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It’s an impertinent question from a total stranger, a stocking cap pulled low over his ears to ward off the chill of a gray Kansas day. I smile politely but decline to comment on my level of experience.
Pawpaw Guy and I have climbed off the bus on a USDA New American Farm sustainable agriculture tour highlighting small producers in the Kansas City area. The farmers we visit are exploring niche markets such as asparagus, flowers, mushrooms and goat cheese, looking for ways to make farming pay off financially.
Unable to compete with big corporate farms, these energetic, creative family farmers have opted to focus on quality instead of quantity. It’s a strategy that dovetails well with Americans’ surging interest in eating fresh foods grown close to home.
Chris Chmiel of Albany, Ohio, a farmstead cheese maker and pawpaw evangelist, is among the more than 800 farmers, researchers and extension agents attending the conference. He hands out pamphlets about the nutritious native fruit to anyone who will take one.
He sells fresh pawpaws for $6 a pound — about twice the price of apples — at farmers markets. He turns them into chutneys and jams and sells frozen pawpaw pulp, which can be used in smoothies and baked goods. He also processes walnuts and sells truckloads of compost made from the hulls.
Like the other farmers we visit this day, Chmiel is always thinking about new ways to eke a dollar out of his soil or to add a buck to the value of the food he grows on his 18-acre farm.
Farming fungus
The bus pulls up in front of Wakarusa Valley Farm near Lawrence, where Mark Lumpe grows salad greens, watermelons, onions and other vegetables. But it’s his mushrooms that take center stage today, as tour participants crowd around a table to get a good look and snap photos.
These mushrooms deserve a star turn. I can’t resist stroking the soft gills of a beautiful snowy white one that looks more like a piece of exotic coral or a human brain than the stereotypical toadstool.
With the help of a $22,000 grant from the USDA, Lumpe started growing oyster, shiitake, black poplar, hericium and reishi mushrooms in 2003 after reading an article about it.
“We got into it because no one else was,” he says. Mushrooms are a logical thing to grow locally because some varieties don’t ship well.
Farming mushrooms involves a lot of science. That suits Lumpe, who works part time as a medical technologist at the University of Kansas. His wife works full time off the farm.
In short, mushrooms grow in plastic bags stuffed with a substrate of sterilized straw or sawdust. (Lumpe likes to grind up local elm.) Mushroom spores are too tiny to handle, so Lumpe cultures his own by inoculating cereal grains with spores and injecting them into the substrate.
The plastic bags are transferred to one of two mushroom houses. The small buildings are kept warm (60 degrees) and humid, just the way mushrooms like it.
After the mushrooms deplete their food source, they fruit and pop through the plastic bag. Shiitake mushrooms fruit in about eight weeks, pink oyster mushrooms in as little as nine days. Average yield is about 1 pound of mushrooms per bag.
“The great thing about mushrooms is they’re inside. I don’t get sunburned,” Lumpe says.
He sells 80 to 100 pounds of mushrooms a week for $8 to $10 a pound to restaurants and the Community Merc grocery in Lawrence, as well as at the Downtown Lawrence Farmers Market. Rolling Prairie Alliance also includes Wakarusa Valley mushrooms in its CSA bags.
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