As you progress through the courses, you’ll be introduced to new tools and resources on your home dashboard. Navigate to the Courses tab on the left side of the screen to see the full curriculum, where you can read ahead or refer back to previous content at any time.
Lesson 1
Welcome to the Hub
Back to: Dive In
What You’ll Find Here
Technical Curriculum
The Hub is organized into two tracks: Getting Started and Annual Operations.
Getting Started is designed for anyone just starting out. The courses in this beginner track will guide you through the steps of finding a site, designing a farm, launching a business, and securing a lease and permit. Use the Farm Design Tool to help guide your exploration, and apply your real-world site characteristics when you’re ready to permit your farm.
Once you have identified a site and applied for a permit, the Annual Operations track walks farmers through the seasonal progression of running a kelp farm. Here, you’ll find courses for correctly installing gear, outplanting seed, monitoring crops, and ultimately harvesting and delivering your kelp. In tandem with the annual crop cycle, courses on sales and marketing contain guidance on how to build your business and expand your customer base.
GreenWave Tip
Kelp-Focused Curriculum
GreenWave utilizes a polyculture model of regenerative ocean farming, growing a mix of seaweeds and shellfish that have a natural symbiosis and act in concert to revive ecosystems. On the GreenWave farm, we grow both kelp and shellfish via a form of row-cropping, cultivating different species on separate array systems within the same farm site. Studies show that growing kelp in tandem with shellfish, like mussels, can reduce local levels of ocean acidification and improve the outcome of both crops1.
Click on the icons to learn more about shellfish.
For a farmer, growing multiple species makes financial sense. A diversity of crops means more economic resilience should something fail on your farm. It also opens up more sales channels. While there is an established market available for many species of shellfish and you can find avid oyster lovers in any coastal town, many kelp farmers find that they have to put a lot of time into educating their customers about the benefits and value of kelp.
The core infrastructure of an ocean farm, as well as the permit and leasing process, is largely the same for both shellfish and seaweeds. However, the courses in the Hub do not currently contain guidance on growing shellfish. Unlike kelp farming, growing shellfish is a well-practiced craft with hundreds of years of history and a robust and developed industry in the U.S. There is a multitude of high-quality resources available online to help farmers learn how to grow oysters and other shellfish. Regional shellfish associations and established local co-ops offer additional support. We highly recommend you lean on these resources to learn more about shellfish farming. In the future, we hope to include more material on integrating kelp and shellfish on your farm. But for now, the courses that follow will focus exclusively on farming kelp, particularly sugar kelp (Saccharina latissima), the most commonly cultivated species in North America.
Geographic Scope
GreenWave’s headquarters are on the East Coast of the United States, which is where we’ve developed our expertise. Although we have partners all over the country and the globe, the majority of farmers we support are based in the U.S. and Canada, and the guidance and tools in the Hub are designed for a North American audience. Our farming model also focuses specifically on growing cold-water species of kelp. At this time we don’t offer any guidance on growing warm-water species and can’t support farmers hoping to cultivate seaweeds in waters measuring temperatures above 60°F.
We hope that international users can draw inspiration from the Hub, but if you’re based outside the U.S. or Canada, be aware that our species-specific guidance on permitting, markets, and farm design may not apply to your region.
Resources for Starting an Ocean Farm Outside North America
1https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0044848621014952
2https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X18308099