Hope in the Water: "Farming the Water" (Intuitive Content, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, June 26) I watched a couple of reasonably interesting science programs on KPBS, including “Farming the Water,” the second of three parts in the mini-series Hope in the Water. The basic thesis of this series is that much of humankind’s future is resting in and on the oceans, especially as the amount of arable land in the world steadily decreases due to climate change as well as long-term human development. The host for this episode is one of my least favorite people on earth these days, Martha Stewart, who was trotted out as a guest host I guess in hopes her name attached to the program would draw more people to watch it. Stewart got dragged along in a fishing boat by a young man named Struan Coleman, who had ambitions to become a lobsterman in his native Maine. Alas, there were two roadblocks to that career path: the tightly held grip on lobster-fishing licenses by the people who currently had them – the waiting period for one could be as much as 10 to 12 years – and climate change, which is warming up the oceans off the Maine coast so both lobsters and the things they feed on are moving elsewhere. According to Google.com, “People used to think that lobsters were scavengers and ate primarily dead things. However, researchers have discovered that lobsters catch mainly fresh food (except for bait) which includes fish, crabs, clams, mussels, sea urchins, and sometimes even other lobsters!” So Coleman decided to forgo a career as a lobsterman and instead use an elaborate series of traps, nets and underwater stations to raise scallops.

His segment was the second of three stories on this show; the first, and in some ways the most interesting, was the fascinating tale of Paul Damhof, a drop-dead gorgeous young man and a third-generation dairy farmer until one day his father’s doctors essentially gave him an ultimatum: either the cows go or you go. So in 2015 Damhof and his dad organized a sale of his entire herd of dairy cows, and looking for an alternative that could save their farm, Damhof’s mother ran across an article on how to make money by raising shrimp. This required a major up-front investment, including building eight swimming pools on the Damhof property (which not surprisingly raised eyebrows among his neighbors!) – at the moment he’s using six of the pools as farms to breed and grow shrimp, and he’s getting ready to farm shrimp in the other two – and buying huge quantities of salt in bulk to turn the water in them appropriately salty. One of the most interesting people profiled in this documentary was Tran Huc Loc, Ph.D., a researcher in Viet Nam who came from a long-time family of shrimp fishermen. In the early 2010’s shrimp all over the world began dying of a mysterious new disease that ultimately cost the shrimp industry between $2 and $4 billion. Loc was part of the research team that studied the disease, and he helped figure out that it was infectious and caused by two pathogens working together. He also worked out ways to prevent it by spiking the water in which shrimp were grown with probiotics, and running the newly hatched shrimp through fish ponds stocked with certain kinds of fish, like tilapia, that actually eat shrimp feces.

While Paul Damhof and his business partner Barb Frank were working out the glitches in their indoor shrimp pools in Minnesota – 1,300 miles away from the nearest ocean – Struan Coleman was working out an elaborate system for farm-raising scallops off the coast of Maine. Farming scallops requires an elaborate system of nets and traps to ensure that the scallops remain in place for the two years they need to mature and become edible. Coleman showed Martha Stewart how he uses a small-bore drill to drill tiny, harmless holes in the shells of the scallops to ensure they remain on the line until they are fully grown. The third segment of the show was perhaps the most interesting: it dealt with a Native Alaskan Inuit named Dune Lankard, who’s worked out a way to farm kelp, an underwater vegetable. “My Eyak name is Jamachakih, which means little bird that screams really loud and won't shut up,” Lankard said, adding that he’s lived up to that name big-time. He’s shown harvesting kelp and processing it for human consumption, including cutting slices off the big balls that form on kelp stalks as they grow. That had me wondering just what kelp tastes like; when the kelp bulbs are sliced they look like onion rings, though that doesn’t leave much of a clue as to what they actually taste like. Lankard is shown using them as the basis for his own seafood cakes, usually with crab as the protein ingredient. Like the first episode of Hope in the Water, “The Fish in the Sea,” “Farming the Water” is a rare breath of optimism in the field of nature documentaries, most of which these days are about how humans in their short-sighted greed are plundering the planet and rendering it uninhabitable for themselves and their descendants.