Dec. 1, 2011 - A customer at an Austin Farmers Market got to chatting with Lewis Weil about the seaweed he was selling under the name Austin Sea Veggies. "Where did you go to school?" the man asked. Weil told him he went to Texas A&M University. The customer laughed. "That explains it!"
What he meant was that since it was weird, the idea of selling edible seaweed at the farmers market had to have come from the mind of an Aggie, and it did, but Weil didn't major in agriculture at A&M. He studied molecular cell biology and works as a researcher in that field for an Austin firm. He helped out in the bio-aquatics lab in College Station and sometimes worked with seaweed to help keep the water quality right, but that's not where he got the idea to grow seaweed in aquariums and sell it as food.
The germ of the idea might have started in arid and landlocked El Paso, where he was born and grew up with a fascination for the ocean -- he was a big Jacques Cousteau fan. One day he simply decided to see if he could grow some kind of seaweed after reading an article about the fragile state of natural seaweed beds.
Seaweed is used in a wide range of products, including medicine and cosmetics, in addition to food.
"We've gone to the ends of the earth to harvest seaweed, and it's not a sustainable harvest," Weil said recently at his "farm," which doubles as his garage. "Human quality seaweed is getting hard to find.
"It's a plant that takes up what's in the water, and around the coastline where this grows is often badly polluted. I wanted to do this right, as a closed system, where we don't draw on natural resources or release anything back into the environment. I wanted to do aquaculture right."
The problem was that no one else had really grown edible seaweed in tanks for direct sale to the customer like Weil wanted. Being a scientist, he really wanted to do it just to see if he could. He was encouraged when he met Bart Reid, who delved into the wider world of aquaculture by starting Permian Sea Organics, a shrimp farm, in the Chihuahuan Desert after tapping into the underground reservoir of saltwater, the Permian Sea, which covered the area eons ago.
"I thought if he could raise shrimp in the desert, I should be able to grow seaweed in my garage," Weil said.
Weil experimented with several varieties and settled on ogonori, commonly called ogo, wide-leaf seaweed from Japan. It's thin, but sturdy, and can be layered and cut into sheets and used in sushi. His wife pointed out that since people eat the stuff, maybe people would want to buy it at the farmer's market. He pitched the idea to the Austin market and got the green light. Response at the markets was immediate and positive.
"Really, I could only have started this in Austin," he said. "I might be the only person in North America doing this, and I don't know if I could have got this started in Houston or Dallas. Here, people lined up the first week to buy it."
That's not to say he doesn't think it will eventually work in other markets. Local restaurants buy his ogo to use in their dishes and stores like Wheatsville Food Co-op carry it on their shelves along with a note of recognition of Weil as a local grower of delicious seaweed. Weil hopes eventually to expand and move the business out of his garage, but for now there is only so much seaweed to go around. His success at the markets was such that he no longer has enough to sell at the markets.
"I don't have the reserves to do special orders and reliably bring it to the farmers markets," he said. "I feel bad about that because I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the markets and the support they gave me and the experience I gained from growing it for the markets."
Not all of that experience has been good. Aquaculture is a part of agriculture, and the heat this summer was such that he had to shut down operations for a while. The previous summer had been hot, but his ogonori didn't die. Its growth rate slowed, but it survived. That wasn't the case this year.
"We hit that stretch where it was 106 or hotter every day for three or four weeks, and it just never cooled down at night," he said. "I'd come out here in the middle of the night and it would be almost 80 degrees. I'd stick my finger in the water and it would be still be hot. Everything died. It all happened so fast I couldn't react in time."
That was in August. Weil replaced the seaweed he lost and has three tanks of ogonori growing in his garage and shipments are going out again. The salt he uses comes from the Red Sea and the live seaweed that he cultivates comes from Hawaii, but the peculiar nature of Weil's business still makes him a purveyor of locally-grown seaweed.
"It's given me a way to reach out as a scientist," he said. "What I'm doing is not weird or scary, but it's about something that's an important part of our lives -- food. I'm the only person I know doing this now, and I wouldn't mind helping people who wanted to try it on their own, but not for free. I spent a lot of money and time experimenting with different things to get it right.
"The profit margins aren't great and the work is not glamorous, but I love it."
