Sea Forest lick block wins Good Design Award Gold as founder heads to Climate Week NYC

The founder of Tasmanian seaweed sustainability startup Sea Forest is in the USA this week to attend Climate Week NYC, flushed with success after their innovative “Low & Grow” lick block won a Good Design Award Gold on Friday.

A collaboration with Australia’s oldest family-owned and operated sea salt maker Olsson’s Salt, the block is enhanced with asparagopsis seaweed and is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from grazing livestock.

Asparagospsis is a native Tasmanian seaweed shown to reduce methane emissions when fed to livestock. This innovative product targets enteric methane reduction through sustainable practices, advancing the decarbonisation of the agricultural industry.

The Australian Good Design Awards showcase the very best in design and innovation to a worldwide audience. Every year, the Awards attract cutting-edge design projects from across the globe, celebrating the very best in design, architecture, engineering, research, fashion, and social impact.

Originally established in 1958 and recognised by the World Design Organization (WDO) as Australia’s peak international design endorsement program, the Awards have been setting the international standard for good design for more than six decades. The Good Design Awards embody the philosophy that design has the power to shape a better world.

Sea Forest, Earthshot finalist and science-based enviro-tech company

Across 1800 hectares of land and marine space at Triabunna on the east coast of Tasmania,  Sea Forest has been scaling up production of its livestock supplement made from asparagopsis.

Feeding the red seaweed extract to livestock can slash methane emissions by up to 98%.

In 2020 the asparagopsis food supplement was patented and CSIRO scientists begun working with Meat and Livestock Australia and James Cook University to develop the product.

Since then nine licences have been issued to seaweed growers such as Sea Forest to supply asparagopsis to the livestock market, and the product has been commercially available to cattle producers since 2022.

Speaking to SmartCompany from New York City where he is joining business leaders, entrepreneurs and Prince William at the largest annual climate event of its kind, Sea Forest CEO and founder Sam Elsom explained why the new lick block marks an exciting step on the company’s mission to create large scale solutions addressing climate change.

“The holy grail has always been grazing cattle,” explains Elsom.

“There are 23m of them out on pastures across Australia, and we needed to figure out how to deliver solutions where the farmers don’t see the cattle every day. The challenge is how do you get the Asparagospsis into them, and how do you ensure it doesn’t degrade? This journey has taken us two and a half years – working with the brilliant Brissy-based family business Olsson – to control the dietary mix, and tweak the flavour profile to ensure the cows get just the right amount of seaweed to make a difference.”

“Farmers are really keen to explore these technologies, but cautious about the cost of implementing them.

“So we’re trying to make the delivery of the solution as easy as possible without significant practise changes, e.g. a lick block that fits in with their existing processes.”

Sea Forest has also brought to market the seaweed-based supplement SeaFeedTM. Livestock whose diets contain 0.2% of the supplement have methane reductions of up to 98%. Around 15% of global greenhouse emissions come from livestock production.

“We’re increasingly focused on working with the downstream partners,” says Elsom, who is meeting with major agricultural businesses while in the US. “These are businesses who want these [net zero] outcomes, who’ve pledged millions, sometimes billions of dollars to realise these outcomes.”

In the UK, Sea Forest has this year partnered with supermarket Morrisons to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from beef cattle. Working with Morrisons’ manufacturing arm Myton Food Group, the startup will exclusively supply SeaFeedTM – its methane-abating livestock feed – to help fast-track the introduction of lower carbon beef products such as burgers, steaks and mince in Morrisons supermarkets, with products on the shelf by 2026.

The Tassie-based business has already collaborated with Aussie burger chain Grill’d to introduce a beef burger made from grass-fed black Angus cattle that produces 67% less methane emissions, and with Ashai-owned Sydney-based brewery Four Pines on a “Why Is There Seaweed In My Beer?” Tasmanian Pilsner, launched to promote Sea Forest’s climate change solutions.

Such collaborations support partners’ ambitions to achieve net zero agriculture emissions by 2030.

Sea Forest was a finalist in last year’s The Earthshot Prize, a prestigious award launched by Prince William in 2020.

Why Sam Elsom founded Sea Forest

Noosa-raised, former clothing designer Sam Elsom has spent most of his career in sustainability, after launching eponymous fashion label Elsom in 2004.

In his previous life he was focused both on quality design and ethical practices, growing organic cotton in India to spinning sustainable fabrics in Italy.

“We were focused on measuring and reporting our social and environmental impacts, building reporting processes, ensuring we used no chemicals, which led to the development of early sustainable textiles, and fibres from plastic. So I’ve always had that curiosity about innovation, and a familiarity with what it takes to disrupt a supply chain.”

But not in agriculture? “No! This space change is completely new.”

“It really has been an incredible journey: we’ve gone from Kate Moss wearing our jeans to wearing Akubra hats in regional Australia while trying to figure out how to get millions of cows to reduce their methane emissions.”

So why seaweed?

“I was doing consulting for clients such as Caring Group and Quicksilver,” says Elsom. “And while it was exciting it wasn’t really moving the needle. In 2017 I tuned into a Climate Council webinar with [environmentalist] Tim Flannery talking about the state of the planet, and the irreversible effect of extinctions and sea level rises.”

“[At that stage] we had 13 years to hold warming by 2030. I thought ‘I wanted to be part of the solution’. I spoke to Tim, said I wanted to dedicate my energies to solutions, and got excited about seaweed.”

“It’s a zero input crop, but there was very little commercial activity in Australia. SeaSol have a licence to gather from beaches after a storm, but no one was growing it. I stumbled on the research by CSIRO, showing the potential of methane to significantly reduce livestock emissions.”

“Methane has 84 times the warming effect on our planet on carbon. Carbon stays up for 100 years whereas methane has a short-lived effect (11 years). So reducing methane emissions is the best way to have an immediate effect on addressing climate change.”

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