Happy Nice Mall

Michael Doall hated seaweed when he was younger, and so did everyone else he knew on Long Island. It was a nasty nuisance on the beach rubbing against your legs, dirtying your fishing hook, and getting tangled in your boat propeller. But later, as a marine scientist and oyster farmer, he developed a love for sugar kelp, an extinct native species, one of the most beneficial seaweeds. Now he’s on a mission to bring her back to New York waters.

He grew up on the waters of Long Island’s South Shore with a mother who saw a nice day as a good excuse to take her to the beach instead of school. He helped his family with an ambitious home garden in Massapequa Park and earned a master’s degree in marine environmental science before becoming a shellfish specialist at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.

From there, his passions led him to sustainable aquaculture and oyster farming, which began his academic pursuits as a side job. Seaweed farming is a kind of happy coincidence. “I love being in the water and I love growing things that help the environment,” she said. “Kelp farming allows me to do both.”

Sugar algae, although still in an experimental stage, has become the seaweed of choice for New York aquaculture. Besides being a native plant and a delicious vegetable, it cleans the oceans, captures carbon and nitrogen in the water, and helps prevent ocean acidification and harmful algae growth. Each acre of algae planted removes nitrogen from the water (a pollutant from human waste) at 10 times the rate of nitrogen-reducing septic systems required for new homes throughout Suffolk County. Algae farming does not interfere with recreation because the growing season begins in December and ends with a dramatic growth boom in May, just in time for it to be harvested and out of the water before boating season.

Last December, Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law the law allowing kelp farming in Suffolk County. The measure opened the 110,000-acre Peconic Estuary shellfish lease for seaweed farming. Its defenders called it the Kelp Bill.

“New York has used this new law to make real progress toward cleaning up our waterways and creating economic opportunities for local farmers,” governor spokesman Leo Rosales said in an email. He added that the state is working with research groups, local governments and industry to develop infrastructure for algae harvesting and shipping for the good of the market, the environment and the region’s economies.

The big problem: Few farmers figured out how to successfully grow kelp in New York. By the end of the growing season in May of this year, when fall planting time was just around the corner, the New York Department of Environmental Protection had not issued a single kelp aquaculture permit. Only two commercial farmers have applied so far.

But Mr. Doall is confident he can adapt his techniques to almost any farm. “Every farm has its own personality,” he said. “Some are in deep water, some are shallow; some farmers think things through, others throw it out. They all work.”

Despite the aspirations behind Kelp Bill, New York coastal waters are not an ideal fit for traditional algae-growing practices. Mr. Doall first became interested in seaweed as a way to diversify oyster farming; He needed a winter crop to grow alongside his oysters, as farmers in Maine and Connecticut discovered. But he learned that all algae growing in the United States takes place in deep waters and includes 10-foot branches suspended underwater, hanging from lines that sway freely in the ocean. These conditions are not present in the knee-deep waters of the Long Island oyster farm.

But Mr. Doall had an idea. “No one has really tried growing it in shallow water,” he said. “I like a challenge.”

Working with a grant in 2018 New York Institute of Farm VitalityMr. Doall designed a simple pile-line method for growing algae in several feet of water without the expensive anchors traditionally required for seaweed. He didn’t even need a boat. Tested the new method at Paul McCormick. big gun Oyster farm in Moriches Bay, off the Hamptons.

Mr. McCormick and Mr. Doall attended Massapequa High in the 1980s, unaware of each other’s existence; It was oyster farming that brought them together years later. The duo challenged experts who said it was impossible to grow algae in shallow water. For four consecutive years, Mr. Doall claimed, they produced between four and nine pounds of algae for every square foot of line they planted.

“Mike Doall invented shallow algae farming,” said its founder, Bren Smith. green waveA Connecticut-based organization that first trained Mr. Doall to grow algae. Now Mr. Doall is a master farmer, giving advice, troubleshooting and willing to get wet, willing to help novice algae farmers.

Word of the kelp guru spread. Does the float stay free? He can tie the truck to the vending machine or the bowline and he knows which knot will work. Does the seed thread unravel? One cold morning last winter, while setting up a new seaweed line for an oyster farm in Noyack Bay, he would pull out a seedling with his bare hands and set it in place.

In the four years since he began growing algae, Mr. Doall has developed techniques for every aquatic environment in New York: from the fast-flowing, turbid East River to the shallow, sandy bottom of Moriches Bay to the deep, pristine waters of the sea. Peconic Estuary. As state regulators are still working on health and safety regulations for growing seaweed, he has advised and planted at more than 15 commercial sites, all of which are considered experimental.

If New York seaweed farming is on the rise, it will be largely thanks to Mr. Doall’s ability to show other farmers how to grow them where no one has grown before.

Seaweed farming is barely a moment in the U.S. economy compared to Asia, where most of the world’s algae is grown. In the United States, seaweed is grown mostly in Alaska and New England, but despite New York’s expansive coastline and proximity to an avid seaweed-eating city, the state has been slow to develop the industry.

Harvests at the Peconic Estuary sites opened by Kelp Bill have so far been a fiasco: The moss was anemic, with pale, stunted leaves or no growth at all. Planting may have been too late, Mr. Doall said, but he suspects another possible explanation: Perhaps the waters more clean. Pollutants like nitrogen tend to be low in these areas, leaving the algae with few nutrients to fuel its growth.

Karen Rivara, who has seaweed lines on her Peconic Bay oyster farm for the first time this year, pointed out that the ability of algae to remove toxins from the water is a big part of planting. “I’m not sure how commercially viable it is,” she said, “but I’m still more concerned with the environmental benefits.”

Fertilizer, cosmetics, and fuel are established uses for algae, but algae for food brings the best price, as well as the best chance of making seaweed economically viable in New York. One of the newest mosses to transform banking into its commercial future is former WNBA Hall of Fame basketball player Sue Wicks. He’s in his second year of growing oysters on a shallow water farm a short walk from Mr. McCormick’s house.

The first harvest was a failure, but last month Miss Wicks harvested hundreds of pounds of kelp. The product obtained is transformed into seaweed puree, pickles and spices. East Side Institute of Food and the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, which aims to inspire chefs and food manufacturers to find new ways to use seaweed. As part of a project supported by Moore Family Charitable Foundationsupporting conservation causes, they are not yet for sale.

“In a few years. We’ll all be successful overnight,” said Mrs. Wicks. “I want to be a part of the future and what kind of food we will eat. And I will do it in the bay where I grew up, where my father, grandfather and grandmother grew up. Even if I’m just tying a knot with sugar moss, I’m doing something positive.”

Shanjana Mahmud, a kelp grower with the Newtown Creek Alliance in Brooklyn, is ready to join the community. His interest in kelp stemmed from his enthusiasm for eating it, along with his interest in the environmental benefits of kelp.

Mr. Doall advised him to start by learning about oyster farming, which he did on a shallow water farm. Then, following Mr. Doall’s example, he planted moss where no one thought it would grow: in Newtown Creek, a Superfund site and one of the most toxic waterways in the United States. Of course, the kelp from Newtown Creek would not be edible; Like all New York moss now, the moss he grew there was experimental.

But now he’s applying for an aquaculture lease near Moriches Bay, where he hopes to grow algae for food. “I am not from the water or the boat life,” said Mahmud. “Kelp farming seemed feasible.”