Brackish Course
College faculty
Has taught aquaculture, aquaculture business, marine ecology, and biology as a professor at Santa Monica College, MiraCosta College, and Chapman University.
About the professor
Jules Marsh — your instructor.
A decade in seaweed, a company built from the intertidal up, and years in front of college classrooms teaching aquaculture as what it actually is: a business that happens to be underwater.
I'm Jules. I co-founded and ran Kelpful, a women-led, worker-owned seaweed company on California's Central Coast — harvesting, drying, teaching, and selling. That work pulled me into the wider ocean economy and, eventually, into the classroom. I've taught aquaculture, aquaculture business, marine ecology, and biology as college faculty, and I run a blue-economy and aquaculture workforce certificate program. Everything in Brackish Course is my own material: built, owned, and continuously updated by me, drawing on years of farm work, teaching, and industry research.
Where the credibility comes from
Workforce program lead
Leads the Blue Economy and Aquaculture Technology Workforce Certificate Program at MiraCosta College — building curriculum and career pathways for coastal workers.
Operator, not just lecturer
Co-founded and ran Kelpful, a women-led, worker-owned Central Coast seaweed company: harvest, drying, product, wholesale, branding — and the hard parts nobody puts in a textbook.
Business training
MBA focused on regenerative business, earned while running the company it was tested on. Prior career in engineering and large public infrastructure projects — budgets, permits, and standards included.
A teaching practice, not a side hustle
- 01
It started with a cooking class.
The very first thing Kelpful ever did publicly was a seaweed cooking class in 2019. A journalist showed up, an article followed, and the room was full. That night set the through-line for everything since: education and community serve people better than any single product can.
- 02
Years of tours, workshops, and talks.
Intertidal foraging walks, hands-on workshops, conference talks, and community education ran alongside the business the entire time — teaching people to find, name, harvest legally, and actually cook what grows on their own coastline.
- 03
Then the college classroom.
That teaching practice became a formal course sequence I designed and delivered at multiple colleges — semester-length aquaculture and aquaculture business classes, revised each term based on what actually worked for working students.
- 04
Built for this school.
Brackish Course is my own 19-module sequence — rebuilt for self-paced online learners from the lessons, assignments, and business templates I developed independently. You get graded checkpoints, instructor-reviewed work, and editable tools you keep.
How I teach it
Aquaculture education tends to split in two: biology that never mentions money, or business advice that has never touched a tide chart. This course refuses that split. You get the husbandry and the water quality, and you get the permits, the cost of goods, the break-even math, the market channel, and the paperwork that keeps a farm legal.
I teach from the captain's chair. That includes the parts that didn't work — the capital that never arrived, the investors who didn't take a women-led food company seriously, and the decision to close a production warehouse. Those are lessons too, and they're in here.
Accessible shouldn't mean less careful. It just means priced for the people who need it most.
Why take this seriously
- →Built and owned by the instructor who developed and taught the material in college classrooms and on working farms.
- →Written by someone who ran the business, hit the funding wall, and says so plainly.
- →California-specific permitting, agencies, and cost reality — not generic industry filler.
- →Assignments reviewed by Jules personally, within a week of submission.
- →Priced to be reachable, with member rates and installment plans, on purpose.
Ready when you are
Come learn it from someone who ran it.
Nineteen modules, four graded checkpoints, a capstone I review myself. Start any time — the tide doesn't wait, but the course will.
The rest of the work
Teaching is one line in the water.
Brackish Course is the school. The consulting, project, and permitting work — site assessment, farm planning, feasibility and permitting support, market and operations strategy — lives at Brackish & Co, alongside the rest of the Brackish suite. If the course raises a question bigger than a course can answer, that's where to find me.
Visit Brackish & Co →