Fungi in the City and on the Farm

Small Farms Radio covers the urban mushroom life cycle and explores indoor mushroom production.

 

How does a mushroom move through the city? What does it take to grow mushrooms indoors? These questions were tackled on two recent episodes of the Small Farms Radio podcast as our agroforestry and mushroom specialist Connor Youngerman talked with mushroom farmers, chefs, suppliers, and consumers in New York City.

 

Fungi in the City

Urban mushrooms’ journeys are shaped by compost collection vans — not subways or taxi cabs — Youngerman learned. With the help of farmers, chefs, and business owners, Youngerman explored the life cycle of urban mushrooms, and how several organizations are working to close the loop of food and food waste in New York City.

 

As a researcher and educator with our Specialty Mushrooms project, Youngerman is always looking to connect with mushroom farmers, suppliers, and consumers across the region. He explained to podcast host Jamie Johnson that NYC is a hub of mushroom farming. Over the course of many trips to the city, Youngerman formed connections with a suite of farmers, entrepreneurs, chefs, and educators (some of whom participated in our Community Mushroom Educator program!). Although from different backgrounds, they shared a common thread: the love of mushrooms. Youngerman decided to follow a mushroom through the city, to make sense of the unique cycle of urban mushroom production.

 

His journey began at the Empire State Building. Chef Morgan Jerrett at the STATE Grill and Bar explained that her restaurant, like many, must get creative to deal with the large volume of food waste. Looking to dispose of their waste simply and sustainably, STATE formed a partnership with Afterlife Ag, a circular mushroom production company based in Queens. Co-founder Winson Wong shared that he was inspired to start Afterlife to address the negative impacts of food waste; over 95% of American food waste goes to the landfill, emitting harmful greenhouse gases.

 

“Commercial waste management companies are expensive to work with … they throw all these food scraps away, hours away from New York City, into landfills, because that’s the cheapest thing to do,” Wong said. “We really wanted to solve for that problem.”

 

Afterlife collects food scraps from across the city and turns them into substrate blocks to grow oyster, lion’s mane, chestnut, and pioppino mushrooms. But after production, the blocks of food scraps become depleted of nutrients. Instead of discarding them as waste to the landfill, Wong searched for a way to repurpose the spent substrate.

 

In the next step of his journey, Youngerman met with Corey Blant, the director of agriculture at New York Restoration Project (NYRP). Blant first learned about urban mushroom farming at a mushroom inoculation event at Red Hook Farms in Brooklyn, organized by the Cornell Small Farms Program. After the event, Blant enrolled in two Small Farms courses on mushroom production, which inspired him to incorporate mushrooms into some of the public gardens and parks that NYRP manages. On his hunt for a source of mushroom spawn to expand production, he found Wong at Afterlife. Wong agreed to supply Blant with the spent substrate blocks, which still contained live mycelium. With the help of some extra nutrients, Blant turned the spent substrate into a key component of NYRPs community gardens in a cycle of “infinite mushrooms.” The remainder of the spent substrate could be used as soil amendments to beautify NYRP’s parks across the city.

 

And the cycle continues: food, becoming restaurant waste, transforming into mushrooms, and producing waste again, before being brought back to life in NYRP’s gardens. Youngerman remarked that the urban mushroom farming system in NYC is one of the most “closed” production loops in agriculture. Farmers can turn waste into valuable growth medium over and over again, preventing environmentally-damaging food waste from sitting in landfills, and putting fresh mushrooms on the table for residents across the city.

 

“Mushroom farmers […] tend to be very resourceful people.” Youngerman said. “[Maybe] just by hanging out with mushrooms you become more resourceful, because you begin to see the world through their paradigm.”

 

Fungi on the Farm

Youngerman next took podcast listeners on a tour of Queens, venturing into nondescript buildings and ducking into basement hatches to discover the innovative world of indoor mushroom production. Here he learned how some growers in the big city are producing mushrooms from “spore-to-table” and every step in between.

 

The first stop was to meet Louis Vassar, a self-described amateur mycologist. Youngerman met him at Biotech without Borders, a community biology lab in Long Island City, Queens. This unassuming building serves as a “makerspace” for microbiologists. Vassar uses tools and techniques from microbiology to produce mushroom spawn, the foundational material used to inoculate substrates to grow mushrooms. Spawn are clones of existing strains of mushroom mycelium. Vassar works under a flow hood, which creates a sterile bubble to keep competitors in the air away from the freshly made spawn and substrate. The spawn created in Vassar’s lab are sold and used by small-scale mushroom growers.

 

In the next step of his journey, Youngerman met Smita and Ithu Chakma, owners of Big Apple Fungi in Forest Hills, Queens. He followed them down a basement hatch to find a space alive with racks of inoculated mushroom blocks and a multitude of different varieties of fruiting mushrooms in climate-controlled tents. Together, the Chakmas produce 250 to 300 pounds of mushrooms every week, focusing on varieties rarely seen in grocery stores.

 

The final stop is Cam’s Urban Farm, a compact and efficiently designed basement grow operation run by Cam Bremner. As the solo operator, Bremner has engineered his setup to maximize output using minimal space. He walks Youngerman through his streamlined process, from producing spawn to selling mushrooms directly to local restaurants.

 

“I can grow 300 pounds of mushrooms a week out of 850 square feet of space, that kind of output is just completely unheard of in any [other] farming,” Bremner said. He views urban farming as a core principle of his work and he believes it is the future of agriculture.

 

“Every single farm that I visited is different and there’s so much creativity that gets embedded into every step in growing mushrooms,” Youngerman told podcast host Jamie Johnson as he reflected on his trip to Queens. “I came away just in awe of how creative and diverse and accessible mushroom farming can be — and that delights me.”

 

If you’re curious about growing mushrooms yourself, visit the Cornell Small Farms Program’s Specialty Mushrooms project page. It is a clearinghouse for mushroom resources, PDF guides, and online courses.

 

Youngerman also has some advice for beginning mushroom growers. Before diving into full-scale production, first try a ready-to-fruit block. See if you enjoy growing mushrooms and, more importantly, eating them.

 

Listen to the full episodes of the podcast to learn more about urban mushroom farming and the power of fungi for both recycling food waste and as a food source.

 

Olivia Young & Emma Davis are interns working with the Cornell Small Farms Program.

 

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