An up-and-coming coastal commodity

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Emily Davenport: 
Welcome to "Cultivating Curiosity," where we get down and dirty with the experts on all the ways science and agriculture touch our lives, from what we eat to how we live. I’m Emily Davenport.

Jordan Powers: 
And I’m Jordan Powers. And we’re from the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. 

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Jordan Powers: 
When you hear the word "agriculture," seaweed might not be the first thing that comes to mind. But Allison Fortner, a University of Georgia doctoral student, is doing her part to help raise the profile of this important marine species and its potential worldwide impact. She's here today to tell us about her recent experience with the Safe Seaweed Coalition. Can you tell us -- what's your story?

 Allison Fortner:
Yes. So, I am working on being a Triple Dawg from the University of Georgia Agricultural Leadership, Education & Communication Department, actually.

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Jordan Powers:
A triple dawg means that someone has received a Bachelors degree, Masters degree and Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. A triple Ag Dawg has received all three degrees from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

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Allison Fortner:
So, I am from a small town called Cleveland, Georgia in the Northeast Georgia Mountains and came to the University of Georgia in my undergraduate to study agricultural communication. UGA was the only place for me – actually, the only school I applied to, and I studied agricultural communication after some involvement in the National FFA Organization in high school.

 And then, once I finished my Ag Education degree, I went on a study abroad for, actually, my final credit of my undergrad to Romania, and I fell in love with international travel. Unfortunately, that was my last credit. I didn't have time to do anything else with it before I went off into the working world, where I worked doing marketing for a turfgrass company for about three years and then came back to the University of Georgia, at first as a staff member and then as a full-time graduate student.

So, I started my master’s degree in the ALEC Department in the fall of 2020. So, you know, the best time [laughing] to start something new: in the middle of a pandemic. And so, I worked on my Master’s of Ag and Environmental Education there with a communications focus, and I really got to explore doing the International Agriculture certificate

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Emily Davenport:
Check out the show notes for more on the CAES international agriculture certificate!

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Allison Fortner:
while I was there. And part of me coming back to do my master’s degree was to incorporate an international element into my work, because I really didn’t get to do that in the work that I was doing in turfgrass and things like that. So, the opportunity arose for me to incorporate a little bit more about cultural communication and science communication into my work, which I knew I wanted to do as I applied for the ALEC PhD program. So, I am a through-and-through Ag Dawg, and I love Athens, love being here and getting to know all of the new people and the diverse voices and really delve into communication topics.

 Jordan Powers: 
That's amazing. [laughs] That sounds very exciting. We love having a Triple Dawg here. What led you – you're obviously UGA, CAES through and through. What led you to the program specifically?

Allison Fortner:
So, when I was finishing up my master’s degree, my committee encouraged me to explore more international opportunities, especially since I would be here in the College of Agriculture for a few more years. So, I took an International Development class, which is actually a required class for the International Agriculture certificate, and through that, I found out that I really was interested in incorporating this more into my work. But in order to qualify for that certificate, you needed an eight-week international internship. So, that led me to thinking, “I can't do this with only my master’s degree left, so let's move this into the PhD a little bit, just so I can understand a bit more what it means to communicate on an international level, what it means communicating agriculture on an international level.” And so, I started looking for opportunities, just because I was going to need something that I thought I was going to do in the summertime, actually. It ended up not working out that way, but I got connected with this organization called the Safe Seaweed Coalition

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Emily Davenport:
We’ll add a link to the Safe seaweed coalition’s website in the show notes for you!

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Allison Fortner:
through my advisor, whose name is Dr. Alexa Lamm. She had won the Borlaug CAST Communication Award for agricultural communication. Someone saw her keynote address and said, "Hey, we really need some help with science communication from this new global coalition, and we don't really know where to go. We kind of have a smaller team. So, can you talk to us about what you recommend?" And she recommended a few things for them and their communication strategy, but also that she had a student who needed an internship, which worked out really well for me.

It was a little bit different than what I had expected, I think, because I never anticipated going to France, which is where the – most of the coalition's government is based. And so, they met me and talked to me, I got to help them with an event, and then they said, "We will work with you to have an internship here." And it was in the seaweed industry, which, at first glance, you would think, "This is not related to agriculture whatsoever," but their entire goal is to help safely and sustainably scale up the seaweed industry outside of Asia right now. This is incredibly innovative, it's a new area, and it was a team that was open to new ideas, so I thought, "I would love to learn more about this, and, you know, there has to be some sort of connection between agriculture and seaweed," and I really found out that there is. And the opportunity to go to France and see this, work with people from not only France but from across the world in it, really attracted me to this opportunity.

Emily Davenport: 
Great. That's super awesome, and it sounds like a really cool experience. Can you talk a little bit more about the safety aspects of the Safe Seaweed Coalition, like what types of safety are they focused on?

 Allison Fortner: 
Yes. So, the Safe Seaweed Coalition has three pillars of safety. The first is environmental safety, because obviously, you do not want to grow an industry without understanding how much that industry will have an impact on the environment, especially when it is the ocean environment. The ocean is so large and so understudied, and so, you want to make sure that you're not having any negative impacts on that as you grow an industry.

As well as worker safety – so, they want the occupational safety aspect to be a big thing behind the safety of the workers. Are they able to swim if they have to go out and collect this seaweed? What are the best practices in place, and are they being culturally responsive to the workers in this area?

And then, they also focus on consumer safety, not only in consuming seaweed itself but even looking at packaging regulations, as seaweed is being used as a bioplastic for some food packaging. These regulations tend to be pretty fragmented across the world, and they just need to be a little bit more streamlined in order for the industry to be able to reach more consumers and get people to begin eating something. So, they want to focus on those three things and have found a lot of projects that can really help address all three of those pillars at one time.

Jordan Powers:
So, you did mention a little bit before that going into this experience, you were trying to figure out the connection between seaweed and agriculture. What is the connection between seaweed and agriculture?

Allison Fortner: 
Seaweed is in an interesting place, and I don't think I realized it until I started really getting involved in knowing more about what they call the seaweed value chain. But there are two things they're kind of experiencing right now, where people just go out and collect these wild seaweeds from rocks, the ocean floor, whatever they're doing – just these populations of seaweed that have been growing in places naturally, and so, that is what you call wild seaweed harvest. 

However, you have your cultivated seaweed, in which people are actually growing it in nurseries, kind of breeding the seaweed itself, putting it on ropes, putting it out in the ocean, growing it in certain ways depending on the type of seaweed that it is. And so, seaweed is going through a lot of the industry development things that agriculture has gone through over hundreds, thousands of years in figuring out how to develop genetically strong species and the ones that are the most commercially viable.

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Jordan Powers:
Commercially viable just means that a product is able to compete on the market and make a profit.

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Allison Fortner:
So, they're kind of trying to follow along with what agriculture has had so many years to do, but do it very quickly. So, they're trying to learn from agriculture, the best practices in that way.

 But they're also connecting to some really interesting other aspects of agriculture, such as there's some promising research right now about possibly feeding a type of seaweed called Asparagopsis taxiformis to beef cattle, actually, to reduce their methane emissions without reducing the meat quality and impacting the weight gain. So, they've done some pretty extensive studies of that in Australia right now.

However, they’re – they've seen some issues such as that's not a commercially cultivated type of seaweed right now. You can't necessarily grow it everywhere, because, much like in agriculture, you have your warm season and cool season crops. They're going to thrive in different areas. And so, there are a lot of things that have to be worked out and researched further. So, right now, a lot of popular press is saying seaweed can save the world, like it's going to eliminate all methane emissions, and while that is very – it is very promising, there's still a lot of research to be done on that. But there's a lot of opportunity for farmers of seaweed and cattle to work together to move toward climate solutions.

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Emily Davenport:
Check the show notes for links to recent research on using seaweed to help with climate issues surrounding cattle.

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Allison Fortner:
There's also these seaweed in biostimulants. So, many, many years ago, farmers in France started putting wild harvested seaweed on their fields and actually improving their crop growth with them. And so, this really cultural indigenous knowledge was taken as a concept, and people began to extract certain ingredients from seaweed and put them into what you call plant biostimulants. And these biostimulants can improve crop growth by increasing the root systems, making them more drought tolerant, things like that, which is especially important as some more commercial fertilizers are being criticized a lot on the market, and I know several University of Georgia researchers dedicate their lives to improving plant growth. And so, innovative technology like biostimulants are really coming onto the scene a lot, and using those within the agricultural industry can really help in addressing some of the problems we may see with various crops.

 So, really, making those connections and seeing how farmers can work together to use these innovations is an up-and-coming thing, but also, the seaweed industry is going to have to produce a lot more to meet the demand, as we have so many of these innovations up and coming. So, they're trying to figure out how to do this safely and sustainably and also learning from agriculture and some of the ways our industries have grown.

 Emily Davenport: 
You mentioned applying seaweed to crops and also maybe cows eating seaweed. Are all species of seaweed edible?

Allison Fortner:
So, as far as we know, you can eat all species of seaweed. They're not going to be poisonous if you ingest them. So, that's the macroalgae.

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Jordan Powers:
Macroalgae are large seaweeds – the kind that you can see without using a microscope. Microalgae are tiny seaweeds that you need to use a microscope to see.

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Allison Fortner:
However, they might not all taste good. [laughs] So, certain ones are better for certain things, such as there is one particular type that's called a sea truffle because it has a little bit of that truffle-like taste to it, and people will use it in various dishes. There's another type of seaweed that's called sea spaghetti, and it just kind of grows like a noodle, and that – I don't believe that one is being commercially cultivated, but it's wild-harvested and can be cut up, and people will use it almost like pasta.

 So, people are constantly searching for innovative ways that you can use seaweed in cooking, which I will say is a little bit more popular in France and some of your Michelin-star restaurants and things like that, but – you wouldn't necessarily want to eat all types of seaweed, but you definitely can.

Jordan Powers:
Okay. Now I have to ask: What's your favorite way to consume seaweed? If you do, maybe. [laughing] Maybe you did the whole study and decided you don't want to eat any of it.

Allison Fortner: 
[laughs] I do like seaweed a lot. There are quite a few companies in the Brittany area of France that are based around seaweed and innovative ways to eat it. I've had some plant-based meat made out of seaweed – TU-NAH, I think it's called. [laughs] It was okay, but I think my favorite way to eat seaweed is what they call seaweed tartare, which – I don't think means raw seaweed, really, but it's a mix of seaweed along with some oil and some spices, and I liked it on a loaf of French bread. I mean, what doesn't taste good on a loaf of French bread? [laughs] But I think that was my favorite way that I've tried it, and I'm excited for more products to come to the market, especially in the US so that we can begin trying to incorporate it into our diets a little bit more, just because I don't think we quite know how to do that yet, and it'll be interesting to see the products that come out as a result of this spike in seaweed growth over the recent years.

Jordan Powers: 
Absolutely. I feel like here, you see – you know, people think "seaweed," and they immediately go to sushi, right? Like that's the most natural kind of connection. But it is interesting, once you start looking, to see restaurants that have seaweed salads on the menu, or – you know, my son right now is obsessed with seaweed snacks that we found at Publix of all places. So, it's getting broader as we speak, so it's fascinating to see this behind-the-scenes look at it and how it's expanding.

Emily Davenport: 
Outside of it being a food source, what are some other ways that we're looking at using seaweed? I know that – I think there's some pretty innovative things being discussed about how to use seaweed.

Allison Fortner: 
So, they are talking about seaweed as a bioplastic right now, which is pretty neat. There are some companies really looking into how to replace many plastics with seaweed, where they have like a little edible container you can just eat that's made completely or almost exclusively out of seaweed, or you put a package of noodles in this seaweed based plastic, and you can just drop it straight into the pot. You don't have to take it out of the packaging at all, because it's technically all edible, and while the packaging itself is not too tasty, it's not really going to do anything to you to consume it. So, that's an up-and-coming market right now.

There is also a look at seaweed as a biofuel, but that is one where you really have to grapple with whether it would be best as a biofuel or for people to be eating it, because seaweed is, of course, an option for a food source. It can also be used in a lot of cosmetic products as well, whether you're using kind of the coarser seaweeds for an exfoliant or actually extracting things like carrageenan and alginate from the seaweed itself to make these kind of jellifying substances that can really contribute to the substance of the cosmetic products you're using.

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Emily Davenport:
Carageenan is an extract from a red seaweed that is used as a thickener in food products. Alginate is extracted from brown seaweed, and is also used as a thickener and gelling substance. Nutraceuticals are food items that provide health benefits. An example are vitamin-enriched cereals, which could be considered nutraceuticals because they provide extra nutrients to those eating them.

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Allison Fortner:
It's being used in pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals right now. It's being used in some health-enhancing products and can also be used, going back to the cosmetic industry, as an active ingredient in skincare products to kind of take care of those pesky aging problems [laughs] that we sometimes deal with. It's also being used in pet food. I've been in touch with a company that uses fermented seaweed in pet food. And – I'm trying to think – like I said, the plant-based foods as well. Oh, it can also be used in building materials and paper and things like that. There are some people working on these big innovations and honestly looking for the suppliers to get the seaweed materials to them as well as the way to scale up. So, people have a lot of ideas with it, and I'm very excited to see which ones develop and grow and how much we see over the next few years.

Jordan Powers: 
Absolutely. That's fascinating. It's fun to hear you talk, because we started this conversation with "Seaweed? I have no idea how we're going to tie this into agriculture," and you clearly jumped headfirst into the waters, no pun intended, of seaweed. So, that's – it's just amazing to hear.

What did the day-to-day look like? You've clearly come from this internship experience with a wealth of knowledge, but what did the day-to-day look like while you were on this project?

Allison Fortner:
So, while I was on this project, I actually started working with a variety of people on the secretariat on the Safe Seaweed Coalition, who are based all around France, and I went to France in January of 2022, where I first spent four weeks in Paris to get a little bit more of the cultural experience. And in Paris, I got to meet with some artists who love seaweed and were making innovative products out of it. There was one who made a chair out of seaweed, was making paper, was making these building materials and things like that, and an artist who just appreciated the sea a lot and had made these giant nets out of a type of seaweed called Ascophyllum nodosum. And so, you really got to see how the people of France who love art had incorporated that love for seaweed and their love for art.

 So, really getting to interact on a professional level with the people of France, which was great intercultural communication, just working outside of an area in which I was very comfortable, which came with learning some French. I know a very limited amount of French, but it was interesting to learn that very specific language around seaweed. They call it algue. That's the French word for "seaweed." [laughs] So, when people would ask me about my internship, I would have to think about how to best say it in French. After spending some time in Paris, I then traveled to a town called Roscoff, which is in the Finistère district of Brittany, France, and fini- means "end" and terre means "the earth," so literally "the end of the Earth." [laughs] It was very much on the western coastal area of France.

 And they have a research station that has been there for 150 years, and I got to work with the scientific coordinator of our coalition, who is a seaweed scientist there. So, being around scientists, much like we're accustomed to being around these hard science researchers from the University of Georgia, except for his expertise area was in seaweed itself, specifically connecting seaweed to the industry, which he's been working on for years and years now through a project specifically located in France, then another one located within the seaweed industry in Europe, and finally now, he's working more on a global scale. So, there was so much to learn from him and his expertise.

 I shared an office with two other PhD students. They were both studying microbiology, which was very different from what I study as a social scientist. They were showing me all of this lab equipment and just assuming I knew what it did, so I nodded and smiled a lot [laughs] when I was looking at all the lab equipment. But during that time, I got to write a lot about seaweed and connect with the industry in the area where we got to go visit a lot of these places. We visited the biostimulant plant. We went out on the boat with some small-scale seaweed farmers as they were harvesting kelp and wakame and saw their operation and talked to them about the seasons of how it grows and what they’re doing to innovate in their businesses. We went to a cosmetics company and saw their entire operation. We saw a food processing facility, the one that actually makes the seaweed tartare. We saw how they stabilize and dry seaweed. In some cases, it’s in these very large, high tunnels where they just string up the seaweed and wait for it to dry. 

And so, I got to see a lot of innovative ways in which it was being used, take photos – because that is one of the issues within the industry, is you see so much press around seaweed these days, but there are so few great photo representations of the industry that sometimes they’ll come up with a photo of sea grass, and then all of the seaweed scientists get mad and say, “This isn’t even seaweed! They’re misrepresenting our industries!”

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Jordan Powers:
The main difference between seaweed and seagrass has to do with how the plant moves nutrients and dissolved gasses. Seagrass have roots, stems and leaves just like grass on land and they use those roots and leaves to move nutrients throughout the plant. Seaweed does not have roots, stems or true leaves, and relies on diffusion to move water and nutrients in and out of its tissues.

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Allison Fortner:
As someone with a communications background, I had the opportunity to kind of help build a photo library from our various stakeholders from across the world, email back and forth on that, and get to connect with people who were directly in the industry – some were working in areas such as Africa and southeast Asia, helping developing seaweed farmers with some red seaweed – and got to learn from them, even if I did not get to directly visit their… farms, I guess you would call it.

And then, another thing I did at my internship was establishing the Seaweed Ambassadors Program, which was just kind of an idea before I arrived. It was a WhatsApp group of people who said, “I love this industry. I want to be a part of it,” but maybe they were a student and weren’t professionally involved yet, or they had just heard about seaweed and said, “I think I have something I can contribute to this. I want to share it with my networks and be able to use my everyday language, maybe bring it up if I’m at a conference.” So, I helped organize what it would look like to bring these individuals together for our Seaweed Ambassadors Program. And by the time my internship concluded, we had had a couple of cohorts of ambassadors come in with, I think, 21 people from across at least five continents coming together, which it was very interesting to see how many passionate people there were across the world in the area of seaweed and how we could all connect on this one common goal. So, it was very exciting to be a part of that.

 Jordan Powers:
That's amazing. That's an incredible – an incredible thing to kick off and kind of carry on the legacy of what you started with the internship.

Allison Fortner: 
Thank you.

Emily Davenport: 
And can you define for us the difference between macro and micro? Just so we are – know what you mean by that.

 Allison Fortner:
Microalgae can grow in many different places. It does not have to grow in saltwater specifically. So, it can grow – there’s freshwater microalgae, saltwater microalgae. Microalgae can be harmful. When you were asking if you could eat all seaweed, yes you can. You can eat all macroalgae, but you cannot eat all microalgae, as I understand it, just because it does have the potential to be harmful. And macroalgae is a larger organism.

Jordan Powers:
Well, I know you’re working on your Ph.D. So, what’s next for you in coming back from this experience?

Allison Fortner: 
Well, I actually just started my Ph.D., the first semester, in France. So, I am starting off specifically getting my core classes out of the way in my Ph.D. and studying, actually, differences in cultural communication. I think I would like to base my dissertation on the differences in how people perceive scientific messages based upon their cultural background. And so, I’d like to incorporate that more and maybe incorporate seaweed into my dissertation work as well. I’m looking at ways to possibly do that, looking for funding, looking for ideas, things like that, just because I do appreciate merging to seemingly unrelated things and helping people from different industries come together and learn from one another. So, I hope to be able to do that moving forward.

 But for right now, I will be at UGA for at least the next two years, working on improving my research and communication skills, figuring out how to best communicate research that’s innovative and that matters, especially because I know we do so much wonderful research here at the University of Georgia, and it deserves to be communicated by wonderful journalists such as yourselves, who really want other people to know about the work that can be done here and how it can change lives, even if someone does not realize that they are connected to agriculture, which I think is one of the largest things that we need to accomplish.

Emily Davenport: 
We agree.

Everyone:
[laughter]

Jordan Powers: 
Yeah, for sure. Thinking about the word “agriculture,” what does “agriculture” mean to you?

Allison Fortner: 
Hmm… To me, “agriculture” means the community of people that comes together to feed a growing population in a way that brings together personal experience and passion, and science that advances for the good of the entire world, as well.

Emily Davenport: 
Well said. [laughs] I like it.

Allison Fortner: 
Thank you.

Jordan Powers: 
You’re clearly well-spoken on both seaweed and agriculture and all of your work at UGA. What’s life outside of academia for you? Do you have secret hidden talents?

 Allison Fortner: 
[laughs] Outside of academia, I like to spend a lot of time with my family. I am fortunate to have them all within the state of Georgia. So, really soaking up being near family, now that I’m back in the country. I don’t think you realize the advantages you have when you have family close until you know they are a continent away. So, I do a lot of that, as well as -- I love to cook, to explore new recipes, and to explore Athens itself. It’s a town that you easily fall in love with, and, clearly, I’ve chosen to stay here for a very long time. [laughs] So, getting to know the Athens community in new ways all the time. And – hmm… It’s always so hard when someone asks you about your hobbies. [laughs]

Jordan Powers: 
Always.

Allison Fortner: 
Always, yes. But those are my main interests as a student. It’s kind of hard to think of your life outside of being a student, which is a hard thing to grapple with, because I think, as new generations arise, we want to explore our identities in new ways outside of just careers and academics and things like that, so.

I do like to travel and try new food. I’m a bit of a foodie. I mentioned I love my family; a few of them actually came over and visited me after I left France. So, we went to Italy and got to try all kinds of delicacies from there in very interesting ways, just to see how – maybe they’re not innovating in Italy, but they have thousands of years’ worth of culture and food development and things like that. So, I enjoy seeing that and seeing how different people use their cultural knowledge to really take pride in something.

Jordan Powers: 
So what’s next on your travel calendar or travel bucket list with a passion for travel?

Allison Fortner: 
Next, I am going to Costa Rica for a research conference. My colleagues and I have been exploring systems thinking as an educational tool to teach students about complex systems, such as feeding people through the aquaculture industry, which actually came up before my internship in seaweed came up. So, I’m getting a little more familiar with aquaculture. I’m excited to travel to Central America because I’ve never really experienced that area of the world before. I’ve done a lot of traveling in Europe, but that’s very, very different. I get to try to use some other language skills, brush off that Spanish from high school. So, I’m excited about that as well as the opportunity to present research.

And then, I would like to see some of the seaweed farming operations in Asia. I have been talking with some seaweed farmers in Malaysia. So, maybe one day, I will make it there, but we will see. We will see!

Jordan Powers: 
It’s all an adventure.

Allison Fortner: 
That’s right!

Emily Davenport: 
Do you have any fun facts about seaweed that you would like to share with us?

Allison Fortner: 
Hmm… yes, let me think about it. [laughs] So, another favorite fact about seaweed is that giant kelp can grow up to 24 inches per day, and there is a lot of ongoing research right now in seaweed as a carbon sequestration mechanism, and people researching whether or not seaweed farms and the environment around them can actually be positively influenced just because there is a seaweed farm there. So, people may say that they sequester more carbon than a rainforest. The jury is still out on that one, but the carbon sequestration potential of seaweed is very, very promising right now.

Jordan Powers: 
Is there anything that we forgot, Allison? Is there anything else important in the world of seaweed or your academics to share with listeners?

Allison Fortner: 
If you haven’t heard about the growing seaweed industry before, start looking for it now, because I promise you will begin to notice it now that you are aware of it. It’s a very popular, up-and-coming innovation, and if we get the correct research behind it and the correct people behind it in order to make sure that the industry safely scales up, then it looks as if there is unlimited potential for this very promising sea vegetable. So, try to look for ways to incorporate this into your diet when you see it, and see if you can become part of the seaweed revolution.

Jordan Powers: 
Love it! Well, I will certainly be on the lookout, I know, even more so than I am now when I’m out and about. But thank you, Allison, for coming in today. This was fascinating. It was amazing to hear about both the seaweed side of your life [laughs] and just the academics and your academic journey, specifically through the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, so thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

Allison Fortner: 
Thank you so much for the invitation! It has been lovely.

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Emily Davenport: 
Thank you for listening to “Cultivating Curiosity,” a podcast produced by the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. A special thanks to Mason McClintock for our music and sound effects. Find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts.