In the News: Our Logs to NYC Program Sets Sail with Sail Freight Ship Apollonia

Our Specialty Mushroom project’s new Logs to NYC effort, which connects New York City-based mushroom growers with resources from upstate, recently partnered with the Apollonia, a sail freight ship, to transport logs for their mushroom classes into the city. This maiden voyage of Logs to NYC was featured in an article from Civil Eats.

The abundance of logs upstate are not showing up downstream in the city, Steve Gabriel, our program’s mushroom specialist, told Civil Eats. 

“I was teaching classes, and talking to people in the city who would say, ‘Boy, I’d love to get my hands on some logs.’ It seems so impossible to them, but where I live upstate, I’m tripping over wood, it’s kind of a waste product here in more rural areas,” Gabriel explained. “So it struck me that there’s an opportunity to connect those two things.”

The Apollonia was a part of the solution. It’s shipment of logs landed at Red Hook Community Farms, where a volunteer team of Community Mushroom Educators trained through the Cornell Small Farms Program inoculated them with shiitake mushroom spawn. The inoculated logs were then distributed to local community gardens and farms around the city. The logs transported by the Apollonia are expected to yield approximately 1,000 pounds of mushrooms for CSA boxes, food pantry donations, restaurants, and farm stand customers.

Their partnership with the Apollonia enabled the Logs to NYC program to reach city mushroom growers on a significant scale. By purchasing logs in bulk for transport to the city, the Logs to NYC program could alleviate some of the financial stress of sourcing logs individually. The establishment of this partnership- and the general concept of using ships for log transport- has the potential to keep fruiting benefits into the future.

For more information on the Logs to NYC program’s partnership with the Apollonia, read the full article from Civil Eats.