Lowly Algae in the Desert Have Farmers Seeing Green

The Japanese engineer, the Ethiopian chemist and the Mexican American production manager looked over their simmering crop of spirulina and they were pleased.

It is an unlikely crop in an unlikely place, but Yoshimichi Ota, Amha Belay and Juan Chavez have midwifed into existence the largest farm in the world devoted to growing the protein-rich algae with the blue-green hue.

The Aztecs, had they lived so long, undoubtedly would have approved. For extra oomph during their empire-building phase, they used to munch on the spirulina that grows wild in the lakes of central Mexico.

Nowadays, spirulina--from the Greek, speirea , for its coiled shape in nature--is part of the growing food additive market for people pursuing vim and vigor. The health conscious, particularly in Asia and the United States, sprinkle it on granola and mix it with rice cakes. Or they simply pop tiny, tart-tasting spirulina tablets.

The state Department of Food and Agriculture has yet to think enough of spirulina to list it among the commodities it tracks. But Ota, Belay and Chavez, all officers of Earthrise Farms, think a great leap forward is near.

“The color is good, very good,” said Ota as he surveyed one of the huge outdoor ponds where the mossy, tubulous spirulina is growing merrily beneath.

The farm has 30 such ponds, each with a quarter of a million gallons of water, located on 100 acres in the brutal desert east of the Salton Sea. Paddles such as those on a stern-wheeler keep the water in a state of modulated turbulence, lest bugs and opportunistic organisms get an unhealthful grip.

The modern boomlet for spirulina started in the mid-1970s when it was “rediscovered” by a French botanist, who found it being eaten by the people of Chad. The market is still small by worldwide standards--about 1,000 tons annually--but is increasing.

Spirulina grows wild in lakes in certain warm-weather climes. The rub is that it is a stubborn, fickle, unglamorous crop that has thwarted several efforts at large-scale farming in Mexico, Taiwan and the United States.

A change in temperature or wind direction can spoil a batch overnight. Insects can muck up the works. Production costs are beastly. And while spirulina can help chickens grow up healthy and meaty, using it in poultry feed could significantly drive up the cost of broilers.

Partly because it is so easy to grow in a laboratory, spirulina is a favorite topic of researchers. Scientists at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., are exploring whether it might help bolster the immune systems of HIV-positive people.

At Earthrise, the process of turning algae into a marketable product begins with sucking the pond water into a two-story aluminum building, where the water is drawn off and the algae is turned first into sheets of sludge-like consistency, then blow-dried into powders and flakes. It is a wet, humid, noisy and secretive process (Earthrise won’t allow pictures).

Every few minutes, a teeth-rattling horn blasts inside the building to shake the flakes loose from the equipment. If you’ve seen the movie “Mosquito Coast,” starring Harrison Ford as an eccentric wizard, just think of the mammoth ice-making shed where he dazzled the natives with his innovation.

Earthrise Farms, whose corporate parent is the Tokyo conglomerate Dainippon Ink & Chemical Inc., accounts for 30% of the world’s market for spirulina as a food additive.

Each of the top officers at Earthrise Farms came from a different direction, geographically and professionally. “We’re the United Nations,” Belay said.

Ota, 52, the president, is a mechanical engineer and trouble-shooter who has worked at a fertilizer plant in the Ukraine and a plastics factory in Romania. He was sent to Calipatria by Dainippon in 1983 to begin the spirulina farm.

The first years were tough. Dainippon’s partner, a California corporation, bailed out, but the Japanese firm stayed the course until the venture became profitable.

“Our corporate parent was very patient,” Ota said. “So many things went wrong, so many things. . . . It was very frustrating.”

Belay, 49, became fascinated with spirulina when he saw it growing in the lakes of his native Ethiopia. He became an algae expert, got a doctorate in biochemistry from a British university, and was on a Fulbright Fellowship at UC Santa Barbara, before he joined Earthrise six years ago as vice president for research and development.

The chance to work with a company that thinks of nothing but algae was more than Belay could resist, even if it meant enduring the Imperial Valley heat. “Not many scientists get to experiment like this,” he said.

Chavez, 31, was born in Mexicali and graduated from Brawley High School. He got a job helping to build the farm when it opened and worked his way up to vice president for production.

The harvest occurs daily during the April to November growing season. Chavez knows his hunch is not scientific, but he swears that the harvest is the best the morning after a full moon.

“Each pond is different,” Chavez said. “You have to play around with it to keep it from being too different. You have to beat it at its own game.”

From Calipatria, the bulk spirulina is trucked to Petaluma, north of San Francisco, for packaging and distribution by Earthrise Co., a subsidiary of Earthrise Farms. The president of Earthrise Co., Robert Henrikson, is an apostle of spirulina and has written a book titled “Earth Food Spirulina.”

On his own initiative, he has sent spirulina to the Institute of Radiation Medicine in Minsk for the child victims of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident and to hospitals in Croatia for refugee children from Bosnia.

With or without Earthrise, there is no question that spirulina is a hot topic of scientific inquiry these days. Most of it is basic research, however, and is not likely to lead to practical uses any time soon.

In the past five years, 40 articles have been published in medical journals about spirulina and its intriguing properties: spirulina as a possible antibody enhancement, spirulina as a way to avoid fatty buildup around the liver, spirulina as a source of Vitamin A, spirulina and enzymes, spirulina and cholesterol, and more.

A preliminary study at the National Cancer Institute found blue-green algae such as spirulina to be “remarkably active” against the AIDS virus--in the test tube. But Gordon Cragg, chief of the institute’s natural products branch, cautions that a lot of algaes have shown promise, only to be eliminated upon further study.

“Spirulina has been around a lot of years,” said David Newman, a chemist in the natural products branch. “It’s like mushrooms. There are people who believe mushrooms are the next wonder drug, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

At Petaluma, and at Calipatria, the people at Earthrise are quick to say that they are not banking on spirulina becoming an AIDS drug. They’re content with the idea of spirulina as a product to lift the energy level of a flagging world.

“The micro-algae industry,” said Ota, standing by his jade-green ponds, “is in its infant stage.”