In 2015, smelly mats of a brown macroalgae called sargassum piled as high as 1.2 meter (4 feet) on the beaches of Barbados, recalls Joshua Forte. It was the fourth year in what has become an annual nightmare, with an estimated 18,100 kilograms (20 tons) of seaweed inundating Caribbean shorelines each year and wrecking the region’s tourism-centered economies. The onslaught of seaweed reeked of rotten eggs, but Forte smelled something else: opportunity. A year earlier, Forte founded an organic fertilizer company called Red Diamond Compost. He was already selling a soil additive from sunflower seeds called Liquid Sunshine. But the sargassum seemed too big to ignore. So, Forte started to collect the seaweed by hand, hauling 27-kg (60-pound) bags of it into the back of a pickup truck. It became the raw material for a new product called Supreme Sea, a soil additive that includes growth-stimulating plant hormones and microorganisms extracted from the sargassum. After extraction, Forte composts what’s left over into a humus-rich product that’s safe for crops. The idea was to “have as big of an impact as possible on the influx of sargassum while contributing in a positive way to agriculture,” Forte told Mongabay. Sargassum contains a slew of nutrients, minerals and microorganisms that can foster and even accelerate plant growth, such as iron, magnesium, potassium, calcium and more. But rather than add nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus into the soil, it does something savvy: Its properties help plants be more efficient at taking up those…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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