What do you think of when you hear “seaweed”? Chances are, its sushi, nuisance at the beach, or something in a package at an Asian market. If that’s the case, you’re in for a surprise.
Without knowing it, you might, literally, be up to your neck in seaweed; seaweed is a common ingredient in cosmetics, moisturizers, anti-aging and anti-inflammatory products, lotions, shampoos, and toothpaste.
Globally, the seaweed industry hauls in about $6 billion per year, with farmers producing more seaweed per ton than lemons and limes. Its products run the gamut in agriculture, from farm to fork; as biomass for biofuel; and in ways that help the environment to mitigate climate change.
“There are many types of seaweeds that are a part of marine ecosystems,” said Caird Rexroad III, national program leader for aquacultureat USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. “Seaweed is harvested from the wild, however we’re also seeing an increase in seaweed farming in the United States.”
International seaweed production has increased over 1000-fold since 1950, up from 34.7 thousand tons to more than 34.7 million tons. Although Europe and Asia have outpaced the United States, seaweed farming is the fastest-growing sector of American aquaculture. Dozens of aquatic farms have taken off in New England, the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska, where production has grown from 18 tons in 2017 to about 440 tons in 2021.
Seaweeds are farmed by culturing them on long lines that are suspended below the surface of marine waters, Rexroad said. Once fully grown, farmers harvest it for processing. Seaweeds can also be grown on land in tanks supplied with seawater, but these systems are primarily used for research.
Rexroad chairs a Congressionally directed group from USDA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); its mission includes studying how seaweed could help deacidify the oceans; study emerging ocean seaweed farming practices; and coordinate and conduct research to develop and enhance pilot-scale seaweed farming.
“I expect seaweed farming to expand in the United States so that we can consume and/or export more seaweed food products, and one day have them included in the making of biofuels,” Rexroad said. “The United States has tremendous marine resources that could support seaweed farming.”
Many chefs include various types of seaweed in their recipes or serve it as a featured item. In addition to flavor, seaweed has many nutritional benefits, depending on the type of seaweed. Those benefits include iodine, which supports thyroid function; vitamins, including B12; and many antioxidants, carotinoids, and flavonoids. Carotinoids have cancer-fighting properties, while flavonoids help prevent cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and such cognitive diseases as Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Rexroad’s team includes the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, in East Boothbay, ME; the National Science Foundation; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; and several agencies of the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Interior, and Health and Human Services. – By Scott Elliott, USDA-ARS Office of Communications
The Fish Friendly Farming Certification Program has enrolled over 200,000 acres of farmland in California including the majority of vineyards in Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties. The Fish Friendly Farming program has now been benchmarked against SAI Platform’s Farm Sustainability Assessment version 3, at Silver Level. SAI Platform is a global non-profit organization working with its 150 members across the global food and drink industry to develop sustainable agriculture solutions through pre-competitive collaboration. SAI Platform aims to catalyze change and establish sustainable agriculture as a pre-requisite for doing business throughout the food and drink industry supply chain. Underpinning all of SAI Platform’s work are the Sustainable Agriculture Principles and Practices. These eleven sustainable agriculture principles provide a holistic framework and are interdependent, with best practices often benefiting several principles. These principles address: climate, land and soil, nature, water communities, legal compliance, livelihoods, working and living conditions, health and safety, markets and resources and animal welfare. They help SAI Platform prioritize activities and resources and form the foundation for the development of industry solutions and regional initiatives.
One of the industry solutions developed by SAI Platform is the Farm Sustainability Assessment (FSA). It was developed in 2014 by the members, their suppliers, farmers, and external stakeholders as a tool for measuring and verifying on farm sustainability. It has been created and reviewed in keeping with the Sustainable Agriculture Principles and Practices. The Fish Friendly Farming Certification Program joins over 150 other systems, standards and certifications which have been benchmarked against the FSA. FSA 3.0 was released in April 2021.
National Marine Fisheries Service certifier discussing farm plan with grower
The benchmarking process involves scoring against the 109 questions of the FSA, as well as a consistency check by a SAI Platform-approved independent expert. This benchmark is an endorsement of the value that the Fish Friendly Farming Certification Program holds for addressing sustainability concerns on farm. It means that for any farmer using the Fish Friendly Farming Certification Program, the crops that they grow can be recognized at FSA Silver Level. Moreover, by-products derived from a supply chain that were successfully Fish Friendly Farming certified can now also be sold as FSA equivalent.
Joe Iveson, FSA Manager at SAI Platform said: “Congratulations to Fish Friendly Farming on reaching FSA Silver Equivalence. This is a great achievement that reflects the certification’s commitment to promoting sustainable agricultural production.”
A project of the Napa-based nonprofit, the California Land Stewardship Institute, Fish Friendly Farming (FFF) certifies growers on management practices that protect the health of their local watershed and the community. First developed in 1997, the initiative has since grown to more than 1,900 participating sites in 15 counties. This expansion reflects the growing interest, both among consumers and winegrowers themselves, in sustainable management practices.
Laurel Marcus, Executive Director for FFF, admits that farmers have to comply with a complicated series of rules to achieve certification. “It is a very detail-oriented program, but that’s the way the environment and community are. It is a complex system, so you have to look at all the places a farm touches the environment that could cause an impact and how it affects the community and workers.”
FFF visits the farms and works with farmers to collect information on assessing erosion and native vegetation. They note how drainage systems work, how vineyards are winterized and perform a complete road assessment. There is a labor and work force element, a business practices element and a green initiatives element. They look at wells, which chemicals are used and make sure farmers have legal water rights.
All information collected by FFF during their assessment is put onto maps and templates which are read and accompanied by more on-site inspections by official governmental certifiers like the National Marine Fisheries Service and County Agricultural Commissioner. They inspect the site and can add requirements to the original farm plan. The farmer gets a list detailing what they need to do to implement their farm plan along with a time frame to get the work done. “Fish Friendly Farming has more rigorous standards and compliance is more difficult to achieve than other programs,” said Marcus. “It’s not just that a majority of vineyards in Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counites are certified, it’s that they are certified to a very high standard.”
“Through our role as an independent, third-party certifier for Fish Friendly Farming, we are able to work directly with hundreds of growers to assure stream conditions are improved for steelhead and salmon through water quality and habitat improvements,” said Joe Dillon, Water Quality Specialist with NOAA’s National Marine Service.
The FFF program clearly resonates with Napa Valley grape growers. Julie Nord is the owner of Nord Vineyard Services and currently farms nearly 1,000 prime Napa Valley acres, selling grapes to over 60 ultra-premium wineries. “Our winery clients are focused on sustainability and our impact on the environment,” said Nord. “Fish Friendly Farming gives us ongoing help about farming in ways that best protect the environment. Once they even helped us obtain a grant to work on an erosion project. Their certification guarantees our clients that we are up to date on the latest regulations and that our vineyard practices protect fish, waterways, workers and the environment.”
Constellation Brands, Wine & Spirits have had a long-standing association with Fish Friendly Farming dating back to early 2003. With over 1,800 acres currently certified against the program requirements, Fish Friendly continues to be an important contributor to ongoing sustainable practices across their Napa and Sonoma vineyard Operations. “Fish Friendly Farming has provided our Napa and Sonoma vineyard teams with a practical framework focused on environmentally-beneficial land practices that are supportive of local ecosystems and the unique environment in which we conduct our business” said Matt McGinness, General Manager, Global Environmental Sustainability, Constellation Brands Wine & Spirits.
Matt Crafton has worked at Chateau Montelena since 2008 and was named winemaker in 2014. He worked with Fish Friendly Farming to obtain certification for the winery’s vineyards. “Fish Friendly Farming is based on vetted science. It is a verified approach with clear cut goals,” he explained. “The team is very professional. They understand the farming, the viticulture, and they understand that the two goals of protecting our waterways and farming can be one and the same, especially with a high-quality, valuable crop like wine grapes. They do a fantastic job of making sure the practices that are beneficial to the fish are also beneficial to the vines, so you really have farmers and scientists and environmentalists all working together to the same goals.”
“We are proud to have our vineyards certified Fish Friendly Farming, especially as the stewards of 360 acres in the Napa Valley as well as miles of the Napa River. I appreciate the rigor of Fish Friendly Farming’s scientific approach. From the environmental scientists on staff to the regulatory agencies they engage us with, every project and practice the California Land Stewardship Institute recommends is specific, results based, and enduring,” said Russ Weis, president Silverado Vineyards. He added, “Sustainability is all about making sure we celebrate more milestones like this. We will continue to rely on Fish Friendly Farming’s practical and visionary guidance as we work to preserve our land for future generations.”
The Fish Friendly Farming certification program not only benefits the local environment but is also a cost-effective, efficient management strategy for farmers. Because of that, local growers have been practicing revegetation efforts along local creeks and streams that provide for cool shade that helps benefit fish. In addition, the certification program calls for controlling erosion from roadways which improves water quality and stream flow. And it requires fish screens on all water diversions, legally approved water rights and conserving water in the vineyard. The program has implemented environmental improvements on more than 1120 miles of roads, 465 miles of creeks and 83 miles of rivers. The grower must also demonstrate they follow all labor regulations and wage requirements and work to improve their employees lives through training and advancement.
Fish Friendly Farming was previously associated with the Napa Green program of the Napa Vintners. However, the programs are now separate to better differentiate the environmental and social improvement certification of Fish Friendly Farming from the Napa Green marketing program.
A listing of wineries who have all of their lands certified by Fish Friendly Farming reads like a Who’s Who of the California Wine Industry: Treasury, Sterling, Beaulieu Vineyards, Beckstoffer Vyds, Boeger Winery, Provenance, Beringer, Robert Mondavi Winery, Trinchero Family/ Sutter Home, Joseph Phelps Vineyards, Silverado Vineyards, Clif Family Winery, Cliff Lede Vineyards, Chateau Montelena Winery, Domaine Chandon, Domaine Carneros, Long Meadow Ranch, Hall Wines, Charles Krug Winery, Boisset Family Estates, Frog’s Leap Winery, Hess Collection, Saintsbury Winery, Schramsberg Vineyard, Silver Oak Cellars, Trefethen, Clos Du Bois, Simi Winery, Fetzer Vineyards, Bonterra Vineyards, Golden Vineyards, Roederer Estate, Duckhorn Wines, Francis Ford Copolla Wines, Foley Wine Group, Parducci Wines, Ridge Vineyards, V. Sattui and many others.
The other day I was enjoying a nice breakfast, when I saw a man sitting next to me with his bicycle. Of course, my wife started talking with him! It turns out that he is a professor from Columbia, NY who, as far as I could understood, teaches something related to climate change. I couldn’t help asking him, do we still have time to fix the global warming problem and mitigate climate change? His tone of voice changed and his gazed off and said, “Save yourself, there is nothing we can do about it.” Still, a week after that conversation I am thinking about his comment! I consider myself an optimist, but it worries me when I see what is happening with the fires on the West Coast, and recently the floods in Belgium, Germany, and other places.
According to the National Interagency Fire Center as of August 26, 88 large fires are burning in the US across 13 States. They have destroyed nearly 2.4 million acres of forest. We know that trees are our best friends, they can store and sequester carbon. We know that a healthy forest reduces carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but what happens when a forest catches fire?
The answer is not very simple because the carbon cycle is very complicated, with many variables involve. When carbohydrates are burned, they oxidize, creating carbon dioxide (CO2). Photosynthesis on the other hand, removes CO2 from the atmosphere and simultaneously stores carbon in the form of wood. According to NOAA, a very big and hot wildfire could emit the same amount of CO2 as six large coal power plants in one year.
To better understand the role that a forest ecosystem has on the storage of carbon, a study was conducted by the NASA Institute on Climate and Planets. They studied what happens in unburned and burned sites in the Black Rock Forest, NY. The hypothesis for the study stated that the unburned site will significantly store more carbon than the burned site.
The results, as we expected, showed that more carbon was stored in the unburned plot than in the burned plot, which means that the fire diminishes the carbon that was originally store in the wood. On the other hand, some of the vegetation is not consumed by burning, instead it is transformed to charcoal which has the advantage that it resists degradation so it can store carbon in soils over long periods of time. As it was mentioned before, the carbon cycle is very complicated, and fire has other consequences like emissions from decomposing dead wood which can surpass the direct emissions from the fire itself. But at the same time, new growth in the burned areas starts once again to take CO2 from the atmosphere and store it. This topic is very complicated, but fortunately, it looks like the effects of wildfires on climate change are smaller than the effects of coal, oil, and gas. — By Henry Mayer, University of Florida, Institute of Food & Agricultural Sciences
Firefighters have reported that Western wildfires are starting earlier in the morning and dying down later at night, hampering their ability to recover and regroup before the next day’s flareup.
A new study suggests why: The drying power of nighttime air over much of the Western U.S. has increased dramatically in the past 40 years. The paper was published in Geophysical Research Letters, the American Geophysical Union (AGU)’s journal for high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.
“Nighttime is an important time in fire management. When fires die down at night it gives firefighters a chance to rest, move equipment and strategize. The problem firefighters are reporting is an unexpected increase in nighttime fire activity,” said lead author Andy Chiodi, a University of Washington research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean & Ecosystem Studies, a joint center with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Our findings support that this has been going on over the last 40 years over much, but not all, of the Western U.S.”
Earth’s atmosphere is warming due to climate change and warming in many places has been greater at night. Warmer night air had been suspected as the culprit altering the daily pattern of wildfire activity, with burns continuing later into the night.
The new study, however, shows it’s not just that the night air is warmer. The study found a dramatic shift from 1980 to 2019 in its drying power—how much moisture the nighttime air can carry away from the fuels—over much of the Western U.S. This shift is not captured in climate models, and the authors say it could be related to natural long-term cycles rather than to climate change.
“We paid special attention to the change in recent years compared to the conditions seen in the ’80s and ’90s, which is when many of the current firefighters started their careers, and presumably formed their ideas about what normal fire behavior should look like,” Chiodi said. “We tried to quantify the changes that we were hearing about from firefighters.”
MOISTURE DEFICIT
The study looks at the “vapor pressure deficit,” or the difference between the moisture in the air and the saturation moisture level at that air temperature. This difference is a measure of the air’s drying power.
“In the southern Sierra Nevada, the average summer nighttime vapor pressure deficit for the recent decade was 50% higher than the average in the ’80s and ’90s,” Chiodi said. “I was surprised—it’s unusual to see geophysical data change that dramatically.”
Some of this shift in vapor pressure deficit is happening because warmer nighttime air, caused by climate change, produces higher saturation values. But part of the drying power is happening because the nighttime air in some regions has less moisture, and that effect is not predicted by climate change models, at least this much or in this pattern. The authors find a possible connection to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a long-term cycle that can influence inland weather.
The increased drying power of nighttime air is especially pronounced in California’s San Fernando Valley and in the Bitterroot-Blue Mountain Region—including parts of the Idaho Panhandle, southeast Washington, northeast Oregon and western Montana.
“Firefighters had been saying for several years that they feel some fires burn later into the evening than they used to,” said co-author Brian Potter at the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory. “We found that in some areas, the amount of water in the air is decreasing, sort of doubling up on the warmer nights. These areas, including where the Snake River Complex and Lick Creek fires are burning right now, are much more likely to have fires burn late into the night.”
The analysis used hourly weather outputs from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. The recently released hourly reconstructions of historical weather allowed investigation of daily cycles.
The next step, Chiodi said, is to further explore the causes of these changes in nighttime vapor pressure deficit. After that, he hopes to connect the atmospheric conditions more directly to fuel moisture and fire behavior.
The other co-author is Narasimhan ‘Sim’ Larkin at the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory in Seattle. The research was funded by the U.S. Forest Service through its AirFire research team and by NOAA (grants: 100007298, NA15OAR4320063). — By the University of Washington & the American Geophysical Union
The Fish Friendly Farming Certification Program has enrolled over 200,000 acres of farmland in California including the majority of vineyards in Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties. The Fish Friendly Farming program has now been benchmarked against SAI Platform’s Farm Sustainability Assessment version 3, at Silver Level. SAI Platform is a global non-profit organization working with its 150 members across the global food and drink industry to develop sustainable agriculture solutions through pre-competitive collaboration. SAI Platform aims to catalyze change and establish sustainable agriculture as a pre-requisite for doing business throughout the food and drink industry supply chain. Underpinning all of SAI Platform’s work are the 
