Kelp: Great slippery aquaculture potential
In a kelp forest
— Photo by Ggerdel
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Growing the seaweed called kelp could become an important part of Rhode Island’s “blue economy’’ in coming years. So it was heartening to read, in ecoRI News, of the enthusiasm of Azure (birth name?) Cygler about her newish company, Rhody Wild Sea Garden LLC. She’s growing kelp in Narragansett Bay’s East Passage in water leased from an oyster farmer.
Kelp is great stuff – as a highly nutritious food, as a thickener and sweetener, for cosmetics and as a fertilizer. It is also a weapon in the battle against global warming: It absorbs carbon dioxide more effectively than do trees. And it takes in the excessive nutrients that wash into the water from chemical fertilizers (ah, those lawns and golf courses!) and other manmade stuff. Further, it’s harvested in the winter, and so less likely to draw the well-lawyered opposition of, say, affluent people with summer places along the shore.
Kelp in canned salad form
That gets me thinking about the University of Rhode Island’s Bay Campus, in Narragansett, home of URI’s internationally respected Graduate School of Oceanography. The Bay Campus needs major repairs and additions if the school is to continue to do the world-class research (with economic-development rewards from that) that, with teaching, is central to its mission.
Gov. Dan McKee has proposed a $50 million bond issue for improvements at the Bay Campus for voters to decide on next November. But URI says the full cost of the needed work is $157.5 million; there’s hope that state legislators will back a bigger amount than $50 million. They should: The School of Oceanography has a major part to play in the state’s future, environmentally, economically and otherwise. That includes defense, energy and, yes, aquaculture.