FoA 313: Farming Seaweed to Reduce Cattle Emissions with Joan Salwen of Blue Ocean Barns

Thank you to our quarterly presenting sponsor, Merck Animal Health Ventures: https://www.merck-animal-health.com/animal-health-ventures/ 

Blue Ocean Barns: https://blueoceanbarns.com/

Today’s episode features Joan Salwen, co-founder and CEO of Blue Ocean Barns. Joan grew up in the long shadow of her family’s Iowa farm where she harvested cherries and cared for the sheep. During 20 years as a Managing Director at Accenture, Joan managed $50M+ client relationships and led the firm's Atlanta practice for organization and change strategy. In 2015, Joan transitioned to Stanford, where she built a team that energized university, market and government interest in seaweed as a solution to climate change. She founded Elm Innovations, a non-profit platform for exploring the potential of the seaweed-livestock connection and ultimately co-founded the commercial engine for it, Blue Ocean Barns in 2019. 

I’m very excited to share today’s episode with you. There is so much here. Not only does this project have incredible incredible potential to reduce methane emissions. But also this is an incredible entrepreneurial journey Joan went through to resurrect old research in this area, support further research, commercialize the venture, then figure out how to grow, process and distribute the product at a scale that could be meaningful for the future of agriculture.