I stared for a while at the placid face of Long Island Sound before I could make out Bren Smith’s farm. It was a warm, calm morning in September. Sixty buoys bobbed in rows like the capped heads of synchronized swimmers. It wasn’t until Smith cut the engine of his beat-up boat, Mookie, that I knew for sure we had arrived. The farm, a three-acre patch of sea off Stony Creek, Connecticut, starts six feet underwater and descends almost to the ocean floor. From the buoys hang ropes, and from the ropes hang broad, slippery blades of sugar kelp, which have the color and sheen of wet Kodak film.

At first, the local fishermen thought that Smith was growing some kind of marine hemp; that seemed cool. When they found out it was seaweed, they ribbed him relentlessly. Smith, in any case, prefers to call his produce “sea vegetables.” He also raises mussels, scallops, clams, and oysters in lantern nets shaped like accordions and stacked pyramids. He pulled up a lantern net full of twenty thousand black-and-orange scallops, two months old, the size of M&M’s. The net was covered in murky, greenish clumps of seaweed, crawling with sea squirts, little crabs, and translucent shrimp. “The farm is a reef for hundreds of species,” he said, cutting off a hank of seaweed—Gracilaria—for me to try. It crunched, filling my mouth with the taste of lobster juice. “This is what you want to see,” he said. “This is good, restorative ocean farming.”

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