About · Jules Marsh
My name is Jules. I co-founded a California seaweed company, taught the people who want to start one, and never did get a lease of my own in the water. Permit Reef is the thing I kept wishing existed at every single step.
10 yrs
In seaweed
2019
First class taught
CA only
Scope of this chart
0
Leases I ever got
What this is, and what it is not
Coverage is California shellfish and seaweed only. If you are growing something else, or growing in another state, the route mapping here will not match your situation.
This page states who builds Permit Reef and the limits of what it does. Covers California shellfish and seaweed only. Every outside link on this page was last checked automatically on Sep 18, 2026, and it is re-checked weekly. The agency's own published page and notice remain the legal record.
The short version
01
I co-founded Kelpful, a Central Coast seaweed company — harvesting, drying, packing, selling, and eventually teaching. The very first thing we ever did publicly was a seaweed cooking class in 2019. The turnout was wild, a journalist showed up, and I still have the clipping framed. That night set the through-line for everything since: the teaching and the community mattered more than any product ever did.
02
By 2023 the snack we'd developed was ready for national scale and the capital wasn't there. The food-system investors who did show up often treated us like silly little women rather than serious operators. So we closed the production warehouse, sold the equipment, and doubled down on what mattered: teaching, tours, and stewardship.
03
Not because the science didn't work, and not because the market wasn't interested. Because the distance between “I want to farm here” and “you may farm here” runs through roughly eleven agencies, two to ten years, and a six-figure environmental review bill no small operator can absorb. The outfits that make it through are decades-old incumbents or backed by patient money. Co-ops, tribes, families, students — effectively locked out.
04
I've taught aquaculture, aquaculture business, marine ecology, and biology as a professor, and I now lead the Blue Economy & Aquaculture Technology Workforce Certificate Program at MiraCosta College — building curriculum and pathways for the next generation of coastal workers. Teaching it is what forced me to write the path down clearly. You cannot hand a student “it depends.”
05
Permit Reef is a chart of the actual reef: how much, how long, which agency, what form, where the soundings run out, and which of those gaps agencies and operators can close together. A lot of what I take on now is work the industry needs that nobody is doing at a price the industry can actually pay.
How one person covers this much ground
Each craft feels its way forward independently while staying tethered to the same intention. The skills aren't actually separate: attention is attention, and building something useful is building something useful.
2015 – 2023
Co-founded and ran Kelpful, a Central Coast seaweed company — harvesting, drying, packaging, selling, teaching. Built a small business from the intertidal up.
Curriculum & pathways
Taught aquaculture, aquaculture business, marine ecology, and biology at the college level. Now leads the Blue Economy & Aquaculture Technology Workforce Certificate Program at MiraCosta College.
Where the permit patience came from
A full engineering ladder before the ocean: lab benches, QA/QC, roundabout design in several states, lead ADA facilities designer and trainer, senior design on some of the largest transportation projects in the state.
Priced for who needs it
Small-team tools and strategy for operations that don't have enterprise budgets — plus an MBA in regenerative business, earned while running the seaweed company.
“Think like you've got nine brains, feel like you've got three hearts, and hug as though you have eight arms.” — Liz Marvin
How I work on this
Accessible shouldn't mean less careful.
It just means priced for the folks who need it most. Every number in here is sourced or labeled as an estimate.
Look at the problem sideways.
The best routes through this are the gaps nobody else noticed — a District lease, a species list, a programmatic envelope.
Ship the tight version.
A working chart people can correct beats a perfect one that never leaves the drafting table.
Nobody is the villain here.
Agency staff are working overlapping mandates with thin budgets. The difficulty is structural — and structural things can be redesigned.
Where this sits
The name came from that edge — where land and sea negotiate a shared chemistry. It fit a practice that moves between aquaculture and agriculture, code and coastline, classrooms and contracts. Everything sits under one roof because the through-line is the same: work at the boundary, where two systems meet and something new forms.
Permit Reef
The public chart of the California shellfish and seaweed permitting route. You are here.
Project Brackish
Ops software for farmers of every stripe — harvest, inventory, orders, projections.
BrackishBooks
Financial planning for aquaculture & agriculture — pricing, budgets, cashflow.
All of it runs through Brackish & Co, the parent studio. The desk currently happens to be on the Salish Sea — tours and in-person work in the North Sound, everything else wherever there's wifi.
The chart is public and free to read without an account. A private workspace exists, and access to it is by invitation. Corrections are the most valuable thing you can send me.
Built with salt, stubbornness, and the conviction that the ocean shouldn't be the easy part.
