Seaweed Farming in Lembongan

I was sitting in a beachside restaurant and talking to one of the guys there. This is what he told me:

People began farming seaweed some time ago. They went out and marked out little plots. In the beginning they went out and marked them out. There was no sales, no rentals. People just went and took some of the space. Then they put little anchor lines. These were to hold the growing lines in place. They then took long lines and attached bits of seaweed to it. These bits of seaweed are well chosen, chosen for ones that look like they will grow well. The lines are taken out, on a boat, and attached to the anchor lines. Then they are left for 40 to 45 days, during which they grow. Once grown, they are harvested. The growing lines are detached from the anchor lines and put in a boat and brought to shore. The grown seaweed is stripped from the growing lines and laid out to dry. New bits are attached and they are taken out to be replaced on the now empty plot.

The harvested seaweed dries on tarps in the sun. It is covered with plastic and left. It is this part that bleaches the seaweed to the pale colour. There are apparently two kinds of seaweed out there. There is a higher quality green kind and a lower quality reddish-coloured kind of seaweed. What kind is planted and harvested depends on where the plot is located. Off-shore of the island is a kind of plateau that goes out for about four or five hundred meters. Then there is a sharp drop off of the sea floor. This is a breakwater and at that point large waves can be seen. Surfers like that area, for the waves are good for surfing. The large waves seem to rarely come into the shore. These large waves stir up the water in the vicinity of the breakwater. This stirring up of the water keeps some sort of feeder, or parasite off the seaweed, and that seaweed is the green stuff. And that is what is planted out around the breakwater. The red seaweed is harvested closer in and is of a lesser quality as a result because of the parasitic effect. The higher quality seaweed sells for a higher price, so those farmers with plots out by the breakwater make more money.

All of the space out in the plateau is now claimed. Farmers may have three or four plots, but they rarely have too many because they must farm the plots themselves and can only plant and harvest so much with their time. If they have too many plots, some will go unused and be wasted. Anyone new who wants to harvest seaweed has to either buy a plot from someone who has one, or rent a plot in some fashion.

The guy at the restaurant told me that he used to help his parents with their farms, but it is a lot of work and can be frustrating. It is possible for one person to string and plant about 50 lines of growers in a day. They can only be planted at low tide. If low tide is at 9 in the morning, not much problem. But if it's at 2 in the morning, well, no dreams for him that night. He has to go and plant. And if the tides are too big, as happens through the month as the moon changes position, there is no planting. In addition, if the waves do get too rough, during a storm for instance, the seaweed can be stripped away and then all the work of planting it is wasted. Nevertheless, he told me that currently seaweed farming accounts for about 60-70 percent of the economy of the island, with tourism making up the rest. Of course, it used to be 80 to 20, so the revenue of tourism is going up. Or perhaps it is revenue from seaweed farming that is going down as more young people choose to farm tourists instead of seaweed, and ageing parents have to do more with less and get less done.

But that is the process of seaweed farming as it was explained to me.

Later on, I watched a fairly impressive sunset over Bali.