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Lesson 1
Guiding Principles of Farm Design
Back to: Farm Design
Considerations for Year One
When you’re first getting into ocean farming, there is a lot to figure out. Beyond the journey of finding and permitting your site, designing a farm, organizing seed, and identifying a market for your crop, there are two key questions to consider:
Like with so many things in life, you can do your best to plan and predict, but the best way to truly answer these questions is to live it.
We recommend that you approach your first year of farming as a trial period. Think about your first season as a test run where you go through all the stages, steps, and processes of outplanting, growing, and harvesting kelp on your chosen site, but you minimize your up-front capital expenditure to the best of your ability. You’ll learn as much your first year farming from growing two lines as you will twenty. And by minimizing your overhead, you’ll reduce the risk of losing a lot of money. In essence, you want to design and permit a farm, but plant a garden.
Ask Yourself:
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Does kelp grow well on your chosen site?
GreenWave Tip
Permit a Farm, Plant a Garden
In an ideal world, every state would have a permitting process in place to allow farmers to easily lease and permit a test site to conduct these tests. In some states, you can receive an experimental permit; Maine grants LPAs (Limited Purpose Aquaculture permits), small inexpensive leases, which allow farmers to try out the industry. But unfortunately, many other states don’t have this option, and the permitting process can be long and drawn out. In short, you don’t want to do it twice in two years. So, although you may not be growing at a full commercial scale until year two or even year three, it’s in your best interest to permit your farm for the full acreage required to operate your farm at scale, based on your calculations.
As you go through the rest of this course, design and plan a farm that will help you meet your business goals, but keep in mind that you don’t need to install all of the gear immediately. You could permit a 10-acre site but only install two arrays your first year. Even though you don’t plan on running your full farm in year one, you should be roughly aware of how your farm will look and how much money you stand to earn when your farm is running at scale. So, it’s a good exercise to design your fully operational farm to the best of your ability.