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Urban Agriculture Podcast Series: Urban Mushrooms with Buttons Testa

In this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, host Morag Gamble speaks with Buttons Testa – the creator of The Mushroomery – a micro mushroom farm she set up in her Brunswick backyard in Naarm (Melbourne) in a 10m2 growing space.

The little farm supplies two restaurants and a farm gate from time to time with tasty oyster mushrooms. She is influenced by the ethics and principles of permaculture. She is working on closing multiple loops of waste within her farm. Being a massive foodie she is keen on making farming more visible in the city to create better understanding around food within the urban bubble.

Buttons is also inspired to spread the knowledge of how mushrooms grow and what wonderful benefits they can have for yours and the environments health. Fungi is on the precipice of solving many earthly problems from waste to health.

Buttons also loves to show how much food can be grown on small marginal plots of land in the inner city. She believes that we will need to localise our food systems in order to transition to a low-energy sustainable future.

This is part 4 of our 5 part  Urban Agriculture podcast series celebrating Urban Agriculture Month (Nov 2022)

Click here to listen to the episode or watch it on the Sense-Making in a Changing World youtube.

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Urban Agriculture Month
This special Urban Agriculture series on Sense-Making in a Changing World is brought to you by the Permaculture Education Institute in collaboration with Sustain Australia – celebrating growing food in cities and towns for Urban Agriculture Month.


Full transcript below.

Morag:

Hello and welcome everyone. Welcome back to a special Urban Agriculture series here on the Sense-making in a Changing World podcast. My name is Morag Gamble and I’m sitting here on the land of the Gubbi Gubbi people and I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. I’m talking with someone far further south from me in a different country who runs an amazing micro mushroom farm in Melbourne. So welcome to the show Buttons. 

Buttons:

Thank you for having me. 

Morag:

So just before we start talking about your project, which country are you in? How do you describe where your project is based?

Buttons:

I suppose we’re quite urban in Wurundjeri. I’m based in Alphington, just in the fairfield in the urban bubble. I’m located there in the hopes to be more visible to the urban people in the urban area so that they can have more of a visual indicator of how food grows and where it comes from.

Morag:

Fantastic. So The Mushroomery, before we talk about what that is, I wonder what fascinates you about mushrooms? What is something about mushrooms that you’ve discovered in working with them that just knocks your socks off?

Buttons:

I got really interested in mushrooms when I studied permaculture. I started growing a whole lot of veg in my backyard and then I was trying to figure out what I could grow down the side of the house because it was sort of a bit of a darker area and somebody said to me, “Why don’t you try and grow mushrooms?” So then I went on this whole new adventure of learning how to grow mushrooms and it’s quite different to popping seedlings in the ground. And when I went on that journey, I realized there’s so many different varieties of mushrooms that we didn’t really have access to at that stage. I suppose I saw it as this new and exciting place to go. Along that journey, I’ve learned that Mycelium is a wonderful thing that’s doing all sorts of magical stuff for our soil, for breaking down pollution, it creates networks between trees and helps them communicate. There’s just so many, so many things that Mycelium is capable of.

Morag:

In terms of picking a mushroom farm as an idea and also with your world in thinking about permaculture, how much of what you’re doing is like a global imperative or a local imperative or in both? I wonder if this is part of your global activism or is it more about just feeding people locally? Like work? What is it, for you, the most important thing to do?

Buttons:

When I started permaculture, I realized that a big part of sustainability is sort of localizing the food system trying to cut down on embodied energy. So if we start to localize our food system, it means that it’s not traveling as far and that means we’re not using as much energy to access our food and I suppose a really cool thing about mushrooms is that they can be grown in marginal land. So it’s easier to grow mushrooms in urban areas because we don’t need all this sunlight and land and we can sort of vertically stack, which means that we can fit a lot more growing space into a smaller amount of space and get a lot more food in that small area. So I suppose it is my own little way of trying to be more sustainable for the future 

Morag:

Nutritionally, what have you discovered about mushrooms and their health benefits?

Buttons:

Every mushroom is a little bit different and there are so many wonderful ways that they’re helping to sort of stop the onset of Alzheimer’s, oyster mushrooms, which I grow, are really good for people who are on the FODMAP diet, they can actually eat them, which is really exciting for them. They’re good for helping with cardiovascular disease, all sorts of things. There’s just so many benefits. Even like they’re doing a lot of tests at the moment with psilocybin and looking into how that can help with people with depression. So, every mushroom has a different sort of exciting health benefit.

Morag:

Which ones are you growing? You’re growing the oyster ones? Do you have other ones too?

Buttons:

At the moment, I’m just growing oysters because they are the most prolific to grow. So if you’re growing in a small space, you’re gonna get the most quantity and they’ve also got the quickest turnaround, which is really good for a small space as well. So I’ve just got some shipping containers, that means I’m really limited to space. So I really want to be able to maximize what I can do in that space. If you grow Shiitake or Lion’s Mane, they have a much longer incubation period and so you sort of need a little bit more space for that. But I am hoping to start to work on that, eventually. It’s small steps, you don’t want to take on too much all at once.

Morag:

So how long does it take you to get from inoculation through to harvest with the oysters?

Buttons:

So it really varies depending on the time of year. Through winter, it could be about like two stages were inoculating out when I’m not doing grain spawn at this stage, but I’m hoping to in the future. So from inoculating my straw to a fruiting mushroom in winter can be about six to nine weeks, but in summer it can be about two to three weeks.

Morag:

It’s an amazing difference. So where do you get your store and your population (8:00) growing from there? Is there another micro enterprise that does that?

Buttons:

I got my spawn from the sun rising calm down (8:12) and then the straw was sourced from Victoria. It’s organic wheat straw that we grow. But as I said, I’m hoping that I will start to do my own grain spawn. I’m really trying to sort of cut down on waste. So the thing is, I brought in buckets, which we reuse. I’ve collected all those buckets from different businesses who are throwing them out and so we keep reusing them and cycling through the farm and washing them. Now, until I start to grow my own grain spawn, I am not able to do that. So I still have that waste coming through, which is the grain spawn still coming in plastic bags. But it’s just a slow process of taking on new things and not trying to overwhelm yourself too much. So I’m slowly trying to reduce the amount of waste coming out of the farm. But by using our buckets, we’re saving 120 plastic bags from going into landfill each week. That’s, I suppose, a big problem in the mushroom growing industry.

Morag:

That’s amazing. And what do you do then with the beautiful product at the end? The waste straw, like how does that get distributed? And I’m sure it’s in great demand.

Buttons:

Oh, yeah. So I do sell it. It’s really good for the soil mycelium, it creates air pockets for microbes to live in, it helps with drainage, it’s a natural soil binder, it helps with erosion. So I sell it at the farmers market and to whoever wants to buy it online. But also, I gift it to different places as well like sort of farm projects, or gifting, or I’m doing trades where people wash the buckets in exchange for the mulch. Because bucket washing is one of the biggest labor costs I have and it’s still a process of trying to balance that out and make it really economical and that is a big reason why a lot of farmers use plastic bags. Because it’s not very cost efficient to pay somebody to wash them. 

Morag:

You kind of have a gift economy aspect to it, like volunteers coming in to do certain things in exchange for a product, which makes sense.

Buttons:

Yeah and there’s definitely a lot of mulch coming out of the farm. So it’s a pretty desperate thing to try and move so much each week. 

Morag:

But for permaculture communities around the area, what a fantastic resource to have. Because I know, as a permaculture gardener, it’s something that you’re always looking for, particularly in urban areas, which is more of that kind of high quality, organic input and so I’m sure there’d be a high demand for what you’ve what you’re producing there. I’m really curious to hear about what’s your model? What’s your economic model of making this work for you? I think I read somewhere you have a kind of like a CSA model or you’re going to markets. How do you distribute your product in a way that makes it work for you?

Buttons:

So I suppose before the pandemic I was just selling to restaurants, which as you would know permaculture isn’t very sustainable because you don’t have a very diverse system, which were quickly shut down when we went into lockdown and all the restaurants closed. So I really had to diversify them and so I started selling to farmers markets, but also I did start a CSA and I suppose for those who don’t know what a CSA is. It’s community supported agriculture and it’s basically a subscription model so the community can just sign up for a subscription of mushrooms, they can get a fortnightly or a weekly subscription and that really helped me to get through the lockdowns. I also sell to box games as well. I’ve been selling to nurseries because we also sell the mulch, but I also grow kits as well and I’ve just, in the last year, started preserving mushrooms as well. Because it took me a while to get that certificate to be able to do that food handling. For the rest of those years, I was donating a lot of mushrooms to food relief to the point that it wasn’t really sustainable for my business. But luckily, I have been happy that the people were receiving that and being fed. So whatever we don’t preserve does go to food relief. But it’s really great now to be able to preserve that and sell pickles to people as well.

Morag:

I was gonna ask, what kind of preserves are you growing? I’ve not heard of a mushroom pickle. That sounds amazing.

Buttons:

Yeah, they’re really tasty. So I do a rosemary pickle, which is really nice on toast with cream cheese or through salads and I also am doing like a [inaudible] a pickle at the moment, which is really nice in noodle salads, hoping to do over the [inaudible] and some other little things on their way.

Morag:

Do you do any drying of the mushrooms as well? I work with some refugees in East Africa and they’re just starting up little mushroom houses there at the moment, like each permayouth hub. So there’s like permaculture youth clubs and each starts up a mushroom house with oyster mushrooms and they get so many too and that they are designed to dry them and make them as a powder. So they can use that to help like others and I find that’s a great way also to help them store it when they don’t have refrigeration or anything. 

Buttons:

That’s what I’d like to be doing. I have done like a smart, dehydrated mushroom powder. But I’ve found it really hard to get past to sell that because it’s going to take a little bit of time and the cost of getting passed to do that isn’t really worth it at this stage.

Morag:

What are they looking for? What are those limitations? What’s the rules that are making it difficult for you?

Buttons:

Well, basically they don’t have the food safety programs that are easily accessible for dehydration and then they’re asking me to pay a specialist to come in and get that written up for me, which is going to cost like $5,000. And then when I weigh it all up in the end, and like once you dehydrate the mushrooms, they actually shrink so much that you’re not really going to get as much. You’re not gonna get as much money for them or the product is going to be such an exorbitant cost that it may be harder to sell it in the long run anyway. So actually pickling them is more economical for me because I’m not losing all that sort of liquid, because mushrooms have something like 90% water. So once you dehydrate them, you don’t have much left. I still like dehydration better. It would be good for me in the fact that the product will last a lot longer. But the quantities that we’re growing and the access that we have, it’s just not really worth it at this stage to pay that extra money to do that.

Morag

It’s something they probably don’t have to deal with over there and don’t have those limitations. How hard is it to look after mushrooms now? Are there diseases that come through or are pretty straightforward? Or do you have to be really into it?

Buttons:

It’s like a minefield of mold out there. So pretty much with every breath we take in, we breathe in about 10 different types of spores and as you can imagine, they’re like the weeds of the mushroom growing world and we can’t even see them. So it’s a constant battle. We have sort of filters on all that intake in the farm and then with every stage we do some sort of sterilization or pasteurization which is mainly pasteurizing at the moment and that doesn’t stop everything from getting in black. Still, us farmers walking through are bringing in contamination. We scrub our shoes before we walk in, but we may still be covered in mycelium. A lot of mushroom farms are more commercial setups. Some wear hazmat suits every time they go into the farm and every time they come out, they throw it out and put a new suit on if they have to go back in again. So, look, we’re really trying to avoid that. What we’ll do is every day, like every time we’re doing an [inaudible]we make sure we’ve had a shower that day, we’ve got clean clothes on. But that doesn’t stop all your content or everything from getting in. So, from time to time we do have blowouts and I’m really trying to get on top of that as I go on and sort of keeping on top of that is having a really good turnover so you don’t have blocks of mushrooms staying in the system for too long collecting too much contamination. 

And also, I suppose I’m learning my lessons like, in the past, when I’ve got contamination, I might just take out one of those blocks that are contaminated and hope that it hasn’t spread to others. But I’ve really learned that it can be quite soul destroying and you may keep doing that for weeks and you just keep finding it. So I’ve found that the best thing to do, even though it is the status thing to do, is just to pull everything out and start again. But Touchwood, I haven’t had any contamination for a little while. But as we go into summer, we have a much higher amount of mold spores in the atmosphere and I generally tend to have my biggest blowouts through January and February. So I was thinking of just closing it down for that period of time this year and I’ve been growing without any temperature control for four years now. But I have just got these air conditioning units, which I’m going to test using through summer this year, just when we get to those really hot days, turning them on to try and see if I can make it through summer even though I’ve been trying to avoid because I don’t want to use those fossil fuels or I want to avoid using too many fossil fuels. It’s going to be something that I just tes and hopefully, in the future we can move to sell or renewable energies

Morag:

When you have a blowout like that, what happens with your CSA? Like what’s your discussion with your customers when you have a blowout like that? How does that support you in that kind of situation?

Buttons:

I’d say CSA members are the most forgiving. But it is trickier when you’re trying to supply restaurants and also farmer’s markets and you’re having to cancel their orders all the time. They’re gonna take you off their menu or they’re gonna replace you with a different farmer. So, I’m lucky that the farmers market has been good to me. But it’s tricky, definitely.

Morag:

Do you have two rooms or do you just have them all in one container? Because if you have contamination in one but not the other, do you keep going or is it all in one spot?

Buttons:

Totally. It’s quite a big investment, building a mushroom farm. So, unfortunately, we’re a bit fragile in that sense. I’ve only got one incubation chamber on one fruiting chamber. I did some work experience up in Noosa many years ago and they have a very similar setup to me and they were talking about getting another chamber for if that happens, but it is such a big investment to do that, that it’s not really something that’s very high on my priority list at the moment, unfortunately.

Morag:

I was gonna ask you about where you learn to become a mushroom farmer? Is there like this network of young mushroom farmers around the country that you talk with and learn together?

Buttons:

I just jumped into the deep end and like have been scrambling ever since trying to find my way and just blind naivety. I did a course with [inaudible] which is a great course. Then I started trying to grow at home and just grew a lot of green mold and then I messaged every gourmet mushroom farmer that I could see in Victoria, asking if they’d take me on for volunteer work experience. Nobody would take me on. The only place that took me on was a place in Noosa and so I went up there and just did one week of volunteering with them and I came back and started growing. I started trying with the knowledge that I’d learned there and was successful and then I slowly built it from there, just like building it up and thinking, “Oh, this is easy.” I’ll just like to multiply it and not really think of what the problems could be until they hit and then being like, “Oh, how do I fix this?” So in that case, I would just email a lot of people in desperation asking questions and there were great people who gave me advice. But at the end of the day, there’s actually not much that can be done when you get contamination started again.

Morag:

So is becoming a farmer something that you grew up thinking, “When I grow up, I’m going to become a farmer” Where did this becoming a farmer enter into your mind? And are there any of your friends and in your network also interested in doing farming or production of some sort in the urban area?

Buttons:

I was really into making clothes when I was a child and I wanted to be like a fashion designer. I studied costume design and I started making clothes on consignment and ready to wear clothes and it just really wasn’t an industry which was making me any money. So I was a bartender and that was my primary income. I was a bartender for more than a decade and I really wanted to get out of working those night shifts and living that hedonistic lifestyle. I started growing veg in the backyard and got so excited. I was learning the plant or what a capsicum plant looks like or what plants actually look like and where vegetables are coming from. and that was so exciting to me. I’ve always been really into food. My mum was really hellbent on organics since I was a child and my father was really into getting into the deli and getting all the good stuff. So I’ve always been into food and I had thought if I wasn’t going to be a costume designer, maybe I’d be a chef. So it was somewhere between there and so when I started growing all those vegetables, it was like, “Whoa, there’s something about growing your own vegetables that tastes better.” All that love and energy you’re putting into your food, I don’t know if it’s just subliminal, but you can really taste it and also I can really tell the difference between good quality vegetables, organics and the flavor is just so much more. Then when I started growing and started doing permaculture, I realized how important agriculture is and also I started going and doing a lot of work experience on farms and that’s when I really became interested in farming and sort of really wanting to try and grow all my own food and I was looking for a new career path. So that’s where it was sort of leading me and that’s how I got into farming and so none of my friends, at the time, were farmers or interested in agriculture in any way, shape or form. But I suppose through this journey, I’ve collected great friends who are really into all of that sort of stuff.

Morag:

So is it a pretty big movement in Melbourne about Urban Agriculture that you’re finding? Is it growing? Did it change a lot during COVID as well, with all those lockdowns? I can imagine such a big shift in Melbourne in so many ways.

Buttons:

There’s definitely a really big movement. Especially, I think there’s a lot of young gay farmers who are really all starting their own little stands. So yes, there’s a big movement, it’s becoming quite fashionable.

Morag:

Is it kind of like hyperlocal food? Are you talking about just growing and selling directly in your local neighborhood in a way?

Buttons:

Yeah, totally. There’s lots of little pockets of little urban farms happening, which is so exciting. I don’t know that we can feed out a whole city from these little things. But it is wonderful in creating excitement around agriculture and changing people’s mentality and hopefully, if we can be more visible with these sort of more sustainable techniques and if there’s more people showing interest in buying food from those farmers, then maybe, hopefully, one day, we’ll see a shift in larger agriculture.

Morag:

You kind of like the thought leaders who are kind of opening new pathways for things to change. So I noticed that you’re part of a farmer incubator group, a young farmers incubator group. Is that still operating? Is that something that exists? If a young person is thinking, “Oh, yeah! I’d like to do this” Who can you reach out to? Who are the mentors that you can reach that can help support you in taking those steps? Or just just go for it like you did?

Buttons:

I think if you want to get into farming, the best thing to do is go and volunteer on farms, go to your local farmers market, meet the farmers, ask them if you can come and volunteer. There’s a lot of those farmers taking on, like doing internships and that sort of thing as well. So that’s a really good way to get into farming. There is a program called Farmer Incubator, which is wonderful, where they teach people about farming and what you do is you plan what they generally do, each participant gets given a row and they plant their garlic and they go through the whole process from start to finish, from planting to selling. Through that course, they go to a lot of classes where they talk to different farmers. I think that’s a great program and that’s really exciting. But definitely gone volunteer on farms.

Morag:

Apart from selling and sharing the produce, what other ways are you trying to help make this more visible? Do you have classes or events? So what kind of things are happening out of your place?

Buttons:

I’m doing workshops at the farm and you get a farm to learn how to grow mushrooms. But also, I’ve been having a few school groups coming through so I’m really keen on teaching kids where their food comes from and I think if we start with the youth, it’s a good place to start because they’re the future and they’re particularly the ones in this bubble of not knowing what like the beef is from a cow or whatever. And they get so excited coming to the farm and seeing things grow.

Morag:

So where is your farm at? You said it was in Alphington. But is it on private land? Where do you find the space to create this spot for shipping contains?

Buttons:

You know, you think, “Oh my gosh! There’s all this marginal land in the city, surely we can find somewhere to get our farm up.” But actually, it’s really hard. Because a lot of the unfortunate thing about mushrooms is that we do need power and we do need water. Which means that a lot of the marginal land that there is in the city isn’t hooked up to power or water. So it was really hard to find a space where we could grow. But we were really lucky to find this industrial site, which had space for us. So we were set up next to the Durban park lands on a commercial site and the commercial side is actually council owned and it’s on an old tip site. So it’s unlikely that they will develop where we are.

Morag:

What are the kinds of things that you think need to happen? Either policy wise, government wise, anything like that, that would help to support more young farmers to step up in the way that you have? What are some of those hurdles you’ve come across that you think are unnecessary? If we could shift this policy or open the door here that would really make Urban Agriculture so much more easy to get set up and viable and all of that.

Buttons:

Well, actually, I suppose when I was trying to find land to farm on, I was quite surprised. When talking to the council, they’re very excited for you to start farming in places. The only setback I had is the fact that it was a mushroom farm and I needed power. So if you want to start a farm or a little community garden, I’d suggest calling a council because they may be able to direct you to a piece of land that is available. When I was talking on the phone, it sounded a lot easier than it might be to set up and because there’s the council, there is a big push to be more sustainable. So they’re excited for projects like this at the moment. 

But having said that, when it comes to farming, I do feel like we do need more government support. Food should be more attainable to the general public and these little projects that we have going, it’s expensive to run them. It’s expensive to pay staff, which is why food costs so much and without the government supporting farmers or farms to pay their staff, we’re going to have exorbitant prices for food when it comes to more quality food. So I feel like I ultimately want the government to be subsidizing farming a bit more so that we can afford to lower our food prices and make it more attainable to the general population.

Morag:

There’s subsidies that go in all different directions that are really about supporting things that are degenerating the planet. We need to be supporting projects that are regenerating the planet and creating good and healthy food for people. It’s a no brainer and I totally agree with you. So where do people find out about your project? How could they discover you and are there any other links that you’d like to share with people because we can pop them down in the show notes below.

Buttons:

Well, I would love people to follow me on Instagram. Then you’ll get updates about what farmers markets I’m doing each week when I’m doing workshops and if you want to do a workshop or learn about mushrooms, jump on my website. I suppose that’s my little shout out. And from my Instagram, you can look at who I’m following because I’m following some pretty cool farms too. Then start your journey and learn about different little farming projects that are happening in Melbourne and really all over Australia.

Morag:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. I know you’re sitting in your car, you’ve just been on a delivery somewhere. Was that for mushrooms or for mushroom growing? 

Buttons:

Yes, I was late for a delivery last night. So I said, I’ll come in the morning and do it and I got caught in traffic so I didn’t manage to get back to my home office in time.

Morag:

Do you sell straight from your farm as well or you always just take things out? 

Buttons:

Oh, yes. So with the CSA, I have picked up points. So people can come and pick up from the farm or from I’ve got to pick up points in Brunswick as well. Just to cut down on that delivery factor. But actually, I think it’s probably more sustainable for me to deliver. Unless people are walking to the pickup point, rather than a lot of people driving their cars to pick up.

Morag:

Unless they’re going for something else. Like to have a market somewhere else or to a store and they’re getting all their other things and they get the box of mushrooms.

Buttons:

Yeah. So it really works if you’re within walking distance from the pickup line.

Morag:

Which seems entirely possible in urban areas, doesn’t it? 

Buttons:

It definitely is.

Morag:

All right. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today.

Buttons:

Thank you. When I started my permaculture journey, I definitely watched quite a few of your videos. So it’s really nice to meet you. Thank you.

Morag:

Thanks Buttons.