S1E78 - Rot Glow Farm on Forest Farming Mushrooms

Episode Summary

B and M from Rot Glow Farm teach Inmn about how to farm mushrooms in the forest. They talk about their farm and growing set up, as well as the Lobelia Commons project they work with, and the Earthbound Almanac that they help put out.

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery.

Guest Info

Rot Glow Farm can be found on Instagram @RotGlowFarm. Lobelia Commons can be contacted at [email protected] or found on Instagram @LobeliaCommons or on Twitter @LobeliaCommons.

The Earthbound Almanac can be found at www.Earthbound.farm or on Emergent Goods at https://www.emergentgoods.com/

Deadline for submissions is July 31st, 2023.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Rot Glow Farm on Forest Farming Mushrooms

Inmn 00:16 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host Inmn Neruin, and this week we're going to be talking about something really fun. And that is fungi. Specifically, we're going to be talking about how someone can grow mushrooms for food or medicine. And we're going to be talking with the folks that operate Rot Glow Farm where they grow mushrooms in the forest. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channels Zero Network of anarchist podcasts and here's a jingle from another show on the network. Doo do do doo doo doooo. [Making noises that sound like singing a melody]

Inmn 01:40 And we're back. Thanks y'all so much for coming on to the podcast today. Would you like to introduce yourselves with your name, pronouns, and the farm that y'all are both part of and just tell us a little bit about about that project?

B 01:59 Sure. My name is B. My pronouns are they/them. We a part of Rot Glow Farm and are farmers in Mississippi, pretty close to New Orleans, about an hour and a half away.

M 02:16 Yeah, I am M. And he/they. And yeah, we've been farming here in southwestern Mississippi for three years.

Inmn 02:26 Cool. Cool. And could y'all tell us a little bit about like, what is Rot Glow Farm and what do y'all do there?

M 02:34 So we're primarily a mushroom farm and tree nursery. We grow quite a bit of shiitake mushrooms outdoors on logs, which we take to market and most of the sales from the shiitakes goes into basically subsidizing this tree nursery that we have where we grow thousands of trees and give them away in New Orleans and rurally in Mississippi.

Inmn 03:07 Cool, cool. Like how did y'all get involved in doing this?

M 03:12 For me, several years ago, I read that book Mushroom At the End of the World, which was kind of a life changing book for me. And that got me really excited about mushrooms generally and fungi. That first manifested by growing shiitakes in New Orleans as part of a backyard gardening practice. And then, when the pandemic happened, some of us had been part of this project in New Orleans called Lobelia Commons, which is this...We define it as like a network for food autonomy and neighborhood survival. In that project, we started a collaborative mushroom group where we kind of learned together how to produce mushrooms, which would fit into a wider network of ways of producing food in the city. So, the way that first manifested was doing oyster mushrooms, workshops to do oyster mushrooms in buckets at a decent scale. And we then also started doing some production on logs. Then wanting to scale that up a bit, we were interested in growing shiitakes in the forest north of New Orleans. So then we started growing out here in Southern Mississippi. And yeah, that's how I got here.

Inmn 04:53 B, How did you start to...Like what got you interested in in mushroom farming?

B 05:00 Yeah, so where I was living before, I was involved in mutual aid programs and just living in a place for a while and feeling sort of stagnant and feeling like the work that we were doing was great and impactful. But it...I just....I think my heart wasn't in it. It felt more like a job, like going to my mutual aid job. And it felt more like charity than it did like actually connecting with people in a way that felt horizontal. And, I had a big life event and had to leave where I was living at and started to get involved with the Gulf South region through hurricane relief after [Hurricane] Ida. And so I was connecting more with people in this area. And I met M a few years prior and M and I were getting closer as friends and starting to meet more people who were doing this work that, to me, felt more aligned with my interests and my value system and also just something I was really fascinated by. And the mushroom farming was an aspect of that. And like M said prior, it helped us subsidize this thing that we do and the nursery growing that what we do and some of these other projects that were involved in. And, it felt sort of like a natural progression for myself because years prior I used to live in central California and had a fair amount of experience just walking through the woods and foraging mushrooms that were wild and talking with budding mycologists. And where I was living before, it was sort of like a casual culture of mushroom interest that people had. And so there's like a annual fungi fair that happens every year in the area I was living before. And so I guess I had never really considered farming mushrooms. And M was already starting to cultivate that here. And once I was introduced to it, it felt like this really exciting thing, but yeah, it just kind of fell into my lap in this way what was like, "Oh, yeah, of course. That's what I'm doing now." And yeah, like I said before, it's not disconnected from anything else that we do. It feels really interconnected. And that's what also makes it feel regenerative and worthwhile. Does that make sense?

Inmn 07:47 Yeah, totally. Totally. And I guess maybe this is silly question, but like, why...why mushrooms as opposed to like any other food or medicine thing that you could grow?

M 08:03 Um, so partially, the land that we inhabit here is a successionary forest, very young. Everything around us is pine plantation, mostly Lob lolly pine. We have a lot of like lob lolly here and a lot of young sweet gums, young oaks. And in...like, in some ways, the only way to farm at all here we would have to clear some woods. So, and on the one hand, it's practical, because we also would like to grow large amounts of trees. So, we can't grow trees in the middle of the forest. Well, we could, but it would take a very long time. And it wouldn't be like really effective towards getting them in the hands of people who want to plant trees. So, we cle