The Morrison government did not sign it,with then deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce declaring the only way to make that happen “would be to grab a rifle and go out and start shooting your cattle”. If Sam Elsom and his seaweed come good,such a radical solution may not be needed. (Resources Minister Madeleine King recently confirmed that the Albanese government is open to signing it but stressed no decision will be taken until after consultation.)
Seaweeds contain a cornucopia of chemical compounds that variously have antibacterial,antiviral,antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties,super-defences that protect them from being eaten by marine creatures and disease. About a decade ago,the possibility that some of these compounds could be used to improve animal diets caught the attention of CSIRO ruminant nutritionist Nigel Tomkins,who teamed up with Rocky De Nys,a seaweed biologist at James Cook University in Townsville. Apart from the potential nutritional value,the pair had also become interested in an idea that had been floating around the scientific literature for years – that some seaweed compounds might reduce methane production in the rumen.
Tomkins and De Nys tested 20 seaweed species and found that the red algaeAsparagopsis was the most effective. It contains a compound,bromoform,which blocks the action of an enzyme needed to convert carbon dioxide to methane. Animals receiving as little as 1 per cent or less of their feed from it produce virtually no methane. The results of the early experiments were so stunning that the researchers feared their measuring apparatus was broken. There was an added bonus – animals fed the seaweed supplements actually grew faster. Less methane,more steak.
Tomkins,De Nys,PhD student Lorenna Machado and postdocs Marie Magnussen and Nick Paul published their work in 2014,and the CSIRO created the company FutureFeed to commercialise the finding as a joint
venture with Meat&Livestock Australia and James Cook University.
It wasn’t long before Sam Elsom’s searches turned up theAsparagopsis-methane connection,and he called a number on the CSIRO website to be told,“Call Rocky.” In November 2017,he did,telling the academic that he was looking for help on growing the seaweed at scale. He wasn’t an expert,he said,but he was curious,passionate and driven. Although they didn’t realise it,the phone call was the beginning of the end of Elsom’s fashion career and would fundamentally change the lives of both men. Sheree Commerford describes that first contact with De Nys as a “rare moment in time … they connected on a unique level … it was really just meant to be”.
“I couldn’t even speak the same language. I was scribbling like a maniac in my book,then Googling the terms later.”
They began to chat every Friday. “I couldn’t even speak the same language,” Elsom says. “I was scribbling like a maniac in my book,then Googling the terms later. At the end of each call,another paper on seaweed would arrive in my inbox.” He mentions those early calls with reverence,still not quite believing that this busy academic would take so much time to deliver Seaweed 101 to a fashion designer from Sydney. “He was just so generous. He treated me like a peer.”
Under De Nys’s tutelage and growing friendship,Elsom’s learning curve was steep. A key fact was that the two species ofAsparagopsis with the biggest impact on methane reduction were both native to Australian waters,withA. taxiformis mainly found in warm tropical areas such as the Queensland coast,andA. armata in southern,cooler waters in NSW,South Australia and Tasmania.
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Concerns about bromoform,the methane-blocking compound,have already been investigated – and largely dismissed – in terms of its effect on cow health and on the environment. Using tests on rats and mice,the US EPA classified bromoform as a Group B2 probable human carcinogen. These tests,however,used concentrations up to several thousand times greater than in any of the ruminant supplements. Further,bromoform has rarely been detected in either milk or meat of the cows fed seaweed supplements,and when it has been found,its levels were more than 500 times lower than the World Health Organisation standard for drinking water. So far,so good.
The other concern was the ozone layer,which can be depleted by bromoform. But research has shown that the amount of bromoform that would be released by even large-scale human cultivation would be a tiny percentage of that released naturally by seaweeds in the ocean,and not make a significant impact.
But the biggest challenge was the sheer quantity of seaweed – millions of tonnes – required to make a real difference to methane reduction. All their experiments to date had been performed using seaweed collected from the wild,and attempts to cultivate the tropical species,Asparagopsis taxiformis,had failed (the team is considering another attempt). De Nys suggested that the second species,A. armata,common in Tasmania,might be worth a try.
Elsom’s growing excitement aboutAsparagopsis was proving contagious. Fashion pal Heidi Middleton,the former Sass&Bide designer,had arranged for Elsom to have coffee with Stephen Turner,a Sydney-based venture capitalist also interested in sustainable fashion. “I guarantee you will start a business together,” Middleton told Turner. She was right. Turner says he was “blown away” by Elsom and the whole seaweed idea. He and Elsom co-founded Sea Forest in 2018,with Turner as chair and Elsom as CEO.
By 2019 Elsom had a plan. Go to Tasmania. FindAsparagopsis armata. Figure out how to grow it. Simple.
About an hour’s drive north of Hobart,the quiet coastal town of Triabunna on Spring Bay is the gateway to the popular tourist destination of Maria Island. Pre-2012,most of the employment in the town was based around logging,an industry that came to a juddering halt with the end of the Gunns pulp mill. Today,many of these ex-loggers are employed in the seaweed business.
The Spring Bay site had been suggested by Craig Sanderson,a marine ecologist at the University of Tasmania,known to some as “the god of Tasmanian seaweed”. The planets were aligning – not only didA. armata grow in abundance in the bay,but part of a former mussel farm there had become available for lease.
Elsom had wound up the Elsom label,but continued to design freelance for other fashion companies to keep the wolf from the door. “I was still doing my day job but was totally distracted by the seaweed stuff,” he says. To figure out the perfect combination of light,temperature and nutrients to triggerAsparagopsis reproduction,Elsom and Turner commissioned research from scientists at James Cook University,University of Tasmania,UTS,UNSW and the University of Waikato in New Zealand. The group held weekly calls,sharing results of experiments. “There was friendly competition among the different teams but also camaraderie – it built a family,” Elsom says. Much of the funding was coming from his own pocket;he and Commerford delayed much-needed home renovations. “It was stressful,and we had to cut back on lots of things.”
When the first COVID-19 lockdown hit,Elsom,Commerford and their two children relocated to Byron Bay to be closer to her family. Elsom was commuting weekly to Spring Bay and returning to Byron on weekends. (He now travels fortnightly,and offsets flight emissions.) Commerford,a multitasking dynamo herself,has taken on the lion’s share of raising their two children as well as renovating an old seaside inn and running a sustainability-focused online creative agency. The family sacrifice has been considerable,she admits,but she’s unfailingly supportive,and “feels privileged to be in the position – and grateful for the opportunity – to do something big”. Elsom,she says,has “found his life’s calling”.
By 2020,the team’s research was showing enough promise that a funding prospectus raised $5 million in private equity,enabling the purchase of the Spring Bay site and establishment of a laboratory and ponds for land-based seaweed production. The question at this stage for Elsom:“Are we going to be a little seaweed business that’s having a crack,or are we really trying to significantly reduce emissions?”
“From the beginning,there was a requirement from our side that there had to be an alignment of values. It was always about climate change,not making huge profits.”
They decided to have an even bigger crack,and in 2021 brought the total investment in Sea Forest to $41 million,allowing the company to buy two large marine farming vessels and secure the 1800-hectare marine lease,plus an additional 30-hectare site in Swansea,50 kilometres north of Triabunna. The latter,on an old abalone farm,has 660 ponds,which resemble small swimming pools. Elsom and Turner were fussy about their investors. “From the beginning,there was a requirement from our side that there had to be an alignment of values,” says Elsom. “It was always about climate change,not making huge profits.”
The Sea Forest workforce now numbers 46,including both Rocky De Nys and Nigel Tomkins,the discoverers of theAsparagopsis-methane connection. On my visit to Spring Bay,I watch De Nys as he gestures enthusiastically to a bubbling broth of pom-poms,slipping words such as “tetrasporophyte” and “spermatangial” effortlessly into his conversation as he describes the fiendishly complex three-stage life cycle ofAsparagopsis. I begin to understand those first phone calls with Elsom. It’s clear that the genial De Nys is utterly delighted to talk to anyone,anytime,about seaweed.
Initial efforts to grow the species in tanks on land were only partially successful. Cultivating the leafy phase that most people recognise as seaweed proved more challenging – it’s not a simple matter of planting seeds in the water and watching them sprout. But the team eventually figured out how to “seed” the seaweed onto ropes lowered into the sea which could then be hauled in,covered with the leafy stuff,eight weeks later.
The team turned its attention to making the seaweed into something that cows and sheep would actually eat. Realising that the essential methane-killing ingredient was oil-soluble,De Nys developed seaweed “smoothies” using canola that could be added to livestock feed. Finally,they were ready to test it on real animals and,somewhat accidentally,Elsom’s fashion connections helped them find some.
Menswear company M. J. Bale, founded by CEO Matt Jensen in 2009,becameAustralia’s first fully carbon-neutral fashion brand in 2021. “Matt and I have known each other for 15 years,sharing a passion for sustainability,” says Elsom. A conversation about Sea Forest led Jensen to introduce Elsom to Simon Cameron,a fourth-generation farmer and conservationist in Kingston in Tasmania’s northern Midlands,who supplies ultra-fine merino wool.
Cameron embraced the trial challenge of feeding 48 sheep with the seaweed smoothies every day for 300 days,which showed that not only did the sheep appear to enjoy the supplement with no ill effects,they also continued to produce exceptionally fine wool. A larger experiment measuring methane emissions in 500 sheep is now underway. When Sea Forest took out both the Innovation and the Sustainability categories of the 2022 Telstra Best of Business awards in April,Elsom accepted the awards wearing an M. J. Bale dinner suit.
Further proof-of-concept projects are underway. Fonterra,the New Zealand-based multinational dairy giant responsible for about 30 per cent of global dairy exports,has a goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Cows in a handful of farms in the Tasmania Midlands supplying Fonterra are receiving Sea Forest supplements – farmer and Nuffield Scholar Richard Gardner’s operation was the first – with their milk already part of the Fonterra supply chain.
According to Elsom,Sea Forest is embarking on its first commercial-scale project,supplyingAsparagopsis supplements to 9000 head of premium feedlot beef at the north-western NSW producer,Rangers Valley. In the not-too-distant future,there may be Sea Forest-labelled beef in a supermarket near you. But Elsom is still modest about the company’s achievements. “We haven’t made it yet. We’re on the journey but won’t be there until we’re feeding hundreds of thousands,even millions,of cows.”
How much seaweed would producers like Sam Elsom need to grow to make a significant dent in the methane bomb being produced daily by the world’s livestock herds?
An article published in the journalAnimal Frontiersin 2020 calculated that by 2030,feeding 20 per cent of the ruminant livestock in Australia withAsparagopsis supplements would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 13 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. To put this in perspective,according to the Australian National Greenhouse Inventory figures,all of the renewable energy production in Australia in 2019 saved about 4 million tonnes.
Sea Forest is doing its bit. At full capacity,the current 1800-hectare lease,proudly described by Elsom as “the largest in the southern hemisphere”,could produce 7000 tonnes ofAsparagopsis per year,enough to feed more than 300,000 head of cattle,avoiding annual emissions equivalent to about 1.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide,comparable to removing 300,000 cars off the roads. The lease may soon expand,with the company eyeing off 3500 hectares in surrounding waters.
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Some issues remain. Sea Forest supplements must be given daily to be effective,a problem for widely dispersed rangeland animals. Tomkins and De Nys are developing blocks called “licks”,infused with the supplement and salt or molasses to attract the stock,which they hope will deliver the methane-busting magic at paddock scale.
If challenges like this can be overcome,the potential value to the Australian economy of a thriving seaweed industry could be considerable. A2020 report to AgriFutures Australia from the Australian Seaweed Institute estimated that theAsparagopsis industry could be worth $1 billion by 2040,providing 5500 jobs and reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 10 per cent. But even with this expansion,it’s clear that Sea Forest alone won’t solve the global methane problem.
Competing companies are cropping up in Australia and internationally,including CH4 Global in South Australia,US-based Greener Grazing,Symbrosia and Blue Ocean Barns in Hawaii,and Volta Greentech in Sweden. Intense research is also being devoted to engineering yeast and/orE. coli to produce pills that could be fed to ruminants to permanently disrupt the methane production in the rumen.
Elsom and Turner are sanguine about the competition. For a start,they gently remind me,the business is not all about making money,it’s about mitigating the climate problem. But Turner,still a businessman at heart,can’t help also pointing out that Sea Forest,having figured out how to growA. armata through its life cycle on land and in the sea,has a “four-year advantage” over most of the other companies. Turner also notes that the longer-term intention is to supply technical know-how to seaweed farmers worldwide,rather than attempt to keep it all themselves.
Not everyone in the seaweed industry is optimistic. One of the more outspoken critics of theAsparagopsis enthusiasm is Pia Winberg,a marine ecologist and the director of Venus Shell Systems,which develops seaweed supplements for human nutrition. She believes the claims of theAsparagopsis companies,and especially those made by CSIRO’s FutureFeed,are overblown – “an illusion of progress,a bit like clean coal”. Scaling up will be too difficult to be effective in the short- to medium-term,says Winberg,who is calling instead for a focus on fossil fuel emissions from the transport of livestock and meat products. The Sea Forest team shrugs off the criticism:“We’ve just got to throw everything at this problem.”
More general objections come from those who want to do away with the industry altogether. I ask Elsom:wouldn’t it be better to Just Say No to cows and sheep? For all his evangelistic zeal in tackling the methane challenge,Elsom displays marked pragmatism. “People need choices,” he says. “While there are cows and sheep,there will be a need to tackle methane.”
At least 1.3 billion people work for livestock industries worldwide,with 600 million smallholder farmers depending on them for income.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation bears out Elsom’s view,projecting that global demand for red meat will continue to increase at about 1.5 per cent a year due to population growth and increasing affluence in developing countries. At least 1.3 billion people work for livestock industries worldwide,with 600 million smallholder farmers depending on them for income. The market for methane-busting seaweed seems unlikely to diminish anytime soon.
A couple of months after visiting Spring Bay,I catch up with Tim Flannery and ask how he feels about the upheaval his little seaweed book has caused. “I must admit that I was slightly apprehensive when Sam told me that he had decided to become a seaweed farmer,” he says. “It’s a big jump from being a fashion designer and I warned him about the dangers of entering an industry that was so undeveloped. I should have known better.”
When I think back to that beautiful day in the sun at Spring Bay when we stared into the bubbling broth of pom-poms,I feel a sense of rare optimism. As someone who has been researching the impacts of climate change for 30 years,I’ve come to think of global warming as an enormous wall between us and a brighter future. Sam Elsom,for all his softly spoken demeanour,is not content with removing a few bricks – he’s determined to take a sledgehammer and bash out a bloody great hole.
I ask him if he has ever had any doubts about whether this whole crazy idea would actually work. He pauses only briefly,smiling. “No,” he says. “Never.”
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