Welcome to iGrow News, Your Source for the World of Indoor Vertical Farming
VIDEO: What's In The Bag: Zoomin' Along
We're saying goodbye to gas for good with this all-electric car. With this new mode of transportation, we'll be able to expand our local delivery range and keep our zero-carbon footprint deliveries. We'll continue to deliver by bike, foot, and public transportation
Look Out For The Farm. One Electric Vehicle on NYC Streets!
We're sure you won't miss it. We're saying goodbye to gas for good with this all-electric car. With this new mode of transportation, we'll be able to expand our local delivery range and keep our zero-carbon footprint deliveries. We'll continue to deliver by bike, foot, and public transportation!
US: Washington, DC - A Sommelier's Foray Into Urban Agriculture Starts With Mushrooms In Shipping Containers
Barry Farm resident Calvin Hines Jr. launched EightFold Farms to address food deserts and underemployment
Barry Farm resident Calvin Hines Jr. launched EightFold Farms to address food deserts and underemployment.
JAN 29, 2020
COURTESY OF CALVIN HINES JR.
“This started out with me being pissed off that I had to go to the grocery store far away,” says Calvin Hines Jr. The D.C. sommelier and bartender, who has been mixing drinks most recently at Hank’s Oyster Bar in Dupont Circle, grew up in Hillcrest in Ward 7. Later in life, he lived off the U Street Corridor as the neighborhood rapidly developed. Recently, he moved back east of the river and settled in Barry Farm in Ward 8.
“I forgot that you used to have to travel to go get food,” Hines says. “There’s no place we can walk.” He drives to the Harris Teeter on M Street SE for groceries. “The Safeways that are closer to me don’t have great food.” There are only three full-service grocery stores for the more than 150,000 people living in Wards 7 and 8, though others broke ground in 2019.
This got Hines thinking about food deserts and socioeconomics. “What can I do that would be most effective in solving the problem or multiple problems?” he asked himself before diving into urban agriculture research.
Havana, Cuba emerged as a source of inspiration. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba entered a phase known as the “Special Period” in the early 1990s, residents had to work quickly to find new and sustainable ways to feed themselves. “They were able to build urban agriculture in Cuba to help them with their food shortage and also increase employment,” Hines says.
The Cubans did so with great success. As of 2014, Havana, a city of two million people, had dedicated more than 87,000 acres to urban agriculture. “If they’ve been doing it for this long, why can’t we do it in D.C.?” Hines asks. “I live here.”
Hines is launching a for-profit urban agriculture company of his own—EightFold Farms. The name is a nod to Hines' Buddhism practice. The Eightfold Path consists of eight directions, including mindfulness and effort, that are supposed to lead to liberation.
“We can build these small sustainable intensive farms through the city and throughout Wards 7 and 8,” Hines says. “Through these farms, we can sell to restaurants, which I’m linked into. We can start farmers’ markets in Ward 7 or 8 or any other area that lacks food in D.C.”
He’s starting small with one or two shipping containers that he will convert into mobile mushroom farms in partnership with the Phillips Collection, Non-Stop Art, and developer MidCity. The containers will be temporarily housed at 1325 Rhode Island Ave. NE "just until we find space on the other side of town,” Hines says. He went to high school with Non-Stop Art founder Nehemiah Dixon.
“We’re starting with oyster mushrooms and maybe some lion’s mane and shiitake,” Hines says. “Oyster [mushrooms] will be the bulk of it. They’re easy to grow and there’s more of a demand.”
EightFold Farms aims to have an educational component Hines calls “From Farm to Table” that will teach young Washingtonians both practical urban agriculture skills and the business side of restaurants. He hopes to accept them into the program as early as elementary or middle school and keep them through high school when they would potentially be ready to attend the University of the District of Columbia’s College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability and Environmental Sciences.
“There are not enough people that are into urban ag,” Hines says, noting this is particularly true for people of color. “We’re creating a workforce that can bridge that gap. They’ll already have a good foundation, a practical education.”
Hines has even bigger goals down the line, including launching an all-encompassing space that would have indoor and outdoor farming areas, a market, and food vendors. For now, he’s just hoping to have a quarter to a half-acre of space planted the first year EightFold Farms gets off the ground.
He estimates he’ll need about $125,000 to buy and refurbish the shipping containers and purchase equipment. Omar Hakeem from buildingcommunityWORKSHOP, a Texas-based nonprofit community design center, is helping with the design of the containers. Hines launched a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe today.
“We’re trying to attack the problem through food,” Hines says. He hopes EightFold Farms grows healthy food that can lead to better health outcomes while also creating pathways to employment for his neighbors.
This Wisconsin Economist Found Happiness Growing Mushrooms In His Basement
He started researching how to grow mushrooms online and attempted to grow button mushrooms that grow in manure
Jerome Segura III has turned what started as a hobby into a viable commercial business.
Photography courtesy of Segura & Sons Mushroom Farm
When Jerome Segura III leapt from the ivory tower of academia, he didn’t know what would be waiting for him when he hit the ground.
The central Wisconsin resident quit his job as chief economist and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point in 2018 because he was unhappy at work. He figured he would do some consulting work and be a stay-at-home dad to his two sons while his wife, Cara Adams, embarked on her dream of launching a makers market. But he found he had a ton of free time when the children were at school or napping. He started filling that time with trying to grow mushrooms. He had been thinking about how much the family spent on mushrooms every week, and he figured he could try to grow his own for fun.
He started researching how to grow mushrooms online and attempted to grow button mushrooms that grow in manure. “I found myself going out and foraging poop from our chickens to make this compost in which these things were supposed to grow, but they never grew,” he says. “I just kept growing mold. So I threw that stuff out pretty quickly.”
When that experiment failed, he turned away from forums on the internet and started looking into academic literature for better advice. He came across a sustainable form of mushroom cultivation used in developing countries. “These people around the world are growing these things in some of the craziest of conditions,” he says. “In Southeast Asia, they’re growing them in bamboo huts. I thought if they can grow these things in tough socio-economic conditions that aren’t necessarily very clean, I might actually have an opportunity to do this here.”
This process involved a lime pasteurization method, rather than a steam sterilization. Segura knew that the latter would not be an affordable option for him, as a lab could cost tens of thousands of dollars. He started using the lime pasteurization method to grow oyster mushrooms on sawdust wood pellets (and not poop).
In his first few months, he says 80 to 90 percent of the spores he was planting were failing. But since then, he says 98 percent of them have been successful.
Segura started sharing photos of his mushrooms on Facebook, and soon people started asking him if they could buy them from him. More and more customers started coming out of the woodwork, and what started as a hobby in his basement quickly grew into a flourishing local business—Segura & Sons Mushroom Farm. Segura now sells mushrooms to families through a CSA to local restaurants, as well as out of his wife’s store.
When he started his mushroom operation, Segura says, he never would have imagined it would grow into a viable commercial venture. He didn’t even know if there was a market for mushrooms in their part of Wisconsin. But there was, and now he’s known as “the mushroom man” around town.
“All of a sudden, where people used to know me as this economist, now they’re talking about me as the mushroom man,” he says. “I didn’t think I was going to be successful growing mushrooms, let alone actually running a mushroom farm.”