((PKG)) FARMING SEAWEED ((VOA Persian)) ((Banner: Farming Seaweed)) ((Reporter: Crystal Dilworth)) ((Camera: Austin Harris, Cody Troxell)) ((Adapted by: Martin Secrest)) ((Map: Thimble Islands, Connecticut)) ((NATS: Various)) ((Locater: Thimble Islands, Long Island Sound, off the coast of Connecticut)) ((Popup Banner: GreenWave Company is developing techniques for seaweed and other ocean farming)) ((NATS: Various)) ((Popup Banner: Seaweed is started in a hatchery and moved to ocean farms)) ((NATS: Various)) ((Bren Smith, Co-Founder, GreenWave)) OK, so these are the spools that we took from the hatchery and what we’re going to do now is we’re going to take out the spools. We have to be really careful with them because they’re sensitive and we’re going to seed the lines. So here we go. ((NATS: Boat)) ((Bren Smith, Co-Founder, GreenWave)) We’ve got floating long lines and from there we grow our mussels, our scallops and our seaweeds. And then below that we’ve got cages where we have our oysters and clams. ((NATS: Lab)) ((Locater: Seaweed Lab, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California)) ((Jennifer Smith, Ecologist, Scripps Institution of Oceanography)) One of the more popular things that seaweeds have become known for is their use as a super food. And when I say super food, that basically means that they have a really high concentration of vitamins and minerals. They have very low digestible carbohydrates. So, seaweeds basically contain an order of magnitude more vitamins and minerals than any leafy green vegetable that you can eat, including kale and you know, any other super food. While they’re incredibly low in calories and incredibly healthy, they also produce omega- 3 fatty acids, which is something a lot of people are trying to increase in their diets. And so, they just represent a type of nutritional resource we really should be taking more advantage of. The uses for seaweeds are kind of insurmountable in terms of the things that they can do. A lot of people don’t realize that you probably consumed something that has seaweed in it today. Most of the non- dairy or low-fat, non-fat products ranging from yogurt to ice cream to alternative dairy milk, you know, rice milk, almond milk, coconut milk - anything that has kind of creamy consistency that’s silky. Even toothpaste, shaving cream, whipped cream, all of those things have some sort of emulsifier in them and one of the most common types of emulsifiers is a group of compounds produced by red seaweeds known as carrageenan. ((NATS: Boat)) ((Popup Banner: Ocean seaweed farming could hold potential environmental benefits)) ((Professor Matthew Edwards, Biologist, San Diego State University)) We can use farms in the ocean to clean polluted waters. We can clean carbon out of the water to help with ocean acidification, but we can also clean pollutants out of the water and heavy metals out of the water, using farming in the ocean to help as a natural way of cleaning the water without having to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to invent new machinery, new chemistry, to go out there and to try to do this with us, you know. The seaweeds are out there 24/7 doing their job. ((NATS))