The California Coastal Commission voted unanimously this week to let Ocean Rainforest, a seaweed company based in the Faroe Islands, move forward with what would become the country’s largest kelp farm: roughly three square miles of federal water about six miles off the Ventura County coast. The vote caps years of environmental review for a project that, at full build-out, could grow up to 6,000 tons of giant kelp a year, not for food, but to be processed onshore in Ventura into products meant to improve soil and plant health on California’s avocado and strawberry farms.
Ocean Rainforest isn’t new to these waters. NOAA Fisheries profiled the company’s smaller demonstration farm off Southern California in 2024, where seaweed scientist Javier Infante, who also helped run one of the company’s original farms in the Faroe Islands, has been testing how giant kelp grows on longlines in the region. This approval effectively lets that pilot scale up, but slowly: the commission’s conditions call for a phased build-out over roughly a decade, with construction on the first phase possibly starting in 2027 and further growth contingent on periodic reviews of how the farm is actually performing in the water.
The permitting fight came down to a familiar tension in offshore aquaculture: opponents worried about whales getting tangled in the farm’s growing lines and anchor systems, about the hundreds of extra boat trips a year needed for maintenance and harvest, and more broadly about turning open ocean into working infrastructure. Ocean Rainforest and its supporters pointed to two years of demonstration-scale operation with no recorded whale entanglements, noted that the farm’s taut, rigid growing lines behave differently than the loose lines that typically catch marine mammals, and argued the site’s distance from shore keeps it away from the densest whale traffic. They also leaned on kelp’s now-familiar selling point as a carbon sink and habitat generator, framing the farm as a net environmental positive even as it reshapes a patch of ocean.
What happens next is mostly a matter of scale and patience: Ocean Rainforest still needs to secure remaining permits and financing before it can start installing infrastructure, and the commission’s phased-review structure means the farm’s eventual six-thousand-ton capacity is a ceiling, not a guarantee. But as one of the first large offshore seaweed farms to clear U.S. regulatory review, it’s likely to be watched closely by the handful of other companies angling to grow kelp at commercial scale along the West Coast.
Further reading: Amy Taxin, Associated Press, “California officials allow plans for the country’s biggest kelp farm to move forward” (2026).