Revolutionary Indian Farming Startup

Budrigannews.com – Seaweed has a much wider range of uses than just wrapping sushi and adding flavor to soups. It can be used in cosmetics, textiles, biodegradable packaging, and even biofuel.

Seaweed is typically grown in the ocean on ropes or nets, but current methods make large-scale cultivation nearly impossible. Shrikumar Suryanarayan, co-founder and CEO of Bangalore-based Sea6 Energy and former head of research and development at Biocon, an Indian pharmaceutical company specializing in biologically sourced medicines, claims that ocean farming is in the “stone ages.” It’s like farming with a trowel and a pick.”

With its “Sea Combine,” an automated catamaran that simultaneously harvests and replants seaweed in the ocean, Sea6 Energy, which was established in 2010, aims to mechanize ocean farming in the same way that tractors did for agriculture.

The machine alternates between two lines of seaweed, removing fully grown plants and replacing them with lines with new seeds.

At the company’s seaweed farm off the coast of Indonesia, a prototype is currently in use. According to Suryanarayan, the Southeast Asian nation’s seaweed farming tradition involves villagers manually harvesting the lines after manually tying pieces of seaweed to ropes and hauling them out to sea. There is a strong demand for the crop there. The company intends to deploy additional Sea Combines, including in India, as the market expands and technology advances.

According to market research firm Fortune Business Insights, despite the fact that the global seaweed industry doubled in size between 2005 and 2015 and produced 33 million metric tons in 2018, labor-intensive and expensive production is anticipated to stifle market expansion.

According to Suryanarayan, seaweed’s uses are limited by its price, and in the current market, seaweed is frequently only economically viable for high-priced food applications.

Suryanarayan hopes that the Sea Combine will lower costs and make seaweed more affordable, allowing it to be used in more places. He believes that because village cooperatives could lease the machinery, which would enable them to farm a larger area, doing this won’t hurt the local economy.

According to Suryanarayan, the Sea Combine is merely “a tool” in the larger operation of Sea6 Energy. He claims that the machine-harvested seaweed is currently utilized in the small-scale production of animal feed and agricultural fertilizer by the company, which has raised $20 million in funding.

Although Suryanarayan acknowledges that the company has progressed slowly, primarily as a result of a lack of investment in its early years, he believes the company is now at an “inflexion point” as the foundations have been laid, technology has been developed, and there is a great deal of worldwide interest in the potential of seaweed to reduce the effects of climate change.

The next thing the business wants to do is make more seaweed-based products, starting with bioplastics, which it wants to start making in three years.

Since the EU funded research into it a decade ago, seaweed has been promoted as a biodegradable alternative to plastic. Seaweed has already been used to make environmentally friendly sauce and beverage packaging by London-based startup Notpla. Sea6 Energy is working on creating its own biodegradable film to replace plastic and paper bags.

However, the most ambitious goal of the company is to turn seaweed into biofuel, which would help India reduce its reliance on crude oil. The company’s scientific research indicates that it is technically possible, but Suryanarayan acknowledges that it still has a long way to go before it becomes commercially viable.

Vincent Doumeizel, senior advisor at the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), the UN’s corporate sustainability initiative, and director for the Food Programme at the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a charity that supports research and innovation, is skeptical. He tells CNN Business that “to produce a few gallons of oil, we would need hectares and hectares of seaweed.” Producing seaweed for biofuel resembles mining gold for gravel, in my opinion.

Sea6 Energy ought to instead concentrate on areas where seaweed can have an immediate impact, according to Doumeizel. Because it contains compounds that prevent the production of the gas by microbes in a cow’s gut, seaweed-enriched cattle feed has the potential to cut down on the emissions of bovine methane; Bioplastics may aid in the reduction of carbon emissions; Additionally, he asserts that the nutrient-dense plants may contribute to the supply of food for the expanding global population.

However, industry investment must first be accelerated, according to Doumeizel, who also lauds companies’ efforts to develop technology for industrial-scale cultivation.

This isn’t just the case for Sea6 Energy. The “Seaweed Carrier,” a sheet-like structure that can grow a lot of kelp in deep water, was designed by Norwegian company Seaweed Solutions. Belgian company AtSeaNova created a floating seeding and harvesting machine.

According to Suryanarayan, “one of the ways… to improve the sustainability of the planet is through sea agriculture.” If we can demonstrate that it is financially viable, both our work and our journey will be successful.

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