A Mushrooming Business

by Ralf Kircher
Naples Daily News

Curt Miller is one farmer whose neck does not grow red when he works his fields. His fields are measured not in acres but in shelf space. In that space he does no weeding, no plowing, no harrowing. In fact, the only tractor one might find Farmer Miller riding is a lawn mower when the grass gets a little shaggy. And unlike most farmers, he does not mind it when fungus invades his crop.

Rather, fungus is his crop. In a Quonset hut in Naples, Fla., Miller grows mushrooms--specifically the gourmet varieties, shiitake and oyster mushrooms.

Shiitakes are used most in Asian cuisine, but their popularity has grown in recent years, according to the Mushroom Council. They have become prized for their meaty texture in recipes that range from soup to stir-fry.

Oyster mushrooms are known for their delicate, mild flavor and velvety texture. Miller owns Florida Gourmet Mushrooms Inc., one of the only mushroom farms in Florida and one of the few outside the nation's mushroom-growing powerhouse, Pennsylvania.

During the peak of tourist season, when the demand is heaviest from the wholesalers and restaurants he supplies, Miller ships out between 800 pounds and 1,000 pounds a week. Retail, shiitake mushrooms sell for more than $15 a pound, but Miller sells only on a wholesale basis. In the summertime, Miller ships out from 400 pounds to 500 pounds a week.

Unlike other crops, mushrooms have no growing season and can be produced year-round. "They don't know Tuesday from Saturday from Christmas," Miller says. Mushrooms are saprophytes, which means they live on dead or decaying matter. They have no chlorophyll, which makes plants green, and they need no sunlight to grow. As such, they grow on blocks of sawdust that sit on racks in three darkened climate-controlled growing rooms in Miller's Quonset hut.

"It's not brain surgery by any means," Miller says. And that's a good thing, because Miller is not a brain surgeon; actually he was a banker by trade for 17 years. A couple of years ago, he tired of the banking industry and was looking for a business to buy and operate. A neighbor who is a business broker showed Miller all the for-sale listings at the time, and the mushroom farm did not catch his eye. But the broker friend suggested he might want to check out the farm, which had been in existence about four years.

"I laughed," Miller says. "I just kept laughing at him, never imagining I could be a farmer." But then he took a look at the farm and its operations. Once I saw how simple it was," he says, "I started thinking about it."

And then he bought the place and started doing it. He orders six-pound blocks of oak sawdust that are impregnated with shiitake mushroom spores from a supplier in Pennsylvania. Oyster mushrooms are grown from hanging plastic sacks of sawdust.

The blocks are soaked in water overnight and then placed on shelves, which are wheeled into a growing room. In about a week, in a 65-degree to 70-degree room with controlled humidity and an elevated level of carbon dioxide, little nubs begin to appear all over the blocks. In about 10 days, the shiitakes mushrooms are ready to harvest.

After this "first flush," Miller soaks the sawdust blocks again, and they produce another round of mushrooms about 10 days later. The blocks produce about three or four crops of mushrooms, and then Miller discards them outside, where the sawdust just melts into the soil after a few months.

From picking, the mushrooms go into a 36-degree refrigerated room at least for a day, where the lowered temperature removes the heat from the mushrooms and begins to bring out their flavor. After a day in refrigeration, Miller boxes them and delivers them to a local produce wholesaler, which then delivers them to restaurants. One of his mushrooms could be on someone's dinner plate as soon as three days after it's been picked. Mushrooms from Pennsylvania or other places could take as long as a week. Shiitakes have a shelf life of about 2-1/2 weeks; oyster mushrooms less than two.

"It's a big difference from the world of banking," Miller says. He spends from three to four hours a day, seven days a week, working on the farm. He's found it's given him more time to spend with his son and daughter, but it's tougher to take a vacation or to take a day off, because the mushrooms don't stop growing.

On weekends during the school year and any day during the summer, Doug, 11, and Vicki, 14, may come out to help and give Mom, Doreen, and Dad a hand on the farm. "It's OK," says Doug Miller of mushroom farming. "The good thing is the blocks are pretty heavy, so it's like working out."

The sixth-grader hopes it will help him get in shape for football. As Miller sees things, he's still in the fun stages of being a mushroom farmer. Looking long-term, he envisions expansion: a refrigerator truck for farther deliveries, a couple of employees.

"So far, I've kind of stretched the rubber band as far as I can stretch it myself," he says. He's deciding now whether to go ahead with expansion or to sell the place and let someone else expand it, and he actually has the farm for sale to see if there are any takers.

But meanwhile, Farmer Miller can be found in his 4,000 square feet of darkened, cool and damp fields seven days a week, every week of the year. It's a peaceful job, he says, not much like banking. "I just turn the radio on, and it's just me and the mushrooms and the radio."

(Ralf Kircher of the Naples Daily News in Naples, Fla., can be reached at rekircher@naplesnews.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)