“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.” – Isak Dinesen
A+P 100: A Blue Forest
Hello again!
Back in the olden days when my life revolved around chasing the biggest expeditions possible, I became good friends with the lovely Olly Hicks. His perennially cheerful exterior hid an iron resolve: Olly rowed the Atlantic at 23, for example.
I wanted to share today the story of how and why he has changed direction from bold expeditions to launching a regenerative ocean farming business: a perfect case study of Adventure + Purpose!
So Olly, can you just introduce yourself and what you do?
My name is Olly Hicks, and I am one of the cofounders of Algapelago, a regenerative ocean farming company based in North Devon. For the past three years, we have been pioneering the development of offshore ocean farms that cultivate and restore our seas rather than extract from them.
Before setting up Algapelago, I did many things. I was in the Army, ran marine expeditions, worked in offshore renewables, and built biomass-fired power stations. Amongst other things I have also been a tree surgeon and ran a marquee business.
How do you combine adventure with purpose, so it’s not just a privileged or slightly selfish delight?
I think, first, it’s important to recognise that there’s nothing wrong with adventure and expeditions purely for selfish delight. In fact, I think it’s to be encouraged in and of itself, but also because the pursuit of adventure can often lead to unlocking purpose in some way, either by new ideas, experiences or connections.
Yet, to answer the question directly, that’s what we’re doing now through Algapelago, where there is a clear element of adventure and purpose combined. Every day, we’re working to develop a new type of aquaculture for the UK. We’re not the only ones trying to grow, farm or cultivate seaweed, of course. There are lots of people working on fish farming, some on seaweeds and a rich legacy of mussel farming, but no one else is really looking at all three of those, and certainly not in an offshore setting.
The purpose comes from the fact that our model of ocean farming promises to be influential in regenerating our seas at speed and scale. By cultivating kelps at the surface, mussels in the midwater, oysters, scallops, and more at the seabed, we can harness each keystone species as a nature-based solution for climate change, combating ocean degradation and dramatically increasing available fish biomass for fisheries and nature alike. We’ve formed significant partnerships with universities to baseline and then track our progress, and we then hope to prove the ecosystem benefits of this whole model.
The adventure comes from the fact that we have to build our own picks and shovels before we can mine. No one in the UK has done this before at scale and offshore. So, alongside all the messing around in boats or diving on challenging seas, we must make up everything as we go along. Whilst frustrating at times, we get the chance to learn from our mistakes, all while looking to found a brand new industry driven by the world’s most sustainable biomass—kelp. This makes our business endlessly fascinating along the way.
What’s the biggest challenge that gets you riled?
I don’t think I’m riled by it, but the fact is that funding is inevitably the hardest part to achieve. Whether you want to go on expeditions or build a business, the barrier to entry is usually cash. If you want to climb Everest, you need $30 or $40 grand. If you want to row across the Atlantic, you need ~$100 grand.
But you know, such is life, and funding is always slower and harder than you want it to be. In the context of building our seaweed farming business, we can’t do anything without funding, whether that’s through direct investment, sponsorship, or grants, especially in an industry so new and underdeveloped.
The challenge of funding, though, goes with the territory. To raise the funding, you often need to kiss many frogs, but then this opens up new doors you may not expect. For example, combining expeditions with scientific research on my rows helped raise the profile of the challenges and reinforces a purpose all of its own. Without purpose, you can end up stuck quickly. With it, you can find the energy to fight on.
What advice or action would you recommend to the reader to help them make a difference in their lives, whether through adventure, building something or just being outdoors?
What endlessly surprises or encourages me is the huge power of just carrying on.
Even when you think that you’re going to run out of money, or that what we’re doing is fruitless or going nowhere. If you just carry on one more week, two weeks, or two months, and believe in what you’re doing, then usually the weather or the situation changes; a new investor crops up, or we find a workaround to some technical issue on the farm.
For example, our boat sank, but we found a new way to operate, opening doors to new partners and new ways of working so we don’t need to run our own boats. So in a sense, there’s value in hoping for the best, keeping a sense of optimism, and the power of keeping on keeping on.
We work in a space where the hype around ocean regeneration and the power of seaweed farming, especially, has never been higher. Put simply, our oceans are in crisis, but we have this potential solution to prove and rapidly scale nature-based solutions to climate change, yet for all the posturing, you still need to show you can grow the stuff. You still need academics to do the science to get the baselines, and then, only then, can you scale.
Our purpose is to prove the model, but we require additional funding to ensure the science is as robust as possible. The twin challenges of ocean restoration and funding are interlinked, but someone has to do it. So we’ll keep going, keep overcoming hurdles, keep learning and keep on keeping on towards creating an ocean regeneration model that others can follow.
For more information on Algapelago, or its pioneering Blue Forest program, visit: https://www.algapelago.com/blue-forest.
