Other Ag News: Fungi in the City: Small Farms Radio Talks Urban Mushroom Life Cycle

How does a mushroom move through the city? On the most recent episode of the Small Farms Radio podcast, our agroforestry and mushroom specialist Connor Youngerman learned that it’s compost collection vans — not subways or taxi cabs — that shape the journeys of urban mushrooms.

With the help of farmers, chefs, and business owners, Youngerman explored the life cycle of urban mushrooms, and how several organizations are working to close the loop of food and food waste in New York City.

As a researcher and educator with our Specialty Mushrooms project, Youngerman is always looking to connect with mushroom farmers, suppliers, and consumers across the region. He explained to podcast host Jamie Johnson that NYC is a hub of mushroom farming. Over the course of many trips to the city, Youngerman formed connections with a suite of farmers, entrepreneurs, chefs, and educators (some of whom participated in our Community Mushroom Educator program!). Although from different backgrounds, they shared a common thread: the love of mushrooms. Youngerman decided to follow a mushroom through the city, to make sense of the unique cycle of urban mushroom production.

His journey began at the Empire State Building. Chef Morgan Jerrett at the STATE Grill and Bar explained that her restaurant, like many, must get creative to deal with the large volume of food waste. Looking to dispose of their waste simply and sustainably, STATE formed a partnership with Afterlife Ag, a circular mushroom production company based in Queens. Co-founder Winson Wong shared that he was inspired to start Afterlife to address the negative impacts of food waste; over 95% of American food waste goes to the landfill, emitting harmful greenhouse gases.

“Commercial waste management companies are expensive to work with … they throw all these food scraps away, hours away from New York City, into landfills, because that’s the cheapest thing to do,” Wong said. “We really wanted to solve for that problem.”

Afterlife collects food scraps from across the city and turns them into substrate blocks to grow oyster, lion’s mane, chestnut, and pioppino mushrooms. But after production, the blocks of food scraps become depleted of nutrients. Instead of discarding them as waste to the landfill, Wong searched for a way to repurpose the spent substrate.

In the next step of his journey, Youngerman met with Corey Blant, the director of agriculture at New York Restoration Project (NYRP). Blant first learned about urban mushroom farming at a mushroom inoculation event at Red Hook Farms in Brooklyn, organized by the Cornell Small Farms Program. After the event, Blant enrolled in two Small Farms courses on mushroom production, which inspired him to incorporate mushrooms into some of the public gardens and parks that NYRP manages. On his hunt for a source of mushroom spawn to expand production, he found Wong at Afterlife. Wong agreed to supply Blant with the spent substrate blocks, which still contained live mycelium. With the help of some extra nutrients, Blant turned the spent substrate into a key component of NYRPs community gardens in a cycle of “infinite mushrooms.” The remainder of the spent substrate could be used as soil amendments to beautify NYRP’s parks across the city.

And the cycle continues: food, becoming restaurant waste, transforming into mushrooms, and producing waste again, before being brought back to life in NYRP’s gardens. Youngerman remarked that the urban mushroom farming system in NYC is one of the most “closed” production loops in agriculture. Farmers can turn waste into valuable growth medium over and over again, preventing environmentally-damaging food waste from sitting in landfills, and putting fresh mushrooms on the table for residents across the city.

“Mushroom farmers […] tend to be very resourceful people.” Youngerman said. “[Maybe] just by hanging out with mushrooms you become more resourceful, because you begin to see the world through their paradigm.”

Listen to the full episode to learn more about urban mushroom farming and the power of fungi in recycling food waste into a food source.

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