Thriving on Decay

His original business plan looked nothing like what Boreal Woods became. Meares intended to mass produce shiitake mushrooms for grocery stores. A conversation with a wholesale distributor changed his mind: imported shiitake blocks from other countries could be grown in the United States for less than Alaska producers could ever charge. “It just didn’t work out financially to compete with essentially imported goods,” he says. So he rerouted toward farmers markets instead of wholesaling; he found he liked it better.

“Once we caught on with the markets, we enjoyed it more, and it was in the direction we wanted to go—more community-based farming,” he says.

Meares has watched the mushroom industry fluctuate over the six years he’s been farming the fifteen varieties Boreal Woods offers. In addition to selling at farmers markets, he sells grow kits and runs a community-supported agriculture program that peaks around eighty to ninety members in the summer. When mushroom production alone isn’t enough to sustain the business through a slow stretch, he falls back on fresh pasta, a product he sold at farmers markets even before he grew mushrooms.

“When something happens, it knocks you down on it and it takes a while to recover. I wanted something that was less complicated than mushrooms, so we started doing pasta again,” he says. Plus: “Mushrooms and pasta go together like nothing else.”

Buttoning Up Wholesale

Trying to break into the wholesale market is still in Meares’s eventual business plan. Meanwhile, Christopher Ferrieri is betting everything on his ability to crack into Alaska’s wholesale, grocery, and restaurant pipeline. The Great Alaska Shroomery aims to bring commercial button mushroom production to Alaska, as well as cultivating morels—something no one has managed at scale outside of Asia.

Cultivators don’t produce button mushrooms commercially in Alaska, largely because the process is incompatible with gourmet cultivation. Button mushrooms grow on pasteurized horse manure rather than sterilized sawdust, and the two methods will cross-contaminate if housed together. Ferrieri sees that incompatibility as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, pointing to what he calls “a large horse manure problem in Alaska” that his farm is positioned to solve.

He’s also using an ultraviolet flash system to convert a naturally occurring compound in button mushrooms into vitamin D, boosting the mushroom’s vitamin D content by roughly 600 percent, with no added cost to the customer. Because the US Food and Drug Administration requires disclosure, the product would be labeled “enhanced.” Ferrieri argues the appeal, especially in a state where vitamin D deficiency is a near-universal concern, speaks for itself.

His morel project is even more experimental. Commercial morel cultivation has only ever been achieved reliably in China and Japan, so Ferrieri spent years following Chinese growers online before figuring out how to cultivate morels himself. He’s now running a self-funded feasibility study on leased land at the historic Raymond Rebarchek Colony Farm on the Alaska State Fairgrounds, using morels harvested under a commercial picking permit to generate liquid cultures, which he inoculates directly into the ground rather than into grain.

Last year’s outdoor trial fruited successfully. This year, he’s building a controlled tent and hoping for two harvests a year, once he’s perfected a method of simulating the freezing winter and warming spring necessary to harvest morels indoors year-round.

Bringing new local mushrooms to Alaska’s wholesale market isn’t without its cost, though. Restaurants and grocers typically require product insurance and Good Agriculture Practices audits, plus compliance with state health regulations, which call for a dedicated clean room and commercial-grade sinks. Even sourcing raw materials is harder than it sounds; the soy hulls most mushroom farms use as growing medium aren’t sold in small quantities, so Ferrieri imports them himself, two tons at a time, at a cost that few small operations can absorb.

“Go big or go home is kind of my attitude,” Ferrieri says. “There’s a lot of cool things happening with mushrooms nowadays.”

Scaling Up

Far North Fungi got its start in Anchorage in 2014, when Gabe DeGange built a 10-by-15-foot shed to grow mushrooms in his Airport Heights backyard. Inspired by a talk from mycologist Paul Stamets, DeGange and his business partner Allison Dunbar eventually tried and failed to scale up, retreated to the backyard, and eventually landed in Chugiak. There, they’re now finishing a new 5,000-square-foot production facility.

Along the way, DeGange has watched a rotating cast of hopefuls try their hand at the business. “We get people all the time who are like, ‘Oh, I really want to start up my own operation,’ and 90 percent of them never do,” he says. “The 10 percent that do, most of them rapidly realize that it’s just not an easy way to make a go of it.”

Because mushrooms take three to four months to mature, from spawn to harvest, growers get maybe two or three shots a year to refine their process. And unlike commercial fishing, which DeGange did before turning to mushrooms full time, a grower must handle every link in the chain personally: production, processing, delivery, sales. “We’re having to do all those jobs [ourselves],” he says. “It’s way more complicated.”

DeGange and Dunbar didn’t draw salaries from their business until last summer, nearly a decade after officially incorporating in January 2017. Today, Far North Fungi relies on farmers markets and direct retail, with wholesale as a long-term goal. DeGange describes the farm as still in “phase one,” as he continues to study market demand and builds toward a new production facility that can meet Good Agriculture Practices certification, the standard that Fred Meyer, Costco, and Walmart require and that currently locks the farm out of grocery shelves.

In the meantime, Far North Fungi has diversified into value-added products—mushroom jerky, powders, and medicinal tinctures—largely to avoid wasting mushrooms that don’t sell fresh within their narrow shelf life.

“The business model is awful,” DeGange admits. “You spend three months growing something, you have a week to sell it. That’s made it ‘innovate or die.’”

For all their differences, the three growers agree on one thing: mushroom farming in Alaska rewards patience over quick returns. Far North Fungi persisted through COVID-19, through failed scaling, and through gradual growth. Meares learned to diversify through making pasta and through community-supported agriculture to make Boreal Woods successful. And Ferrieri’s The Great Alaska Shroomery is still betting on wholesale potential, developing new products for Alaska’s restaurant and grocery markets.

The mushrooms, in other words, aren’t the hard part. Building a business sturdy enough to survive long enough to sell them—that’s where local growers keep testing different approaches to bringing mushrooms of all varieties to Alaska’s diners and cooks.