To the passing seagull, it doesn’t look like much: a few buoys bobbing about in the North Sea, four miles off Scarborough harbour. But the buoys mark the next frontier in UK farming and an initiative that could help North Yorkshire become the first carbon-negative region in England.
Thirty-five metres beneath the waves is the UK’s largest offshore seaweed farm, a 10-hectare (25-acre) patch of ocean managed by a company called Seagrown, started four years ago by a marine chemist, Laura Robinson, and Wave Crookes, an aptly named local trawlerman turned mariner. In 2015 they met and fell in love working on a British Antarctic Survey icebreaker and resolved to return to the UK to develop a form of “regenerative, restorative” industry.
