When a mushroom farmer who was moving overseas contacted them offering his growing gear, Cameron Matthews and Tom Allen had no idea the impact the gift would have on their lives. RICK BAYNE reports.
Cameron Matthews and Tom Allen started mushroom farming because of a gift and it has been a gift that keeps on giving.
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In 2021, Cameron and Tom were contacted by Ernesto Sanchez, who had been running Geelong Fungi for about six years.
Tom had been working at a social enterprise in Geelong and was keen to start his own business, while Cameron was working in IT and eyeing a career based on computers.
They were both part of a community group at Norlane in north Geelong called The Farm Next Door, which centred on urban farming and local food security.
“We had a Facebook page and Ernesto reached out and offered his mushroom growing gear,” Tom said.
“I’d grown mushrooms in my backyard before and was kind of interested, so we went to his place and he gave us a tour of the mushroom farm.”
A chef and permaculture educator, Ernesto had been living in Australia for more than 10 years. When COVID-19 restrictions eased, he and his wife decided to return permanently to their native Colombia and he gifted the infrastructure, intellectual property and restaurant contacts to Cameron and Tom.
They initially operated out of a garage in Norlane before moving to shipping containers in Drysdale in 2023.
Today, Cameron and Tom continue mushroom farming because they see it as a continual gift to partner with fungi and share them with the community, even if the road to business success has been slower than anticipated.
Ernesto’s good relationships with local restaurants transferred to the new owners, as did his time and energy efficient processes.
“Permaculture is all about designing systems that flow with minimal effort,” Cameron said.
“Ernesto designed the mushroom farm following that philosophy. It was a really lean system and that was another major part of the gift.”
He used a lime recipe for pasteurising with a much lower ratio of lime compared to most recommendations, but it meant he could re-use the wastewater, a practice Cameron and Tom have continued.
However, it was a low-tech mushroom farm using re-usable buckets in a garage with no temperature and contamination control, something that the new owners were keen to improve on.
They are committed to zero-waste production methods wherever possible and want to change the mushroom industry’s heavy reliance on single-use plastic grow bags.
City boys take on farming
Tom grew up in Melbourne and had some farming blood in his maternal line, but Cameron was raised in Norlane with no farming genes.
They both see themselves as city lads getting into farming.
“My first exposure to agriculture was through The Farm Next Door,” Cameron said.
“We were both city boys interested in exploring the agricultural world. The Farm Next Door was like a taster to that. It wasn’t until this gift from Ernesto and I heard my friend was starting a mushroom farm that I became more directly involved.”
The real shift happened when Tom lent Cameron a book on mushroom growing.
“Cameron went to bed at my parents’ farm with this textbook and came out the next morning like he hadn’t slept — he was like a changed man,” Tom joked.
Despite their solid start, developing the business during the COVID-19 pandemic was challenging.
“We thought moving to Drysdale, setting it up as a partnership and buying the shipping containers and extra equipment would solve a lot of problems we were having running it in the garage,” Tom said.
“We thought adding a few layers of environmental and temperature control would lead to a massive improvement in sales, but that didn’t eventuate.”
It’s profitable — just — and that’s before calculating labour.
Cameron is full-time in the business, while Tom works three days a week for an Aboriginal co-operative in Warrnambool. They hope to both eventually derive a solid income from it.
“It’s an exciting business to be in, even if it’s not super profitable at the moment,” Tom said.
“It has potential. It has been a harder road than we thought, but it feels like we’re gaining momentum.”
Mushrooms are vulnerable but Cameron and Tom have followed the philosophy that an ounce of prevention prevents a pound of fixing.
“We have very controlled environments within the containers,” Cameron said.
“We grow year-round and it’s like autumn all the time. If we were growing outdoors, we would be limited to the wetter months for production.”
That reliability appeals to clients who don’t have to worry that cold weather could ruin the mushrooms.
They grow about six different strains of oyster mushrooms, including yellow and pink varieties, but most are brown-grey.
“The pink oysters are pretty to look at and get a lot of attention, but restaurants are more interested in tans and blues that are much closer to meat replacements in their meals,” Cameron said.
They have installed new equipment to diversify into other species of mushroom such as Lion’s Mane in response to requests from chefs, and long, stringy Enoki used in Japanese cooking.
Mushroom trial
The Gippsland mushroom murder trial has captivated the nation, but Cameron and Tom say it hasn’t impacted their business.
“The attention was on foraging, so it didn’t make people squeamish about our mushrooms,” Tom said.
“We haven’t seen a decrease because of it. The trial has increased people’s wariness of buying mushrooms that have been foraged in the wild, while increasing the trustworthiness of commercial cultivators like us.
“I know of several people who are still running thriving mushroom foraging businesses, selling foraged mushrooms at farmers markets and running foraging workshops. If the Erin Patterson case has impacted the mushroom industry, it would be those guys, rather than us, but broadly I don’t think any area of the industry has been dealt much of a blow by the murder case.”
About 70 per cent of their market is restaurants, the rest are sales through local retailers and a few sales from hosted tours. They don’t do farmers markets, reckoning that a single product isn’t worth the effort.
They also have a growing market for hosting workshops on the art of growing mushrooms.
“We both really enjoy engaging with people who want to learn about growing fungi and sharing our knowledge and skills,” Cameron said.
They remain fascinated by the power and potential of mushrooms.
“They are biologically powerful organisms that grow in such an interesting way, so different to plants and so different to animals and yet with some characteristics of both,” Tom said.
“It’s an exciting organism to partner with. We’re just helping it along to expand and grow.”
Cameron said it was fascinating what you could grow from the tiniest amount of something.
“They are like chemical masters communicating with the outside world and new studies are constantly finding the different health benefits of mushrooms,” he said.
“A mushroom can produce something off a block of wood that would take a lab years to cultivate in the right environment.”
And, yes, they both like eating mushrooms.
Where to find Bellarine Fungi Mushrooms
The business supplies some of the best names in the culinary scene in Geelong and the Bellarine, including The Q Train, Jack Rabbit, Samesyn, Merne, 360Q, Tulip and more.
Outlets
Bellarine Farmgate: 218 Murradoc Rd, Drysdale
Geelong Organic Larder: 167 Malop St, Geelong
Bliss n Co: 64A The Terrace, Ocean Grove
Ket Baker: 377 Grubb Rd, Wallington, 1/174A High St, Belmont
Farm gate: 15 Basin Rd, Drysdale (by appointment only).
DNA writer