Seaweed pioneers for 26 years: Beware the imposters

Calling a spade a spade - it is a great saying, and one of the things we love about our farming community. The straight talking.

Seaweed?has been getting PR recently but it’s important for us to remind our valued customers in the dairy industry who rely on our products that not all seaweeds and seaweed products are the same.

Due to the rise of interest in seaweed, it’s becoming apparent that there are potential sheep in wolf’s clothing out there. Many companies are "adding seaweed" to their products, most often a teaspoon of dried powder that has been heat treated and then has had higher value extracts taken off for other sectors.

We care about our customers, and we care about the reputation of our industry and the sustainability of the resource.

We have always offered farmers and growers a direct line to our team of trained area field consultants to discuss individual farm and orchard needs. Because they can trust our 26-year journey of research and relationships, we've found ourselves asking them to ask for AgriSea by name.

Not all seaweed products are created equal. Of course that's true. Did you know that there are 1000 seaweed species in Aotearoa NZ alone??

All around?the world seaweed is categorised into its colours - red, green and brown. For high bioactivity and efficacy, look primarily?at the brown species?and species that have had no heat treatment.

AgriSea products are the only seaweed products on the market that have been trusted and proven by New Zealand farmers for 26 years, with a team of support partners to help them, and backed by Internationally Peer Reviewed Research.

When it comes to biostimulants, AgriSea is the pioneer and leader in New Zealand.

With our depth of experience, we recently partnered with American-based seaweed non-profit GreenWave, which is trialling kelp fermentation methods to open up market opportunities for North American seaweed farmers.

Regenerative ocean farming can revive the long tradition of using seaweed to break down the walls that separate our land and ocean based food systems, Greenwave writes.

Bren Smith, Co-Executive Director of GreenWave, was drawn to AgriSea’s strong reputation both domestically and internationally to help in Greenwave’s goal to support 10,000 farmers, through seaweed farming.

“With AgriSea’s established track record of biostimulant production with Ecklonia, we’ve teamed up to replicate their fermentation methods using sugar kelp, a species commercially cultivated in the U.S.?,” Bren announced this month.

“In addition to [AgriSea] advancing the economic and environmental goals of coastal communities in New Zealand, bringing these lessons back to the broader ocean farming industry will be a catalyst for communities around the globe searching for solutions to make a living on a living planet.”

For us, it was a massive boost to hear after all these years of research and trials alongside our incredible community of farmers and growers who saw the value in our products from the start.

We’re looking forward to some great chats with our agricultural customers who’ll be at Mystery Creek for the national fieldays in 14-17 June – and we’ll be there to shout the coffee of course.

We feature our AgriSea Fortress Castle promoting our cow nutritional product Fortress + that helps animal and farm health with proven science.

Fieldays is valuable time with our team and customers, especially when farmers face the added cost pressures that they do.

With the continued pressure on Nitrogen pricing and sustainability, many farmers are switching to AgriSea Ocean Nutrition as an effective, natural and cost saving way to get good dry matter production and we're encouraging farmers to talk to the AgriSea team or the team at Farm Source to find out more.?

Farm Source nzfarmsource.co.nz is offering six months deferred payment terms for Fonterra Suppliers from 1 June – 30 November and our fieldays specials are running right throughout June.

If you've got a question about biostimulants, or the science of AgriSea's animal nutrition supplement Fortress + we will be on-hand at fieldays to talk you through it.

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