Katrina Atkinson fought back tears as she and her partner Daniel Tibbet shared their difficult decision to close the gourmet mushroom business they worked so hard to build from scratch.
The young couple crowdfunded in 2017 to help establish Mountaintop Mushrooms, growing a head-turning array of tasty, colourful fungi in a century-old pineapple packing shed on the Sunshine Coast hinterland.
Mr Tibbet’s black, yellow, pink, chocolate, and pearl-coloured oyster mushrooms, as well as native coral tooth, king brown, lion’s mane, shiitake, and pioppino fungi were prized by many of the region’s best chefs and sold directly to customers at local markets.
But the combined pressures of their failing infrastructure, weather-related crop losses, the need to move from their rented shed, and juggling a demanding business with a young child, proved too much.
Weeks of production were lost in the past few months.
“Because it’s so wet and so misty I’ve had electrical faults with the air conditioning, when it’s rained for days and days and … it’s just cut out,” Mr Tibbet said.
“That was kind of the nail in the coffin — [we] just decided it’s too much to deal with these losses anymore.”
Ms Atkinson has been working off-farm for Barung Landcare for several years.
“The change in the economy has definitely made things a bit trickier,” she said.
“It just was too much for one little young family like ours to pull off.”
No regrets
Despite their tough decision, the couple did not regret their decision to start a gourmet mushroom farm.
“I just wish that we had more capital behind us to do it properly and not be scratching, just putting things together with the little budget we had,” Mr Tibbet said.
“If we had money behind us we could have done a lot better, there’s a lot of ways we could have mitigated different issues that we have had.”
Ms Atkinson said they gained a deep sense of satisfaction from educating people about the wide variety of colourful edible mushrooms that could be grown.
“Seeing people’s excitement about it was so rewarding,” she said.
Changing times
Last year an AUSVEG survey revealed that 34 per cent of vegetable growers were considering leaving the industry.
Mountaintop Mushrooms is not the only gourmet mushroom farm to close in recent months.
After three years of operation, Scott Andrews wound up Tagigan Road Produce at Goomboorian near Gympie late last year after being lured back to a lucrative oil and gas industry job.
“They’re offering new money that you’d probably never see in farming — farming is more of a passion,” Mr Andrews said.
“It was never a point of stressing about the business not being viable — the last week that I operated, 85 to 90 kilos actually went out.”
His mushroom business benefited from the cold rooms already established on the former passionfruit farm he and his wife purchased.
Mr Andrews said infrastructure costs were a major barrier to young entrants to the industry.
“If you are someone starting out new, you’d probably be looking at $60,000 to $100,000 in set-up costs.”
A passionate supporter of the international slow food movement, he said most gourmet mushroom farmers were traditionally small-scale operations servicing local customers.
“I think strawberries and oyster mushrooms are possibly the two worst things you could grow in terms of shelf life,” Mr Andrews said.
“Keeping them good is part of the art of growing — picking time is essential.”
On the Sunshine Coast, Eastwell Farms is still growing gourmet mushrooms, in combination with a pasture-raised Nguni beef business at Kin Kin.
“When there was a big hurrah down in Melbourne about someone allegedly poisoning their family with mushrooms, that might have made a bit of a glitch in the process for a while,” owner Bryant Ussher said.
“But generally, we’ve just had a reasonably steady production; we’ve not lost many of our original clientele.
“We’re also finding that the general public are starting to eat a little bit more mushroom and have seen the benefits of eating mushrooms, so that’s been really positive for us,” Susie Ussher said.
Australia’s gourmet mushroom industry is undergoing a shake-up with the entry of a large-scale producer.
Last year, the Epicurean Food Group refitted South Australia’s former Holden car plant to begin growing tonnes of oyster mushrooms.
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