The Cascadia Seaweed Pivot: What Farmers Actually Pay For with Bill Collins

Amazing, and thank you for bringing that forward again because I think Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance has done a really good job in terms of their slogan, "Aquaculture is agriculture" as well, and so the education asset has also gone mainstream.

So just compared to seven years ago what it's like or what people know about good or maybe even better aquaculture.

I remember when we were discussing this, we were talking about it's not even sustainable aquaculture.

I think you were talking about, like, positive ...

How did you call it? Climate positive aquaculture or-

Hmm

... something like that.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, um, you know, I see the results, and i- interesting, uh, Lourdes, what seaweed aquaculture and the investment that's ha- in particular in Cascadia that has been substantial, uh, far more than we ever anticipated, uh, by impact investors no less, um, that what we see is a tremendous ability to look at the ocean.

A- as a result of us being in the business and the result of us paying attention and our, uh, particularly our First Nations partners who have been on the water, uh, for a long, long time, uh, we knew we had to measure the, the impact, and so as a result of that, we've created an Ocean Nexus platform, which is now being offered for ...

The platform's being offered for use around the world for folks that wanna measure biodiversity, uh, because we, we absolutely believe that the best way to protect the ocean assets, uh, for the long term is to better understand what's going on.

So that Ocean Nexus platform is a biodives- biodiversity measurement mapping tool, and that has been a, a, a wonderful positive offshoot of our requirement for understanding the ocean in which we're growing the seaweed.

I love that.

I didn't even know that you guys have this, so this is actually news for me.

And so this platform, and I'm gonna go allude now to when you were talking about how technology and approach to actually, um, measure environmental sustainability, I'm guessing this is one of the objectives of this platform?

Yeah, that is, that is correct.

Uh, when we, we, we b- by the nature of our values in saying that we, uh, limit the impact, uh, on the ocean, we had to prove it, uh, and, and we needed this technology to be able to prove it, and as it turns out, uh, this technology is in demand.

And, and, you know, I've been in...

This is my fifth decade as an ocean scientist, and I've, uh, s- seen a lot of ocean, uh, everything from ocean mapping to oceanographic understanding to satellites.

Um, when I was first, uh, doing ocean mapping work, there was no GPS.

Um, so what, what we're able to see, I think, and but it surprised me, we were at a conference, uh, back in March at a conference called Oceanology International with our Ocean Nexus platform And I was surprised at the subsea technology folks that were basically a, a consolidation of the multiple companies that were around, uh, as I said, four decades ago almost.

They are now being asked whether you're an energy pipeline, whether you're c- communications cabling, uh, any subsea, uh, structures that keep our economies running, uh, they're being, uh, demanded now to understand the, their impact on biodiversity.

In Europe, it's legislated and regulated, not so much in North America yet.

Uh, so we had a lot of people, I mean, these are old established, uh, subsea, you know, perhaps billion-dollar revenue organizations saying, "We love this platform because we can deploy it with our subsea installation and then meet compliance requirements for, uh, for our government, uh, reporting." Uh, I was surprised, uh, that there wasn't this kind of technology available already, uh, but for this deep subsea, uh, crowd that we were talking to, it, it, you know, tons of opportunity.

So what we're really saying is we understand we've developed technologies to support our merchants as a seaweed farmer and to support our, uh, stated values of taking care of the ocean.