From left to right: Monte Paynter holding shiitake mushrooms, Elah holding oyster mushrooms, Lija Lasmanis holding lion's mane mushrooms.
Monte Paynter has always been passionate about mushrooms and until five years ago that passion took the form of harvesting native fungi in the forests near his home in Kimberley, B.C. That was until the day he and his partner, Lija Lasmanis, watched a TED Talk by renowned American mycologist, Paul Stamets and were inspired to start cultivating gourmet mushrooms in their home.
“We looked up his company and found he sells mushroom grow kits, so we ordered one and set up a little greenhouse in our living room and fruited some mushrooms,” says Paynter, who initially intended to grow mushrooms to satisfy his personal needs. “But it came to a point where we realized that if we’re going to grow a small amount, we might as well grow a larger amount because the amount of work can be similar. You have to maintain the cultures and do a lot of the same steps to grow a single bag that you do to grow 20.”
Four years ago, Paynter and Lasmanis founded Kootenai Fungi and began supplying gourmet mushrooms to local restaurants and selling them at the Kimberley Farmers’ Market. Paynter notes that many of the mushrooms he produces are not readily available to consumers for several reasons, but most importantly because they don’t store or transport as well as common varieties such as white button or portobello.
“That’s a benefit for a small scale local grower because you’re not competing with big companies from outside so much,” he says. “But it’s also part of the challenge because anything we harvest has to be refrigerated immediately and sold within a week. And you have to be very careful when handling it.”
Those requirements have the potential to cause significant losses if buyers aren’t readily available.
“So before jumping in and committing, you really need a good understanding of your local market and how much you can handle, which we don’t fully know yet because we’ve been building up and we haven’t yet met the demand that we know is here,” Paynter says.
Another part of the challenge of growing gourmet mushrooms comes in the rates at which the different mushroom species mature, which vary depending on species. Shiitake mushrooms, for instance, take roughly three months to go from colonization to fruiting while species such as oyster or lion’s mane take just 10 days.
“If we knew for next year that there’s a restaurant that wants a ton of shiitake and nothing else, we would have to start creating them over the winter,” Paynter says. “With the two different cycles (long and short), we could be making shiitake blocks in late winter or early spring and then stopping because we know they will be fruiting in three months. Then we can start making the blocks that fruit quicker.”
Not only do different species mature at different rates, but sometimes there can be a bit of unpredictability associated with mushroom fruiting times for an individual species, something that Kootenai Fungi has factored into its marketing strategy.
“We’ve simplified it for the restaurants. We give them the same price for any type of mushroom so they get what we’ve got when we’ve got it and we don’t have to worry about supplying different pounds of different species,” Paynter says. “And if there is a particular mushroom they don’t want, we give them the other ones but, generally, people like to have a mix.”
Paynter concentrates on three mushroom varieties for his main commercial crop — shiitake, oyster and lion’s mane — largely because they are easy to grow, produce well and have a large, built-in market.
“There are a lot more mushrooms we would like to grow, but the more species you add, the more it complicates things,” Paynter says. “We’ve grown up to seven or eight species at a time and when you do that, it’s a lot of work and you can wind up losing track. It’s much easier to keep the species count low. It simplifies things a lot.”
The process of creating a new crop of mushrooms begins in a mini-lab fitted with a laminar flow head in order to create a sterile work environment. In that environment a small amount of culture is placed in a petri dish lined with agar. When the agar is fully colonized, a piece is transferred to a jar of grain. The colonized grain is then used to inoculate sawdust blocks that are sealed in plastic bags fitted with filter patches.
“All of the nutrition is there in the medium that you inoculate,” says Paynter. “The sawdust generally gets supplemented with something high in carbohydrates and a bit of nitrogen. But it’s mostly carbon the mushrooms feed off.”
When the colonized blocks are ready to fruit, they are moved to an outdoor fruiting chamber.
“The whole operation is a super dirt-bag-cheap setup, but it works,” says Paynter. “If you read a mushroom growing textbook and looked at this, you’d say, ‘This will never work’. Or if you went to a big serious mushroom farm and told them what you saw here, they’d just shake their heads,” Paynter says. “We’ve taken a low-tech approach. The infrastructure cost we have here is pretty low compared to most mushroom farms. We’re trying to do things in the simplest manner and surprisingly, it’s actually working pretty well. We have come up with methods that can be scaled up and that are quite different from any other mushroom farm out there.”
Oyster mushrooms (centre) and shiitake mushrooms (lower right) hanging in the fruiting chamber surrounded by sawdust blocks in various stages of fruiting. The blocks that look like dirty Styrofoam are actually sawdust blocks colonized by culture (the white stuff).
The key to success is that all of the components utilized in the early stages — from the petri dishes to the sawdust blocks to the mini-lab itself — must be completely sterile in order to avoid contamination, which could spell disaster.
“If your spawn run gets contaminated by bacteria or mould or competing fungi then you lose the crop way back before it even gets to fruiting. That’s the whole point of the laminar flow head, the sterile procedure, the filter patches and everything you see here,” Paynter says, adding that later in the process, there’s a different foe.
“Once you get into the fruiting stage, it’s mostly insects. Things like fungus gnats, fruit flies and little beetles will nibble away at the mushroom, which isn’t a big deal, but then they lay eggs in the mushrooms which hatch and then you have mushrooms that are full of worms, which no one wants.”
Paynter says that the worm infestation they encountered during the second year of production was a huge surprise in the wake of what had been a successful first year that saw their mushrooms producing high yields while encountering no significant issues.
“We got excited. And then that second year, all of a sudden, halfway through the year all of our mushrooms were full of worms,” Paynter says. “I guess it takes a year for the populations of insects to realize the food source is here.”
The good news is that not all mushroom species were impacted by the worm infestation. The reishi and shiitake crops were relatively unaffected. The oysters, however, were a different story and cloth bags are now used to protect them from flies, something that has been an effective strategy from a pest control perspective but not necessarily from a time management one.
“It’s a lot of work to open and close those bags all the time,” Paynter says.
In an effort to gain control over the pest situation in a more time efficient manner, Paynter is experimenting with a sealed fruiting chamber in addition to the open chamber that he’s used in production for the past four years. It’s a different strategy and one that comes with its own drawbacks.
“Your entire room can get full of mould and it gets pretty bad, pretty quickly. You really should have a couple of rooms and, periodically, shut one down and sanitize it while you fire up another one,” he says, noting, “It’s impossible to keep it clean forever.”
One thing that often surprises people about mushrooms is that, contrary to popular belief, most species don’t thrive in the dark and they don’t do well without an adequate supply of oxygen.
“They need light, they need humidity and they also need fresh air,” Paynter points out. “Fungi are actually more closely related to animals than they are to plants. They breathe like us. They take in oxygen and they release CO2, so if you don’t have that fresh air exchange, they basically suffocate.”
Although fresh mushroom production will continue to be Paynter’s primary focus, at least for now, in the coming years he hopes to expand his operation to include the sale of mushroom growing kits, cultures, spawn and even colonized dowels that can be plugged into stumps or logs. He’s also interested in working more with apothecaries and others interested in mushrooms for the health benefits they have been reported to possess.
“It’s actually a great market for dried mushrooms. Then we don’t have to worry about storage,” he says. “It’s probably a large market if we were to go after it especially since there is more public education these days about the medicinal benefits of mushrooms. Lion’s mane is kind of hot right now. There have been recent articles and podcasts about it. But it’s not the only one.”
For a small mushroom producer in the interior of British Columbia, the future seems bright.
— Vanessa Farnsworth