Our Story
From land and sea, back to the soil.
We are a women-owned company, founded by a fisher, a rancher, and an ecologist, each committed to grassroots, community-driven food production and climate action.
In nature, nothing is wasted. Every fallen leaf, discarded shell, and flow of the tides serves a valuable purpose in a finely balanced cycle of renewal. By repurposing underutilized resources like fish and wool, we create bioactive soil nutrients that restore fertility, strengthen food systems, and enable farmers and fishers to both achieve high yields and take a stand for climate action.
We believe that healthy soil is one of our greatest tools for capturing carbon and rebuilding resilient ecosystems. With every product we create, we do more than promote plant growth; we work with nature to replenish the land and promote a future where soil biodiversity thrives, water is clean, and communities prosper.
Victoria Voss
Victoria was born into a Santa Barbara-based family of commercial fishers and has fished commercially for sockeye salmon in Alaska and spiny lobsters in California. With a passion for sustainable take and ethical stewardship, she is deeply connected to the identity and way of life that comes with an ocean-based living.
Kim Selkoe
Kim is a marine ecologist affiliated with University of California, Santa Barbara, and is the executive director of Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara, a nonprofit port association. She is passionate about bringing together fishers, scientists, and policymakers to tackle complex issues facing our fishing community.
Jenya Schneider
For two decades Jenya has been asking how we can best learn from and steward our native ecologies, working across human, plant, and animal-centered systems from the Elwha River watershed to the Cuyama Valley. In 2016 she cofounded Cuyama Lamb, raising Merino sheep for regeneratively sourced food and fiber, and for a California that lives safely alongside natural wildfire ecologies.
How it happened
2018
It starts with a question about fish scraps
Victoria and Kim founded Get Hooked Seafood, a community seafood program. What began as a practical question, how to responsibly use the fish scraps the program generated, turned into a deeper exploration of living soil and ocean-derived nutrients.
2022
From scraps to fertilizer
Jesse Smith of White Buffalo Land Trust approached Victoria and Kim with a method: combining fish scraps with molasses and lactobacillus, fermenting the mix at low temperature for eight weeks. The result is a fish hydrolysate: a nutrient-rich liquid with bioactive polypeptides, diverse amino acids, and beneficial microbes that heat processing typically breaks down.
2023
Lotusland puts it to the test
Victoria and Kim partnered with Lotusland, Santa Barbara's premier botanic garden, and received grant funding from the Office of Wendy Schmidt. The funding let them deepen their knowledge of the fertilizer's application, performance, and environmental benefits, and let Lotusland carefully replace its imported fertilizer with the local alternative. It outperformed the competition, stimulating soil fungal biomass while reducing heavy metals and salts in the soil.
2023
Wool enters the picture
Riding that success, additional funding from the Office of Wendy Schmidt helped expand the product line into new waste streams, including wool, and began farm trials of the fertilizer. Around this time Jenya Schneider reached out. She'd been raising Merino sheep at Cuyama Lamb since 2016 and had heard about using wool as a soil input. Wool releases nitrogen slowly as soil microbes break down its keratin fibers. It holds moisture, builds soil structure, and carries virtually no burn risk to seedlings. With California the top wool producer in the US and at least half of shorn wool unmarketable, there was a real opportunity.
2025
Marino Soil Foods launches
Thanks to that support, Victoria and Kim joined forces with Jenya to launch a dedicated fertilizer company: Marino Soil Foods. Farm trials and new product development are ongoing, and the wool and fish scraps no longer go in the trash.
What makes Marino different
If a fishing community's scraps can feed soil biology, and a rancher's wool can deliver nitrogen while building soil structure instead of depleting it, what else is sitting in a waste stream right now that nobody has looked at yet? That's the question Marino keeps asking.
Many of these processes aren't new. Fermentation, composting, returning animal byproducts to the soil: humans have done this for thousands of years. These methods work because the biology is real. Marino brings a scientific lens to those old ideas, testing formulations, running farm trials, and measuring what actually happens in the soil. The goal is synergy, where the inputs, the process, and the outcome all reinforce each other instead of working against the system they're meant to support.
Sweet Fish Brew
A cold-fermented fish hydrolysate: wild California fish scraps, molasses, and lactobacillus, fermented at low temperature for eight weeks. That process preserves much of what conventional heat processing breaks down, including amino acid chains, beneficial microorganisms, enzymatic activity, and bioavailable sea minerals.
Wool Pellets
100% Merino wool from Jenya's flock, which now grazes coastal Santa Barbara County hillsides for fire fuel mitigation. Soil microbes break down the keratin fibers gradually, releasing nitrogen over months rather than all at once, while the wool itself holds moisture and builds soil structure. NPK 7-0-4. No synthetics, no additives, and virtually no burn risk to seedlings.
Neither product contains CAFO or feedlot inputs, fish farm byproducts, GMO organisms, or fossil-fuel-derived ingredients. Every ingredient is sourced in California and traceable to its origin.
Why this matters
Decades of synthetic-heavy farming have depleted organic matter, weakened soil structure, and left growers more dependent than ever on inputs shipped from across the country or overseas. The 2022 fertilizer price spike showed how fragile that supply chain really is.
A growing number of farmers, landscapers, and gardeners are looking for a different approach, one that builds soil biology instead of bypassing it. Healthy soil sequesters carbon, holds water, and becomes more productive over time. Feeding its microbial ecosystem is how you get there, one field and one growing season at a time.
What's next: urchins and kelp
The next answer might come from the ocean floor. Purple sea urchins have overrun kelp forests along the California coast, grazing them down to barren rock. With partnership from Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara and funding from the Office of Wendy Schmidt, Marino is experimenting with drying and grinding harvested urchin shells into a calcium-rich powder that could complement its other soil products, turning a marine restoration problem into another useful input.
Ready to try the products behind the story?
If you're a farm, nursery, or institution and want to talk through what would work for your operation, reach out directly. We like real conversations.