Since starting up a kelp enterprise in Ketchikan in the spring of 2023, Pacific Kelp Co. founders Nick Stern and John Smet have held fast to their goal of bolstering Alaska’s mariculture industry.

Now three years into building up their business, Stern and Smet are purchasing wild-harvested macrocystis kelp from Ketchikan fishermen and using specialized equipment they set up in a portion of the RS Seafood plant to produce and market “KelpEdge,” a liquid kelp product that helps plants grow.

The product — a clarified, golden-brown liquid with a briny ocean smell — is an organic biostimulant that serves as a supplement to plant fertilizers. It’s available in one-liter or two-gallon jugs for small-scale growers, and in large barrels and drums for farmers.

Pacific Kelp founders Stern and Smet traced their business journey back to their college years at Cornell University in New York state. They both graduated in 2017 and worked in finance before deciding to start up a new venture.

They first visited Ketchikan in early 2023, with the idea of farming kelp or other seaweeds.

“That was the initial idea — let’s farm seaweed,” Stern said. “It’s really good for the environment, really good for the ocean, and that’s a big reason we got into it.”

“But as we got more and more entrenched, did more research, got to know the seaweed world and industry a bit more, we saw the market wasn’t quite ready for that,” Stern said. “Pulling raw kelp out of the ocean — there’s not many buyers for that.”

Soon after moving to Ketchikan, and attending the Alaska Mariculture Conference, the business partners saw a need for new Alaska kelp products.

“Producing a processed, finished good out of kelp — that’s what we sort of identified as the best area in the overall kelp supply chain for us to play in, and that’s what I think is best for us, and best for the industry,” Smet said.

While putting down roots in Ketchikan, Stern and Smet explored many possibilities, including the idea of drying kelp for export. Their research led them to develop a kelp biostimulant that could gain traction in the agriculture industry.

“You think about agriculture — it’s an extremely, insanely huge, huge industry, and seaweed products are only growing within it right now,” Stern said.

“We’re also starting to see the agriculture system breaking a little bit,” he said. “You’re seeing way more farm and crop failures, with extreme weather conditions, climate change, all these things, and it’s not a question of ‘How much can we farm?’ anymore, it’s starting to be like, ‘Can we even farm?’”

Kelp biostimulants could help solve problems like heat stress, or specific plant viruses like leaf roll virus that causes wine grape leaves to curl up, which can result in sour grapes, Stern said.

Smet said they’re discovering new applications by working with university professors and researchers who are already focused on using seaweeds in agriculture.

Stern noted that companies around the world have been creating similar seaweed biostimulants for more than 50 years.

“We’re bringing a new supply, new region, new process to the market, and there’s not really many other people doing this — in the United States, at least — so that’s what got us really, really excited,” Stern said.

Stern and Smet developed their own process for creating a biostimulant by exploring articles about pharmaceutical-grade extraction techniques and trying it out on kelp.

“We’re running kelp and water through this machine that basically causes the cells to rupture, and then from that we basically separate the solids and liquids, and the liquid is the finished product,” Stern said. “It’s working well.”

While developing their biostimulant, Stern and Smet learned how to grow plants and vegetables indoors so that they could test it out.

The company also hired Ketchikan fishermen, including Tom Carruth and Jeremy Leighton, to harvest wild macrocystis by giving a “haircut” to kelp beds outside Ketchikan, which can grow up to two vertical feet each day.

Smet noted that he and Stern met Carruth and Leighton while addressing dive fishermen’s concerns with the original farm site lease application that Pacific Kelp submitted with the state, for an area of Ryus Bay.

After discovering a mapping error, which triggered divers’ concerns, “we moved our farm site into deeper water there, where there were no active geoducks or sea cucumbers, and now we’re very close with the divers,” Smet said.

Farming is still a part of the Pacific Kelp vision. Smet said he and Stern hope to set some gear at their farm site this year to get a sense of what it takes to grow kelp.

“We think farming is the way to go, from an environmental and cost perspective,” Smet said. “It’s more reliable, higher quality, cheaper and better for the environment at scale.”

“We just need to provide to the industry in Alaska as well as our customers that we can produce reliable, high-quality products, and we need to get our feet under us to be operating at the size that it makes sense to invest in farming.”

Smet said the KelpEdge product, which has been on the market for about a year, is already at work on house plants, home lawns, home gardens and a variety of farms. He noted that the consistency of the product is important: It flows well through all sorts of plant spraying devices.

The company sells its product to farmers growing onions and potatoes in the Pacific Northwest, strawberries and pistachios in California, strawberries in Virginia, blueberries in Oregon and soybeans in North Carolina. Pacific Kelp also is working with distributor Alaska Mill and Feed in Anchorage and researchers at University of Alaska experimental farm in Palmer.

The Ketchikan Community Gardens network is taking excess kelp from Pacific Kelp to make compost.