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I caught Sam Elsom on a Sunday afternoon, just days after flood waters had damaged low-lying areas of his current hometown of Byron Bay.
In the same month, the worst floods ever recorded in the area had completely decimated neighbouring areas of the Northern Rivers. It was a heartbreaking and startling event for Australians to watch unfold, let alone endure. Startling yes, that floodwaters could reach the unprecedented heights of third-storey roof sheets and completely swallow towns, streets, livelihoods, souls, and dreams in the process. The increasing likelihood of flood events like those he had just lived through was the catalyst for Sam’s vision and subsequent creation of Sea Forest, a land and marine based seaweed farming operation aimed at addressing emissions reductions. Although softly spoken, Sam talked with a calm urgency about how he came to be introduced and involved in the production of Asparagopsis, what his life looked like beforehand, the trials and tribulations his distinguished team has faced along the way, and why he feels Sea Forest could genuinely become a leader in CO2 emission reductions on a global scale. Sea Forest’s success has been somewhat rapid, but Sam and his team are not getting ahead of themselves, nor are they slowing down.
Firstly, congrats on the Sea Forest team being recognised and included in the Australian Green Power Players list in 2022, as well the Sustainability and Innovation Award at the 2022 National Telstra Best in Business Award.
Yeah, thank you, all that stuff is really awesome and it’s great for building recognition for what the team has been able to achieve. We’re based in a regional community about an hour and a half out of Hobart in Tasmania, so for the whole nation to recognise the work that’s underway is kind of exciting. It’s a huge motivator for the team because when we started the business, we knew that seaweed held enormous potential, but it was really just a concept. It’s a solid nature-based climate solution that grows really quickly and also doesn’t impact the land that we need for growing food and other things. Seaweed also doesn’t rely on finite resources like fresh water or require inputs such as pesticides or fertilisers, so it has a lot going for it. Thankfully, we’ve been supported by some of the world’s leading scientists in seaweed, who have dedicated a huge portion of their lives to understanding these complex organisms and are now being able to produce commercial results.
The recognition is huge and very well deserved. I wouldn’t mind rewinding back to your upbringing, where you were, what your childhood and teenage years looked and felt like.
I was born in Victoria and spent the early years of my life in Mount Eliza, on the Mornington Peninsula. Then my folks moved to Noosa, and that’s when I got right into surfing. We’d getup super early, and mum would take breakfast down to the beach, and we’d surf before school and surf after school. It was just an awesome upbringing. Years 11 and 12 at school were interesting times. I had one of my best mates commit suicide at high school and I was like,“I’ve got to get out of here”. I needed to get a proper education, or I was going to wind up with no direction. I begged my parents to send me to boarding school, and they did. It was a big sacrifice but they sent me to Nudgee College in Brisbane for the last two years of high school. I had an ambition at that stage to become a doctor. I was dead keen on completing it, but it was like eight years of study. It felt like a lifetime when I was 18 and so I wanted to rip in. My parents encouraged me to take a year away from study and travel to Europe. So, I did.While I was over there, I decided to study art, so I enrolled in Central St. Martins, which is a design school in London. I always loved drawing and design, but I just never really thought growing up in Noosa that there was a career path in being an artist or a designer. Eventually, I wound up in textile design, which led me into the fashion industry, which then inspired me to pursue that career path. I came back to Australia and was working in the fashion industry during the early 2000s. After several years of working for someone else, I started my own business, Elsom, which had more of a focus on sustainability. We were looking at supply chain transparency, more so because I’d been exposed to both the social and environmental impacts of the supply chain from my roles in the other businesses. You go to places like India, for example and you see cotton farms, and you see the conditions that these people are working under. They’re the poorest paid people in the world. There are huge amounts of pesticides being poured onto these crops, and cotton, in particular, is a very thirsty crop, so it requires a lot of irrigation. That irrigation ends up being run off into local waterways, which are then used to drink, bathe, and cook, people were getting really sick all the time. You see sweatshops where there’s people stacked into these buildings like sardines, sewing clothes and getting paid peanuts. None of that you see when you walk down the high street and see window displays of the latest threads. I felt like the consumer needed to know more. So we began to build a business around being intimately involved in the supply chain. We had some good success, being stocked at some high-end retailers like Barneys, Fred Siegel, Selfridges, Lane Crawford and David Jones here in Australia.
How did you transition out of that industry and onto Sea Forest?
It wasn’t like one day, I stopped doing that, and started doing the next. I had always been aware of climate change, but certainly didn’t understand the urgent need for action. That came about in 2017 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report. I was a member of the Climate Council and was listening to Professor Tim Flannery break down this 300 page document and put it into layman’s terms around what was the state of play and what climate scientists were projecting. It was really, really scary and I was just gob smacked. At the time, I saw a lot of activity around renewable energy, but not a lot of other solutions. When Tim began talking about seaweed and its huge potential and as someone that loved the ocean I thought this seems like a challenge worth tackling. But asI looked around our backyard in Australia, I couldn’t believe that nothing was happening in the space. The more I researched, I realised that you’re not allowed to grow non endemic species of seaweed. Therefore, we needed to find a seaweed that was both native and one that had an existing methodology for us to be able to grow it because seaweeds are incredibly complex. It took approximately 40 years to develop a seaweed industry in Japan. We didn’t have 40 years; we have until 2030 to make as bigger impact as we can to avoid 1.5 degrees of warming. Even with the progress that Sea Forest has made, we’re still living in a world that climate scientists have predicted. We’ve just experienced two one-in-500-year floods in the same month and before that, we had bushfires.Call it climate change or whatever you want to, but the world is changing.
You saw a glimmer of hope and chased it?
I spent lots of time researching and making phone calls to scientists to try and learn more about what we could do. My concept originally was that we could do a small community seaweed farm in the Pittwater in Sydney. Then I thought it needs to be bigger as we need gigatons of carbon to be reduced. I realised that acute little community seaweed farm was not going to cut the mustard, so I kept researching and stumbled across research that was happening at the CSIRO, and that was the game changer. A ruminant researcher, Dr. Nigel Tomkins and a seaweed scientist named Professor Rocky De Nys, who was the Head of Aqua-culture at James Cook University came up with a plan to feed 30 different varieties of seaweed to livestock to see the impact it would have on methane emissions. Everybody knew that methane from livestock was a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. It has between 28and 80 times the warming impact on the atmosphere of regular carbon dioxide. Their research found one native seaweed, called Asparagopsis, could virtually eliminate methane emissions when fed at very small dietary inclusion. Just 0.2% of the animal’s diet. It’s like a supplement, equivalent to a Vitamin C powder in your glass of water. Cows will eat anywhere from 10 to15 kilograms of dry matter or feed a day. Just0.2% or about 30 grams of that is the seaweed.That tiny amount of seaweed mixed in with their feed eliminates all this methane. Over one year, it’s about 10 kgs of seaweed. That will stop anywhere up to four tons of CO2 equivalent being produced by these animals.
Drawing inspiration from Dr Tim Flannery’s ‘layman’s terms explanations, how does it work?
It only works in ruminants like cows, sheep, goats. They’ve got four stomachs and one of those stomachs is like a giant gas chamber. What the seaweed does is it reacts with enzymes in the rumen at the final stage of digestion and disrupts the production of methane. In doing so, it improves feed conversion, so the livestock convert more of the food they eat into energy and less of it into a gaseous waste product that they burp out, contributing to global warming.So, you actually get an increase in productivity as well as a positive environmental benefit.
Challenge activated?
No one in the world knew how to grow it. The upside is enormous if we can try and get there because methane from livestock production makes up about 15% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. They’re responsible for 70% of agricultural emissions. I began making phone calls to seaweed scientists. The first was Professor Rocky De Nys at James Cook University, who then put me in touch with the Godfather of seaweed in Tasmania, Craig Sanderson. I was just bouncing around the world of seaweed academics, trying to learn as much as I could about how we could approach this.Rocky was amazing, if it wasn’t for his support and mentorship, really, we wouldn’t have been able to start Sea Forest. We spent hours on the phone and often it would be a Friday afternoon when we’d speak. I’d get off the phone and he’d send me reams of published literature to my inbox, which I’d read over the weekend, andI would have more questions the next week. I feel like when you enter this new world, there’s also a feeling of being an imposter. People have spent their lives dedicated to educating themselves and contributing to the science of seaweed, then you come in and start talking about it or wanting to learn or even build a business around it, but you haven’t put in those hard yards. He really dispelled all of that.Where is the primary harvesting facility exactly located and what does the operation look like ?Because there’s no methodology to be able to cultivate it, and it’s an extremely complex organism, we had to develop first and foremost an understanding of the reproductive life cycle of the seaweed, and then be able to control that and develop methods for seeding and cultivation. Seaweed is quite seasonal in most parts of Australia. We found a location down the southeast coast of Tasmania where there was an industrial aquaculture site with access to fresh seawater. As improvements came online through the research, we were able to update our methodologies or standard operating procedures. We had a land-based focus to cultivate in ponds, utilising the seawater from the ocean, the water that we draw feeds the seaweed then discharges more alkaline. It’s unlike any other aqua culture facility because it’s cleaning the water that we use rather than creating an effluent, like a lot of other fin fish or other aqua culture operations. We then raised $5 million fora land-based approach, which was scary. Our core focus at that time was making sure that investors were environmentally aligned and that they were getting involved for the right reason.If we’re making decisions, we’re putting the environment first rather than financial returns.We developed unexpectedly the ability to grow the seaweed in the ocean and were able to secure one of the largest marine leases in the Southern Hemisphere down on the southeast coast of Tasmania. We’re hoping to dedicate the entire area to seaweed cultivation, which is quite exciting. We raised an extra $34 million which enabled us to establish the lease and buy a land-based site about 40 minutes up the road, which was a redundant abalone farm that had 660 swimming pools in these concrete tanks.We now have a team of around 45 employees and we’re supplying to livestock farmers around Australia.
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