You've landed at Brackish Course — a working-water school where the flagship class teaches you to run an aquaculture operation like the business it is. Nineteen modules, real templates, graded checkpoints, and a certificate you have to actually earn.
Just want the lay of the land first? Get the Seaweed Industry Primer.
What this is
Brackish Course is a real school for working-water people. Lectures, readings, exercises, graded checkpoints, deadlines you set, and a certificate at the end. Everything is built from courses we actually teach in a classroom.
Who it's for
If you farm shellfish or seaweed, want to, or teach people who do — you're in the right slip. No prior business background needed. We start at "what is a permit" and end at "here is my funded plan."
Why it's different
Every module hands you the actual working file: budgets, cash-flow models, lease research sheets, a feasibility study, a capstone plan. You get editable versions and finished examples, both. Every spreadsheet also has a matching lab in your browser, so you can do the math even if you never open Excel. Steal our homework — that's the point.
Plenty of online courses hand you a PDF and a pat on the back. This one grades you, reviews your writing, and makes you build the documents before it calls you done.
Pass every quiz at 80% or better and finish all 19 modules. Then four projects get read by a real person: your writing assignment, a plan for keeping your community on your side, a feasibility study (can this actually work?), and your final business plan. Jules reviews within a week. After that your certificate comes with a code anyone can look up.
See what's included →Enterprise budgets, cash-flow projections, pricing worksheets, permit trackers, grant-proposal skeletons. The seaweed budget runs on rates stopwatch-measured on a working California farm; the California oyster budget didn't exist anywhere, so we built it from published extension sources at their most conservative. Other courses lock their spreadsheets so you can't see inside. Ours open up, and you can change anything in them.
Browse the course →Flagship course · Aquaculture realm
Enrolling nowEverything it takes to plan, permit, fund, and actually run an aquaculture business on the California coast.
Working growers, career changers, and college students who want the business half of aquaculture, not just the biology.
Nineteen modules of mussel-building for your business brain — site selection to sales, permits to profit.
01 · [module 01]
Business Types and Site Selection
How farm models (shellfish, finfish, seaweed, land based recirculating) drive the site you need, and how site constraints quietly decide the business model for you.
02 · [module 02]
Permitting and Leasing
The federal, state, and local permit path in plain order, who signs what, and where applications actually stall.
03 · [module 03]
Infrastructure Development and Production Planning
Gear, buildout sequence, stocking and harvest cycles, and building a production calendar that survives contact with weather.
04 · [module 04]
Safety and Standards: OSHA, FDA, and Best Practices
Worker safety obligations, food safety controls, sanitation, recordkeeping, and what an inspection day looks like.
05 · [module 05]
Social License to Operate
What social license is, how it is earned, how it is lost, and what it costs to rebuild.
06 · [module 06]
Stakeholder Mapping and Engagement
Work out who cares, who holds real power, and who is simply loud, then decide who to talk to first.
Four ways in, from a wade to a full plunge. Every tier has a Driftline rate — a lower price, right there, no code, no explaining yourself. Split any of them into 2 or 4 payments.
Tidepool
$95
Driftline $44
Core lessons, self-paced
Brackish
$225
Driftline $111
Full course + certificate
Full Send
$500
Driftline $333
Everything + editable template pack
Faculty Pass
$1,111
Driftline $666
Teach it yourself: decks, keys, syllabus
01
Enroll and land
Everything unlocks day one. Jump around, skim ahead, start where you're curious.
02
Work the modules
Short lecture, one real exercise, no busywork. Mark a module done once you've passed the checkpoint that covers it.
03
Build the documents
Feasibility study, social license memo, capstone plan — the same files a lender or a lease board would ask for.
04
Get reviewed, get certified
Human review inside a week, then a verified certificate with a public check page.
Who's teaching
A decade running a women-led, worker-owned seaweed company; college faculty teaching aquaculture, aquaculture business, and marine ecology; and lead of a blue-economy workforce certificate program. Years of tours, workshops, and talks before any of it became a course.
Meet the professor →The world is your oyster — learn to farm it
Enroll today, keep the materials, and every realm we add lands in the same library. The water's brackish — exactly how we like it.
