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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.
Indoor Farm Started In A Shipping Container
The Gruger Family Fungi farm has come a long way since its beginning in a metal shipping container. Today the mushroom farm is in a warehouse in an oilfield industrial park
September 26, 2019
Rachel Yadlowski shows some of the mushrooms grown in her family’s indoor farm. | Mary MacArthur photo
An Alberta family’s mushroom operation sells its produce to wholesale markets, restaurants, hotels and specialty stores
NISKU, Alta. — The Gruger Family Fungi farm has come a long way since its beginning in a metal shipping container. Today the mushroom farm is in a warehouse in an oilfield industrial park.
There may not be soil, gravel roads and quarter sections of land, but Rachel Yadlowski believes their warehouse bay is a new kind of farming.
“We are farming in a warehouse. It’s an indoor farm,” said Yadlowski, who operates the farm along with her husband, Carleton Gruger, and other family members.
“It’s a different kind of farming. It’s a different way of producing nutrition all year around.”
This farm doesn’t grow just one crop, it grows a colorful collection of tree-loving mushrooms few people have heard of, seen, or eaten.
The pink oyster mushroom has a subtle bacon flavor, while the blue oyster becomes soft and velvety when cooked. The gold oyster has “fruity notes” and the king oyster is nutty and cashew-like. The lion’s mane mushroom looks like cauliflower and tastes like lobster.
And those are just the eating mushrooms. The family grows reishi and codyceps for tinctures and creams sold for their health benefits.
For hundreds of years, mushrooms have been an important part of people’s diet as a source of protein and healing powers. Yadlowski wants to bring mushrooms back as an important part of our diet.
“We’ve lost our mushroom knowledge.”
Yadlowski has been making converts from her farmers market table and now from the grocery store promotion booth since the family fungi business started in 2015. When customers look at the strangely shaped fungi, they’re worried the mushrooms she sells are not safe to eat, or are just too strange to eat.
Almost half of their customers are vegan, buying mushrooms for their high level of protein. A growing number of chefs and home cooks want to incorporate the unique flavoured mushroom into foods. The mushrooms are now sold through wholesale markets, restaurants, hotels and specialty stores.
The process of raising mushrooms begins in the laboratory with spores grown in a petri dish.
“This is where we’re cultivating the seed for our fungi farm.”
The spores are added to jars of sugar water and then splashed into a bag of warm wheat grain to grow and expand. That bag is added to a mixture of hemp herd, hemp heart screens and mash from the nearby Rig Hand Distillery.
“It’s all nutrition for our mushrooms.”
The mycelium-rich mixture is mixed together in the mushroom mash mixing machine before it’s heated, cooled and squished into long, plastic-shaped logs and hung in one of 13 climate-controlled growing rooms.
Pink, blue and gold oyster mushrooms grow on artificial logs in special climate controlled rooms. | Mary MacArthur photo
“We are creating artificial logs.”
In two weeks the pink, gold and blue mushrooms are poking out of the bags and picking begins. It takes about three weeks before the king oyster mushrooms can be harvested.
“Keeping the rhythm on our farm is important. We always have to make sure there is good rotation.”
In 2017, growing mushrooms was still a hobby, but the demand by restaurants for a more regular supply of unique mushrooms pushed the family to jump into mushroom production on a larger scale. The first harvest at their Nisku farm was March 2018 and with more demand and improved processes, they can double production on their farm at the same location.
When the mushroom growth in the rooms slows down, the logs still filled with thousands of mycelium are sold to home gardeners, spread onto soil and the mushroom growing continues in the backyard.
“Mushrooms give back that life and invite more micro-organisms back to the soil.”
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Indoor Neon-Lit Mushroom Farms Are New York's Hottest New Food Trend
Pink oyster mushrooms grown in a ‘mini farm’ unit. Photograph: Hannah Shufro
Written by: Laura Pitcher
Diners at the Bunker, a Vietnamese restaurant in Brooklyn, may not realise that the mushrooms in their bánh mì were grown in a blue-tinted, spaceship-looking “mini farm” underneath their seats. But it’s just one of a growing number of plug-in fungi farms mushrooming in New York City.
Smallhold, the company that created the idea, grows around 100 pounds of various mushroom types a week, then distributes them three-quarters grown to climate-controlled, do-it-yourself mini “farms” around the city. The mushrooms finish growing within the automated units, while a remote technician adjusts humidity, airflow and temperature, offering chefs on-the-spot, fresh and self-replenishing batches of a food item that has a short shelf-life.
The units could also work for perishables such as lettuce and herbs but the company is currently focused on catching the rising fashion for exotic mushrooms. “Mushrooms are amazing. Mushrooms are the future,” co-founder Andrew Carter gushed to the Guardian. “When you usually find them, they tend to be really gross looking on the shelves because they’ve been sitting in trucks. This way, we can give them [the customers] a brand-new experience with mushrooms.”
They currently sell nine mushroom varieties, including oyster, lion’s mane, shiitake and pioppino.
Smallhold ‘farm’ unit at a Whole Foods store containing mushrooms. Photograph: Hannah Shufro
Smallhold has been distributing their farms through partner restaurants and markets, including Manhattan’s Mission Chinese restaurant, Kimchee Market in Greenpoint and a Whole Foods store in Bridgewater, New Jersey.
Smallhold farms also happen to look very pretty, with weird mushroom formations glowing under nightclub-style lighting. Danny Bowien, the chef and owner of Mission Chinese Food, told Vogue in an interview that many of his customers think the units in his restaurant are art. The launch of the first unit in the Whole Foods store saw a similar reaction. Confused shoppers crowded four-deep around the mushrooms.
Blue oyster mushrooms. Photograph: Andrew Carter
But Carter and his co-founder and college friend Adam DeMartino insist it’s more than just an aesthetic trend. They argue the cultivation process is more sustainable than traditional mushroom farms, using about 96% less water, creating 40 times the output per square foot and less food waste.
The organic material the mushrooms grow in is also sustainable, made from recycled materials such as sawdust, coffee grounds and wheat berries.
Setting up a mini-farm is not cheap, prices start at $3,500, and there are cheaper generic indoor grow units available. Home Depot currently sells a small cardboard miniature organic mushroom farm for $39.99 per box.
The pair acknowledge they may soon face competition, but for now they appear to be something of a status symbol. As one local blogger put it, it’s like they’ve created the “vegan version of the lobster tank”.
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