There are a few sources of Sea Moss. The main processes are Pool Farming and Wildcrafting.
Pool Farming means artificially recreating an ecosystem to grow the Sea Moss.
It involves the use of machinery to simulate the currents of the ocean artificially. Like any other pool, the water is kept clean with the help of chemicals. The result is a heavily manipulated product that many people call “FAKE” Sea Moss.
This is not ideal. I mean, you didn’t turn to natural products to end up consuming chemically processed junk, did you? It doesn’t make sense. There’s got to be a better way…
And that’s where ‘wildcrafting’ makes its appearance.
Wildcrafting means harvesting plants from their natural, or 'wild', habitat. That is all. No other human manipulation in the whole process.
In the case of Sea Moss, it means diving in the ocean to look for places where Sea Moss grows on its own, and harvest some of it. I say ‘some’ because you need to leave some behind so it grows back again naturally.
Seems like wildcrafting is the way to go. Sounds sustainable… or does it?
The fundamental problem with wildcrafting is that there is not enough of it to satisfy the demand. And if anyone takes too much of it, it will disappear.
It’s extremely hard to make a profit out of it, and it is fundamentally unsustainable for the ecosystem.
A quick tip: be wary of unscrupulous brands that market their Sea Moss as ‘Wildcrafted’. They are basically lying. They are just throwing a buzzword at you to convince you that their stuff is more natural. They can’t survive picking wild sea moss.