Adding Additional Revenue Streams

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Margins on the farm are getting squeezed across a variety of commodities. Some agricultural business owners are finding new revenue streams to try to make up some of the difference. Shrimp farmer Steve Sutton of TransparencyFarm says seaweed production is one possibility that fits his market and growing system.

Sutton... "When the rubber meets the road it’s farming. And anybody who knows a bit about farming knows that you should probably make your changes slowly and don't assume too much because these are living things, and the law of unintended consequences always pops up. So that said, you know, we've grown seaweed before, both myself and my partner Doug in the past, and we're going to grow it. We're going to feed some of it back to the shrimp, so that's going to allow us to reduce our footprint and hopefully even elevate the omega threes a little higher. Then once we've done that, we'll start to tinker with it and see if we can get the quality of the seaweed to be human-grade so that, not that it's unsafe for humans at all, but humans expect a certain flavor in seaweed and it's very specific, and that comes with the ocean tide, you know? So that's going to be something that we tweak and hopefully, yeah, it becomes maybe we can do dried seaweed chips, like an eco-friendly value-added product, something like that in the future."

Sutton serves as the founder and CEO of TransparentSea Farm.