A photo overlooking the remaining gray infrastructure from the closed abalone farm. The gray of the Pacific Ocean is visible in the background, with a mountain peeking out below the fog to the left of the viewer.

Agriculture in the Ocean

/in /by

A visit to the Harmony Coast Aquaculture Institute

 
By Maya Weeks
June 19, 2023
 

My name is Maya Weeks. I’m a marine geographer and California Sea Grant State Fellow at Ocean Science Trust, and I live, work, and get in the water as much as possible on the beautiful Central Coast of California. Growing up surfing here, I always knew there was a local abalone farm, but didn’t know quite what happened there.

While the abalone farm closed in 2019, shellfish farming and other forms of low-trophic level aquaculture continue in California. OST has ongoing projects on sustainable aquaculture, so when I learned that the largest aquaculture facility in the state, the Harmony Coast Aquaculture Institute (HCAI), is slated to be on the site of the old abalone farm, I jumped at the opportunity to join a tour.

A black pipe extends into the gray of the Pacific Ocean, past greenery, then sand, then dark rocks in the surf. The sky is overcast and fades into the horizon.
Aquaculture requires a continuous flow of seawater. The permitted intake pipe for the tanks at HCAI–a rarity in California–stretches out into the tidepools.
A tall pole stands next to a large concrete tank. Flowering ice plant is visible in the foreground, and the gray sky and ocean blend together in the background.
Infrastructure! Tanks for shellfish sit on the hillside above the intake pipe.
A dusty brown road winds off into the hills. Buildings and a fence are visible in the foreground along the road, but the crest of the hills are bare and golden except for a few patches of deep green shrubbery.
All roads lead to here. The buildings where millions of abalone, a crucial group of marine snails in California, have been spawned over the years. Abalone, including two endangered species (white abalone and black abalone), are crucial for biodiversity reasons as well as for cultural ones. They have been deeply important to the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini (ytt) Northern Chumash Tribe, whose ancestral homeland this is, for millennia.
A rectangular concrete pit littered with empty shells and two parallel pipes.
Hardly strictly abalone: when seawater was pumped in to support the abalone being grown in these concrete tanks, other larvae (and even more critters including crabs!) would enter. A smattering of evidence of the local ecosystem is still visible today.
A photo overlooking the remaining gray infrastructure from the closed abalone farm. The gray of the Pacific Ocean is visible in the background, with a mountain peeking out below the fog to the left of the viewer.
In the abalone farm’s heyday, dozens of people maintained a complex infrastructure that fed people locally and internationally.
A photo overlooking the remaining gray infrastructure from the closed abalone farm. Gray concrete divisions lead away from the viewer towards a large hill in the background.

Today, HCAI seeks to catalyze sustainable aquaculture for a range of different species, but sustainable commercial aquaculture of multiple species using integrated multi-trophic aquaculture methods is not HCAI’s only goal. The project also aims to serve as a model for similar projects; motivate conservation; conduct research; and offer broad education, especially to students who may not otherwise have access to the ocean.

No other facilities like this one exist anywhere else in the United States. It is exciting for HCAI to figure out how to use permitted infrastructure that already exists, especially as the ocean continues to change with climate change and carbon-neutral (or -negative) farming becomes an ecological and economic imperative.

Here at OST, my colleagues are working to understand the state of the current science specifically around seaweed aquaculture and related science needs in the state. This work involves farmers, researchers, managers, policymakers, and more who work on seaweed aquaculture. This is timely, as the California Ocean Protection Council is currently leading the development of a California Aquaculture Action Plan. The Plan will provide direction for management and expansion of seaweed and other forms of sustainable aquaculture statewide and is expected to be released later this year. It’s exciting to see both aquaculture developments on the ground and insight into the decision-making processes as part of my California Sea Grant State Fellowship.

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