Five kelp farmers from around Kodiak Island have started the Kodiak Ocean Growers Co-op. It’s a member owned and operated organization that hopes to benefit all of the archipelago’s kelp farmers in the growing, local industry.
Kelp farmer Tollef Monson, who operates Alaska Sea Greens with his wife Adelia on the west side of Kodiak Island in Uganik Bay, said the idea for the co-op started two years ago. He said the hope is that the farmers will collectively be able to communicate with buyers about a price that they can survive on.
“So each farmer didn’t have to go to each buyer and try and negotiate," Monson said. "The co-op can be kind of a place of negotiation but also for aggregation, for the total amount of kelp that a buyer wants.”
Monson said the intent is for each participating farm to sell its kelp to the cooperative, which then sells to the buyers. They’re working with at least two main buyers this year, Macro Oceans and Cascadia Seaweed in British Columbia.
The co-op's five member farms are Monson’s, Icy Waters Fisheries owned by Curt and Avenue Waters, Kodiak Island Sustainable Seaweed or KISS owned by Nick Mangini off Near Island, Alaska Ocean Farms owned by Lexa Meyer and Alf Pryor in Kodiak, and Kelp Island owned by the Ivanoffs.
All five are diverse in terms of size, location and quantities of kelp they grow. Monson, for example, said his kelp farm on the west side of the island has to harvest sooner than farmers on the east side.
“Our side tends to run out of nutrients in June, early June, and so we need to have our kelp out of the water," he said. "Whereas the town guys, the east side folks, tend to have a longer growing season; I think because they’re connected to the entire Pacific Ocean out here, so there’s a lot more upwelling of nutrients.”
Monson said he’s hoping to harvest between 80,000 and 100,000 pounds of kelp at his farm this summer. He said the whole cooperative plans to grow a million pounds of mainly sugar kelp this year.
Monson said that’s “totally reasonable” for the Kodiak Island farms, especially with the new GreenWave kelp hatchery in Kodiak providing competitively priced, locally raised kelp seed.
Local kelp processing is also scaling up, with Kodiak Island Wildsource getting a significant upgrade to its kelp processing capabilities this year.
“It’s just too hard for any one individual to build this industry alone. I mean, think about salmon when they started. It wasn’t just one cannery or one fisherman," Monson said. "So, you know if it’s community oriented and we can all work together, then we’re all going to succeed together.”
Monson expects two new kelp farms in the Kodiak Archipelago will start up and join the co-op next year.
The Kodiak Island cooperative is accepting new kelp farmers, members and interns for this summer. More information can be found on their website, https://kodiakoceangrowers.org/.
