The Danish business, agriculture and research industries are making efforts to tap the great potential in planting seaweed forests and farming mussels in the ocean areas surrounding Denmark's coastline.
A little "gardening" experiment underway in Copenhagen harbor is showing the way of seaweed and mussels farming, which could create hundreds of jobs, generate billions of Danish kroner profit and save thousands of square metres of Brazilian rainforest, experts say.
According to a blueprint of the new sea farming development, in the near future it may be common to buy seaweed and mussels in Danish supermarkets when shopping for dinner.
"There is huge potential in converting our ocean resources into a sustainable strategy in which we can produce algae and mussels which can be included in a cradle-to-cradle mentality that can recirculate our productions," Lars Hvidtfeldt, deputy head of the Danish Agriculture and Food Council, told the Danish newspaper Politiken.
He noted that there is a lot of area in the sea around Denmark not currently being used that can be used for food production. As well as cleaning pollution from the sea, seaweed and mussels can also become very good human and animal food. Proteins in seaweed and mussels can, for instance, replace part of the huge quantity of soy that Denmark imports from South America.
And it could become an invaluable resource in feeding the continuously increasing population of the world.
"In the future, we must begin to utilise the ocean territories better if we hope to feed the world," Jens Kjerulf Petersen, a professor at the national shellfish centre, Dansk Skaldyrcenter, a part of the Danish Technical University that researches the cultivation of mussels and seaweed.
Denmark doesn't have more land in reserve, but has vast unutilized resources in the surrounding seas to provide more protein sources, while the climate reports say there will be a food shortage in this industrialized country, Petersen said.
As of today, Denmark farms about 1,000 tons of mussels, while seaweed farming is done mostly in conjunction with research.
But researchers believe that if Denmark dedicates just one percent of its sea territory to seaweed farming, it could generate lots of jobs, billions of Danish kroner, save 10,000 square metres of Brazilian rainforest and further reduce Denmark's CO2 emissions by five percent.
Currently, the Danish maritime gardening association is conducting an underwater gardening experiment in the Copenhagen Harbor, and also has been cultivating shellfish in the blue depths beneath the sea.
Preliminary testing of tissue from mussels that have been raised in the harbor has shown that the water is clean enough for the shellfish to be considered edible.
Next week, the association will introduce about 600 oysters to the underwater garden, said related news report.
