by Frank Michael

Location and history

Mushroompeople is a mail order business operating from The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee, USA. The Farm is slowly working toward becoming a full-fledged ecovillage. Everyone here agrees in principle that we want to become an ecovillage. The constraints in this effort include the expenses involved and the internal politics of persuading the hard-working membership to invest their time and effort in more sustainable and ecological ways of doing things.

In our early years The Farm was the most radical thing around, a collective spiritual community whose members took vows of poverty in solidarity with the majority of people, and took on saving the world as our project. 25 years down the line, we've had children, grown older, and have transferred more of our energy towards meeting our family needs, as well as to individual preferences on how best to help the world situation. No longer collective, vow-of-poverty activists, we still hold our land in common, have cooperative agreements, and have strong bonds forged by a great adventure.

One of the cottage industries on the Farm is Mushroompeople, a non-profit ecologically-oriented supplier of spawn (mushroom seed equivalent) and cultures (sterile agar sources for making spawn), plus tools, books, and videos to enable people to grow any kind of cultivable mushroom. Mushroompeople customers include home growers, as well as commercial producers of these delicious fungi.

Louise McMahon, from Mushroompeople, checks out a healthy crop of oyster mushrooms

But what do mushrooms have to do with sustainability, or an ecological cottage industry?

 

Mushrooms & Sustainable Forestry

Mushrooms are a sustainable forest product. 8 years ago we brought the 25 year old company Mushroompeople to the hardwood forests of Tennessee, a mushroom cultivator's paradise. In an age of unregulated chip mills and large-scale clear cutting within our southern US forests, we try to show our farming neighbours that growing a forest mushroom like shiitake can be a profitable small and local enterprise, earning US$2,000-3,000 per cord of wood, after expenses, over the 2-3 year production lifetime of the logs. Using sustainable logging methods, one can actually benefit the woods by releasing healthy trees from competition from weaker ones, thus growing a climax forest faster than nature can alone. If we love forests, it is necessary to preserve them while making them cost-effective. Growing shiitake we can preserve our forest and eat it too!

Natural, freshly-cut oak logs yield the highest quality shiitake, successfully competing locally against large commercial growers. Some of the most profitable mushroom businesses in the USA are small family-owned farms. Shiitake is suitable for outdoor and indoor cultivation year-round.

Mushrooms are delicious. With flavours and textures remarkably different from those of the familiar vegetables or meats, they can bring a new dimension to even ordinary dishes. The variety of flavours and chewiness of fungi has inspired whole cookbooks dedicated to what are, surprisingly, extraordinarily healthful foods.

But are mushrooms even nutritious? Yes. For example, the Japanese forest mushroom shiiitake is 10-29% protein by dry weight, high in the amino acids leucine and lysine (scarce in most grains), and containing a good variety of minerals and vitamins. Shiitake is clearly a high-quality food source. Other mushrooms are equally nutritious. The familiar oyster mushroom can be grown in straw, sawdust, coffee grounds, bagasse, copra, old newspapers, cotton waste, and many other agricultural waste products. Because of this versatility, they show potential for alleviating hunger in poor regions of the world.

A mushroom cultivation laying yard at The Farm in Tennessee, USA

Many mushrooms show powerful immune-stimulating properties. In Japan, lentinan, an extract of shiitake mushrooms, is routinely used as part of cancer prevention and as an adjunct to the usual therapies. Several polysaccharides found in the polypore Reishi, and more recently in the delicious Maitake (hen of the woods), have in clinical studies produced remarkable benefits for the immune system, as well as cholesterol-lowering effects. These properties are not surprising, since the familiar antibiotics themselves are metabolites made in nature by fungi to compete with other microorganisms.

Mushrooms are ecologically important. Many plants owe their very existence to fungi. While green plants easily perform the miraculous transformation of sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into living plant material though photosynthesis, they are unable to break down inorganic materials (e.g., rock) into soluble forms. On the other hand, the fungi, while unable to synthesize carbohydrates (sugars and starches), easily break down inorganic matter into the soluble nitrates, phosphates, sulphates, etc., that are essential to plants. Over the aeons, plants have co-evolved with fungi within this type of symbiosis, called mycorrhizal. Without fungi, some plants die. Without plants, many fungi do not thrive.

It is easy to grow shiitake. Making money growing shiitake is another matter, being dependent on good marketing. From 1988 to 1991, some 230 US shiitake growers increased production from 3.7 to 4.1 million pounds and earned from $22 to $22.4 million/year in gross sales, averaging $4.17 per pound. Local wholesale rates vary from $5 to $7 per pound, with the higher rates going to growers making reliable weekly deliveries to local produce managers and restaurant chefs. While the market in North America and Europe is steadily expanding, at times supply still exceeds demand, which causes prices to fall below cost, something no farmer can sustain for very long. For this reason, small growers often group together to form small co-ops that share transportation, cooler space, tips on efficient production, and to fill in each other's gaps in produce supply. To help growers cope with a changing marketplace, many mushroom spawn-makers and suppliers provide growers with a variety of services, including:

• Telephone and fax numbers, internet sites, and e-mail with fast answers to common questions, cross-references, and links to on-line mushrooming resources.
• Commercial kits containing cultivation manuals, financial analyses, and marketing tips.
• Information about the profound health and nutritional value of mushrooms, facts to help growers create the markets of the future.

Since shipping spawn into foreign countries faces the obstacles of possible customs restrictions, plus high express shipping costs for living material, we encourage prospective growers outside the US to make their own spawn locally. Some of our products that can help in making spawn include agar petri dish cultures of all the main cultivated mushrooms around the world, plus others that show promise in their edible and medicinal properties.

Frank Michael,
The Farm,
Summertown TN 38483-0090,
USA.
Fax: +1 931-964-2200.
E-mail: mushroom@thefarm.org
http://www.mushroompeople.com