An Open Letter on the Current State of Seaweed Farming in New York

An Open Letter on the Current State of Seaweed Farming in New York

Dear colleagues and partners in New York’s seaweed community,

I am writing to offer an assessment of where seaweed farming currently stands in New York, based on several years of direct, on-the-ground involvement across towns, nonprofits, and commercial operations.

My work through Lazy Point Farms has focused on a single objective: reducing barriers so that more people can grow seaweed. That has meant investing not in aspirational future infrastructure, but in the unglamorous, early-stage tools required to make cultivation possible in the present, focused on meeting real, immediate needs.

To that end, Lazy Point Farms has directly funded, granted, or supported cultivation and nursery infrastructure for multiple municipalities and organizations, including the Town of Brookhaven, Suffolk County, the Town of Hempstead, and the Town of Huntington, as well as nonprofit organizations in New York City and elsewhere in the region. Support has also been extended to existing and prospective commercial growers. This has included spools, grow-out equipment, greenhouse and nursery capacity, and pilot-scale systems intended to lower the threshold for new growers to participate.

Much of this infrastructure is already in use. In several cases, agencies currently exploring processing solutions are not aware that their county already has access to equipment and systems that were previously funded and made available—underscoring how fragmented the system remains, despite sustained efforts to coordinate it.

Against this backdrop, I am increasingly concerned about the direction of planning and funding conversations, which now emphasize downstream infrastructure at a moment when New York still has only a very small number of active commercial seaweed growers and a single commercial hatchery.

This concern is amplified by the continued reliance on a narrow set of feasibility studies that are frequently cited but rarely examined in detail. These studies have largely focused on sugar kelp alone, have not incorporated other species with different seasonal and market profiles, and have not meaningfully accounted for emerging cultivation methods such as gametophyte-based systems. On-the-ground progress in New York has already moved beyond the scope and assumptions of these studies. They do not fully account for the present-day regulatory, logistical, and economic constraints faced by growers currently operating in New York waters.

Nevertheless, these studies continue to inform assumptions about “viability” at the state level, and their anticipated successors are often treated as prerequisites for progress. As a result, decisions are deferred while additional reports are awaited—despite the fact that the most immediate limitations facing the sector are already well understood by current growers.

It is also important to be precise about risk.

Concerns about insufficient processing capacity assume that large volumes of seaweed are already being successfully grown and harvested. In that hypothetical case, the worst plausible outcome would be a temporary surplus—harvested seaweed without immediate processing outlets for a season or two while capacity catches up. That is not the primary constraint facing New York seaweed farming.

By contrast, the constraint we are actually facing is more fundamental: if people cannot access permits, equipment, seed, and workable pathways to get lines in the water, the sector will never reach a scale at which processing becomes a shared limitation.

What troubles me most is the degree to which funding incentives appear to be shaping priorities. Grant availability has become a dominant force steering the sector, encouraging the construction of new infrastructure—sometimes duplicative of what already exists—rather than sustained attention to grower access, coordination, and practical support. When grant pursuit becomes the organizing logic, it can quietly divert focus from the hardest constraints to address.

For these reasons, I am choosing to step back from further expansion and to observe how the next phase of New York’s seaweed efforts unfolds. This is not a retreat from the work itself, but a recognition that meaningful progress now depends less on additional infrastructure and more on alignment, clarity about constraints, and seriousness about enabling people to grow.

Seaweed remains a powerful opportunity for New York. Realizing that opportunity will require sequencing that matches reality, updated assumptions grounded in current practice, and a collective willingness to build on what has already been put in place rather than continually starting over.

Respectfully,

Wendy Moore
Lazy Point Farms