Jo Lane On Sustainable Kelp Products Leading The Regeneration Of Marine Ecosystems
Jo Lane is on a mission to introduce kelp farming aquaculture to Australia. With a Marine science degree and postgraduate qualifications in Environmental Studies, Jo is passionate about introducing regenerative ocean farming to improve the health of our marine environment and produce sustainable food products.
Jo has worked in a variety of roles including seal trainer, diver and working with volunteers on coastal weed programs. Throughout her career, she has also worked for the Federal, state and local government in marine protection roles.
In 2019, Jo received a Churchill Fellowship and travelled to Korea, Ireland, Scotland, Faroe Islands, Norway, USA and Canada to investigate appropriate technologies to introduce kelp farming aquaculture to Australia. Since returning, she and her team have built a laboratory and worked to understand the breeding requirements of our native species of kelp, Ecklonia radiata.
Jo discusses why she is pioneering kelp farming aquaculture in Australia and how it supports a regenerative and sustainable food system for future generations.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work with kelp and aquaculture?
[Jo Lane] - When I was at university, I studied science and zoology. I was interested in conservation and environmental issues, but everyone kept telling me, “you’ll never get a job.” I started looking for work at different zoos and aquariums, and luckily got a job at an aquarium which changed the course of my future studies and life.
I fell in love with the marine environment, so I changed my university courses to marine biology and continued my mission to be involved in marine conservation.
My career has been varied; I've worked for federal, state, and local government departments. After moving to the South coast, I was having a coffee one day, and the front page of the local paper said a property was being sold for six million dollars. This was big news for our town, and the owners of the property also owned a seaweed business. I wondered what they were doing with that business, so I contacted the owners and in 2015 bought the business. That got me deeper into the world of seaweed, kelp and all the opportunities it presents.
Can you tell us more about your enterprise and the impact it's generating for both the consumers and local environments?
The business I bought is called Sea Health Products, and when I was working for fisheries, I processed this company’s permit! We wild harvest kelp as it rolls in on the tide, wash it, dry it, and create a range of seasonings, soaps, and skincare products. It's a nice job, but when I started researching all the things you can do with kelp, I realised I couldn't physically collect enough to do all the amazing things I wanted too. I looked at what was happening overseas, and everyone’s farming it in Asia and Europe. I wondered why we don’t just do that, which led me down the path of farming kelp. The most exciting development is we built a lab in our backyard. My husband is an air conditioning refrigeration mechanic, so we have a cool room laboratory to grow kelp.
As a seaweed nerd and scientist, just understanding how this works and watching the babies grow has been rewarding. The scale of what we can potentially achieve has increased. When you have a plant, you can take a small piece of it in the lab and release all its zoospores. In the ocean, kelp is stuck on rocks, so they must release lots of spores in the hopes of some meeting. In the lab, we can make hundreds of thousands of babies. The other thing we can do is get them to this stage where they fertilise, and if you put them under a red light, they won't progress any further. Because of this we can create a seed bank. I've got babies from Sydney and a range of other locations, so we don't have to go back into the wild to collect that stock. We can create this seed bank for projects in the future, and maybe even future proofing through using different genetics.
It's such a new area and there are so many research projects and questions we need answered. as a scientist in conservation, I feel like I can play a role in something which will have an impact. We can grow so many babies and plant them to address climate change; something positive and hopeful.
How many varieties of kelp do you work with?
I'm very biased, so I only work with one. It's called golden kelp or ecklonia radiata; that's what we've been focusing all our energy into for the last five years. It's a beautiful species and an important habitat former in the Great Southern Reef. Everyone's heard of the Great Barrier Reef, but in Australia we have an expansive Great Southern Reef that provides habitats for so many species. Our cuttlefish, seahorses, abalone, rock lobsters, and this amazing variety of fish live in ecklonia, the basis of the Great Southern Reef ecosystem. There are 12,000 species of seaweed globally divided into red, brown, and green. Of the brown species, there are about 2000 total, and I work with one of them.
Is there a reason you've selected that species over pursuing other varieties in parallel?
I suppose when I bought the business it was based on the golden kelp, and I knew it's a popular food product so it was easy to work with. We targeted our research into that, but it has other good properties. It's good for gut health and has extracts or bioavailable compounds which can be useful in cosmetics, fertiliser, and agricultural feed. There are people in Melbourne doing awesome research on its application in concrete and building materials. That's exciting, and like I said, there's a girl in our area doing work with bioplastics. She's able to make plastic utilising ecklonia as well. I suppose early on we became fixated with ecklonia, and it took so long to work out how to grow it. Now we understand it, we might be able to move on to other species.
As a Churchill Scholarship recipient, what were some of your key takeaways regarding why kelp is important?
There are so many things you can do with kelp. It’s good for you as it's high in iodine, macro, and micronutrients. It's like taking a natural multivitamin!
It’s good for human health, but the other thing which excited me is as it's growing, it's like the forests on land. It provides an ecosystem and habitat which improves biodiversity for all marine organisms. It absorbs carbon and nutrients, so in a farming context we can utilise kelp for a whole range of reasons.
The thing to remember is it’s a nice alternative for a food production system. One of my concerns right now is the way we grow and consume food has a negative impact on the environment. If we grow more kelp, it doesn't utilise any land, fresh water, or fertiliser. It's a regenerative, restorative form of aquaculture, and an important way of improving food security.
When you travelled to different countries, did you observe any practices which you now utilise in Australia?
We were fortunate enough to visit a whole range of enterprises. There were people focusing on breeding, farming, and development of kelp products. We're trying to do all three of those things. Once I came back, we realised there are two major things we needed. We needed to grow the seed stock, and that was a real barrier in Australia because we didn't have an industry. We didn't originally understand the breeding requirements for our unique species.
That's what I've been putting a lot of my energy into for the last five years, understanding how to grow Australian or Southern hemisphere kelp. To do this we used practices and procedures which have been successful overseas, and we're now able to understand how to grow these species.
Now we can grow it, which sounds easy, but it's taken a lot of trial and error in the lab. It's very rewarding because we can literally grow hundreds of thousands of baby kelp from one handful of adult plants. It’s regenerative, and we can utilise those babies in a farming and restoration context, because as temperatures are rising, we're getting marine heatwaves, and kelp forests are declining. We can play a role in helping to restore those habitats.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive social change?
There are big projects and local ones which are close to home. In the kelp world, I’m inspired by the projects happening in Africa and Tanzania around seaweed farming and empowering women to create businesses. They are utilising seaweed in soaps and cosmetics. One of my local partnerships (I supply seaweed to her) makes beautiful hand creams. That's Saarinen Organics, she’s walking the talk by having a permaculture garden. She' introduced a reusable packaging program where she makes her skincare products and then you send the packaging back to her for recycling. She's using solar power, and I find it inspiring when people do environmentally positive things across the entirety of their supply chain. There are lots of great things happening and consumers want to make environmentally responsible choices for the planet.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?
I'm very consumed by seaweed, so I'll give you a couple of seaweed books. There's one called Eat Like a Fish by Bren Smith, and that’s his journey of becoming a kelp farmer. Eat Like a Fish shows if we eat more algae like fish, we will be as healthy as fish! People are eating omega 3 and fish oil thinking that's coming from fish, but fish get omega 3 from the marine algae they eat. Another great book is called The Blue Zones, and this highlights areas where people are living the longest. It's not just about their diet, but a whole range of factors including community values and purpose. GreenWave is a website based in the U.S. for people wanting to learn more about seaweed farming, and my website is seahealthproducts.com.au.
