Seaweed, sabotage, and how Ireland could benefit from a sustainable crop under the sea

Paul Cobb, who has built up a business exporting culinary seaweed from West Cork to Japan, says there is an ocean of untapped potential in Ireland’s Atlantic waters

Roaring Water Sea Vegetable grows seaweed in Dunmanus Bay, West Cork. Because the seaweed is growing on lines which hang in the water moored to buoys, there is no disruption of the delicate marine ecosystem of the seabed involved in harvesting the farmed product. Picture: Paul Cobb

Many of us think of sushi when we think of eating seaweed, but the chances are that, even if you’re not a fan of Japanese cuisine, seaweed is already in your diet, as well as in your medicines, beauty products, and more.

From the agar jelly used in laboratory research or as a gelatin substitute, to alginates in your cough medicine or carrageenan used to thicken and emulsify foods like yoghurt and ice cream, seaweed products are actually all around us.

“Probably everyone is using seaweed, and they just don’t know it,” as Paul Cobb puts it.

“It’s an important raw material, and I think that is just becoming recognised.

“At the moment there is a huge demand for seaweed right across the world, in industry, agriculture, cosmetics, and medicine.”

From known medicinal benefits — university studies have shown that a mineral called vanadium found in sugar kelp can help type-2 diabetes sufferers with blood sugar regulation — to its unique nutritional profile, some of seaweed’s applications are well known.

Paul Cobb at the recent Ballymaloe Food Festival. He says his introduction to seaweed farming was an eye-opener: 'I was just amazed that in a period of three or four months you could produce such a rich, nutritious crop, in the winter months when not much is happening on the land.' Picture: Dan Linehan

Others, such as using seaweed as a food supplement in farming to reduce methane gases in cattle, are just beginning to be understood and researched.

Paul Cobb started off harvesting small quantities of seaweed from the shoreline in the time-honoured fashion, for the veg plots of his West Cork smallholding, having moved to Ireland in 2002.

Originally from Devon, he worked in fishing and construction until the collapse of the Celtic Tiger in 2008.
Casting around for a new living, he did an aquaculture course in Castletownbere, and did his work experience at Roaring Water Sea Vegetable Co-op, Ireland’s first ever seaweed farm.

At the time, Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM) was investing in the novel technology of seaweed farming.

Paul Cobb on the Roaring Water Sea Vegetable farm. He pays tribute to BIM's work in the early 2000s, saying Ireland was then at the forefront in Europe of sustainable seaweed farming. 

Seaweed farming is quite different from just harvesting wild seaweed: It involves culturing seaweed spores, spraying them onto string, and developing them into sporophytes (juvenile plants), before wrapping the seeded string around ‘longlines’ in the sea.

These are then left to grow over the winter, and the lines retrieved and the seaweed harvested after about four months.

Because the seaweed is growing on lines which hang in the water moored to buoys, there is no disruption of the delicate marine ecosystem of the seabed involved in harvesting the farmed product.

Paul was hooked.

“I was just amazed that in a period of three or four months you could produce such a rich, nutritious crop, in the winter months when not much is happening on the land,” he says.

“I never looked back. I thought: ‘yeah, this is what I want to do’.”

Environmental benefits

On top of the seasonal work being at a time of year when other local work — in tourism, fishing, and farming — is in a lull, Paul says he was drawn to seaweed farming because it is environmentally benign, even beneficial.

Paul Cobb chatting to one of the visitors to the Roaring Water Sea Vegetable stand at the recent Ballymaloe Food Festival. Picture: Dan Linehan

“You’re not putting any chemicals into the environment, and farming seaweed actually improves the quality of seawater in areas where there is agricultural runoff by taking nitrates and phosphates out of the water,” he says.

“It provides a habitat for fish too, like a nursery. All the life thrives around it.

“It’s the next best thing to a marine reserve.”

To protect the marine environment from microplastics, Paul avoids using cheaper polypropylene rope and instead uses long-lasting nylon, and longlines made from recycled clothes.

Paul could see the huge potential for sustainable employment for rural west coast communities being hit hard by the twin blows of the decline of the fishing industry and the economic collapse of the late 2000s.

At the time, Irish research into seaweed farming, supported by BIM and the Marine Institute, was at the forefront of European moves to develop the industry.

“BIM were pioneering the first growing facility in Ireland on the site where I did my work experience,” Paul says. 

“Ireland was really at the forefront in Europe at that time, pioneering the techniques of seaweed farming, and it took a bit of tweaking to get it right.”

Exporting to Japan

Having quite literally learned the ropes, Paul ended up running Roaring Water Sea Vegetable Co-op for nine years. A Bord Bia introduction led to Paul connecting with a Japanese client seeking top-quality culinary grade edible seaweeds, attracted by the pristine waters of the west of Ireland.

While the many seaweed varieties are used in everything from food production to cosmetics, there is a particularly strong connection between seaweeds and traditional Japanese recipes such as sushi and Japan is a major destination market for Irish-grown seaweed. Picture: iStock

This is still Paul’s biggest export market for his dried culinary seaweeds, species of which include hijiki, sugar kelp, sea spaghetti, wakame, nori, and dillisk.

Roaring Water Sea Vegetable export 150kg pallets at a time to a Japanese client.

“They are very keen on the sea spaghetti and wakame and, funnily enough, channel wrack, which grows right at the top of the beach and which they say is like hijiki,” Paul says.

“Japanese customers have become my mentors, and that has been a great help.”

As well as his dried products, Paul, himself a vegetarian, produces a variety of chilled meat substitutes in his commercial kitchen, including a wakame-based “sea pudding” which is like black pudding, as well as vegan chorizo and sea burgers.

Seasonally, Roaring Water Sea Vegetable will employ up to four people at harvest time, when seeding new lines at the start of the season, or during processing.

Disaster and sabotage

The life that Paul Cobb loves is not always without its trials and tribulations. Last year, he experienced a disastrous setback that his business is only just recovering from.

Paul Cobb drying the harvested seaweed. The business received a nasty shock one day in June 2023 when Paul discovered all his longlines had been cut, meaning the loss of an entire crop as well as equipment including floats, barrels, and buoys. 

When Roaring Water Sea Vegetable Co-op was disbanded and its seaweed harvesting licence given away, Paul went it alone and was finally granted a new licence for a new two-and-a-half hectare site in Dunmanus Bay in 2022.

And then, disaster struck.

The first year in the deeper waters of Dunmanus Bay, the early 2023 harvest was a bumper crop.

“We had double what we were getting in Roaringwater Bay on the same length of longlines,” Paul recalls.

So much that we were still harvesting at the end of May. We were working seven days a week, bringing in boatload after boatload. 

“On the third of June, we finished harvesting on a Saturday evening, and on Sunday morning we went back and we had been sabotaged: All the lines had been cut.”

All his marker buoys, longlines, barrels, and floats were gone. 200m of longlines with a harvest of several tonnes of sugar kelp were gone, cut free of their moorings.

Paul presumes all his equipment drifted out to sea, posing a risk to shipping and becoming marine litter.

He later dived the site and discovered that all his ropes had been cut close to their mooring chains, meaning a boat with a winch would have had to be used to lift them and cut them.

“We lost the lot, and it set me back a whole year,” he says. “I’m only getting back on track now.”

He reported the sabotage to Bantry Garda Station and offered a reward in the local press, but to no avail.

He is not willing to speculate on who the culprits may have been, but fears there may be a misunderstanding about the nature of seaweed farming and that someone locally may have been under the misapprehension that it is environmentally harmful.

Farming versus mechanical harvest

Paul was one of a number of West Cork residents to spearhead a campaign against the mechanical extraction of kelp from Bantry Bay over the past few years.

Paul Cobb harvesting natural seaweed. He describes as 'a bombshell' the announcement that a licence for mechanical harvesting in Bantry Bay had been granted. 

The long-running environmental saga saw a group called Bantry Bay — Protect Our Native Kelp Forest take a High Court action to challenge the status of a licence granted to Tralee animal feed supplement company, BioAtlantis, to mechanically extract kelp over a 1,860 acre site in Bantry Bay, the first such licence to be granted in Ireland or Britain.

Kelp forests on the seabed are sometimes called “the lungs of the sea” and play a role in carbon sequestration as well as providing an important marine habitat.

The campaign group argued that mechanical extraction would destroy this habitat, even though BioAtlantis said that no more than 25% of the site would be harvested in any given year.

Although a 2019 High Court ruling found that the licencing process had never been completed due to the government’s failure to properly advertise it on its website, the campaign group were not delighted with what they saw as an inconclusive decision on some of their legal arguments.

However, the BioAtlantis licence, which was first granted in 2014, lapsed in April, never having been used.

Bantry Bay — Protect Our Native Kelp Forest have been left with €30,000 in legal costs which they are now fundraising to cover.

“It was a bit of a bombshell when it was suddenly announced that they had gotten a licence for mechanical harvesting in Bantry Bay,” Paul says.

“I was involved from the outset. 

For me it was relevant because I know the water, I dive in it. Because I’m in seaweed farming, I can understand that it’s a huge resource, but those kelp forests are vitally important marine habitats.

“Our coastal waters are in crisis and with marine environments under so much pressure already, I think it’s better to just leave those ecosystems alone.

“A whole community evolved around that campaign and it was a phenomenal reaction. I didn’t think all those people would get so involved.

“That does give me hope for the future — if people are willing to step up to protect the environment.”

For Paul, the frustrating thing about the granting of the licence was that he knows a more sustainable alternative to mechanical harvesting is right there in the form of seaweed farming.

For minimal additional running costs, new markets in seaweed could be met by the fully renewable resource of seaweed harvesting, rather than mechanically extracting virgin kelp beds on the sea floor, he argues.

Untapped potential

Since seaweed farming research was first conducted at Roaring Water Sea Vegetable Co-op, seaweed farms have been founded at other sites on the west coast, with Paul estimating that there are around 12 small businesses now up and running.

Paul Cobb has practical suggestions for the further development of sustainable seaweed production, likening a centralised processing unit to the creameries of old in every dairy-producing locality around Ireland. 

But he says the full potential of Irish seaweed farming remains untapped and under-resourced, with early funded research in Ireland now stalled and other EU countries overtaking Ireland’s early lead.

At present, each seaweed farm is operating in isolation like a small cottage industry, dealing with the challenges of drying and processing their product on an individual scale.

He believes pooling resources and investing in a centralised seaweed processing refinery is the only thing that can take Irish seaweed farming to the next level.

He’d like to see a model like that of the dairy industry of the past, he says.

“There used to be lots of little creameries, and farmers would send their milk by horse and cart,” he says.

“With seaweed, we could be turning it into a green slurry and that could be like a chilled milk tanker on the quay, and then the tanker could go to the refinery. That is what I am hoping will happen.

“We need a central marketing board and a fixed price and more collaboration and shared resources.”

Hand-drying seaweed in the Irish climate is a difficult process: Paul uses traditional lines to dry his culinary seaweeds, and has polytunnels he can turn to when the weather is bad, and dehumidifiers that can finish the process.

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“For top-end culinary seaweed, the Japanese want it hand-dried, but it’s another reason why we need refineries with industrial facilities that can just take the wet product and deal with it,”

A refinery has just opened in Pembrokeshire where they are using methane from local farms to dry the seaweed. These possibilities exist.

“There has been no major investment in collaboration, while other European maritime countries have raced ahead and had massive government investment. We’ve just fallen to the back.

“I find that so sad: We have such great water for it, so many bays, possibly the cleanest water in Europe and I think there is massive potential for rural employment on the west coast.”