fungi farming

By Pat Petzel

He’s a mechanical engineer; she’s a medical technologist. Put them together and you have a good combination of skills for a not-so-typical kind of agriculture: mushroom farming.

Tom and Wendy Wiandt of Wayne County began their business in the mid-1990s. The idea of growing mushrooms commercially grew from the couple’s hobby of gathering wild mushrooms. Tom said he saw seed catalogs selling growing kits and he thought, “I can go out all summer long and hope and pray that I find these wonderful mushrooms, or I can grow them and have them whenever I want.”

It was one of the instances where everything seemed to fall together. Tom and Wendy were looking to move back to the country after college and Tom’s parents were moving from the home farm. Tom’s heart was not with engineering and he was looking for a way to make a living working outside, maybe even farming. “I am good at math, but I like science,” he said. “Modern farming is largely science.” Things started to fall together when Tom and Wendy began to research the idea of growing mushrooms commercially.

“Creating a spawn laboratory was something I could do very easily with my background,” Wendy said. “We both love being outdoors, so this just seemed to suit us for starting something on our own.”

They started calling restaurants and reading everything they could find on the topic. Certain questions had to be answered: Would there be a market for their mushrooms? Could they get the price they needed? Could they provide a better product, better service and be more adaptable to customer demands than wholesale suppliers could be?

“That’s the hard part about it,” Tom said. “You’ve got to get yourself together and make the call and go visit and deal directly with the chefs.”

Tom and Wendy, under their business name Killbuck Valley Mushrooms, Ltd. have been selling their oyster mushrooms to restaurants in the Akron area since November 1999. Now the business has expanded to more mushroom varieties and more restaurants. Every week Tom makes two trips to Akron and Cleveland to deliver their gourmet mushrooms. They sell five different oyster mushroom varieties (white, blue, brown, golden and pink), and raise shiitake, Lion’s Mane, Trumpet Royale and Maitake mushrooms. Tom said shiitake mushrooms have a smoky and woodsy flavor. Lion’s Mane are sweet, rich and meaty; Trumpet Royale are among the firmest mushrooms and Maitake have a strong, nutty flavor. “In summer we grow Wine caps in garden beds outdoors,” Tom said.

Their business fits in well with the barns on their former dairy farm. A summer kitchen was converted to a lab for the initial growing stages of the mushroom spawn. A large bank barn shelters three rooms where the mushrooms are prepared, grown and harvested.

Tom and Wendy say they know they can’t compete with big commercial producers, but they are serving a niche market that had not been served. The oyster mushrooms they choose to grow are more perishable than other types of mushrooms and cannot be shipped long distances by the larger producers, Tom said. Because the operation is small, they can also be more responsive to their customers’ requests. Often, they are experimenting with new types of mushrooms, establishing them and then marketing them to restaurants, Tom said.

“You’re not going up there (to restaurants) to sell a box of mushrooms,” Tom said. “You’re going there to establish a long-term relationship.”

Where to find Wiandts’ mushrooms
Tom and Wendy Wiandt sell their mushrooms in northeast Ohio. They are available at Crocker Park and Shaker Square farmers’ markets, The Mustard Seed, Miles Farmers Market, Lake Road Market and The Web of Life Natural Foods Market.

They also sell to the following Cleveland-area restaurants: Parker’s Restaurant, Lola and Lolita, Vivo, Flying Fig, Moxie, Russo’s, Nemo, Fire Food & Drink, Sushi Rock, One Walnut, Walden, and South Market Bistro in Wooster.

“We’re happy with the amount of restaurants right now. There’s tons of demand for what we have,” Tom said.

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