57 



Chinese, Japanese, and Korean farms are primarily designed for 

 food production and for the production of plants that yield chemi- 

 cals used as emulsifying and gelling agents. 



The graph provided here shows Japanese and Chinese advances 

 in macroalgal mariculture and provides some approximate answers 

 to questions that were raised earlier about what sort of time frame, 

 and about types of breakthroughs needed for the development of 

 large scale marine farms. 



You will see that on this graph "J" stands for Japan and "C" 

 stands for China. The Japanese marine farming efforts began back 

 in the 1700's and continued up until about 1950 as a "traditional" 

 process. In other words, they would plant and harvest according to 

 seasonal events such as winds and so on, without a scientific basis 

 for doing so. 



The life history of the major organism (porphyra) they were 

 farming was not known and so it was like a very primitive sort of a 

 thing. As of 1950, the Japanese followed up on a discovery by an 

 English woman that the life history of this alga could be controlled 

 and their production increased considerably. Just prior to 1960, the 

 Japanese began to use nets in the sea and to artificially seed their 

 plants on them. At point "J3", they found that they could take 

 seeded nets and freeze them and store them and then later plant 

 them out in the sea. You can see that this resulted in a dramatic 

 production increase. Because of coastal pollution in Japan they 

 began to move their farms offshore and production again shot up 

 very dramatically. What you are seeing here is a very interesting 

 thing. 



The history of agriculture, of course, is shrouded in the mists 

 prehistory having its beginning some 10,000 years ago. What you 

 are looking at here is the beginning of mariculture in Japan and 

 China, where relatively few scientific advances account for most of 

 this major upswing. 



The production in China now is 150,000 dry tons per year. 



The Chinese and Japanese do not have the large float-bearing 

 kelps like Macrocystis, though we have been approached by repre- 

 sentatives from those countries, and from Korea, and asked for 

 seed stock for Californian kelp. I am quite sure that ultimately 

 they will start growing these larger plants. 



Macrocystis is, of course, the largest known marine plant, reach- 

 ing lengths of up to about 140 feet. These produce, as you know, 

 forest like communities where individual plants grow at rates of 3 

 percent per day. These growth rates are whole plant wet weights 

 and are, as John Ryther indicated, really very spectacular things to 

 watch. 



The growth rate times the standing crop, of course, gives you the 

 production. The standing crop in wild populations varies, but some 

 actual numbers are of interest. Measured standing crop values 

 range in natural beds from 2 to 97 wet tons per acre. The actual 

 harvest total in California is about 160,000 wet tons per year, this 

 being harvested by mechanical harvesters. With reference to an 

 earlier question about mechanized harvesting, these harvesters 

 were designed in about the 1930's and haven't changed very much 

 since that time. So, while harvesting is certainly mechanized on a 



