Mushrooms for the Masses: An Interview with Smallhold on Distributed Fungi Farming
Farm to Table is nice and all, but what about food that is harvested ten feet from your plate? Smallhold, a company based in Brooklyn, New York has developed contained-environment mushroom minifarms for restaurants that produce 40 times the output of traditional farms. But the key to their model is that the customer doesn’t need to worry about the whole growing process. Smallhold pre-grows the mushrooms to ensure quality and crop health, and and once the mushrooms are delivered to the restaurants, they continue to monitor the farm so the chef knows exactly when it is time to harvest. This method of distributed agriculture allows the central hub to do all the lab work and initial stages of growth, while still providing the customer with the freshest food possible. We interviewed Andrew Carter, founder and CEO of Smallhold, about purchasing his first shipping container, the potential for farming in cities, invisible technology, and whether he still enjoys mushrooms (spoiler alert: he does).
ME (Michaela Elias): Can you tell me about your background and how you got into mushroom farming?
AC (Andrew Carter): I have sort of been doing this for a little while. I studied ecological design mainly around bio remediation at the University of Vermont and I graduated in 2007. After that I moved back to Los Angeles and worked with a nonprofit called TreePeople for a while as an arborist. A couple of years later I ended up coming to the east coast and moving to New York City. I had a lot of friends and family here so it wasn’t really for a job in particular but I found that there were a lot of people looking for hydroponic growers and people that could design hydroponic systems. This was around 2009 and there weren’t a lot of people doing that at this point in the city. Urban agriculture in New York was focused more around community gardens and periurban farms and this is when Bright Farms and Gotham Greens were just getting started. I worked with a project called the Waterpod and then I ended up working with a company called window farms which is a DIY hydroponic system you can hang in your window with water bottles and we brought a product to market. Then I moved on to be the head grower for Bright Farms which is a greenhouse company that is based in New York.
After that I started consulting on my own helping people grow and understand how to build systems. I ended up working with Agritecture (formerly Blue Planet) as a consultant. I built out a bunch of different projects throughout the city and around the country and we did a lot of analysis on understanding what is going on as far as what people need to be growing in different regions. One thing I was always interested in was mushrooms because they are a fairly expensive product, especially when you’re dealing with exotics, they use waste streams so they have a home in a circular economy, and it felt like there was this lack of innovation. There’s a lot of new technology that’s emerging with mushrooms but I feel like people are just scratching the surface of exactly how to grow a lot of these varieties so that piqued my interest in growing mushrooms. It was really random but I grew up playing cello and I played music for different weddings and one wedding I played at gave me enough money to buy a shipping container. I put it at North Brooklyn Farms in Williamsburg and then started growing mushrooms in there. That was towards the end of 2016. At that point one of my friends and now cofounder Adam DeMartino joined me and we decided to make this thing a reality. In January of 2017 we started building some systems and we created this whole new model of how to distribute food around the city. So that is how I got into it and how Smallhold was formed.
ME: How did you decide on the model of distributed agriculture?
AC: It’s interesting because it’s not completely unheard of. We are pulling aspects from different parts of the industry but we had to create some technology to really allow us to do it. We’re essentially acting as a nursery and distributing younger crops to our systems rather than growing the full growth cycle on site. But I’ve grown enough to know that if someone gives you eight square feet and you want to grow a mushroom or even a plant from seed to harvest you’re not going to get enough yield out of that space to make a difference in their buying patterns. It might be interesting for their customers and it might be aesthetically pleasing but what we really want to do is change peoples buying patterns and allow them to grow food on site. So by doing the pregrow ourselves there’s a lot of efficiencies which allow us to be really cost competitive and productive on site for our customers. To make it as productive and as reliable as possible we need to develop the technology which really supports the system and the service we offer.
ME: Is it a system that is specifically designed for mushrooms or could it be applied to other produce?
AC: It can be applied to other types of produce but we are focusing on mushrooms for now. We found a really good opportunity with it. We operate the only mushroom farm in New York City so we know it’s a good place for mushrooms in New York and also around the country. We have a lot of room to grow but we do plan on going into other varieties down the line.
ME: At the beginning how was your technology or the kind of system you were offering received and has that changed the way people see the opportunity to grow their own food?
AC: We went through a really arduous process of making sure this was something people wanted and we found through a lot of research and talking to different businesses that local is a thing that is going to be here to stay. But people tend to not be able to afford it and even though people like the idea of growing their own food, the logistics around it are really difficult. So what we did is use technology and everything we do on the backend to make it was easy as possible and take all the technical aspects out of their hands. Not because we don’t want them to have it but generally because they don’t want to have it anyway. We call it invisible technology because it’s a magic box that just kind of works even though there’s a lot of data flying around and a lot of controls that are going on. We just don’t want them to have to think about it. It’s a system that grows produce that they can then sell to their customers.
ME: So do you see this model of distributed agriculture as being indicative of the future of agriculture in urban areas?
AC: Yeah I think that as far as urban agriculture and agriculture in general go there are a lot of different offerings and technologies that need to happen to make it sustainable and real. I think that distributed farming is one of them. We’re focus on crops that have short shelf life. We’re not focusing on wheat for example. There are some really great people working on different grain operations near the city which I think is equally as important so I wouldn’t say this is the only way to do it, but I think we are part of the puzzle in bringing more production closer to the places where people are.
ME: Where do you see the limit of the potential for urban agriculture or do you even see a limit?
AC: I think there definitely are limits. I think in my opinion if we are going to be doing production in cities we should focus on crops that have short shelf life and have really insane shipping and cooling practices. Cold chain and food destitution in general is a massive problem that most people don’t realize and there’s other crops out there like the staple crops that don’t have the same supply chain issues. They have their own issues but it’s not the same cold chain that a lot of the perishables have to deal with. So I think if we are going to spend space and resources on growing we should be focusing on those kind of crops because we’re wasting a lot of food by shipping it around the world.
ME: In terms of urban agriculture do you see New York as a unique ecosystem and if so in what way?
AC: I think every city has their own thing going on. New York has a great community of startups and dreamers, and companies and people are really inspired to build something from the ground up. I think New York is a scrappy place so you have people that come from all sorts of backgrounds that get into agriculture and can shed a new light on it. I think other cities have their own benefits as well. I am a big fan of what’s going on in Chicago. There’s a really great food scene and indoor ag and the concepts around vertical farming and hydroponics are in the conversation there as well. I think the United States in general has this really interesting approach to building businesses where a lot of companies just go for it and figure it out while they do it, which traditionally in the agriculture space is rare. Most of the time people will do a lot of research and ask a lot of questions and that’s part of what we did but I think it’s really fun being part of the New York and the US ecosystem because you have people just going for it and making stuff happen.
ME: Do you have a favorite mushroom variety?
AC: Out of the ones we grow I like royal trumpets a lot, also known as king oysters. They’re just meaty and they can be a meal on their own so I really enjoy it.
ME: How has your relationship with mushrooms changed through this experience?
AC: My relationship is fairly healthy with mushrooms. I eat a lot of mushrooms if you can imagine. We have a lot of chefs that use our product which is really amazing. At Mission Chinese they have a whole vegan menu and integrate a lot of our mushrooms into it since we’re growing on site with them. There’s also a great chef called Tara Norvell who cooks next door to our warehouse in Bushwick at Honeys. If you’re lucky you can go on a day where she’s cooking and she cooks ramen with our mushrooms and it’s just this really amazing dish. It’s fun growing food but it’s even more fun seeing what these really talented people do with it.
ME: How did you decide on which mushrooms you would grow?
AC: We focus on varieties that we can compete on. Our big thing is growing on site and being fresh and local. We’re certified organic too so we have this great thing going on but we don’t want to be this extremely expensive product which is a big reason why we do the method that we do. We choose varieties where we can really make an impact. There are some varieties such as button mushrooms for example which we technically can grow in this system but we’re not as competitive as when we’re growing lions mane or multicolored oysters. That’s when we can really make a difference for our customers which is where we’re focusing. As we get to a larger scale we can compete on other varieties as well but our big thing is just really providing a good value for our customers and the freshest stuff possible.
Smallhold’s farms can currently be found in Whole Foods, Mission Chinese, Bunker Vietnamese, Kimchi Market, and North Brooklyn Farms. To learn more go to https://www.smallhold.com
