Seaweed Farming Comes Ashore
How a Dutch Innovator Is Growing the Food of the Future—on Land
With a global hunger crisis impacting hundreds of millions of people, the search is on for innovative ways to address its many causes.
The United Nations estimates that 266 million people are at risk of acute hunger this year. And while many converging crises have conspired to create such a troubling statistic—from geopolitics, war, and extreme weather to inflation—the sheer unavailability of food is perhaps the simplest to understand.
Extreme weather, such as multiple heat waves this year, has hit global food production hard. Europe alone saw significant drops in crop yields as a direct result.
In the face of such pressures, innovative—some might say radical—measures to try and shore up food security are being explored. And one of those answers could originate in the world of water.
Packed with Nutrition
Seaweed provides a healthy source of essential minerals, vitamins, protein, and fiber, and has been shown to improve gut health and protect heart function. What’s more, it is a robust and sustainable crop. It doesn’t need acres of farmland, requires no fresh water, and grows quickly.
And while we might imagine its cultivation takes place only in the sea—either naturally or in specialized farms—one innovator has found a way to bring the whole process ashore. Dutch engineer and entrepreneur Sven Rusticus is challenging the status quo by bringing seaweed cultivation onto terra firma, thus making seaweed harvesting possible all year round.
Sea lettuce … is a wonderful green seaweed with an excellent umami flavor and significant potential as a food ingredient.
He founded Seaweedland in 2022, and working with his friend and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Anko Kuil, a strategy was developed to build the most sustainable and innovative seaweed production facility possible.
In an interview with The Earth & I, he said that one of the mistakes people make when thinking about seaweed is that it’s just one foodstuff, when in fact more than 12,000 types exist—all with different qualities. It is for this reason, he said, that he is not looking to replace ocean cultivation but to complement it.
“Not every species is equally well suited to cultivation in the ocean,” he said.
“Take Ulva, or sea lettuce, for example. It is a wonderful green seaweed with an excellent umami flavor and significant potential as a food ingredient. But cultivating Ulva in the open ocean is challenging. Now compare that with a kelp such as Saccharina latissima. It is a fast-growing brown seaweed that naturally forms large underwater forests and is very well suited to ocean-based cultivation.
“So, the question should not be whether seaweed should be cultivated in the ocean or on land. The question is: Which species should be cultivated where?”
He said he believes the future of the seaweed industry will involve both approaches: ocean cultivation for species that are well suited to it, and controlled land-based cultivation for types where it offers advantages in productivity, quality, consistency, and value.
But broadly speaking, according to Rusticus, growing on land where possible has clear advantages.
“In the ocean, you have little control over the growing environment. Water quality, temperature, storms, pests, and contamination with shellfish, heavy metals, and plastics make a seaweed that is not consistent in quality and needs significant cleaning and purification. And at sea, harvesting is seasonal, while on land it is all year round.”
Dutch Farming’s Tradition of Innovation
When creating Seaweedland, he said he asked the question: What if one could treat seaweed like a crop and grow it under controlled conditions? His approach was inspired by the long-standing Dutch culture of innovation in all aspects of farming.
“In the Netherlands, we have developed an extremely sophisticated horticultural industry because we learned how to control the growing environment. We can produce tomatoes, peppers, and flowers with very high consistency, traceability, and productivity. We believe many of those principles can be applied to seaweed.”
But by its very nature, the ocean provides everything seaweed needs to live and grow while land-based cultivation requires mechanical, man-made interventions. With the need for pumps, building space, and monitoring equipment, it begs the question of how it can compete from an economic standpoint.
This is exactly the challenge, said Rusticus.
“It is why we don’t claim that land-based cultivation will be cheaper for every application. The economics come from productivity, control, and value, not simply from producing the cheapest kilogram of biomass.”
“Our approach,” he said, “is to use relatively simple systems rather than traditional energy-intensive aquaculture technology. And we don’t need to continuously replace all the water. We recirculate it, manage the nutrients, and provide the conditions the seaweed needs.”
Rusticus said they can also locate seaweed farms where land has relatively little alternative agricultural value—for example, on non-arable coastal land—and use saltwater that is already locally available from the sea or salty groundwater.
The enthusiasm for the idea of land-based seaweed cultivation is for it to one day be introduced to non-arable coastal land around the globe.
The company is still at the pilot stage. Rusticus said the current production is around 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) of fresh seaweed per year, and depending on species and cultivation conditions, they are working with yields in the order of 30–60 kilograms of fresh biomass per square meter (6–12 pounds per square foot) per year. This leads to 10–20 times more efficient protein production per square meter than soybeans.
Worldwide Potential
The enthusiasm for the idea of land-based seaweed cultivation is for it to one day be introduced to non-arable coastal land in multiple countries around the globe, something the team is currently working on via its license and joint venture model. In theory, it could allow the cultivation of local healthy seaweed crops and local seaweed-based proteins and fibers in areas where land-based agricultural farming is difficult or simply impossible.
“We are particularly interested in land that is not suitable for conventional agriculture. You need access to clean seawater or another suitable saline water source, reliable energy, and preferably renewable energy. You also need infrastructure, roads, processing, cold storage, security, and logistics.”
He added that while climate is important, it is not necessarily a limitation. In this regard, another potential advantage of seaweed is that where one species may not thrive in a particular environment, another will.
“Different seaweed species perform well under different conditions, and our controlled cultivation approach gives us much more flexibility than simply depending on local ocean conditions. Ultimately, we are looking for places where land, water, energy, infrastructure, and market demand come together.”
Once up and running, he said there would be additional advantages to local people beyond simply the seaweed itself, including jobs.
“A seaweed farm creates opportunities not only in cultivation but also in hatchery operations, maintenance, harvesting, processing, quality control, logistics, sales, and management,” he said. “There are also opportunities for local entrepreneurs to develop food products, cosmetics, and other applications around the seaweed. So, our model is not just building farms and creating jobs, it’s about creating local seaweed value chains.”
It would also provide work all year round due to land-based cultivation being a continuous process rather than seasonal, as with ocean cultivation.
But the path between the dream and reality is made complex by challenges that need to be overcome, which he cites as a combination of biology, technology, and economics.
“We know how to grow seaweed. The challenge is growing it at sufficiently high productivity, with predictable quality, while keeping labor, energy, infrastructure, and processing costs low.”
“We know how to grow seaweed. The challenge is growing it at sufficiently high productivity, with predictable quality, while keeping labor, energy, infrastructure, and processing costs low enough to create a profitable business,” he said. “That sounds straightforward, but when you move from a pilot to hundreds of tons, everything becomes more complicated.”
Peering into the Future
Over the next decade, Rusticus and his team have big plans. One ambition is that by 2035, Seaweedland will have helped establish a global network of land-based seaweed farms.
“And we don’t want to build every farm ourselves,” he said. “We want to develop the technology, biology, operating systems, and knowledge that allow farms to be replicated in different parts of the world.”
Rusticus added that if they can establish between 10 and 25 commercial farms across multiple countries, each adapted to local conditions, that would be a major achievement.
“In terms of production, I would like to see Seaweedland and its partners producing thousands of tons of seaweed per year, with a significant proportion going into food and high-value applications.”
As with all things in this challenging world, there is no quick or easy fix to the multitude of issues exacerbating global hunger, but innovations such as those being piloted by Seaweedland could open up a valuable new supply of nutritious food that can be cultivated all year round.
*Mark Smith is a journalist and author from the UK. He has written on subjects ranging from business and technology to world affairs, history, and popular culture for the Guardian, BBC, Telegraph, and magazines in the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
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