Regenerative farming of seaweed

This organisation supports small farmers for thriving coastal communities

Spotted: New uses are being found every day for seaweed, from aquaculture feed to beauty products. On top of its usefulness, growing seaweed also has benefits for the environment, sinking carbon and boosting marine biodiversity. But, this growth in demand has led to a bottleneck at the supply level.

Coast 4C is tackling the lack of seaweed supply by supporting smallholder farmers and helping communities develop fully operational regenerative seaweed farms in three years. As part of its GROW input packages, Coast 4C provides education, finance, and insurance opportunities to farmers, helping them to modernise and integrate their processes to create an efficient, traceable seaweed value chain.

The organisation also helps to establish community-based marine protected areas (iMPAs), so that coastal communities have legally established seaweed-growing areas. This helps to protect these ecosystems from other harmful human activity in the long term and gives employment security for the smallholders, improving coastal protection in biodiversity hotspots and building prosperous and resilient coastal communities.

As well as helping farmers to grow regeneratively, Coast 4C also pays a premium for this seaweed that meets quality and sustainability criteria, ensuring that smallholders have a reliable income stream and don’t need to rely heavily on other means of making a living, like fishing. This high-quality, responsible seaweed is then delivered to processors and businesses in food, feed, fertilisers, and plastic markets.

Co-founder and CEO Nicholas Hill told Springwise that seaweed has a crucial role to play in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and driving a shift to more sustainable materials. He explains: “smallholder coastal communities inspire us every day – their deep connection to and knowledge of the marine environment, as well as their outlook on life (…) We want to make these coastal communities more prosperous and resilient, because that benefits all of us in the end.”

Coast 4C was named as a finalist for this year’s Earthshot Prize, and support from the Prize will help the company accelerate growth. Hill explained that the company is focusing on driving scale and sees cloud-based technologies, AI, and machine learning as “being a vital part of enabling and catalysing that scale.”

Written By: Lisa Magloff