According to the Portland Press Herald, the Maine Seaweed Festival has been canceled this year due to a rift between the event’s organizers and seaweed harvesters.
Organizer Hillary Krapf, who runs a seaweed products and education company called Moon And Tide, said Maine’s seaweed industry has been besieged by a “Gold Rush mentality” that threatens sustainability as seaweed grows in popularity. New players are getting involved in Maine seaweed farming before there is anywhere near the infrastructure needed to sustainably process and sell it, she said.
Maine overtook California as the country’s largest producer of seaweed about a decade ago. The Maine Seaweed Festival, held in South Portland, has sprung up along with the growth as an annual chance for the state’s seaweed producers to show off products and celebrate all things related to sea vegetables.
The seaweed festival started in 2014 and doubled in attendance to about 3,000 last year. The rise in attendance coincides with growth in Maine’s seaweed industry, which quadrupled its harvest from 2004 to 2014.
Shep Erhart, president of the Maine Seaweed Council and founder of Maine Coast Sea Vegetables, doesn’t paint so rosy of a picture. He said the state is experiencing a “seaweed bandwagon,” and this is a good time for the festival to take a year off.
“We can’t meet demand without overdoing it,” Erhart told the Press Herald. “We want to make sure we can meet this demand that Mother Nature is supplying us. We need to step back and slow down a bit.”
Read the full story from the Portland Press Herald.