A journey from extractive fishing to regenerative ocean farming

Growing up in a coastal community in Newfoundland, Canada, Bren Smith never expected he would become the executive director of a global regenerative farming network.

“All our houses were painted red, green, and blue so we could find our way home in the fog when we were a bit drunk, and all I ever wanted to be was a fisherman,” he told attendees at the 2024 ChangeNOW event in Paris. “They go out in the morning, they have self-directed lives, they succeed or fail on their own terms, and have this pride of feeding their country and community. These are the jobs we like to sing songs about – the coal workers, the farmers, the steel workers. These are soul-fulfilling jobs.”

Smith left high school when he was 14 and “headed out to sea”, fishing herring, lobster, tuna, and, lastly, cod and crab in the Berring Sea. He loved the sense of solidarity among his fellow fishermen and the humility of being surrounded by fifty-foot waves. 

“The trouble was, I was fishing at the height of industrialised fishing, so we were tearing up entire ecosystems with our trawls. I didn't know it – I didn't have the words then – but when you fish and you see seas of deaths around, you think, ‘There is no future in this. […] But I want to die on my boat - that's [my] metric of success!’”

On the frontline of climate change

Smith said he has experienced the impact of climate change first-hand, working through two ecological collapses.

The first was due to the crash of cod stocks that put 30,000 people out of work “overnight”. Smith described how this decimated not just the fishing economy but entire communities that had thrived for hundreds of years.

“Fishermen were walking the streets like hungry ghosts – and I think there was the beginning of a change […]. When you see a culture collapse, you think, 'Oh my god, there aren't going to be any jobs on a dead ocean or a dead planet.’”

The second ecological collapse came when – after a brief stint working on salmon farms where he quickly grew disillusioned with high levels of pesticide and antibiotic use – Smith set up his own oyster farm. This farm was destroyed two years in a row by Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy, and this set him on a path searching for “a new relationship to the seas”.

Regenerative ocean farming is ‘replicable and scalable’

Realising that he was “on the frontline of climate change”, Smith decided to switch to a polyculture farming model where both seaweed and shellfish (scallops, oysters, mussels, and clams) are grown together.

“[You] ask the ocean, ‘What does it make sense to grow?’ and the ocean says: 'Why don't you grow things that don't swim away and you don't have to feed.' One of the fastest-growing plants on earth is kelp and I was able to use a vertical, scaffolding system to grow seaweed,” he said.

Regenerative ocean farming is a food production model that makes sense from an environmental perspective – seaweed restores habitats, promotes biodiversity, sequesters carbon, and removes excess nitrogen – but, importantly, it also makes sense from a farmer’s perspective, Smith explained.

“It requires zero inputs. No fresh water, no fertiliser, no feed – everything we grow uses the sunlight and nutrients [in the water] – so there are very low overheads. The business model becomes simpler and, as the price of food on land goes up because of fresh water [constraints], and so on, ours actually remains constant. It’s also replicable. With 20 to 50,000 dollars you can start a farm – it's just ropes and buoys – […] but it is also scalable.”

In terms of commercialisation, kelp and other macroalgae can be used for food and animal feed and as an alternative to plastic and artificial fertiliser. Research has shown that fermented seaweeds can help soil become more resistant to abiotic stress such as drought and heat, Smith said.

Greenwave: Working to create a blue economy

Today, home for Smith is Long Island Sound, a tidal estuary between Connecticut and New York’s Long Island where his Thimble Island Ocean Farm is located.  

Around 10 years ago, he also created the non-profit Greenwave with co-founder Emily Stengel to spread knowledge about the methods used for regenerative ocean farming. What started out as him informally training his fishermen friends who found themselves out of work – “the lobsters disappeared, gillnets were just coming up empty” – quickly turned into a programme that now has a waiting list of over 8,000 people around the world.

Greenwave has a multi-pronged approach to supporting ocean farmers. Its online Ocean Farming Hub provides a toolkit and knowledge network to help people plan, apply for permits, and launch their own farms, aided by its MyKelp app.

It also has a community hub where people can collaborate to scale their farms, while the Seaweed Source is a marketplace where farmers can find distributors to sell their products.

Its farmer-owned seedbank shares plant resources (thus resisting privatisation) and a commercial farm and hatchery act as its innovation hub where it develops and tests new technologies.

Greenwave also offers a subsidy programme – the Kelp Climate Fund – that recognises farmers for the climate-positive role of their ocean farms by giving them direct payments in return for data on their planting, growth rates, and yields.

Breathing life back into the ocean

Smith is careful to not present this as a magic bullet – it is just one piece of the climate solution puzzle, he said – but he is also confident that with time and investment, regenerative ocean farming can form the backbone of thriving economies, communities, and cultural identities just as fishing has done for generations – all while restoring the environment.  

“It breathes life into the ocean but it's also good for us [who] want to die on our boats,” he said. “I don't know who is going to write the first kelp sea shanty but I'm waiting! Because we are proud of this. It’s where we want to go.”