Transcript

Vertical ocean farming - the least deadliest catch | Bren Smith | TEDxBermuda

so my name is Brendan Smith and I'm a 3d ocean farmer located right outside of New York City and my story is a story of ecological Redemption I was born in a little fishing village of 11 houses I quit high school at the age of 14 and headed out to sea I fished the Georges banks the Grand Banks in the North Atlantic lobster too and I headed to the Bering Sea fish Cod crab you name it I fished it the trouble was is that I was fishing I was working at the height of the industrialization of the oceans we were ripping up entire ecosystems with our trawls we were using ever more efficient technologies to chase fewer and fewer fish deeper and deeper into the ocean and I've personally thrown tens of thousands of pounds of dead bycatch back into the sea and it wasn't just that we were pillaging the oceans most the fish I was catching was going to McDonald's for their fish wit sandwich so here I was a young fisherman pillaging the oceans and one of the most unsustainable forms of food production the planet going to some of the most unhealthy low quality food on the planet but at the same time I loved my job like the humility of being in 60-foot seas the Solidarity that comes with being in the belly of a boat with 15 other people working 20 to 30 hours shifts for months at a time I love that in a sense of meaning and the dignity that comes with helping feed my country these were some of the best days of my life and still I just missed them so so much but while I was on the Bering Sea the cod stocks crashed back on that on the East Coast and thousands of fishermen were thrown out of work boats beached fish plants shuddered and it created this generational split the in the captains of industry they wanted to fish the last fish they want to stay the course but there was a younger generation of us that wanted to spend our life at sea we were thinking 50 years I want to die on my boat and the short-sighted brutal realities of industrial fishing would never let me do that so I went like a lot a lot of younger people my generation went for a search for sustainability and ended up in the in the aquaculture farms up in northern Canada fishing I mean a farming salmon an aquaculture was supposed to be the great answer to overfishing it turned out to be just as destructive using new technologies chalking fish full of medicines antibiotics polluting local waterways just growing terrible tasting and quality food and then when the public found out the industry had adopted a strategy of mislabel it still to this day whether wild or farmed you go to the United States and one out of three fish you eat are mislabeled so just disillusion kept on searching and I ended up in Long Island Sound with a this new program to attract young fishermen back into the fishery by leasing shellfish and grounds for the first time in 150 years so I became an oyster man and I did that for a couple years growing my shellfish on the seafloor and then the storms hit and once again I found myself in this swirl of trends of environmental crisis and transition Hurricane Irene came in buried all my oysters Hurricane sandy 80% crop lost most of my gear washed out to sea two years in a row ocean acidification killing literally billions of shellfish seeped up and down our coast rising water temperatures spreading disease and this isn't just in Long Island Sound this is happening globally whether it's coral reefs or shellfish or even seaweeds around the around the world my farm my job my oysters we're Canaries in the coal mine for a climate crisis that's arrived a hundred years earlier than expected so farm destroyed looking at failure but when I look back now that failure was the best thing that happened to me I've become a like I love failure now because it's the mother it's the mother of invention right it forced me to adapt to figure out resiliency to figure out new things I could do on the water right if I had to re-envision my farm in order to rebuild my farm I'd to move off the seafloor find these new species that were resilient to the rise to the rising tides rising water temperatures I found the work of dr. Charlie Irish who's out of the University of Connecticut it's done just done some of the best work on seaweeds and I took his research and embedded it into my farm so after 10 years of searching I'm now one of the first 3d ocean farmers growing a mix of shellfish and seaweeds for local food organic fertilizer and biofuel so that's the sort of the journey from pillager the Seas to Green fishermen what I'll do now is paint a picture of what the farm looks like so you have a sense of what we're doing and then talk about the long-term vision for the farm so that's the farm absolutely nothing to see but some buoys right makes a terrible PowerPoint but that's a good thing our oceans are beautiful pristine wild places right so our farm is underwater it has a low aesthetic impact and that's the way we want to keep our seas here's a drawing of the farm we go for simplicity not complexity right so our our farm systems anchored to the seafloor hurricane-proof two buoys on the surface and then we just have floating lines on the top right where we grow our seaweeds and our shelf is vertically down into the water column below that we have cages sitting on the floor where we grow other kinds of shellfish there's a picture of the seaweed that's seaweed that's kelp and that that's about three months old helps the second fastest growing plant in the world are here our muscle socks we hang these on the same gear we hang our seaweeds again a really simple multi-use system we do scallops in the same way hanging those and then here are cages the cages sit on the sea floor directly under our vertical ropes and and we do oysters and clams in those the whole idea is to have a small footprint my farm has been shrinking I went from a hundred acres down to 20 acres as I've been using the full water column and growing actually a lot more food on those 20 acres than I used to on the hundred we gotten away from monoculture aquaculture is obsessed with growing one thing in one we're growing four kinds of shellfish two kinds of seaweeds now we're even harvesting salt from our 20 acres here in Bermuda there are shellfish there are seaweeds there are sponges you can grow seaweeds like grass alaria the whole idea is to do an ecosystem analysis of what's possible to grow what are its multiple commercial values and what are things we can grow that are actually restorative that help the environment so the farm we have three main things we do like longer goals we want to have good local community based food production we want to reimagine the fishermen of the future as a restorative farmer and we want to build the foundations for a new blue green economy so on the food front I love food I'm not a foodie I eat at the gas station most nights but what food has taught me it's a wonderful way to build community right so what we've done is we have extort with it really really healthy stuff so our muscles our scallops are packed full of omega-3s our seaweeds have more iron than red meat more calcium than milk and we do something called a Community Supported fisheries program where people buy a share of the farm at the beginning of the year and then every month they're getting good local seafood and we trade recipes and the whole idea is to have this farm and create a community around the food we produce the other thing we've done is we've taken these exotic things America has no tradition of CF eating seaweed even though it's local it's right outside our back door it's something we can grow so we've challenged the chef's and we say listen we've got an exotic thing that's local can you reimagine the American menu around things that are truly sustainable and local and they've stepped up so those are seaweed cocktails we do we do kelp ice cream kelp butters those are fettuccine noodles that are total pasta replacements and gluten-free the whole idea is to carve out a section of the dinner plate to not eat fish but to eat what fishy because fish don't make omega-3s and all these wonderful things they eat them so if we begin eating like fish we get all the benefits but reduce pressure on fish stocks at the same time it's scalable in a 300 by 300 foot area I can grow 24 tonnes of seaweed in five months that doesn't count the hundreds of thousands of shellfish that I also grow if you were to take a network of 3 D farms like mine totalling the size of Washington State in the u.s. you could technically feed the world now not everyone's going to eat become an ocean vegetarian of course but it shows the potential for this to be a piece of the puzzle as we face food crisis because of drought fires all these things in the air of climate change while we have rising populations so the other thing is with the other piece is restorative farming so as an ocean farmer my job is not to be this ocean hero it's not to save the Seas my job is to have the seeds save us and I say that because mother nature created hundreds and millions of years ago to technologies that actually mitigate our harm shellfish and seaweeds oysters are the stunning agents of sustainability they filter 30 to 50 gallons of water a day pulling nitrogen out of our oceans over nitrification is the cause of these spreading dead zones that are absent of any life and oxygen our farm functions is an artificial reef system as our coral reefs disappear there's no there's no foundation for the four ecosystems to be built around we attract over a hundred and fifty species back to our farm what was once this barren patch of ocean is now this thriving life or and the other thing is our farm functions is an artificial reef system I mean as a storm surge protector so it stands in the way between Hurricane Irene and hurricane sandy as they pummel the shoreline it reduces the amount of destruction this is our kelp kelp makes me a climate farmer and the reason is it soaks up five times the amount of carbon as land-based plants it's called the sequoia of the sea in my own little way my foreign farm is running as carbon carbon sequestration a plant the same the other thing is our kelp is used for biofuel if you were to take a network of kelp farms totaling half the size the state of Maine you could replace all the oil in the United States in a one acre area I can grow two thousand gallons of biofuel a year I remember this is with zero inputs this is true for food and biofuel it requires no fresh water no fertilizer no arid land making it the most sustainable form of food in literally in the world and a sustainable source of aisle fuel final finally is fertilizer so all farms pollute land based farms even the most organic wonderful farms they what they leach nitrogen into our waterways so what we do is we capture the nitrogen with our sea vegetables we take them and put them on farms this is a program we have with the Yale sustainable food project they use it to grow their beautiful vegetables then the nitrogen leeches back into the sound we capture it again we're creating this closed nitrogen farming loop and the whole idea is to build a bridge between land-based and sea based farms because too much aren't too often our analysis of the food system stops at the water's edge and we're trying to get beyond that the final thing is creating a Bluegreen economy I'm I'm an environmentalist but I'm not an environmentalist I'm not going to do all this remediation and create these farms unless unless fishermen are making a living the goal that in the era of climate change both on land at sea is we need to figure out how to make a living on a living planet our economy is going to change the hurricane sandy 83,000 people were thrown out of work this is a serious challenge we all face so one of the things we've done is we've made our farm open-source so anybody with twenty acres in a boat about fifty thousand dollars in the US can start their own farm and be up and running the first year the farm is specifically designed to be replicable we've got a program called Project Green Wave where we hire inner-city kids to package cook process all of our food they learn about 3d farming they learn about sustainability one of the kids at the school it's called the Bridgeport Sound School actually took the kelp and invented 12 volt kelp powered biodegradable battery I mean I'm just I'm just a fisherman these kids is just amazing right so the you know oh and I on the blue green economy I think we can think much bigger than this why can't we take my farm and embed it in offshore wind farms why don't we just harvest win let's harvest food fuel fertilizer let's bring it back to land and reclaim the coal plants that are shutting down near me reimagine the fossil fuel industry turn them into kelp biofuel and fertilizer plants let's put greenhouses on the top in order to create a local salt industry this is our opportunity why can't we make a million new ocean farmers in the next 10 years you know we have to act we've triggered one of the largest marine extinctions in the planets history and every other breath you breathe it comes from marine life like we've screwed things up and but in a way that's what's exciting because our backs are against the wall we have to innovate we have to figure out strategies for resiliency we have to completely change our relationship to the planet and and reformat our economy around principles of sustainability so when I talk to politicians about this they just think it's crazy and they say you know the idea of creating a million new ocean farmers is just there's no way and they're right it is a little bit crazy but you know to get from here to there to make it through this transition and do what we need to do to make it through a climate change and make sure everybody can make a living on a living planet may be exactly what we need right now is a little bit of crazy thank you that's