|
|
 |
|
Photo credit: Raymond Salmon, Getty |
|
The Editors' Desk |
|
In this issue of The Deep Dish, we submerge ourselves in the shadowy world of fungi. In addition to the burgeoning development of medicinal and psychedelic or “magic” mushrooms, these remarkable, dynamic, and synergistic organisms possess myriad health and environmental benefits. In one of two features this month, we look at how essential fungi are to sequestering carbon in the soil and the important role they play in supporting crop health, mitigating climate change, and sheltering crops from disease. And, as consumer demand for mushrooms of all kinds continues to grow, our second feature explores ways to handle substrate, the living material left over after growing them.
We also follow up with poultry farmer Craig Watts and his partnership with Transfarmation, a program that aims to help poultry farmers move toward an independent, profitable, fungi-focused future. And we talk with the mother-daughter duo behind the Denver-based nonprofit Spirit of the Sun about the importance of Indigenous wisdom, the power of mycelium, and the need to equip Native youth with tools to combat the effects of climate change.
Don’t miss a new mushroom recipe from author Maria Finn’s new book, Forage. Gather. Feast.: 100+ Recipes from West Coast Forests, Shores, and Urban Spaces, a selection of other stories from around the web, and some of our previous reporting on the world of fungi.
Also be sure to check out our special section below for members, including announcements, updates, and a handful of questions specifically for you.
Thanks for reading, and for being a Civil Eats supporter. If you'd like to increase your support for our work with a tax-deductible donation, please click the button below.
~ The Civil Eats Editors |
| Donate Today |
 |
|
Photo credit: Jakob Creutz, Unsplash
|
|
|
|
|
Member Updates |
|
Be Part of Our Next Issue: The State of Home Cooking
The next issue of The Deep Dish will focus on home cooking, and we’d like to include your experiences, successes, and challenges. We’re curious to hear your answers to any or all of the following questions:
● How did you learn to cook?
● What’s your favorite dish to cook?
● How do your values show up in your cooking?
● What are or were your barriers to cooking?
To be considered for inclusion in the next issue, email us with a sentence or two and include your city and state. The deadline to contribute is March 21.
Share Your Experience With Civil Eats
We will be shining a light on members this year in multiple ways. We’d love to hear how you best enjoy your membership and how it informs your work or life. Please send 1-2 sentences along with your name and affiliation, if you have one, to members@civileats.com, and we may highlight you and your response in a future newsletter. (Please note: Responses may be lightly edited prior to publication.)
Bring Civil Eats to Your College or University
Are you a college student, educator, or faculty member interested in inspiring meaningful change in the food system? We would love to learn how we can support you. Reach out to schedule a brief call with our team.
Connect With Other Food System Changemakers
Join our members’ Slack Community to talk to others who care about food justice while getting early and behind-the-scenes access to Civil Eats reporting. Members use the space to respond to our work and share resources and news from their communities. To participate, please review the Community Rules and Agreements and accept this invitation link, which is good through March 25. (Here are the instructions if you’re using Slack for the first time.) |
|
(Return to top) |
|
|
|
 |
|
Timothy Robb inspects a pile of decomposing wood chips. (Photo credit: Grey Moran) |
|
First Look: Fungi Are Helping Farmers Unlock the Secrets of Soil Carbon |
|
BY GREY MORAN |
|
Timothy Robb peers into a microscope to reveal the underground realm of the living and dying within a fistful of soil. On the glass slide, he sees clumps of golden-brown minerals and organic matter particles, like pebbled splotches of ink. Nearly everything else in the landscape is a microbe, a motley crew of roving shapes, preparing to eat or be eaten. Hairy orbs of protozoa glide around in search of snacks in the flecks of bacteria scattered all around. A nematode, a microscopic worm, thrashes through the scene in a hurry. A tubular strand of fungi stands still, perhaps absorbing the dust of dead plants.
“This is called shadow microscopy,” says Robb, the co-owner of Compostella Farm in southern Mississippi, bringing the microorganisms into focus. It’s a way of viewing living specimens under an oblique light, so they appear backlit and magnified, like a shadow box theater. Just prior to this, he diluted the sample in water and shook it, like a “hurricane or earthquake, any biblical catastrophe motion for that soil.” This broke apart the soil’s structure so he could see everything holding it together, like the dark brown curl of fungi. |
|
|
 |
|
Soil microorganisms busy decomposing, magnified by shadow microscopy.
(Photo credit: Timothy Robb) |
|
|
“This is what a really good, healthy fungi strand looks like,” he says. Its uniform, segmented structure, thickness, and color are often good signs, though he adds that it’s not a hard and fast rule, just clues that this might be an architect of healthy soil.
As a vegetable farmer, Robb is mostly in the business of life. But his interest in building healthy soil led him down into this shadowy world of decay, where microbes shuffle carbon and nutrients in an endless cycle that sustains all life on Earth. This world appears chaotic at first glance, but Robb insists that it is elegant. An orderly marketplace, really. He’s been working to understand and strengthen this underground economy to replenish his soil.
Researchers have increasingly recognized how essential fungi are to sequestering carbon in the soil and some have come to appreciate the outsized role they play in supporting crop health, mitigating climate change, and even sheltering crops from disease. As fungi’s vast benefits come to light, more farmers are tapping into this vital network, learning how to work with beneficial fungi to encourage its growth in the soil, swapping tilling for microscopes.
This growing interest in fungal networks on farms quietly challenges the underpinnings of U.S. agriculture. The prevailing model involves taking care of the crop’s nutritional needs with chemicals, bumping up the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in an effort to maximize the yield of the crop. Farm ecosystems are controlled with herbicides that kill weeds and fungicides that kill the fungi in the soil. Common practices, like tilling the soil, disturb the fungal networks and then deepen the dependence on chemical inputs.
“We’re reliant on these cheap inputs that are no longer cheap,” says soil ecologist Adam Cobb, whose research focuses on mycorrhizal fungi. He notes that farmers are then subject to the whims of a global market, which tends to skyrocket in price during geopolitical conflicts.
|
|
|
“It’s a criticism of how agriculture is currently conducted, and it’s a methodology of introducing the microorganisms that are absent from the soil.”
|
|
These chemical-based practices degrade the soil over time, stripping it of its ability to cycle carbon and nutrients without its supportive network of decomposers. But working to both protect and encourage fungi on farms is a way to reverse course. Robb sees his work of coaxing beneficial fungi back into the soil, which he largely learned from an online program called the Soil Food Web School, as both a challenge to mainstream agriculture and as a way forward to restore agricultural soils.
“It’s a criticism of how agriculture is currently conducted,” says Robb. “And it’s a methodology of introducing the microorganisms that are absent from the soil—the chain of organisms that release different minerals from rocks, clay, or silt particles in the soil.”
The Nutrient-for-Carbon Exchange
Fungi are effectively merchants of carbon. In the soil, they give plants the water and nutrients they need, while the plants provide fungi with carbohydrates (i.e., carbon) from photosynthesis. Fungi can act like a second set of roots, extending the plant’s ability to draw in water and nutrients.
Mycorrhizal fungi, which encompass thousands of species, can form large, underground networks, connected by branching filaments called hyphae, threading through the soil in every direction. One type of this fungi, known as arbuscular mycorrhizal, attaches directly to the cell membranes of a plant’s root, facilitating a smooth delivery. Other microbes in the soil, like protozoa and nematodes, participate in this cycling, too, digesting fungi and bacteria to release their nutrients in a more available form to plants.
“The microbes engineered habitats around the plant roots that would be high in organic matter and make it more efficient for them to be able to obtain water and nutrients that they could then–in this carbon economy–essentially sell it to the plant,” says Kris Nichols, a leading researcher on soil microbiology. “It’s really an economic relationship.”
This relationship becomes especially interesting when business is booming—when the plants are delivering a lot of carbon into the soil that is used to build larger and larger fungal networks while distributing carbon across the soil profile. The carbon accumulates in the soil in many forms, from fungal cell walls to soil aggregates, or pellets of very alive soil that Nichols describes as “little microbial towns,” like economic hubs.
|
 |
|
Fungi threading through the soil of Compostella Farm in Mississippi.
(Photo credit: Grey Moran) |
|
|
When these microbial communities develop, mycorrhizal fungi use their hard-earned carbon to build a protective coating around them, sheltering them from disturbances while more stably storing carbon. To the naked eye, these pellets look like crumbs in the soil.
The accumulation of carbon in the soil effectively slows the carbon cycle, causing carbon to linger in the ground for a longer period of time rather than quickly releasing into the atmosphere, where it takes the form of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas driving climate change. That’s the goal of what’s been popularly described as “climate-friendly farming,” or regenerative agriculture: keeping as much carbon in the soil for as long as possible, in part by keeping these underground networks undisturbed.
And increasingly, fungi have gained scientific recognition for their essential role in slowing this life-ending and -giving cycle. A recent study found that the world’s mycorrhizal fungi store the equivalent of a third of fossil-fuel emissions.
How Farmers Can Tap Into Fungal Networks
Peering through the microscope, Robb’s task is relatively simple: He counts and measures each microbe—fungi, nematodes, protozoa, and bacteria—to understand the microbial relationships in the soil and gauge its health. He also looks for the indicators of beneficial fungi and a diversity of microbes: different colors, lengths, and shapes.
There’s no shortage of bacteria on the slide. It’s common for agricultural soils to be dominated by bacteria, which Robb is hoping to shift on his farm, building a more balanced ratio of fungi to bacteria in his soil. It’s not that bacteria should be scorned; they too are important decomposers that collaborate with fungi. But it’s hard to beat fungi at its game, rightfully a kingdom of its own. Fungi, more complex organisms, are more efficient at storing carbon across vast networks in the soil and more effective at delivering nutrients for certain plants.
The ratio of fungi to bacteria depends on the plants, explains Robb. He mostly grows salad greens across 3 acres of farmland. For his bok choy, mustards, and kale, he’s aiming for a 1-to-3 ratio of fungi to bacteria, but his lettuce requires a bit more bacteria, closer to 1-to-1. He steeps the compost like a tea, extracting the microorganisms in water, and then runs it through his irrigation system.
“You're introducing millions of fungi and bacteria species to the soil. And that’s as far as the management really needs to go, because once the plant gets established, then it’s controlling [the relationship with the microbes],” says Robb. He’s essentially just giving a plant options, a pool of microbes at its service.
In addition to applying compost tea, Robb supports fungal life by creating mulch from wood chips, which the fungi help decompose.
Robb shows me a pile of wood chips softening in the sun. It’s just 3 months old, but already threaded with fine white hairs of saprophytic fungi, resembling a cobweb. “When you can see it visually like this, what you're actually seeing are like thousands of strands wrapped around each other,” says Robb, given that hypha are just several microns in size. |
|
“You're introducing millions of fungi and bacteria species to the soil. And that’s as far as the management really needs to go, because once the plant gets established, then it’s controlling [the relationship with the microbes].” |
|
Before planting, he’ll also coat his seeds in a mycorrhizal treatment, a powder of spores. This inoculates this critical, network-building fungi in the soil. So as soon as the plant germinates, the fungi will be available to swap nutrients for carbon. Periodically, he’ll feed the fungi, adding liquid kelp, fish hydrolysate, and humic and fulvic acids to encourage its growth.
Every month or so, Robb peers at a soil sample under the microscope, assessing his progress. It has been about a year since he bought his first microscope and began surveying the local microbes. Most of his soil still isn’t where he’d like it to be, still dominated by bacteria, but it’s steadily improving. He essentially started from scratch on sandy soil that couldn’t hold onto much water or nutrients.
|
 |
|
Rows of salad greens growing on Compostella Farm in Mississippi.
(Photo credit: Grey Moran) |
|
The most visible marker of improvement, at least to the naked eye, might be the crops themselves. A couple years ago, he observed “a precipitous decline in the quality” of his vegetables. They were yellowing and stunted. His lettuce was drooping. Disease was a regular occurrence. This prompted him to look into how to build soil that could hold onto more nutrients, which led him to fungi.
So far, his focus on improving decomposition has improved the health of his crops—now, rows of mostly bright green, leafing, upright crops emerge from dark brown, lush soil.
A Symbiotic Relationship That Predates Humans
It has taken a while for the role of fungi in supporting plants and soil health to gain mainstream scientific recognition. Elaine Ingham, a pioneer in the field of soil microbiology, recalls facing pushback in the early 1980s when she proposed researching the role of soil microorganisms for her dissertation at Colorado State University. She met with her professors to propose her field of inquiry, only to be sternly dismissed.
“They’d look me in the eye and say, ‘You don't know what you're talking about. Bacteria and fungi in the soil—they're just there. They don’t do anything,’” she recalls. “All of them agreed that I was endangering my ability to get a job at the other end of my research project.”
But Ingham was undeterred. “I wanted to understand what bacteria and fungi in the soil were there for,” she says. “In all the literature I looked at, you couldn't find anything about what these organisms in the soil actually do.” With the blessing of her advisor, she was allowed to pursue a dissertation project, along with her husband Russell Ingham, studying how soil fungi, bacteria, and nematodes interact with plants.
It was the start of her life's work to help peel back the layers of the mysterious world of microbes within the soil. To date, the vast majority of the millions of fungi species on Earth remain unknown by scientists, but it’s now abundantly clear that many fungi play a critical role in soil health. Ingram, who grew up on a farm, now works with farmers to reintroduce soil fungi through the Soil Food Web School.
Robb came to learn how to work with fungi on his farm when he stumbled upon the school by chance in a footnote of a book. He attended the program without a background in science, but it didn’t take him long to feel comfortable behind a microscope. It was an “aha moment” when he realized his soil was depleted of fungi and other microbes—with this, he had the clarity of a diagnosis.
The Vast, Untapped Potential of Fungi
While the Soil Food Web School is one approach, there are practically infinite ways to work with beneficial fungi and microorganisms on farms. Many practices associated with regenerative agriculture and long-standing Indigenous methods encourage fungi. Even if not measured with a microscope, there are signs of fungi at work—like dark, spongious soil. |
 |
|
The roots of a cowpea plant, with fungi stained in blue, under a microscope.
(Photo credit: Adam Cobb) |
|
“We never leave our soil bare. It is always covered with straw, leaf mold, or wood chips,” says Leah Penniman, the co-founder of Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York. “We like to think of these wood chips as encouraging the fungi from the native forest around to come into our fields and partner with our orchards and with our crops.”
In 2006, when she started Soul Fire Farm, the soil was very degraded and the organic matter—which includes soil carbon—was only at 3 percent. But they’ve since increased it to 10 percent to 12 percent in some areas. “That has been through a partnership with fungi,” Penniman says. Slowly but surely, fungi have emerged from the forest, building carbon in the soil.
Robb also thinks of the forest on the outskirts of his fields. The trees have a relationship with mycorrhizal fungi and microbes that take care of all their needs, without any human intervention. “Those are nitrogen-rich plants, and nobody's applying fertilizer,” he says.
He currently adds organic nitrogen to his farm, but hopes to add less and less, allowing the fungi and microbes to increasingly take over in tending to his crops. |
|
(Return to top) |
|
|
|
 |
|
Fruiting mushrooms in substrate. (Photo courtesy of Tivoli Mushrooms)
|
|
First Look: Managing ‘Brown Gold:’ The Challenges—and Opportunities—of Spent Substrate |
|
BY DOUG BIEREND |
|
Collar City Mushrooms occupies a small building along the post-industrial waterfront of Troy, New York. Out back, baking in the winter sun between a shed and a yellow Volkswagen bus, sits a waist-high heap of what looks like dozens of giant Frosted Mini-Wheats, each roughly the size of a cinder block. The weathered caps of oyster mushrooms sprout defiantly from various points in the pile.
The lumpy blocks are spent substrate, the living material left over after growing mushrooms. Composed of sawdust and soy pellets woven through with mycelium—the thread-like aspect of the fungus from which mushrooms sprout—spent substrate is a unique kind of waste. It’s also one with many potential uses; it can be used as compost, as a means of decontaminating soil, as biofuel, and simply for growing more mushrooms. And while each of those uses could provide revenue potential for mushroom farms, the expanding piles of spent substrate also represent a mounting logistical challenge.
“Right now, we have people picking it up almost as a favor for us, because otherwise what are we doing with it?” said Avery Stempel, Collar City’s co-founder, as we gazed upon the pile. Stempel currently takes most of the material to a nearby compost facility, but local farms, gardeners, and florists also take a portion. So do individuals, whether for compost in their gardens or just to grow mushrooms at home. “People will come and buy a bucket for five bucks,” Stempel said.
Before it’s put to work growing mushrooms, substrate is carefully mixed and sterilized to maximize efficiency and prevent competition for the fungus. Protected inside breathable plastic bags, the sawdust and soy hulls are inoculated with an edible mushroom strain, then stacked on racks in climate-controlled rooms. The bags are sliced open when the mycelium is ready, and out sprouts the first “flush” of mushrooms. To make the best use of space, many farms will dispose of the blocks after a single flush, but each block is capable of several rounds of mushroom production. In this sense, the substrate isn’t really “spent.” |
 |
|
Spent substrate waiting to be collected and reused.
(Photo courtesy of Central Texas Mycological Society) |
|
Collar City is a relatively small operation, producing up to 1,000 pounds of mushrooms a week. An hour south, in Hillsdale, New York, Tivoli Mushrooms produces around 20,000 pounds per week, and it’s currently only using half the capacity of its new 15,000-square-foot facility. Soon after moving in, Co-founder Devon Gilroy reached out to a neighboring organic farm, offering the spent substrate for free as compost if they would simply take it off his hands. It wasn’t a tough sell. “They showed up like two weeks later with a tractor and a big truck to load it in,” he said. “They insisted on paying us for the substrate, which really helped.”
More Mushrooms, More Problems
From a revenue perspective, specialty mushroom substrate’s greatest value is currently as compost, which can sell for around $150 per cubic yard. It has a low pH level, useful in soils with low acidity, and a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of roughly 40 to 1, which is close to ideal for building healthy soil. Spent substrate is also a useful addition to vermicompost—worms love to eat mycelium, and in doing, so they also break down woody debris and support soil biodiversity. It is also an excellent addition for structure and water retention.
But that doesn’t mean every mushroom farm has an easy time finding a second life for its spent substrate, and the quandary of how to make use of the material is growing along with the scale of the specialty mushroom industry.
“If you're gonna do it, awesome, but account for this waste stream you're producing and how you're gonna get it off of your property.” That’s the advice Amanda Janney, founder of KM Mushrooms in California, offers new farmers. Janney’s farm is about as modest as they come, operating out of her home in Santa Rosa. As the farm’s output quickly grew, from 20 pounds of mushrooms a week to around 300, the leftover material quickly became a logistical problem to be solved. |
|
“If you're gonna do it, awesome, but account for this waste stream you're producing and how to get it off of your property.”
|
|
“In the beginning when we were doing really low volume, it was not much of a consideration; giving bags of spent substrate out via Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace was sufficient,” said Janney. “Then production increased a lot faster than I had planned on, which is a great thing, but a big piece of it became connecting with farmers that were interested in [taking substrate] and getting a workflow to move it off the property quickly.”
In 2022, driven in large part by consumer interest in meat alternatives, global revenues for mushrooms were predicted to more than double to over $110 billion by 2030. The nutraceutical market for medicinal mushrooms—such as reishi, lion’s mane, and cordyceps—may follow a similar trajectory, with one forecast suggesting the market could triple to reach $62 billion by 2032.
The vast majority—95 percent—of the mushroom production in the U.S. is in Agaricus: the common cremini, button, or portobello (all the same species). Every other variety, be it shiitake or oyster, falls in the specialty mushroom category.
In the U.S., Agaricus mushrooms are produced in vast quantities by well-established farms, often generations old and mostly located in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Grown in a combination of manure and straw, they produce a distinct kind of spent substrate that is also used as compost, though it is a very different material from specialty mushroom substrate, with fewer applications. To farm button mushrooms cost-effectively is very labor- and space-intensive, and to take up producing them at small scales doesn’t make a lot of economic sense.
By comparison, it is relatively easy to grow enough oyster mushrooms to sell at market for more than $10 per pound, compared to around $5 per pound for button mushrooms. It’s also easy to buy a few ready-to-grow kits for home growers. For these and other reasons, specialty mushrooms are what most small and emerging farms are likely to grow. Sales of specialty mushrooms increased 32 percent between 2021 and 2022 alone, which means an equivalent increase in spent substrate, and more questions about what to do with it.
On the extreme end of substrate volume are the emerging mycelium materials companies, like MycoWorks and Ecovative [Disclosure: The author worked for Ecovative in 2022 and 2023.] Based on oyster mushroom mycelium, Ecovative ships most of its substrate off as compost, and the possible uses it is exploring include selling part of the enormous output of leftover substrate to farms in Pennsylvania for a second act producing mushrooms.
There’s a limit to that market, though: “To be frank, you couldn’t possibly eat enough oyster mushrooms in the U.S. to use all the substrate we’re going to make if we meet our goal,” said Ecovative CEO Eben Bayer. “It’s a huge opportunity on a spreadsheet, but on the operational side, it’s like, ‘Get this stuff out of here right now.’”
A Community Solution to Substrate Waste Emerges in Texas
Rather than relying solely on the market, the question of what to do with substrate is largely being answered by communities local to the specialty mushroom farms. In Austin, for instance, the Central Texas Mycological Society (CTMS) has organized a network of about two dozen locations for free spent substrate pickup. They report that some 9,000 people have signed up since the program started three years ago, with a surge during the pandemic, when interest in homegrown mushrooms took off dramatically.
“With spent mushroom substrate, we saw this opportunity to keep people connected,” said Angel Schatz, a lead organizer of the CTMS, whose front yard was the original drop-off point for the program. What people do with the material, though, is their own business. “I know a lot of people are growing the mushrooms, getting a second flush out of the bags, but we don't want to steal the thunder from the commercial farms in any way, so we start first with teaching people the composting methods.” |
 |
|
Photo courtesy of CTMS
|
|
Until recently, a significant amount of spent substrate for the CTMS pickup program came from Smallhold, which quickly became a prominent specialty mushroom grower over the last five years, before declaring bankruptcy in early February. With facilities in Los Angeles, Austin, and New York, the company’s objective was to grow specialty mushrooms near major cities. Each of its three large farms generated about 80 to 100 cubic yards of spent substrate per week, and the company employed a team dedicated to finding productive uses for the material.
“At the end of the day, this is a valuable material,” said Travis Breihan, who was the company’s impact manager in charge of researching uses for spent substrate. “But it is a new material on the scene, and it’s not like there was an established industry of people second-flushing blocks, or using it as a garden amendment, or even a larger-scale farm amendment. So, I think it’s early in the world of adoption, but all signs are very strong that it’s a great area of focus for the mushroom industry overall.” |
|
“With spent mushroom substrate, we saw this opportunity to keep people connected.” |
|
| CTMS isn’t concerned about losing the Smallhold substrate. “We still work with another farm that produces around 1,900 spent substrate blocks a week, and they will probably grow now because Smallhold won’t be here.
Meanwhile, besides giving away blocks, CTMS is working with local farms, food producers, and environmental remediation projects that utilize the material for cleanup of contaminated sites, such as the Circle Acres nature preserve on the edge of Austin.
Given the limitations that scale creates for transporting and productively using spent substrate, any future market for the material may indeed be shaped most by smaller operations. Specialty mushrooms lend themselves to this dynamic. They don’t ship well over long distances, and can run on the waste streams—such as sawdust—of nearby industries. It can take many different shapes and, crucially, sizes. As the specialty mushroom industry grows, spent substrate may find a market for secondary mushroom production, or for building and remediating soil and waterways. The potential of the material may best be realized in connecting mushroom production with other food- and soil-based initiatives, and in supporting more circular, regional economies.
“The least we can do is make sure the cycle is complete, and put it back into the soil rather than a dump site,” said Schatz. |
|
(Return to top) |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Craig Watts in his mushroom-growing shipping container.
(Photo courtesy of Mercy for Animals)
|
|
The Follow-up: From Livestock to Lion’s Mane, the Latest From the Transfarmation Project |
|
BY LISA HELD |
|
In an old tobacco barn in North Carolina, Craig Watts completed three trial runs growing shiitakes before he felt ready to scale up. Then, he pulled a shipping container into one of the four giant barns that have been sitting empty on his farm and connected plumbing and electrical systems that once provided water and lighting for thousands of chickens destined to become Perdue products.
Now, he’s working on expanding his vegetable production on the farm, so that by later this spring, once he’s (hopefully) ready to sell his mushrooms at the local farmers' market, he won’t be “a one-trick pony.”
Over about a decade, Watts has become an indie rockstar of agriculture, famous among a niche fan base of food-system reformers, animal-welfare advocates, and farmers who—after years of being exploited by big, industrial meat companies—decided to speak up and get out. So it was only natural that he also became a poster child for Transfarmation, a Mercy for Animals program that aims to set those farmers up for an independent, profitable, fungi-focused future.
Civil Eats covered the program in early 2020, shortly after it launched, and Watts’ slow but determined journey illustrates the complicated reality of progress over the past four years. While some of Transfarmation’s farmers have laid a lot of groundwork, the path between feeding livestock and misting mushroom substrate was always bound to be muddy.
Transfarmation’s director, Tyler Whitley, estimates that over the last four years, about 100 farmers have reached out expressing interest. Of those, his team has worked with 12 farmers, nine of whom are still enrolled. (The ones who dropped out, he said, mostly did so due to health issues.)
While Transfarmation farmers also grow vegetables, hemp, and other crops, most focus on specialty mushrooms—including blue oyster, lion’s mane, and reishi—due to strong market demand, infrastructure compatibilities, and the fact that they are quick and fairly easy to grow.
The pandemic hit right after the project launched, and that set the timeline back significantly, says Whitley. Then, as the team identified challenges, they attempted to meet each one along the way. They contracted with an agricultural economics firm to analyze the costs of conversion and return on various crops. When it was clear farmers were having difficulty finding buyers for their mushrooms, they hired a “business engagement specialist” to identify restaurants and other buyers farmers might link up with. When farmers faced technical barriers, they found contractors who could visit each farm and help troubleshoot.
“Growth is always a process,” Whitley said.
Some farmers are now closer to running a viable business than Watts, who balances his mushroom business with his other, related job helping former contract farmers find resources through the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project. The Transfarmation team holds up Tom Lim, for instance, as a model. At a North Carolina conference in early February, attendees enjoyed his mushrooms in a tofu scramble for breakfast and a tartlet for dinner and they went home with a bag of dried mushrooms and instructions to make broth.
Still, Lim’s path to making money on his crop has been rocky. He failed to woo customers at farmers' markets before finally finding wholesale buyers with the Transfarmation team’s help. And even now, a lot of his income comes from Transfarmation itself—the program is leasing part of his farm from him and spending about $200,000 to convert one of his old chicken barns into a demonstration greenhouse. The point is to show what’s possible, but it also seems to point to the fact that it’s not yet, in fact, possible for most contract farmers transitioning out.
Watts said one of the biggest limitations of transition programs like Transfarmation and Miyoko’s Creamery’s Dairy Farm Transition is that “the pool of people you can actually help is very limited,” because if a farmer has significant debt from building and upgrading poultry, hog, or dairy infrastructure, and most do, the numbers just don’t work. It’s more complicated than just switching what you grow in a giant, windowless barn. They’re made for one thing, and changing requires investments. Not to mention the fact that small farms growing specialty crops and selling directly to consumers are often barely scraping by.
That leads to a deeper question: Is the system being proposed actually going to be any better, financially, for the farmer compared to what they might make with an industrial chicken contract?
“That’s the $64,000 question,” Watts said. “But here’s the difference: If this doesn’t work out, I can walk away. I’m not going to lose anything.”
Whitley, meanwhile, said that while the number of farmers may seem small and the finances complicated, the point was never to go out and help farmers transition out of operating concentrated animal feeding operations one by one. He sees f each Transfarmation farmer, instead, a mini pilot project. As they experiment and work out the kinks, the Transfarmation team collects data and documents successes and failures. Then, they write it all down and put it online.
“Our theory of change is working with individual farmers to create publicly accessible resources that anyone can independently implement,” he said. “We're not trying to recreate another power-holding system.”
Or, as Watts puts it in his characteristically humble way, “I’ve got to get my shit together and quit tinkering and get this thing working to where it’s replicable. I see that as my role. There’s a learning curve that I can shorten for other farmers.” |
|
(Return to top) |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Shannon Francis (left) and Chenoa Francis.
(Photos courtesy of Spirit of the Sun)
|
|
The Check-In: Spirit of the Sun Uses Mycelium to Restore the Land and Feed the Community |
|
BY KATE NELSON |
|
At Spirit of the Sun, Native American youth are not only learning about traditional ecological knowledge, they’re also empowered to do the teaching.
The opportunity to absorb Native wisdom and share that knowledge with the community is what attracted 20-year-old Nyomi Oliver (Navajo) to the Denver nonprofit, which offers a wide variety of cultural, culinary, and wellness programming. “I am a reconnecting Native as of last year,” she says. “I had lost my ways, but Spirit of the Sun has shown me how important our Indigenous perspectives are and how our history has laid out a blueprint for us to follow in order to align with Mother Nature.”
Oliver got involved in Spirit of the Sun’s Indigenous science and foodways program in 2022, then joined the organization’s newest initiative, the mycelium healing project, which taps into the bioremediation properties of fungi to restore the land and feed the local community.
Mycelium—fungi’s web-like inner network structure—has been shown to remove toxins from the soil while improving its overall health. Last summer, for instance, the organization’s mycelium-inoculated foodscapes demonstration garden yielded more than 1,000 pounds of produce for the elder food share program.
At the helm of Spirit of the Sun is executive director and permaculture educator Shannon Francis (Diné/Hopi). She developed the mycelium healing project in 2021 to address the environmental injustice caused by known polluter Suncor Oil Refinery, located in nearby Commerce City. Since then, dozens of Native youth have participated in the program.
“I was a teen in the 1980s when the Exxon spill in the Gulf [of Alaska] happened, and I remember all the amazing things mycelium can do,” says Francis. “We wanted to share that knowledge in order to address the negative health impacts for the community around Suncor, which is primarily Chicano and Indigenous, including a lot of elders.”
Under the guidance of local mycology expert James Weiser, youth leaders have built out two mycelial mother patches—starter gardens full of fungi that can then be transplanted to create satellite colonies—and regularly host training sessions to teach their younger counterparts and community elders how to grow mushrooms. For the next phase of the initiative, they hope to develop additional mother patches and inoculate homeowners’ gardens to magnify the fungi’s positive impacts, which they are measuring through ongoing soil testing.
Francis is also proud to have her 23-year-old daughter, Chenoa, closely involved with the mycelium healing project as Spirit of the Sun’s youth outreach and agricultural support coordinator. Following in her mother’s footsteps, Chenoa has been an outspoken advocate for Indigenous rights since childhood.
Civil Eats recently spoke to the mother-daughter duo about the importance of Indigenous wisdom, the power of mycelium, and the need to equip Native youth with tools to combat the effects of climate change.
How does the mycelium healing project reflect traditional ecological knowledge teachings?
Shannon Francis: When we’re healing the soil, we’re healing ourselves. Our genetic makeup comes directly from the water we drink and the soil we eat from. Most of the soil in the Denver area is depleted of nutrients, so we have to constantly add nutrients back in. Mycelium is like a nervous system that does its job in conjunction with nutrients in the soil. There are so many positive benefits to soil that is healthy and alive; it is connected to our food, our ceremonies, our language, and our stories. |
|
|
“We want to help our youngest connect with the natural world and see the elements as relatives. . . . Most adults have forgotten how to do that. But we know that everything is in kinship, with a function and a purpose.”
|
|
|
We want to help our youngest connect with the natural world and see the elements as relatives, which is why our Indigenous toddlers and teachings program starts at age 2. Most adults have forgotten how to do that. But we know that everything is in kinship, with a function and a purpose.
For example, if you’re in a forest, all the trees know you’re there. If you put your hand on a tree, it sends signals out to the other trees around it through mycelium. The plants then respond. If you’re sick, these plants will start making medicine for you. But we’ve lost these ways of connecting and paying attention. If we can teach our youth to observe the world through an Indigenous lens, they are better able to hold respect for the natural world, for the animals, for the elements, and for each other.
What do you hope youth participants take away from this program?
Chenoa Francis: Spirit of the Sun is about empowering Native communities one youth at a time. We want to give them tools to not only help fight climate change but also to elongate their lives. Having this program be youth-led is our way of letting them know they matter and giving them the power to take hold of their future.
We actually provide lobbying and public speaking classes in conjunction with the mycelium healing project, because we know that there will probably be some pushback against youth growing mushrooms. We want our youth to be able to fully articulate why they want to heal the Earth without coming across as just another person of color who’s angry with the world.
We also match our youth with elders to create that intergenerational connection. We want to help instill that even for youth who might not understand their connection to the past or their tribe, there is always a way to connect with the Earth.
One of my favorite stories is about a former youth leader, Jaden Huynh, who has grown into such a matriarch. She went from wanting to go to medical school to running experiments with different kinds of mushrooms to [assess] their ability to improve brain function. That all stemmed from our early conversations about how mushrooms can benefit not only the Earth and the soil but also our bodies. She became so fascinated by the web of everything and how it is so similar to our brains.
What hopes do you have for the mycelium healing project?
Shannon Francis: The intention is to try to heal ourselves from the intergenerational traumas that many Native and BIPOC folks experience. For example, I have boarding school survivors on both sides of my family. We believe that creating new positive memories can override traumatic memories. Through our programs, we talk about all these positive Indigenous principles and values. For example, our youth cooking classes are focused on ancestral foods, the stories behind them, their health benefits, and the need to bring them back.
A lot of it is genetic memory, which ties us to all our experiences and our ancestors. We have to remember the traditional ecological knowledge that will help us move forward. We want to help these kids become more resilient and give them the tools, resources, and support they need to move through climate change. Our programs are focused on uplifting youth to make them proud of who they are and give them hope about the future.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Recipe: Maria Finn's Herby Mushroom Leek Toasts
|
|
Maria Finn is a Bay Area author, speaker, chef, and founder of the forthcoming Institute for Ecosystem Based Living. We will be publishing a Q&A with her in the coming weeks about her new cookbook, which will be released early next month.
Herby Mushroom Leek Toasts
By MARIA FINN
Mushrooms sautéed with leek (or onion or shallot) in butter with salt is so simple and adapts to a variety of dishes. These mushrooms can be tossed with pasta, on flatbreads and polenta—or you can add a splash of red wine and make a sauce for pork tenderloin. But my favorite go-to vehicle for wild mushrooms is toasted artisanal sourdough bread. It lets the mushroom flavors shine and works for any culinary mushroom. Make this over a campfire, as appetizers for a party, or if you want it for breakfast, just add an egg.
Makes 4 servings
3 tablespoons salted butter
1 cup chopped leeks
3 cups chopped wild mushrooms (see note)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon finely chopped fresh herbs (like rosemary, thyme, or sage)
4 slices ¼-inch-thick sourdough bread, toasted
⅓ cup shaved Parmesan
Note: You can use any culinary mushroom for this. Just keep in mind if you’re using chanterelles or any other mushrooms that absorb a lot of water, you'll want to dry-cook them first to get the water out. And if using black trumpets or yellowfoot chanterelles, no need to chop them if they’re small.
Directions
In a large pan over medium-high heat, melt the butter and add the leeks. Sauté until translucent.
Add the mushrooms, salt, pepper, and herbs and cook until everything is browned, 6 to 7 minutes. Plate the toasts, pile mushrooms on top, and garnish with the Parmesan.
This recipe is excerpted from Forage. Gather. Feast.: 100+ Recipes from West Coast Forests, Shores, and Urban Spaces by Maria Finn. Reprinted with permission from Sasquatch. Publication date: April 9.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
That's all for this issue of The Deep Dish. Thank you for reading, and thank you for being a member of the Civil Eats community. If this is your first time reading The Deep Dish (welcome!), be sure to check out our previous issues:
If someone forwarded this email to you, please support our work and become a member today. Questions? Compliments? Suggestions? We love to hear from our members: Please send us a note at members@civileats.com. |
|
(Return to top) |
|
Did you enjoy this newsletter? Help us out by forwarding it to a friend or sharing it on Facebook and Twitter.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
