By Mónica Cordero, Investigate Midwest/Report for America and Eva Tesfaye, Harvest Public Media for Investigate Midwest.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for Michigan News Connection reporting for the Investigate Midwest-Public News Service Collaboration
Juan Peña, 28, has worked in the fields since childhood, often exposing his body to extreme heat like the wave hitting the Midwest this week.
The heat can cause such deep pain in his whole body that he just wants to lie down, he said. It sucks his desire to work, as his body tells him he can't take another hot day on the job. On those days, his only motivation to get out of bed is to earn dollars to send to his 10-month-old baby in Mexico.
Farmworkers, such as Peña and the crew he leads in Iowa, are unprotected against heat-related illnesses. They are 35 times more likely to die from heat exposure than workers in other sectors, according to the National Institutes of Health, and the absence of a federal heat regulation that guarantees their safety and life - when scientists have warned that global warming will continue - increases that risk.
Over a six-year period, 121 workers lost their lives due to exposure to severe environmental heat. One-fifth of these fatalities were individuals employed in the agricultural sector, according to an Investigate Midwest analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Administration data.
One such case involved a Nebraska farmworker who suffered heat stroke alone and died on a farm in the early summer of 2018. A search party found his body the next day.
In early July 2020, a worker detasseling corn in Indiana experienced dizziness after working for about five hours. His coworkers provided him shade and fluids before they resumed work. The farmworker was found lying on the floor of the company bus about 10 minutes later. He was pronounced dead at the hospital due to cardiac arrest.
"As a physician, I believe that these deaths are almost completely preventable," said Bill Kinsey, a physician and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Until we determine as a society the importance of a human right for people to work in healthy situations, we are going to see continued illness and death in this population."
Peña harvests fields in Texas and Iowa. This summer, he's overseen five Mexican seasonal workers picking vegetables and fruits in eastern Iowa. With its high humidity and heat, Iowa's climate causes the boys, as he affectionately refers to them, to end their day completely wet, as if they had taken "a shower with their clothes on," he said. They work up to 65 or 70 hours a week to meet their contractual obligations.
"I'm lucky because my bosses are considerate (when it's hot)," he said in Spanish, recalling that he managed to endure temperatures as high as 105 degrees in Texas. "I've had bosses who, if they see you resting for a few minutes under a tree to recover yourself, think you're wasting your time and send you home without pay."
Some of his friends have been less fortunate, and a few minutes of rest have been cause for dismissal, he said.
The fatalities scratch the surface of what is a more extensive issue, according to health experts, academics and advocacy groups, who say the data on heat illnesses and death is inadequate.
"There is a massive undercount," said Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns for United Farm Workers.
She said it is common for the death of a person who died after a heat stroke to be classified as a caused by a heart attack on an autopsy.
Strater said a few reasons make it difficult to quantify the problems farmworkers face. The population's size is unknown. Many are undocumented. And, in general, they move around a lot and live in isolated areas. "Everything to do with farmworkers is particularly difficult because we don't know," she said.
An estimated 2.4 million people work on farms and ranches nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's census of agriculture. This population, mostly Latino, is roughly equal to the population of Chicago. About half are undocumented.
A possible federal standard
Although employers are generally responsible for ensuring a safe working environment that protects their employees' well-being and lives, no federal regulation stipulates a specific temperature threshold that mandates protective measures.
Nearly four in 10 farmworkers are unwilling to file a complaint against their employer for noncompliance in the workplace, mostly out of fear of retaliation or losing their job, according to survey data of California farmworkers conducted by researchers at the University of California Merced Community and Labor Center.
Only four states have adopted outdoor workplace heat-stress standards, and none of them are in the Midwest. California was the first to implement such standards, followed by Oregon, Washington, and Colorado.
This leaves the protection of agricultural workers from heat stress at the discretion of their employers in most states.
OSHA has been working on a heat-stress rule since 2021 that will require employers to provide adequate water and rest breaks for outdoor workers, as well as medical services and training to treat the signs and symptoms of heat-related illnesses. However, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report, this process can take from 15 months to 19 years.
OSHA officials would not comment on the pending federal heat standard.
Last year, the Asuncion Valdivia Heat Stress Injury, Illness, and Death Prevention Act, which would force OSHA to issue a heat standard much faster than the normal process, failed to advance through Congress.
The bill was named in honor of Asuncion Valdivia, who died in 2004 after picking grapes for 10 hours non-stop in 105-degree heat. Valdivia collapsed unconscious and, instead of calling an ambulance, his employer told his son to take his father home. On the way home, he died of heat stroke at 53.
A group of Democratic lawmakers reintroduced the bill last month.
"There is definitely a political decision to be made by members of Congress, in both the House and the Senate, because they have the power to pass legislation to tell OSHA to issue a standard more quickly," said Mayra Reiter, project director of occupational safety and health at the advocacy group Farmworker Justice.
Reiter added that the legislation would also help shield that standard from future legal challenges in court.
As in several recent years, the summer of 2023 has broken records for heat.
In response, President Joe Biden announced new measures to protect workers - including a hazard alert notifying employers and employees of ways to stay safe from extreme heat - as well as steps to improve weather forecasting and make drinking water more accessible.
But farmworker advocacy groups are calling on the administration to speed up OSHA's issuance of a rule protecting workers. They are also pushing for the 2023 farm bill to include farmworker heat protections.
"Farmer organizations and many other worker advocacy groups are hoping that there'll be a federal regulation," Reiter said, "because, going state by state, we have seen that there isn't that urgency to develop these rules."
Long way to a new rule
Creating a new rule to protect workers from heat must overcome several hurdles, from bureaucratic procedures to lobbying industries, including the agricultural industry.
"OSHA is uniquely slow," said Jordan Barab, who served as OSHA's deputy assistant secretary of labor during the Obama administration.
He said the 1970 act that created OSHA imposes many requirements on the rulemaking process. The agency has to determine the current problem and whether the new standard will reduce risk. OSHA must also ensure that the new standard is economically, technically and technologically feasible in all industries.
The road to regulations to protect workers from the heat also has to overcome industry lobbying, including big agricultural and construction groups. One group that has expressed hesitancy to new federal rules is the American Farm Bureau Federation, which has spent on average about $2.3 million on lobbying over the past two years, according to OpenSecrets.
"Considering the variances in agricultural work and climate, (the Farm Bureau) questions whether the department can develop additional heat illness regulations without imposing new, onerous burdens on farmers and ranchers that will lead to economic losses," said Sam Kieffer vice president, public policy at the farm bureau in a statement.
Vulnerable populations
To make a living, Javier Salinas fills 32 sacks of apples each day in Missouri. His daily quota is one ton, or about 3,200 apples. His wife used to walk ten miles a day to harvest fruits and vegetables when she worked in the field.
He said when he gets too hot, he sits in the shade to drink water but feels pressured to keep working due to the method of payment, which depends on the amount harvested.
Strater, with Farmworker Justice, believes that the way farmworkers are paid is one of the main obstacles that must be overcome to ensure their safety because it often incentivizes volume, forcing them to expose themselves to continued work without regard to the signs of a heat-related illness.
Kinsey, the University of Wisconsin professor and the director of a mobile clinic, said the demographic has a higher incidence of diabetes, hypertension, and chronic kidney disease.
"Climate stress," he said, "has introduced an additional layer of complexity to these existing challenges."
Seasonal visa workers are especially vulnerable because they depend completely on whoever hires them: from the house they live in to the food they eat.
"You're going to endure as much as you can with the hopes of continuing to provide for your family," Strater said. "The thing is the endpoint for that is death."
In Tama County, Iowa, Dave Hinegardner owns a small farm called Hinegardner's Orchard, where he grows apples, strawberries, corn and soybeans. He sells his crop to supermarkets, farmers' markets, schools, and colleges.
The farmworkers are immigrants from Latin America who reside in the surrounding area, and some of them have been working on his farm for decades. One of the measures he takes during the summer to avoid risks to his workers is to change the work schedules to avoid the hottest part of the day.
"I think they do a much better job when they're treated with respect and taken good care of," he said.
This story is part of a collaborative reporting initiative with Investigate Midwest and is supported by the Joyce Foundation.
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By Alexandra Talty for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Rebecca Genia walks out into Shinnecock Bay at low tide with a few of her great-grandchildren, using her feet to find hard-shelled quahogs buried in the sand. As a kid, she could fill a trash can with the blue-lipped mollusks in less than an hour-and could also gather other shellfish like oysters, mussels, or scallops, depending on the season.
Now, she says, "it takes us a while to even get a couple of dozen clams. That's not right." She points out that most of the shellfish she harvests these days have been seeded manually by the town of Southampton and local universities, "almost like a science project," she says. "The natural way has been contaminated and polluted by mankind."
What's also not right: the quality of the quahogs. "The shells are so brittle," she says. The increasingly acidic water in the bay makes it hard for the clams to build strong shells. She points to her necklace of wampum-mollusk-shell beads that are integral to Eastern Woodland Native American culture. Hers is a single large indigo-and-white pendant, half an inch thick, the way shells used to be.
Genia, a member of the Shinnecock Nation, has lived along these waters on the South Fork of Long Island, New York, for most of her life. Shellfish are a traditional food source for the Shinnecock; they were also once the backbone of Long Island's robust commercial fishing industry. Her tribe witnessed the crash of the clam and scallop fishery in the 1990s and then another crash in the 2000s, which further depleted shellfish stocks and threatened the nascent farmed oyster industry. Both were caused by massive blooms of harmful algae.
In 2020, after watching the decline of Shinnecock Bay-a body of water that has fed her tribe for some 13,000 years-Genia worked with Tela Troge, a tribal lawyer, to form the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, a group of five Indigenous women who grow kelp to fight climate change. The group hopes to heal their afflicted bay and inspire a new generation to adopt more regenerative practices on the water. "We want our children to be able to go out there and clam and collect oysters and scallops and mussels like we used to," says Genia. Plus, Shinnecock women are water protectors, she says, and being out on the bay is "in our DNA."
The women's move toward seaweed as a solution is emblematic of a shift across the country as the world's oceans change faster than scientists ever expected. Since the 1990s, ocean acidification-caused by more carbon in the atmosphere dissolving into the sea, among other factors-has increased at alarming rates; in the U.S., the West Coast is especially impacted. Increased acidification means crustaceans in their critical larval stage cannot pull enough calcium carbonate from the water to create shells.
By 2015, acidification had become so significant globally that the United Nations addressed the crisis as part of its Sustainable Development Goal 14: Life Below Water. Their guidelines have spurred government investment, university research, and private interest to tackle acidification ever since.
Nitrogen-rich wastewater, another byproduct of rapid human development, feeds huge blooms of algae (known as "red tides" or "brown tides," depending on the species) that starve other marine life of oxygen. Some algal blooms produce toxins that make shellfish unsafe to eat. The blooms are a particular problem in shallow waterways like Shinnecock Bay.
These twin phenomena of acidification and algal blooms are deadly for all crustaceans, including shellfish. And they can spell disaster for coastal communities, as 3 billion people globally rely on "blue foods" from the ocean, including shellfish, as a primary source of protein.
But recent scientific studies show that as the ocean becomes unfriendly for shellfish, seaweed could offer a solution-in particular, the large brown algae called kelp. Wild kelp forests form the most extensive marine-vegetated ecosystems in the world. They grow on every continent except Antarctica and provide habitat and food for the ocean's smallest creatures to its largest.
Rich in minerals, kelp grows quickly and doesn't require fertilizer. It isn't seriously affected by acidification or algal blooms, and in some cases, it can even mitigate their impact on shellfish, because kelp soaks up excess nutrients like nitrogen and increases oxygenation in the waters around it. What's more, the fibrous plant, which can grow two feet a day, also pulls anywhere from five to 20 times more carbon from the atmosphere than any terrestrial crop, something that leading marine scientists are working to quantify right now.
Because of these beneficial properties, kelp is being hailed as a miracle, a panacea for the climate crisis. Scientists, coastal governments, and private industry alike think it could be the cornerstone of a new, blue economy that allows coastal communities in the United States to transition from extractive industries into more sustainable ones.
Bolstered by roughly $380 million in investments since 2018, kelp farmers have proliferated from around zero in 2012 to 108 active farms in 2023, according to Connecticut Sea Grant, part of a national network of university-based programs dedicated to encourage stewardship of marine resources. Seaweed farming, a longstanding tradition in Asia for more than a hundred years, is now gaining a place on U.S. shores.
The Scientists Who Kickstarted American Kelp Farming
The science behind this boom in seaweed cultivation began in New England nearly 50 years ago.
Charles Yarish, now a visiting scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, is considered the father of American seaweed farming. Gregarious and welcoming, Yarish can talk kelp nonstop. In 1976, as a new assistant professor at the University of Connecticut's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and also its Department of Marine Sciences, Yarish became increasingly fascinated by kelp's ability to pull nutrients from the water column. He suspected that farming kelp and other seaweeds could help alleviate water quality issues.
Toiling away at his Connecticut laboratory and conducting experiments in the Long Island Sound, Yarish spent the next few decades proving this hypothesis, focusing mostly on how kelp can pull nitrogen from waterways. "The farming of seaweeds such as kelp not only has business applications but is terribly important for ecosystem services, removing [excess] nutrients from ocean waters and lowering pH," he explained.
Those early studies have impacted the growth of mariculture studies globally. At UConn, Yarish established an internationally known Seaweed Marine Biotechnology Laboratory, and was tapped to advise the Department of Energy's current MARINER Program, which has invested $66 million in seaweed aquaculture since 2018.
In 2016, scientists in Maine, alarmed by their state's warming waters and increasing acidification, and inspired in part by Yarish's early work, began studying whether kelp could provide a sanctuary for shellfish. Using the country's first-ever commercial kelp farm in Casco Bay and funded by a constellation of government, nonprofit, and academic groups, the effort was led by Nichole Price and her team at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences.
After three years, they determined that co-growing blue mussels with sugar kelp-Saccharina latissima, the go-to variety of farmed seaweed for colder North American waters-led to increased oxygenation in the water. The scientists also documented kelp's ability to locally raise seawater pH, which allowed the mussels to build thicker shells despite the acidic waters.
Price dubbed this the "halo effect" of kelp. She plans to continue monitoring outcomes to see how farms will fare in the future, since Maine's waters are predicted to be too acidic for shellfish to calcify for most of the year by 2030.
Price said evidence is growing to support the idea that co-growing shellfish and seaweeds can offset the impact of climate change. The scientific field is tackling some big questions that could benefit the kelp farming industry. Including, she said, "Is it a consistent halo effect, or is it only in these protected bays? Or does it depend on the size of the kelp farm? If it's a really big kelp farm, can it still create a halo even in exposed areas?"
While scientists race to understand the best growing methods for seaweeds with shellfish, the co-growing concept has been widely marketed by Bren Smith of GreenWave, who was first introduced to kelp by Yarish in 2013, after Smith's oyster farms on Long Island Sound were decimated by hurricanes. Smith's brand of co-growing focuses on a polyculture ocean farming model that combines shellfish with seaweed, an idea that he propagated in a book, Eat Like a Fish, and in GreenWave's instruction manuals for "regenerative ocean farming," which the group said thousands have used.
Although scientists on both coasts are still studying the effects of co-growing kelp with shellfish species like oysters-which fetch higher market value but generally grow in different environments than kelp-Smith promoted the idea of growing shellfish and oysters together, and is widely known in the industry for popularizing this approach.
Growing shellfish alongside seaweeds or finfish is a practice long used in Asia, especially China. However, it has been slower to catch on in the U.S., in part because of the lack of trials here. Inspired by the Asian approach and by Price's work in Maine, in 2018 marine scientist Chris Gobler began focusing on kelp's potential to heal his local waterways in New York, where algal blooms posed a bigger threat than acidification.
Eastern Long Island in particular was burdened with aging, failing septic systems that leached nitrogen into groundwater and ponds, lakes, rivers, streams, and bays. That excess nutrient runoff, combined with warmer waters, essentially fertilized the growth of harmful algal blooms yet again that year. Large swaths of open water were closed to shellfish harvesters by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Although Price was studying the co-raising of kelp with mussels to offset acidification, there was no scientific evidence yet to show how kelp could help shellfish during algal blooms. Gobler, working out of Long Island's Stony Brook University laboratory, thought that kelp might benefit oysters. Aided by Michael Doall, a former commercial oyster grower-turned scientist who'd devised a way of growing kelp in shallow waters, Gobler launched a three-year study in 2019, hoping to find a solution for Long Island's troubled waters that could be applied on both coasts.
By 2022, he had his answer: "We've learned the seaweeds can inhibit harmful algal bloom and even represent a direct food source for the bivalves as they slough off microbial cells."
What's more, Gobler's lab had proved that raising kelp with oysters led to faster-growing, healthier shellfish. Gobler dubbed the phenomena the "halo effect"-a nod to Price's studies-noting that the kelp around oyster cages provided a "halo" of increased oxygenation to the oysters as the kelp grew. At the same time, the kelp removed excess nitrogen from the water column. Backed by Gobler's studies and studies from Price at Bigelow Labs in Maine, the idea of raising shellfish with kelp is now spreading across the country, including to the West Coast, where acidification is even more pronounced.
A Kelp-Farming Breakthrough
In 2018, seaweed experts believed that sugar kelp, a large brown seaweed with furled, silky tendrils, could only be farmed at depth-as it was in Maine, the center of the seaweed industry. If sugar kelp could only grow in deep water, it couldn't be deployed for oyster farms, which are often tucked into shallower nooks of rocky coasts or set up in shallow bays.
Michael Doall, a scientist at Gobler's laboratory, solved the problem. A former oyster grower, he saw the business potential for a crop that not only had ecosystem benefits but could be harvested in winter, opposite the main harvesting time of summer for oysters-providing two income streams from the same patch of water.
To pave the way for a kelp-meets-oysters business model that would work on Long Island, Doall decided to try growing kelp in shallower waters. In December 2018, accompanied by oyster farmer Paul McCormack, Doall began an experiment on Long Island's Great South Bay. The two men sank metal screw anchors into the sandy sea floor and strung long nylon lines, inoculated with kelp spores, between them. And then they waited.
Over the next few months, the kelp not only grew, but outperformed their predictions. Doall and McCormack were ecstatic. "It worked really freaking great," recalled Doall. Gobler, using the findings, then put sugar kelp to work in his breakthrough kelp-and-oyster co-raising study.
Using Doall's growing techniques and the science from Yarish and Gobler's laboratories, at least 10 sites across New York are now using sugar kelp to pull excess nutrients out of the waterways. They are also collaborating on a recently proposed $700 million project at Governor's Island that relies in part on seaweed farming to help prepare New York City for climate change.
Although seaweed grown as a bioremediation strategy cannot be used for human consumption-in some cases, as with RETI Center's project in the Gowanus Canal, the kelp harvested showed high traces of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a known carcinogen-scientists are experimenting with other potential uses for it, such as a kelp-based concrete.
Kelp Farming for a Tribe's Future
The first group to raise seaweed using Doall's shallow-water technique were the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers. In 2020, led by Tela Troge, the women began growing kelp in the bay that surrounds Shinnecock Tribal Territory Nation, roughly 900 acres of low-lying sandy land. For millennia, the tribe has lived, fished, and harvested shellfish on this bay. Mitigating climate change and rising water is crucial to their survival, and seaweed offers a way to do that.
"We are a frontline community and we have nowhere else to go," said Danielle Hopson Begun, communications director and hatchery manager for Shinnecock Kelp Farmers. Hopson Begun is equally comfortable out on the bay or giving public talks, where she spreads the climate-saving mission of the group.
"When you're hearing on the news about sea rise and acidification and you're able to move yourself from Southampton Village to higher ground-good for you. It is not good for us," Hopson Begun said. "For us, it [is] a moral imperative to preserve our way of life."
To start their nonprofit, Shinnecock Kelp Farmers worked with GreenWave and Doall, who provided sorus tissue, the reproductive area of the kelp blade, for propagation. They found a home for their hatchery in a wooden cabin at the nearby St. Joseph's Villa, a summer retreat for nuns. The wooded estate overlooks Shinnecock Bay, which now holds their kelp lines. For the 2023-2024 season, the farmers planted 30 lines at 100 feet each, a crisscross of golden-brown algae ribbons dancing beneath the water. As a sovereign nation, the Shinnecock did not need New York State's permission to begin farming, and in 2020, they became the first seaweed growers in the state.
The group dries and processes their kelp by hand, turning the slippery curls of seaweed into hundreds of pounds of nitrogen-rich soil amendment that they use for gardening, sharing it with the local community at farmers' markets. They lay the kelp out in donated screens, or along the pool fence at St. Joseph's Villa, first washing the salt off the seaweed and then waiting for the sun to bake the kelp down.
Eventually, the heat crumbles the kelp into a dry, brown powder that plants love. Through this process, the nitrogen sequestered from the water column returns to the soil, a closed-loop nitrogen cycle now in vogue with organic farmers-although Shinnecock have been growing crops using seaweed as fertilizer for thousands of years, said Hopson Begun. Seeing the decline of seaweed in the bay in recent years, and knowing its benefits to shellfish, prompted them to start farming seaweed themselves.
While satisfying, the work is demanding, sometimes requiring the women to get up and work in frigid waters at dawn. For a recent November planting, they waded into 38-degree water during the first snow of the season, unspooling their kelp string as a hushed snow fell. But Hopson Begun wouldn't trade it for anything. She said, "I love seeing something so small grow into something really incredibly powerful that potentially can make a big difference."
Is Kelp the Answer for West Coast Shellfish?
On the West Coast, nitrogen pollution poses less of a problem, a benefit of the Pacific coast's deeper water and colder ocean temperatures. But acidification episodes are much more acute here than in the East: Since the 1990s, it's been rising precipitously, owing to a combination of increased carbon in the atmosphere and upwellings of deep waters that are rich in nutrients, but also relatively acidic. Many shelled creatures have been suffering as a result, unable to form thick, protective shells.
In 2007, this reached a crisis: Oyster businesses were devastated up and down the West Coast because baby bivalves simply could not grow.
"When it came time for our [oyster seed] orders to come in, the hatchery said, 'We had a complete crash. If anything survived, we are going to be supplying our own farms, not you,'" recalled Terry Sawyer, co-founder of Hog Island Oyster Co., a Northern California favorite for its shellfish-focused restaurants. "We were sitting there, flapping in the wind."
Trained in marine biology, Sawyer is an entrepreneur and lifelong ocean lover. When he and his co-founder, John Finger, realized how catastrophic the situation was, it spurred them to embrace a whole new outlook on marine conservation. Hog Island now regularly hosts marine scientists to study the effects of warming waters on nearby marine life. The company also collaborates with the Central & Northern California Ocean Observing System, providing real-time data from their farm on ocean acidification as part of a global effort to understand why the ocean is changing so fast.
Acidification led Hog Island, based on Tomales Bay, just north of San Francisco, to establish their own hatchery further north in Humboldt Bay, so they could ensure their whole line of production, from larvae to finished oyster. The process took about three years, and cost $125,000 in permitting fees alone, paid to the California Coastal Commission. Sawyer said the decision was the only way they've survived a situation that is cyclical for West Coast waters. Hog Island buffers the water at their hatchery by adding soda ash to make intake seawater less acidic, allowing the larvae to grow. The technique is now common practice; West Coast farmed bivalves cannot grow in the open ocean anymore.
"I love to say, 'If we have a problem, we have to figure out how to eat it,'" said Sawyer, pointing out that seaweeds are a "winner" crop if ocean acidification continues to rise. "We are going to need to look at organisms that aren't as impacted by pH change." For now, though, Sawyer has to wait to unfurl kelp lines in Humboldt Bay, as the California Coastal Commission has no regulatory process for inshore commercial seaweed operations.
Instead, Hog Island has been collaborating with GreenWave and The Nature Conservancy on a non-commercial research pilot study since 2021, growing bull kelp at the Hog Island hatchery in Humboldt Bay. The waters are notably less acidic near the kelp lines-a promising result as the Hog Island team waits for California's permitting structure to change for a commercial kelp farm.
The Promise of Seagrass
Tessa Hill, a professor of marine science at U.C. Davis and author of the book At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans, has dedicated her life to understanding how climate change is affecting the ocean. Hill conducted a study in Tomales Bay and found that seagrass "meadows" there also offset acidification, and could increase shell growth by up to 40 percent. She sees the same value in seaweed. "There is a lot of potential for co-culture of seaweeds and shellfish" in the bay, she said.
However, wild West Coast seagrass meadows and kelp forests are declining, and that makes Hill very worried. Subjected to stress from marine heat, acidification, pollution, predation by sea urchins, and human encroachment, these water-based ecosystems may lose their power to help fight ocean warming. "The more we protect habitats like seagrass meadows and salt marshes, the better chance we have at climate mitigation," said Hill. She sees promise in seaweed farming for the same reasons.
Helpful marine organisms-like sugar kelp, bull kelp, and seagrass-could help reduce some of the worst climate impacts that scientists are documenting on the U.S. coasts. Raised in quantity, they could bring at least some stretches of shoreline back into balance, allowing marine life to thrive again in our waters.
The Shinnecock Kelp Farmers are starting to see it happen, bit by bit. "The most darling was a little tiny scallop that took up space on one of our lines. They're endangered," said Danielle Hopson Begun. "To see that little guy holding to and finding a place in our farm was very satisfying."
Alexandra Talty wrote this article for Civil Eats.
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