![]() Since its capacity is three times more than Oceans Balance requires, Lench formed a new company, Seaweed Farmer Services, offering dehydration and kelp milling to other kelp farmers as well as to agricultural producers in Maine. The seaweed is shred and spread evenly on the belts for drying, and the dehydrator can be operated by one or two people, so its labor requirements are minimal.Įxploring the relevancy, resiliency and scalability of seaweed farming at Seagriculture The 50-foot-long, 17-ton machine uses belts to dry the seaweed at low temperatures, which preserves its nutritional properties. When it arrived in May, his prayers were answered. Lench needed a machine that could handle 10,000 pounds of kelp biomass per day. The company had tried drying in greenhouses and using other dehydrating machines designed for wild kelp, but the temperatures were too high for farmed kelp. Ninety percent of the market is dried kelp.” “The kelp harvest always comes in at the same time of year, March through May, and you can’t dry it outside if you’re in a cold climate, so we had to freeze it,” he said. Oceans Balance had been blanching and freezing its farmed kelp for years because there wasn’t a suitable dehydrator available. ![]() ![]() When Mitchell Lench, CEO of Oceans Balance in Biddeford, Maine, discovered an industrial kelp dryer that could dry up to 3 million pounds of farmed seaweed annually was available in South Africa, he jumped at the opportunity to purchase the $650,000 machine and ship it across the sea. With well-established preferences for seaweed products in the marketplace, it behooves local producers to meet them to wean the market off of imports. seaweed farms coming online on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, producers’ concerns are shifting from raw material procurement to processing. ![]() Oceans Balance in Maine secured an industrial kelp dryer from South Africa that has the capacity to process other local seaweed farming producers’ plants. With dried kelp making up 90% of the market, kelp dryer shows promise for helping seaweed farming companies to expand
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