chuckles) But let's think about something bigger: how to move the industry forward.

And that is the reason why we believe in transparency and sharing.

(determined music) Morning, guys.

(chuckles) - [Paul] Good mornin', Loc.

- It's evening here.

(laughs) - How are you?

- Doin' good.

- You know, first of all, it's fascinating to know that you are running/operating a hatchery inland of United States in cold temperatures, which is blowing my mind.

You guys, I'm very, very excited.

Very excited.

- We were really excited to get an invitation to have a Zoom meeting with Loc.

With all of my years of research and breeding shrimp, Loc has always come at the top of the searches.

- So we have a detailed probiotic protocol I can share with you, no problem, all data.

I'll share with you a document how I prepare the water.

- Mm-hmm.

- That would be wonderful.

- In this one little call, he went through their protocol for cleaning the water.

You could see how open he is, how much he cares about bringing the industry forward, but he wants everybody to come forward at once.

- So if you have a chance to visit Asia, please stop by our facility.

Yeah, you're most welcome.

- I also thought it was real confirming for us that what he's saying he did, we're so close now in all the steps we've taken that it's like, oh, we might be almost there.

(laughs) - We have made several, several modifications, and then also, I mean, we've got a hatchery consultant that we visit with on a daily basis.

So, we think we've got (chuckles) the root of the problem figured out.

Oh, now look at, now look at them all!

Holy!

- Just look at- - Oh!

- Wow!

Isn't that somethin'?

- Yay!

- This is some of the best tanks that we've had.

(Paul laughing) My youngest son, Frederick, just graduated from college.

A younger generation comes in with a totally different outlook.

You know, we're close, we've come a long ways, and now with a little polishing and a little assistance, hopefully, we can continue to move forward.

- We always had this dream that we could take empty barns and revitalize areas, create jobs for people who want 'em.

We have to start finding these other places that we can produce food for the world, and I think it can change rural Minnesota, rural America.

- You know, the more I work with farmer, I appreciate all the dedication they have made.

And in like five minutes... We become friends.

(soft music) We will need to produce more to support the population.

(vehicle engines roaring) (vehicle horns honking) With all the technology we have out there, we can farm shrimp and fish more sustainably.

- Everything's enclosed, we have very little waste product, we can recirculate the water, so it's a win-win for the environment, people's food supply.

It's a win for us as individuals.

It's a win if more people can do this.

- [Martha] Aquaculture can also take pressure off wild fishing as demand increases.

- But I do gotta show you something else a minute.

Follow me here.

(soft music continues) So these are Minnesota born raised shrimp.

We've grown out a couple batches now so that we can get data.

Barb and I'll be eating these in a couple weeks.

(chuckles) These are gonna be good.

These are gonna be good.

(truck engine roaring) (soft music) - I grew up sailing, and when I was 12, my family sailed our boat from Albany, New York, up to South Bristol, Maine, and I became infatuated with lobstering.

I wanted to be a lobster man, making a living on the water.

But getting a lobster license is quite hard.

In Maine, we have a waiting list for lobstering and licenses are scarce, and there's also warming waters.

- [Martha] The Gulf of Maine is the fastest warming body of water on the planet.

- The lobsters are moving because it's getting hot, and their food is moving.

That is rooted in climate change.

- There used to be lobsters down in Long Island, and Massachusetts, quite plentiful in the inshore fisheries, and they're definitely moving further northeast.

So there's a question mark as to what will happen and when that will happen in Maine.

- When the environments change, so do the species dynamics, right?

So you're gonna have these types of trickle-down effects from climate change impacting people, impacting the entire ecosystem.

So the future is going to be more dependent on aquaculture, largely because we've tapped out our wild capture fisheries.

- [Worker] Seven, the order already paid.

(soft music) Number 77.

- [Baby] Scallop.

- Yeah.

- Scallops, yeah.

- Do you like scallops?

And so, thinking about sustainability of what I can do on the water, I was drawn to aquaculture.

And a good friend of mine was like, "people love scallops, prices have historically been strong, and so if we can figure out how to grow these things, we can sell 'em."

- I think we have to respect what is around us and we have to replace what we have taken, we have to encourage new growth where it has stopped.

We have to really work very hard to make sure that these species stay alive and well.

So I was anxious to see what Andrew and his crew were doing out there in Penobscot Bay.

- Welcome aboard.

Just watch your step up.

We're excited to take you down the bay and show you the farm.

(boat engine roaring) (gentle music) We're new to this.

We've only been doing this for five years, roughly, and we're still learning a lot each year.

- How many people are farming scallops like this?

- As far as I know, there's probably two or three of us on a commercial scale on the East Coast.

Normally, we harvest them after two years on the farm.

We will probably harvest between 20 and 30,000 scallops, and that's up from roughly 8,000 last year.

A scallop is a bivalve that lives on the ocean floor.

- [Martha] Scallops are fascinating creatures, with two beautiful shells.

The part that we eat is the muscle that opens and closes those shells.

- Bivalves are a particular class of organisms, are very prone to sustainable aquaculture.

Because they are passively feeding by filtering the water, they return the particles from which they derive their food and their growth, and they return cleaner water instead.

(gentle music) - [Martha] So what's in there?

So these are the bags we use to collect the seed.

Yeah, so inside here, there's lots of little spats, so scallops about the size of your pinky fingernail.

- [Andrew] So when scallops spawn, the egg turns into a larvae, and that's what we call spat.

- [Martha] You put this right in there?

- [Andrew] Nope.

There's no hatchery, so you can't go out and just buy seed, you have to catch it yourself.

They collect in there naturally.

So we put these out- - How do they get through?

- Because they're microscopic larvae.

- Oh, look at this.

- [Andrew] So they're just floating in the water column.

- [Martha] That is a scallop.

I don't wanna hurt them.

- They attach themselves onto the netting, and then they start to grow a shell.

And then once they start growing a shell- - Look how many.

- They can't get out of the netting, so.

- You have hundreds in here.

- [Andrew] Yeah.

- [Martha] So these have been in here a year?

- Just about, yeah.

- Now all of these go into the next sized net?

- [Andrew] Yes.

Stick the funnel in there and just give it a scoop.

- [Martha] And there's enough nutrients in the water to feed all of these.

- [Andrew] Yeah, lots.

- Isn't that great?

- Cleaning.

- Look what I found.

Ah!

- Oh, a starfish.

- Look.

- [Andrew] So that's our number one enemy.

They're keepin' the sea floor clean of baby scallops.

- Oh my gosh, so that should go back in the sea, right?

- [Andrew] Yeah.

Well, yeah.

- What?

You can't- you- Come.

- We're joking.

- Right?

- [Andrew] Yeah, that goes back.

Toss it back.

- That goes back.

- [Andrew] Here we go.

Awesome.

Yes.

- Okay, that's it.

- That's it.

We'll set these out.

We use a static submerged long line.

Off of that horizontal portion of the long line, we will hang different types of gear depending on the stage of growth of the scallop.

So you've got this, essentially, like a curtain of nets in the water.

When the scallops grow from fall through the winter and into the spring, where once they're large enough.

- [Martha] Oh, look at this.

Ah!

- [Andrew] We then take the scallops back onboard the boat.

- Oh my gosh, you have to be strong.

- [Andrew] We grade them for size, and then we do our ear hanging process.

- Ooh, hello, (chuckles) I'm Martha.

- [Andrew] So this drill drills a hole into the bissel notch so the hinge will have a hole to then put the scallops on the dropper line.

- Wow, sounds like a dentist's office.

- It does.

(drill whirring) You're doing great.

I think you're angling for a job, Martha.

- I can work in any business, believe me.

- Yeah.

So we've drilled the scallops, they each have a hole in 'em.

So we've got our dropper line and it's got the pins already through the line, and so we're gonna put 'em- - So they have one hole in one ear.

- One hole each.

Yep, exactly.

And we just- - You have to find the hole.

- [Andrew] Push it past that bar.

- Can you see this little bar, and then when you pull back, it can't go out.

- I can't go out, yeah.

- That is ingenious.

- Yeah, very simple.

- So look how pretty.

And then, they are going to be happily dropped back into the ocean, where they will stay yet another year.

- Yet another year, or two.

Grow and grow.

It's incredibly labor intensive.

Over the course of a scallop's lifespan, they're each handled upwards of seven times or more.

- It is a process.

- It sure is.

And then, there's also risk in what we're doing.

Particularly our dropper lines, if they touch the bottom at all, there's an army of crabs and starfish down there that are waiting to feast.

Or, you know, a windjammer could come along and total our gear, and we'd be outta luck.

But when you're out there every day, and you see the scallops, pull 'em on board and they're clapping or they're swimming around in the tank, it's like, that's the energy and that's the drive.

- They're certainly environmentally conscious of the ocean.

They understand that food has to come from somewhere.

And to see a group of young men trying to do something a little bit different with the fishery business in America is very encouraging.

Farming can also be friendlier to the environment than the traditional methods of collecting wild scallops in Maine.

- Wild scallops are caught, normally, two different ways.

The majority are dragged along the ocean floor.

And then, the other way is diving for them.

Or they'd scoop up scallops one at a time.

Oh, we can shuck one.

(knife rasping) Candy.

Scallop candy.

- Hmm.

Sushi quality.

- [Andrew] Yes.

Yeah.

They don't get better than right outta the shell.

(soft music) - I think the whole trend of eat local, buy local, grow local couldn't be better.

- Do you like cooking?

- Like, yeah.

- Yeah?

- Awesome.

Most folks aren't aware that we're farming scallops.

The first question is normally where do they come from?

And there's great surprise when we tell them they're from right here, Penobscot Bay.

- Thank you so much.

- Yeah, you're quite welcome.

Enjoy.

Keep cookin'.

And also that they can get fresh Maine scallops in the summertime, out of the season from the wild harvest.

(knife scraping) (soft music continues) - The role aquaculture can play in the sustainable production of food.

We can see growing things like seaweeds and bivalves have very, very low impact in comparison to many other foods that we produce.

They can pull nutrients and CO2 out of the water, as well.

And so, you can have these kind of mutual co-benefits.

- [Martha] There is our gorgeous scallop salad.

- Mmm.

Wow, I love it.

(Martha chuckles) (soft music) - This kind of creative farming is extremely important for the future of the planet.

And if we can keep these oceans healthy and not warm them too much, maybe we do have a future for the fishing industry, and a future on earth.

(soft music continues) (birds chirping) (water sploshing) - My Eyak name is Jamachakih, which means little bird that screams really loud and won't shut up.

(soft music) You know, we say that the Eyaks moved out of the interior down to the coast 3,500 years ago, and we decided to stay here in Cordova until it quit raining.

Well, it's been raining ever since.

(soft music continues) (rain pattering) (seal moaning) (birds squawking) (ball thudding) Need a little more arch.

When I was a kid, in Cordova, you either played basketball, you wrestled, or you were a swimmer.

I wasn't very good and I was really tiny, and I said, "Is this it, Mama?

Am I gonna get taller?

And I wanna be a good basketball player for this town."

And she said, "Well then you're just gonna have to work a little bit harder than everyone else."

- Oh yeah!

Woo-hoo!

Mama was right.

What'd I say?

It's been a while.

(soft music) Cordova is right in the center of two beating hearts of the Prince William Sound and the Copper River delta.

It's always been a way of life that was comparable to none.

It's wild, it's pristine, it's roadless.

(soft music continues) (boat engine roaring) I'm a commercial fisherman by trade, and I grew up in a fishing family, so my education comes from the ocean.

And they're coming from the east.

- [Farmer] Yep.

- You gotta think like a fish if you're gonna catch a fish.

(gentle music) You're able to just be in the elements.

You know, I can feel the wind blowing through my hair, and you feel alive.

My entire life, I've pioneered fisheries.

I've done everything you can imagine with seafoods - Yee-hoo!

- When I was 10, 11, 12 years old, my first income from the sea was harvesting kelp.

We've been harvesting it for thousands of years, as native people.

So here I find myself at the end of my fishing career back on the ocean for a kelp.

And so, now I'm a kelper.

It's beautiful.

To me and our people, we've always lived on the absolute bounty and beauty of this place.

- [Narrator] Born next to fishing, Alaska's chief resource today lies in her minerals.

- [Narrator] This innocuous pile of yellow mineral is gold.

- [Dune] Every outsider that comes here, they want to take.

(tree crashing) (soft music) Being a port of extraction, they've taken billions of dollars of resources.

- [Narrator] Alaska's first commercial oil well was struck in 1907, but it wasn't until the 1950s that major fields were discovered.

(soft music continues) - What happens when people discover places like this, they wanna come love it to death.

(bell tolling) (ship horn bellowing) - [Narrator] The spring of '89 will always be remembered here as a time of desperate suffering.

Almost 2,000 kilometers of coastal waters were fouled by 11 million gallons of crude oil spilled by the tanker.

- To see the Exxon crude spew into the Sound and go onto the beaches, and kill wildlife, take out our herring, take out our fishing, the sea otters, the birds, the fisheries, everything collapsed.

This town collapsed.

(soft music) - [Narrator] The oil is everywhere.

There's simply no escape.

I saw... - I saw how my homelands and the way of life that I knew, that was comparable to none... just be treated badly.

Our beloved delta and our way of life is taken away.

That was the day the ocean died.

(soft music) But something in me came to life, and I realized that I had to live up to my Eyak name, Jamachakih, and that I had to be louder than everything else.

There's still dead zones out in Prince William Sound, and now indigenous peoples living along the coast they no longer have a subsistence way of life that is easily accessible to them.

So I decided to start the Native Conservancy because I wanted to figure out how they're gonna survive and how they're gonna create an economic alternative to what is no longer there.

(tranquil music) In California, Oregon, and Washington, where they clear cut their forest and all their salmon died, they wondered why.

So we won.

Saved it all.

We saved a million acres.

- [Mother] Oh my gosh, you have more goodies?

- [Andrew] Yeah, I got some Copper River reds for you.

- Put a lot of energy into our food security programs.

- [Mother] Is that cold?

That's fish.

Can you say fish?

- Fish.

- Fish.

- And figure out how we are gonna grow kelp and create mariculture ocean farms.

(saw whirring) And you better have a good boat that's safe and reliable that's gonna take care of you and your family while you go out to sea.

What we're hoping with this ocean farming industry is that we'll be able to help indigenous peoples change their relationship with the sea and their food sources that they traditionally have harvested for thousands of years.

We have 10 test lines out in Prince William Sound in different spots to see what will grow where.

- All right, that's good.

- I'll just pull it up here.

It's farming, but instead of having to add fertilizer, you're pulling things outta the ocean.

It's regenerative.

This stuff really is the best we've ever grown.

(soft music) - Alaska has more coastline than even the lower 48 combined.

We are really looking towards kelp and mariculture as a booming industry.

We are very hopeful that it will expand and be very inclusive of all the people who live along the coastline.

We're fast learners, and I think that we will be picking up speed very quickly.

- In order to grow this kelp, you have to go and source your seed.

So we actually had to dive down and take the kelp.

And that mother seed is the seed that you need to start your kelp farm.

Then once you deploy it, you gotta figure out how to monitor it over the course of the winter.

- All right.

- Good.

- Then you harvest in the spring, then you process it and get it into a shelf-stable state, whether it's frozen or blanched or dehydrated.

Once you figure out the process and what works and what doesn't work, then it gets a little easier and you get a little better, you get a little bolder, you grow more kelp.

- [Farmer] Ooh, it is big.

- Yummy.

- Yeah.

- Bull kelp is beautiful.

Some of those wild bull kelp bubbles can get like this big, right?

And those whips can be 15 feet long, if not longer.

- Look at that.

- [Farmer] We gotta cheers.

Yay!

- [Farmer] Mmm.

- Kelp provides habitat for biodiversity, it removes carbon dioxide, injects oxygen in the water, buffers turbulence, and improves water quality by removing excess nutrients and so on.

So seaweed aquaculture is regenerative.

It improves the health of marine environments and it provides food and livelihoods to people.

And we are also now able to source a number of very important products from seaweed.

- Kelp is the hemp of the sea.

We should be figuring out how to make these cosmetics, and bioplastics, and clothing, and pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals.

- Okay.

- Compost or fertilizer.

- [Jim] Can you write down 252 for the sugar?

- [Dune] Or if you take animal feed and add kelp and feed it to cows and pigs, it reduces their emissions by up to 80%.

I mean, the list goes on.

- [Jim] 73 for that ribbon kelp.

Can you write that down?

- So I wanted to make sure that we got permitted, that we knew how to build our farms, that we could build a market, and reduce the cost of doing business to make it affordable for indigenous communities.

(birds chirping) (water sploshing) (metal clanking) (brush scraping) I love the color of our sockeyes.

Have you seen the sockeyes from other areas?

They don't have the color of these Copper River sockeyes.

- This summer around last year was good.

I was really poor and just had a baby.

Covid had just kinda started, and they asked me if I could build their kelp farms, they showed me a couple of schematics.

That's how I got started kelp farming.

I just got issued a permit.

It's just gobs of paperwork that Native Conservancy took care of it, all the hoops to jump through.

The problem I see with kelp farming, it's sort of at the mercy of the federal management and the state management, and they, how do I put this?

They have a track record of reallocating the resource to the highest bidder.

And to me, that's the biggest problem.

There's no native preference.

- We do want a seat at the table.

We want a seat at every table where decisions are being made and policy is being discussed.

And this is no exception.

All of the things that are edible in Alaska have been eaten by native Alaskans for a long time.

And we have perfected the way it is processed and preserved, and then integrated back into our diet.

(soft music) (stove clicking) - There's about 250 or more food products that you can make outta kelp.

But a lot of people don't know how to prepare it and eat it.

And so, with this kelp, we add it like we did a traditional fish burger.

- The kelp cakes are made out of celery, kelp, onion, and your seafood meat of choice.

Crab.

- There you go.

Since we didn't have ovens, what the Eyaks would do is take a layer of kelp, layer of berries, layer of kelp, some smelt or hooligan, and then another layer of kelp, and they would cold-press it, and then dry it.

And if you're gonna go on any long journeys, you just throw one of those bricks of kelp in your bag and go.

And this was probably one of America's first energy bars.

Make 'em a little bit smaller; they're easier to fry.

(gentle music) We have several adaptations to the Eyak's kelp cake.

We wanted to be able to show people how to make something fairly quickly that was not very expensive but tasted delicious.

We grew up on 'em.

It was one of the quickest, fastest ways to feed seven little Indians.

Kelp is highly nutritious, it has 14 different vitamins.

Some species have 10 times more calcium than milk.

And it makes a good base for a lot of things that you should be eating.

- Shifting cultures is very, very difficult.

Seaweed have a branding problem in most of the Western world.

Even the name weed, seaweed, is not positive, doesn't sound like a positive name.

But now that problem of branding is now being overridden by the many benefits of growing and consuming seaweed.

Seaweed farming, it's nature positive, so it creates positive outcomes on marine ecosystems, but it also healing communities.

- [Dune] Is this all we got?

(people laughing) (soft music) - [Person] Mmm, that's Marina's pickled bull kelp.

- [Dune] Oh yum.

- [Person] It's good, it's like, sweet and salty and crunchy.

- Mmm, I love the flavor of those cupcakes.

- Me too.

- They're real good.

- Me too.

They're super good.

- They're delish.

- I feel that ocean farming can help communities across the planet.

This is who we are.

This ocean is what's kept us alive, and we've fed millions of people around the world.

And so, I'm hoping that people in America will have the courage to try kelp and figure out how to eat it, because it's not only delicious, it's also really healthy for you.

I believe we can work together and figure out how to restore the ocean, we're just gonna have to work a little harder and a little smarter.

(soft music) - Take one marker.

- Aquaculture already plays a huge part in feeding the world.

One way to do it more responsibly is to adopt more sustainable practices.

- Probably, within another 30 years we're gonna see that 90% of all seafood is farm-raised.

My hope is that we continue to improve sustainability of all these different farming systems.

- I'm a strong believer that we can live better without damaging the environment.

It's all about a learning process.

- We're gonna get this figured out.

- Let me prove the concept, and this is something that can be replicated throughout the United States and the world.

And that's what motivates me, that's what excites me.

- We can also support more trial and error practices today in order to create a better tomorrow.

- Big reason why I'm doing this is for future generations.

I dunno why I'm getting emotional talking about my child.

But talk about climate change, and it feels good to do my part to have something to pass on to my son that is positive for our environment.

- There's a different way that people can live on this planet, and they can be a part of it by eating these products.

Let's figure out how we're gonna survive.

Because at the end of the day, we're all indigenous to planet Earth.

(soft music) (birds chirping) - Can we save our oceans while we feed our growing population?

Is it possible to do both?

Yes, it is possible, and it starts with us.

(soft music) (group laughing) (upbeat music) (gentle music)