Jo Lane's kelp business Sea Health Products has been on a roller coaster since she bought it from the family of the original 'kelp lady' Betty Long in 2015.
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Ms Long was a pioneer in Australia's nascent seaweed industry.
She worked out how to harvest and process golden kelp in the 1960s and an article about her work in the Australian Women's Weekly in January 1970 prompted a flood of inquiries and orders.
"That is how the business started," Ms Lane said.
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Bought the business
Fast forward 45 years to 2015 when Ms Long's son Scott sold the family's 60-hectare Glasshouse Rocks Estate to Justin Hemmes.
While working at NSW Fisheries in Batemans Bay, Ms Lane had processed an application by the Long family which sparked her interest.
She bought some of the kelp and thought it was a great product so when she saw the property was for sale she approached Mr Long to buy the seaweed business thinking it would be a nice job for a mother with young children.
"I thought it would be a relaxing job. It has now turned into an obsession," Ms Lane said.
Tremendous high
That obsession led the marine scientist to successfully apply for a Churchill Scholarship in 2018 that saw her tour Korea, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Faroe Islands, Canada and the US meeting kelp farmers, scientists and governments.
She returned to Australia in August 2019 and won people's choice and judges' choice at the Bega Valley Innovation Hub in December 2019 with her pitch for starting Australia's first golden sea kelp farm.
Then came the bushfires and COVID.
"We were on a tremendous high after that trip.
"Those interruptions gave us time to process things," Ms Lane said.
Creating a seed bank
By trial and error, Ms Lane and her husband Warren Atkins, a commercial air-conditioning and refrigeration mechanic, learnt how to cultivate kelp using the reproductive tissue it produces at certain times of the year.
They are licensed to collect it and grow it into seed stock in their temperature-controlled laboratory in Tilba Tilba.
"Our success rate is quite high and the scale of what we can do is huge.
"Our kelp babies can now be used in kelp farming or restoration projects," Ms Lane said.
Little did they know when they embarked on the seed bank project that it could help restore the kelp forests along Australia's south coast which has been destroyed by sea urchins.
Ms Lane's involvement in that will be the subject of another article.
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