Peacefully tucked beneath gray waves in nooks and crannies all around Southeast Alaska’s Inside Passage, nondescript besides the telltale mosaic of buoys, are major pieces of the region’s sustainable, regenerative food production puzzle: kelp farms.

It takes few forays out on the water in the company of kelp farmers to pick up on the particular flavor of spunk, guts, and daring they bring to the region’s mariculture. According to Sea Quester Farms co-owner Olivia Duner, in Juneau, on any given day, one thing is certain: “It’s always a good day on the farm.”

This mindset is indicative of the tenacity that Duner and her partners, Jonny Antoni and Ozzie Beery, bring to the kelp scene. In this relatively new world of ocean vegetable farming, tried-and-true procedure is still being, well, tried.

“It’s an extremely innovative space, and that’s what’s so cool about it,” Duner said. “Nobody has the handbook. Nobody has dictated how to grow kelp in Alaska, saying, ‘This is how you do it. This is the only way to do it.’ Because of that, it’s such an exciting space to be in.”

As fish stocks around the state decline due to overfishing and changing ocean conditions, fishermen struggle to meet their bottom line in a market that’s saturated by international products. The year 2024 had the lowest level of spawning salmon biomass since the 1970s, and coastal commercial fishery catch rates were near the lowest observed in decades. This, combined with a reliance on outside food (Alaska imports over 90 percent of its food supply nowadays, though the environment did solely sustain healthy communities for thousands of years), puts more pressure on the state’s fragile food security.

“I do think that kelp can play an important role in our overall food security picture,” said Matt Kern, co-founder and owner of Barnacle Foods, known both for its array of kelp salsa and hot sauces, and for introducing kelp to the masses. “Kelp isn’t necessarily going to provide the caloric needs of our people here, but in our case, by working with kelp and using it as a primary ingredient, we are building capacity as a region to preserve foods.”

The Native Conservancy, an Alaska Native-led group serving the twin goals of preserving culture and protecting habitat, has guided the way towards integrating Indigenous tradition, knowledge, and leadership into the kelp farming industry. Kelp has always been a mainstay for coastal Alaska Native people who have been harvesting, frying, drying, and fermenting different species for generations.

Traditional foods include things like, but are not limited to, herring roe harvested on kelp, the especially delicious kelp crab cakes, and functional energy bars for trips into the backcountry made by cold pressing and drying layers of kelp, berries, and hooligan.

As tides shift mainstream cultural currents towards more sustainable, regenerative ways to feed ourselves, the legacy of these ocean vegetables has moved to center stage. New to the scene is a shift from wild harvesting to intentional farming. From Ketchikan to Prince of Wales, over the last few years a robust community of small-scale kelp farmers in Southeast has braved this uncharted territory together.

“It’s really awesome and very collaborative,” Duner said. “Nobody has been stingy with their information. I think we all have an unspoken agreement that in order to keep this as something that benefits Alaskans and that benefits our environment and coastlines, we will need to form a weave together that will guard us and guard our communities, and promote them all at the same time.

There’s definitely an extending hand between all of us.” Though the creation of local jobs in aquaculture seeding, harvesting, and processing is a potential economic perk, the real benefits manifest in that murky world beneath the waves.

“Kelp is a crop that thrives here,” said Kern. “It’s not like you’re trying to force your hand against nature, because it grows abundantly in the wild and it can be farmed without too much difficulty or without too many inputs.”

To grow kelp in a farm setting, it all begins with the wild bloom. Source material from wild plants is collected from around the site before being stored and cared for in a hatchery for about six weeks. From there, the source material will eventually form baby sporophytes on a thin seed line. Those seed lines then get set out on larger lines in the ocean during planting season somewhere between November through January, where they grow until harvest rolls around in the following spring.

“Harvesting takes a couple months for us, at least May through June, and then we take the lines out of the water and we store them for the summer,” said Duner. “Then people use the area for fishing and crabbing before we start it all back up again in the fall. However, we are experimenting with leaving a crop in and only cutting back part of the plant during the first harvest to see if it will regrow without us.”

As kelp grows at rates that can exceed a foot per day during the summer, it uptakes carbon from the ocean, contributing to an overall decrease in ocean acidification. Add to this the potential of these farm plots to act as habitat for juvenile salmon and the safeguard they offer to coastlines against erosion, and it’s easy to see how holistic the benefits of kelp farming can be.

With over 500 species of seaweed in Alaska, the opportunities for flavor are as wide ranging as kelp is biodiverse. Operations at Sea Quester mainly focus on bull kelp, sugar kelp, and split kelp.

“Hopefully we can grow lots of different types,” said Duner. “We’re finding out that each different type has a different texture and taste, just like land plants.”

Kern’s Juneau-based company is at the forefront of bringing kelp to the masses. Few, far between, and (frankly) unpopular are the restaurants in town that don’t have a bottle of Barnacle hot sauce on the table. Many a diner have been known to sneak one into a restaurant with them, and any cooler at a proper Southeast summer bonfire includes a jar of their smoky Campfire Kelp Salsa.

“I was introduced to this really fun tradition of going out collecting bull kelp and then coming together with a bunch of friends,” the Juneau-born Kern said of his early memories harvesting on trips to Gustavus. “Everyone would bring some ingredients, and we’d always make a really big batch of kelp salsa and divvy it out at the end. That was when I initially learned that bull kelp could be made into delicious foods.

“When we started Barnacle, we really wanted to have an impact on food security and regional resiliency, and we thought the best way to do that would be becoming a processor so we could support a variety of farmers,” Kern said. Through Barnacle Food’s success, demand for kelp products has increased and, in addition to wild harvests, Barnacle now buys from local producers like Sea Quester Farms.

Kern and Duner both admit that kelp is a product that the typical American palate may not yet be familiar with. Getting kelp onto more forks, spoons, and tortilla chips helps people to understand that instead of a fishy taste, kelp is briny, savory, and full of umami.

“It just checks all the boxes,” Kern said. “It’s good for the oceans, it’s good for our bodies, and it tastes really good. So we’re trying to share all those bits of the story, but really when it comes down to it, what matters most is that people enjoy the flavor.”

Beyond the plate, kelp’s potential to effect positive change is vast. “There’s a lot of synthetic fertilizers that take a lot of energy to grow, or are toxic to the environment, that are being used on agricultural plants across the nation,” said Duner. “Organic farmers, however, have turned towards kelp.”

Far from its home base in the ocean, kelp may also serve a crucial role in mitigating land-based emissions from one of the most potent greenhouse gas sources on the planet: farmed cattle. Swapping traditional feed with feed containing kelp reduces the amount of methane emitted from cows and provides a new way to curb one of the planet’s most devastating industries.

Kelp growers have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the industrial land-based agriculture industry, which have taken our ecosystems down the damaging route of monocropping, deforestation, and pesticide use. “There’s an innovative way to have forethought for the environment and still get the job done without putting yourself out,” Duner said.

Every season, thousands of feet of nylon are used to seed the farm alone. Sea Quester is acting as the test site for a natural fiber seed string being researched and developed by Tamsen Peeples, a graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Additionally, this year the farm implemented recycled carbon fiber lines.

“I know that for the farmers it’s hard to think about changing all those systems because it’s not available, it’s not as convenient, and it’s already hard enough to stay in the green with your operations, but there’s a lot of room for it and we’re always seeking ways to implement it,” Duner said.

With so much maritime equipment already lying around Southeast, one easy way to forgo the costs, both financial and environmental, of new gear is by using what already exists.

“In Alaska there’s so much other industry using the same exact types of infrastructure,” Duner said. “It’s mostly rope and buoys and so, for instance, our farm is mostly made out of secondhand longlining rope and secondhand crabbing buoys.”

Though charting a new path comes with its difficulties, it also affords the sometimes successful, sometimes not, opportunity to try new things.

“Our very first year setting out the lines and seeding the kelp, we had no idea what to do and we thought that seeding by kayak would be best. Our friends and family came out, and my partner was wearing dish gloves to keep her hands dry and one guy was on a paddleboard. It was so difficult,” Duner shared. “But that year what I really remember is that pretty much everybody was talking to the spores as they were going out, saying things like, ‘All right, come on now, little guys, you’re gonna do great.’ Everyone just had this joy to be a part of something new and for the potential of what it could be, and how it could grow up to be something great for all of us.”

Duner continued, “Keeping the momentum and the stoke levels high will probably get us through this really hard kind of research and development time, where farmers are putting in a lot of effort and sometimes losing all their crops and not having crop insurance and not having kind of the normal or historical benefits that land farmers have.”

With that, perhaps I’ll rephrase my earlier take on kelp farmers: they have just the right flavor of spunk, guts, and high stoke needed to rewrite the rules on what regenerative, sustainable food production should look like in Southeast Alaska.