Spawning Spores
People in the West are slowly waking up to mushrooms. They’re replacing their morning coffee with adaptogenic teas, taking mushroom supplements to calm their nerves, and seeking alternatives to the button mushrooms so pervasive in this country. A mushroom movement is happening, and Chadd Bauman and Kyle Born hope to be at the forefront of the movement with their mycelium farm, Circular Harvest.
Bauman and Born met at the University of Waterloo. Both were taking the environment and business undergraduate program with an interest in reducing agricultural industry waste.
At first, they were drawn to high-tech solutions, such as turning cattle farm emissions into a power source for hydroponic farms. The ideas were big, bold and incredibly expensive. Then they discovered a much simpler way to reduce waste —something that doesn’t need heavy machinery, patents or millions of dollars in upfront investment — mushrooms.
“I was really fascinated by how cool mushrooms really are as food but also how beneficial they are to the planet,” Bauman says. “Plants rely on them to grow; we can use them to clean up oil spills; we can use them for medicine, and they are delicious.”
Bauman and Born developed the concept of Circular Harvest, which takes reclaimed and recycled materials to create grow-athome kits for mushroom enthusiasts. After graduation, they set up an indoor mycelium farm in Abbotsford, intending to sell educational grow kits to hobbyists.
However, they stumbled into another market — commercial farming.
“Mushroom farming can be pretty labour intensive, and farmers like how easy our bags are to work with,” Bauman says. “They open a bag and add the right amount of moisture, and the mushrooms will fruit on their farms.”
These aren’t the classic button mushrooms you find huddled in a bin at the grocery store. These are the unruly fungi found at farmers’ markets, specialty food stores and on the secret paths of keen-eyed foragers. The sort of mushrooms that smell woody, taste nutty, and raise the eyebrows of the initiated, who will undoubtedly ask, “are they safe to eat?”
Mushrooms like these grow differently than button mushrooms, including cremini and portobello varieties. Button mushrooms grow in soil or composted manure. Specialty mushrooms such as oyster mushrooms and lion’s mane naturally grow on trees, which poses a challenge for commercial growers.
“The biggest issue right now is that most farmers are buying hardwood fuel pellets, which means they are pretty much cutting down trees to grow mushrooms,” Bauman says. “We’re finding wasted resources like the straw or discarded wood from carpenters or sawmills that we turn into sawdust blocks mushrooms need to grow.”
Bauman and Born take those wood blocks, put them in a bag and colonize the dirt (called the substrate) with mushroom spores, which then grow into mycelium.
Mycelium is the complex network of fungal threads from which mushrooms fruit. In nature, the mycelium network is often unseen underground and can cover vast land areas. The largest known mycelium network in the world is in Oregon, covering approximately 10 square kilometres.
For farmers like Brian Thompson, owner of Myca Farms Ltd. in Langley, using grow bags is a way to cut down on labour, which is in short supply these days.
“I wanted to outsource the bags so that my focus could be on growing the mushrooms, harvesting them and getting them to the chef within 24 hours of their order,” Thompson says. “Working with the Circular Harvest guys is like outsourcing much of your labour, and you get a great product.”
Thompson is new to farming. He spent 20 years working in youth addiction services after overcoming his own addiction. However, the fentanyl crisis burned him out, so he sought a different career. He worked on tug boats for a time but broke his wrist on the job, which brought him to mushrooms.
“After that, I decided I wanted to stay home and do urban farming,” Thompson says. “All I found in the grocery stores were the cremini and the buttons and some crappy-looking oyster mushrooms. I’d sometimes come across gourmet mushrooms and just loved them, so I decided to learn how to grow them.”
For about a year, Thompson grew mushrooms in his basement, learning through trial and error, before scaling up to becoming a commercial farmer.
“It’s been an eye-opening experience to start a farm and trying to get out there and make enough to support my kids and me,” Thompson says. “The challenge is that I’m going against Walmart-sized farmers. They can get the same thing, but not as good, for cheaper.”
He sells to grocers such as Eternal Abundance on Commercial Drive and Local Harvest Market in Abbotsford. His mushrooms appear on menus around the city, including Parq Vancouver and Chickpea Restaurant. He sells directly to customers at local markets, which he describes as more of a science fair where he spends most of the time educating the public.
“In North America, we’ve been afraid of fungi rather than embracing it,” Bauman says. “People are starting to see the health benefits of mushrooms. It might be the echo chamber online, but it seems like so many businesses are coming up and talking about mushrooms.”
Over the last twenty years, the mushroom industry has shifted significantly. According to statistics Canada, button mushrooms still account for most of the mushrooms grown in Canada with fewer farmers growing them. There’s a mushroom monopoly. In the late ’90s, approximately 96 per cent of all mushroom growers grew button mushrooms. In 2017, the number had nearly flipped, with 19 per cent growing button mushrooms and 81 per cent growing specialty mushrooms.
However, as a Statistics Canada report put it, “it can’t be said that specialty mushrooms have an established place in the market basket. It is one thing to be adopted by the haute cuisine restaurant industry, but quite another to become part of the dietary habits of everyday people.”
Bauman hopes to change that through Circular Harvest. Even so, bringing more mushrooms to market is a complex matter of customer demand.
“It’s difficult to have these mushrooms in store because of their very short shelf life,” Bauman says. “Companies are working on that by growing them very close to store — it’s something we’re working on too.”
“Hopefully, we’ll be able to replace those button mushrooms with mushrooms I personally feel taste better.”
“A lot of it is about education,” said Thompson. “When I’m selling mushrooms at our booth, people have never seen them before. Often they ask me what it is and if they can eat it. The next question, is it a magic mushroom?”
The mushrooms Thompson grows are not hallucinogenic, although they do seem to hold some mystical power over him. “I just saw the mushroom movement, and they just kind of called to me.”
Circular Harvest
141 Ross Rd., Abbotsford
Circularharvest.ca | 604.217.8663 | @circular_harvest
Myca Farms Ltd.
6475 264 St., Langley
mycafarms.ca | 778.829.1965 | @mycafarms
