314 Sowmya Balendiran - How to turn seaweed farming into an industry? Start by farming 1000 football fields of tropical seaweed in Indonesia

Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food

A conversation with Sowmya Balendiran, co-founder and chief business officer at Sea6 Energy, about regenerative aquaculture, how to restore the oceans and use them more to reduce the pressure on land systems, get fossil fuel use down drastically, like in fertiliser, plastics, and in food of course.

Sowmya is one of the pioneers who helped create the first signs of a tropical seaweed industry. What do you do if you have to invent both sides of the business? How do you grow seaweed industrially at scale and price points that make sense? And how do you process seaweed into products that sell for an interesting enough margin?

Someone will soon mention seaweed. It sounds magical, some species grow super fast, you can harvest them year-round, they don’t need any inputs, don’t need land but sea, which we have a lot of, etc. So, why hasn’t seaweed taken over the world yet? What is needed to industrially farm tropical seaweed? Industrial might sound like what we don’t want, but in tropical seaweed, most work is done by hand, standing knee-deep or neck-deep in the water. We can agree that that won’t scale and get us to a seaweed industry that can replace large amounts of fossil fuels.
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

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Chapters

1. Exploring Regenerative Aquaculture and Seaweed Industry (00:00:00)

2. Evolving Seaweed Industry Technologies (00:09:23)

3. Developing Seaweed Industry Strategies (00:22:49)

4. Tropical Seaweed Farming (00:28:50)

5. Unlocking the Potential of Seaweed (00:40:36)

6. Scaling Seaweed Industry Strategies (00:50:27)