From Tradition to Precision: The Path to Scalable Kelp Farming

This is Jan. Jan stands on the deck of his boat, a fraying rope in one hand, his calendar in the other. He squints at the kelp lines still dangling below, hoping last year’s survivors have started producing sorus (classic Jan). 

““It should be time,” he mutters.

But it’s not. Not yet. The sori—those precious patches of mature reproductive tissue—are late this year. Or are they just patchy? Or will they not come this year due to the incredible hot summer? No…..Maybe last summer’s heatwaves stressed the kelp too much! Maybe grazers got to them first. Or maybe nature’s just feeling cryptic this year….

So Jan waits. Then after 4 harrowing weeks he finally finds enough mature sorus tissue scraps—scrapes it off the wild sporophytes, triggers sporulation, hustles it into the hatchery, and inoculates his Twine cultivation ropes. From there, he nurtures them in tightly controlled tanks for 4 to 6 weeks, until the young sporophytes are ready for deployment. Fingers crossed that no infection accidentally is introduced in the basins, making Jan’s work, all that work, for nothing…. And with a bit of luck we can outplant!

Now we just have to hope the weather window aligns with the schedule we set—over six weeks ago….. Uhm, here we go……Fingers crossed…Again………

This is what traditional kelp farming might look like for a farmer named Jan.

It works—but only if nature cooperates. And it’s riddled with dependencies: on wild kelp or surviving holdovers, on available sorus tissue, on the seasonal timing, on a clean hatchery process, on a cooperating weather window. All eating up the predictability a kelp farmer craves for. All adding stress at the start of an already stressful planting season.

What Traditional Kelp Farming Gets You

• You need mature sori to start your cycle.

• These sori aren’t always available, predictable, or cooperative.

• You collect spores, inoculate ropes, and nurture them in a hatchery. A process that is very prone to infections (green algae or fungi) if you do not exactly know what you are doing.

• After 4–6 weeks of babysitting, sometimes even 6 – 8 weeks of babysitting, you hope to have enough baby kelps on your twines to deploy. After all, patchy lines quickly become a risk for infection.

• You have no control or insights on the reproduction of kelp gametophytes. After all, you attach the spores or young gametophytes on the twine substrates and let nature have its groove on😉, without your direct supervision.

Let’s be clear: for many traditional kelp farmers, the process isn’t as chaotic as described above. The cultivation method actually works more often than not. And if it is done by experts, it will give you great results, with beautifull kelp. After all, in Asia huge kelp industries thrive using this traditional approach. However, for many new kelp farmers I worked with, outside of Asia, this method was simply unreliable, stressful, too season-dependent, and above all, imprecise. The lack of control over the farm became especially apparent with farmers that had put their brave shoes on and decided to increase their farm size over de summer period.

It is this lack of control that was experienced by these kelp farmers that leads me to believe that the Traditional Kelp Farming method just does not seem to be made for scale. The traditional kelp cultivation method is like using a surplus shotgun, where you scatter a gazillion billion seeds over your twine with the aim of having a good harvest—when in reality, scaling more often than not, requires sniper-like precision.

In kelpfarming terms, sniping could look like this in a couple of years:

Two gametophytes getting their groove on ---> one kelp that is outplanted --> one kelp that is succesfully harvested. Copy paste process a gazillion billion times. No surplusses of anything.

In short you want to have absolute control over your crop, because the bigger you build, the more precise your production process needs to be. And the scaling ambitions of the kelp industry are unrivalled in the world of agronomy.

🌍 Why scaling matters — Scaling the Kelp Revolution

We’re entering a phase where kelp farming needs to go beyond pioneers and pilots. If Kelp is actually going to:

• Replace fossil-based materials,

• Offer resilient food systems,

• Clean our oceans and rebalance our atmosphere...

…then we need millions of kilometers of lines in the water—reliably producing predictable yields.

To get there, we need:

• Full insight into the production process—from seed to harvest.

• Freedom from hatchery bottlenecks.

• Year-round production, independent of local sori cycles.

• Genetic stability, genetic flexibility, and reproductive control.

• And yes—quantifiable productivity per bioreactor, per seed, per line.

⚙️ Enter Precision Kelp Farming

Now picture Jan in a lab (classic Jan again). Not a white, sterile and cold lab, but one that is alive—filled with tiny bioreactors, air pumps that gently purr, and blinking pre-programmed LEDs.

In this lab a powerful production process is created between three major pillars that are needed to cost effectively scale the kelp industry. Three pillars that are difficult, if not impossible, to utilize synergistically using Traditional Kelp Farming methods.

1.      MAD gametophytes

2.      Direct Seeding

3.      Production Process Quantification.

1. MAD gametophytes are MultiAnnual Delayed gametophytes—microscopic kelp seedbanks that can live for years. They can be stored, selected, and “awakened” on demand. You skip the sorus hunt and skip the hatchery. They exhibit remarkable resilience, tolerating variations in temperature, nutrients, and light conditions. These gametophytes provide genetic stability, allowing precise breeding and consistent traits in kelp aquaculture. Their indefinite storage capacity and selective revival make them an invaluable tool for a scaling kelp industry and conservation initiatives.

2. Direct seeding is an innovative technique in kelp cultivation where juvenile sporophytes are seeded directly onto substrates before placing them in their natural habitat, eliminating intermediate nursery/hatchery steps. This method significantly reduces production complexity, labor costs, and infrastructure needs. It also supports scalable farming, rewilding, and aquaculture by placing genetically selected strains exactly where needed. Its flexibility in timing, substrate choice, and location ensures greater adaptability to environmental changes, enabling sustainable expansion of kelp ecosystems.

3. Production process quantification means systematically measuring and analyzing every cultivation step—from gametophyte growth and fecundity, to seeding success and harvest yields. By establishing clear metris and benchmarks, growers can precisely monitor growth rates, yield, and resource efficiency. This quantification is essential for identifying bottlenecks, optimizing cultivation protocols, and ensuring product consistency. Moreover, accurate, data-driven insights facilitate scaling operations, as reliable metrics attract investment, streamline regulatory approvals, and build market confidence. Ultimately, rigorous quantification empowers precision kelp farming to transition smoothly from pilot projects to large-scale commercial and ecological applications.

This is Precision Kelp Farming. It’s a repeatable, year-round, highly programmable method for producing kelp at scale.And the flashy lab is not about making kelp cooler (although it looks very cool)—it’s about making kelp aquaculture economically viable as a foundational crop for the 21st century.

Having precise control and insights over your production process is not a luxury. It’s the path to scale. If you do not believe me, you can talk to the car manufacturers, pharmacy industries, and the semiconductor industry who scaled their industry before us.

Precision Kelp Farming is still a relatively new cultivation method that has only begun to reach industrial maturity in the past decade. While MAD gametophytes have been used for decades in laboratories worldwide—primarily for breeding and research—the breakthrough came with direct seeding technology. Direct seeding enabled kelp farmers to unlock the scaling potential of in vitro gametophyte fertilization in combination with MAD gametophytes.

But now you might wonder:

“What is the actual difference between the two cultivation methods? Aren’t they interchangeable?”

At first glance, they might seem very similar. Parts of both cultivation methods are even interchangeable. For example, direct seeding could be done using sporophytes derived  from freshly extracted zoospores. MAD gametophytes could uninduced be painted over twine. You could even attempt to quantify the production process within traditional kelp farming in a rudimentary way. It all revolves around the potential to optimize and unlock the catalyzing synergies between the three pillars of precision kelp farming.  The core difference lies in where the gametophytes undergo sexual reproduction. Traditionally, this happens on twine within the hatchery, in an uncontrolled way of gametophyte reproduction. In contrast, the precision method focuses completely on in vitro fertilization under fully controlled lab conditions. 

Fundamentally however, the distinction runs much deeper — and the story gets a bit more complex.

🔬 What is the fundamental difference between Traditional Kelp farming and Precision Kelp Farming?

Describing your kelp cultivation method is nothing different than telling people how you have domesticated kelp as a crop. Finding the fundamental difference therefore always starts with the question:

What does crop domestication actually mean?

In short, it means placing a "plant" species under human control, and a slightly longer explanation is that it's not just the plant itself, but its entire life cycle that must be under our human dominion (Muhahaha). Only when humans can manage the lifecycle transitions and control the full life cycle of a species can we truly call it domesticated.

But there’s still one crucial detail missing: scale. Crop domestication only becomes meaningful for us when a crop can be scaled up from one generation to the next. If you cannot reach that reliability threshold you risk losing your crop all together over the years, making it uninteresting for investments over the long run.

Take apples, for example. One apple tree can produce many apples. So, to domesticate apples, it's essential to master the part of the life cycle that allows one tree to produce many viable offspring. That’s the scaling mechanism that we need to nail to make apples agriculturally interesting. This is why bees are so important for many crops on land.

Now here’s where kelp becomes truly fascinating.

As far as I know, kelp is the only known crop with the ability to scale through two distinct life cycle transitions. That means there are two different biological levers we can work with to domesticate kelp — two ways of domestication that sets it apart from every other crop we know.

We can scale kelp the traditional way—by producing many spores through meiosis (surprisingly similar to how apples scale their genetics). Or we can use MAD gametophytes and thus precision kelp farming, where prolonged vegetative growth of gametophytes enables similar scaling capabilities and the potential to  produce a near-unlimited supply of baby kelps.

What’s more, this ability to scale across generations isn’t just vital for cultivation — it must also have played a key role in kelp’s evolutionary survival over the centuries it has roamed the Earth. This insight — that MAD gametophytes are likely a fundamental part of kelp’s evolutionary strategy — was a major reason we proposed the MAD gametophyte hypothesis with partners spanning three continents, outlined in our 2025 paper “Unravelling the Secret Life of MAD Gametophytes in the Order Laminariales” (Ebbing et al. 2025).

This also marks a pivotal moment for many kelp farmers: the need to acknowledge that there are now two fundamentally different kelp cultivation methods

— and a necessary decision about which path to follow.

Moving forward, Jan the kelp farmer must choose the approach that best aligns with his specific goals and conditions. Does he need the more traditional and easier to use shotgun, or the more accurate sniper rifle? It's simply not economically feasible to invest in both cultivation trajectories while having the ambition to produce kelp in a cost-competitive way. If he dreams of scaling up significantly, he must recognize that achieving large-scale production requires absolute control, and thus will require him to invest now in the more specialized equipment needed for precision kelp farming.

Yet today, I see many farmers unknowingly investing in both. Often, they don’t fully realize that these methods are not just variations of the same process — they are fundamentally different methods.

And this is where our mission, our "Massive Transformative Purpose", comes in;

At Ebbing Tides, we believe precision kelp farming is not just an innovation—it's the essential next step for the kelp industry. We're here to teach, guide, and empower growers like Jan to master precision kelp farming. Our mission is to make advanced kelp cultivation accessible to everyone, from ambitious small-scale farmers dreaming of expansion, to organizations aiming to catalyze ocean-scale rewilding efforts.

Why? Because precision kelp farming isn't simply about efficiency; it's about impact. It’s about making kelp farming predictable, scalable, and genuinely sustainable on a planetary scale. It’s our core belief that precision kelp farming is the only realistic path to achieving the scale needed for kelp aquaculture to truly reach its potential and address global challenges—climate change, ocean health, sustainable food production, and biodiversity restoration.

At Ebbing Tides, we're dedicated to bridging the gap between visionary farmers and cutting-edge science, providing practical, hands-on training, state-of-the-art technology, and expert support. We're here for the Jans of the world—farmers who are ready to upgrade their toolkits and revolutionize kelp farming from a niche activity into a global solution.

Together, let's scale smarter, farm better, and regenerate our planet's potential.