An Underwater Endeavor

IS CULTIVATING KELP THE WAY TO SAVE OUR OCEANS AND SLOW DOWN CLIMATE CHANGE? BREN SMITH IS BETTING THE FARM ON IT

- Allie Wist

BREN SMITH IS STRIKINGLY HUMBLE for a man I’ve often heard referred to as the savior of our food system. Wearing a rubber jumpsuit and sipping weak coffee from a Styrofoam cup, he moves around his dinged-up boat instinctually. Smith is a former industrial fisherman turned kelp farmer and educator, and we’re headed out today to visit the farm of one of his mentees. As we glide between a handful of bobbing buoys off the shore of Groton, Connecticut, there’s no sign yet of the great marvel of ocean sustainability I’ve come to visit. The entire farm is below us, hidden beneath the waves.

“Our food system is changing radically due to climate change,” Smith says. “It’ll get pushed out to sea within the next 30 years,” he adds without a trace of hyperbole. Casually joking about the perils of ocean degradation is a common topic with Smith, who, after dropping out of high school at 14, joined a commercial-fishing operation that trawled the ocean floor and, he realized, destroyed marine ecosystems and killed tens of thousands of pounds of bycatch. Searching for something less destructive to do, he made his way to New England, where, after a brief stint as an oyster farmer, he has spent the past 15 years developing a farming system that revitalizes the waters using both seaweed and bivalves. He holds two distinguished climate fellowships, and was recently granted the Buckminster Fuller Prize for ecological design—a $100,000 award that usually goes to architects or designers. But his farming solution is, at first glance, laughably simple in its ingenuity.