Written by Martin Zorrilla
This is the first installment in a series on the practices, the people and the culinary traditions of forest farming for mushrooms. On our travels we were fortunate in meeting some the pioneers, traditionalists, and scientists that believe in the global potential of mushroom cultivation. The story of this niche field begins where we began our trip, the town of Ithaca, New York.
Growing edible and medicinal mushrooms under the shade of trees is not a new thing. The earliest fungiculture methods date to 1000 years ago during the Song Dynasty in China. In Japan, where modern cultivation was invented, logs were used to grow Shiitake under the shade of Shii trees in the 12th century. A lot has changed since then, for example the button mushrooms on your pizza are now grown in in trays of horse manure in industrial settings, but much has also stayed the same. Dr. Ken Mudge at Cornell University in Ithaca, one of the few researchers studying outdoor mushroom cultivation, has drawn much inspiration from traditional Japanese techniques. His shiitake logs are grown under hickory trees, and where the terrain slopes he uses a log stacking technique called Japanese Hillside Stack.
Although recently retired, Dr. Mudge devoted 20 years of research and extension on the principle that with both traditional and modern tools the forest can be farmed. In a recent book Dr. Mudge promotes a system of cultivation in temperate forests that includes shade-loving medicinal plants, log-grown mushrooms, and Pawpaw (a fruit tree native to the Northeast). Although Shiitake are a mainstay of this technique, he has experimented with the log cultivation of several native species including, Oyster and Lion’s Mane mushrooms. The basics of log cultivation are to cut logs 4-foot sections and ‘inoculate’ them with mushroom spawn (the mycological equivalent of seed) usually by drilling holes in the wood. The logs are kept in the shade until the mushroom ‘mycelium’ fully grows through the log. The mushrooms appear after a heavy rain, although they can be coaxed out by soaking the logs in water or, for mysterious reasons, striking them with a hammer.
I met Professor Mudge by taking on of his classes, Practicum in Forest Farming, and quickly learned that he was not alone in his efforts. A small but growing network of farmers around the United States have begun managing their woodlots for Shiitake as well as firewood. A few farms in the Ithaca area have begun to do so, often maintaining 100 or so logs as a way to diversify an organic vegetable farm. More serious shiitake farmers can maintain upwards of 1,000 logs, although hiring additional labor is often required. These larger farms require more investment and labor than the traditional farms we would later see in Japan, for the simple reason that Shiitake in the U.S. sells as a fresh product.
Most of the world’s Shiitake is consumed by Asian countries, and most of it is purchased dry and then rehydrated in the kitchen. This allows farmers in Japan to have one large harvest in a year, dry their mushrooms, and let the logs rest the remainder of the year. The custom did not make it accross the Pacific. North-American farmers have to maintain a strict schedule of forcing logs to fruit in order to consistently produce fresh shiitake. Forcing the logs to fruit means that farmers can make a single log produce 2-3 times in a year but it reduces the overall lifetime of the logs.
These farmers usually sell their mushrooms locally to restaurants and farmers markets. Their competition is the same of every mushroom farmer we met: industrially produced shiitake, grown in bags indoors on sawdust. While an efficient use of a timber industry by-product, sawdust-grown shiitake does not have the same rich taste and meaty texture as the log-grown varieties. For that reason log-grown shiitake has been able to commandeer a higher price, sometimes selling for as much as $10-12 per pound, where sawdust grown shiitake can only fetch $3-4.
For customers willing to pay a premium for log-grown mushroom, farmers all over North America rely on the farm-to-table movement. A new generation of foodies has have shown some interest in a food that the U.S. in general has been slow to warm to. Genuine enthusiasm for mushrooms usually lies a couple generations back for many Americans, with immigrant families often failing to pass on the traditions of foraging for wild mushrooms that are pervasive in much of the world.
One of the mushroom foraging enthusiast I did meet in Ithaca was my boss, Marina Markot of Cornell Abroad. Marina is from Russia, a mushroom loving country where busloads of city goers will head for countryside during peak mushroom collecting. Upon learning that I had discovered a Bolete spot near campus she grilled me on its location with a laser focus I had only seen in meetings with our deans. Luckily, the foodie phenomenon means that Marina has her choice of mushroom hunting partners in Ithaca, including a student club devoted to the practice. A wave of books and blogs on wild-crafting as well as farm-to-table restaurants hunting for unique local ingredients have contributed to a cultural shift on mushrooms. A growing number of people are now inspecting their backyards for delicate Morels in the Spring, and keeping an eye out for cheerful orange Chanterelles during fall walks.
To Dr. Mudge and the other pioneers of mushroom cultivation, the approach is as much about changing our relationships to our natural landscapes as it is about changing our culinary appetites. Forest farming, considered a particular type of Agroforestry, promises to minimize ecological impacts by producing food and medicine within a forest ecosystem. While producing without the benefit of full sunlight reduces the yield from edible plants, mushrooms are a nutritionally dense food that do without photosynthesis. The result means more good food in more different ways, while also giving people a new appreciation for the forests that surround them. Although again ‘new’ is perhaps the wrong word. Dr. Mudge will be the first to tell you that forests in the Northeast were first managed for food production by Native Americans. A 2008 review of studies on the subject, suggested that the intentional burning of temperate forests were likely a widespread Native American forest management technique to select for useful trees such as Hickory and Chestnut as well as seed and berry plants.