Meiser’s Fresh Grocery and Deli
By Polly Campbell
Published October 4, 2024
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Emalee and Pete Richman, owners of Rich Life Farm and Fungi, grow 500 pounds of mushrooms weekly and sell at farmers markets and wholesale. They're also working to open a farm stop for local farmers and support local food systems through Emalee's role on the Food Policy Council.
Food Policy Council member Emalee Richman and her husband Pete, who own Rich Life Farm and Fungi, run a different kind of farm than most. Mushrooms are in the fungi kingdom, and grow by a different process than other farm crops. So the Richmans grow year-round, inside a temperature controlled building. They never till or weed or water or worry about frost.
Not that it’s easy. They face many of the same challenges other small farmers do trying to fit into the larger food system. Finding customers and markets. Distinguishing their product. Explaining the value they offer. Deciding whether to sell direct to consumers at farmers markets and keep the full retail price or skip all the retail work and sell wholesale at much lower prices.
The Richmans take both approaches. They go to two farmers markets a week, and they sell wholesale to 22 restaurants and a few retail outlets. But understanding that particular problem in the local system, they’ve been hoping to open a farm stop for farmers in their area. A farm stop is a hybrid, a place where farmers can sell their products without being physically present, but can keep more of the price. They have purchased a piece of property on Ten-Mile Road in New Richmond, not far from their mushroom facility. It includes a historic general store building, located in what was the tiny town of Spann. They’re still putting together the money to renovate and run it, but they think there’s the traffic to attract customers, and they’ve talked to plenty of interested farmers who grow food in Clermont County. They’re picturing a commercial kitchen, a little café, a place where people in the area can buy from their neighbors.
Meanwhile, they’re busy growing 500 pounds of mushrooms every week, figuring out the mysteries of fungus.
Mushrooms, after a long time of being either maligned or a very niche specialty product, are coming into their own these days. “I was at TJ Maxx the other day, and I saw mushroom motifs everywhere, from clothes to home décor,” said Emalee. That’s a pop culture indication of a new fascination with what we’ve learned fungi can do: create living systems in forests that link trees together, digest pathogens and toxins, consume hydrocarbons, or be used to make “mycomaterials.” Some have psychoactive compounds, and most have micronutrients with big health benefits. Lion’s mane mushrooms promise neurological and diabetes and Alzheimer’s-fighting effects.
Culinarily, they’re a quality source of protein (including all the amino acids) making them important in vegetarian diets, and umami, which make them delicious in any diet. Rich Life sells up to 35 different cultivars though they switch them up season to season, as some do well in colder, others in warmer, temperature.
Commercial mushrooms are grown in straw beds in huge underground facilities, mostly in Pennsylvania. Though micro farms are growing, there aren’t enough small cultivators that there is equipment sized for a Rich Life type operation. So it all takes some clever use of equipment meant for other things. The steamer they use to pasteurize their growing medium is repurposed from an old bread proofer. Their bagging system relies on a DIY system and computer program. They found a flow hood on Facebook Marketplace.
The process starts by introducing an isolated culture that is like the mushrooms’ “seed” into bags of grain mix in which the mycelium, sort of the mushroom’s “roots,” develop. That is broken up and mixed in bags with a substrate of pelletized oak sawdust and soybean husks until it completely colonizes the bag. In the wild, that mycelium grows into a massive underground network. When a trigger happens, a stressor or a particular combination of environmental conditions, it causes the mycelium to fruit, almost overnight. In the mushroom shed, this can be imitated by cutting a whole in the bag, putting them in a fruiting room at a certain temperature, and watching the weird, fantastic shapes of shaggy lion’s mane or the brown, toadstool-ish chestnut mushrooms or beautifully scalloped bunches of oyster mushrooms pop out from the slit in the bag. One thing they’ve learned, said Emalee, is that “the fungus are always 100% in control.”
Pete had started growing mushrooms as a hobby one long, boring winter they spent in Vermont. Back in North Carolina, where they’d met, they scaled up and started selling a small amount.. Then in 2020, they moved to the Cincinnati are, where Pete is from, where they afford land, and e it seemed there was room in the market. “We were tired of giving away the best of ourselves to other people,” said Pete of becoming entrepreneurs. That’s a sentiment many farmers would recognize. There are farmers who just grow lion mane and sell to companies that turn it into medicinal tinctures. They make own tinctures, too. But they are clear on their reason to be. “We want to grow food for people,” said Pete.
Through working at farmers markets and selling to chefs, Pete and Emmalee have become embedded in the local food scene. To use an unavoidable metaphor, they’re not just interested in the mushroom fruit, they care about the mycelium, too: the networks that allow a whole system to thrive. It takes a lot of intertwined effort to strengthen food production among local, small farmers. Hence their excitement about getting the food stop going, and Emalee’s membership on the Food Policy Council.
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By Kelly Morton
Published October 28, 2024