The farm, and the local food it feeds.

Why a mushroom farm, in Colorado

Mushroom growing is one of the few kinds of agriculture that does not care about Colorado’s climate. There is no frost window, no hail risk, no irrigation allocation and no short season. We build the weather inside a room — which is why the harvest board looks the same in February as it does in July, and why a mushroom farm is one of very few local producers with something to sell in midwinter.

What the climate does change is humidity. Ambient air here is dry enough that every fruiting room needs active humidification, where a farm in the southeast would need the opposite. That is our largest running cost and our biggest single environmental input, and it is worth saying plainly rather than putting a leaf logo on the page.

What the farm is set up to do

Two harvests a week — Tuesday and Friday, cut from five in the morning — and same-day delivery across a sixty-mile radius that happens to contain about four million people. Everything about how we sell follows from those two facts: the Monday order cutoff, the set delivery days, the market stall on Saturday, and the fact that two-day species exist here at all when no supermarket in the country can carry them.

The whole business is a bet that a mushroom cut six hours ago is a different ingredient from one cut last Thursday — and that enough cooks within an hour’s drive will taste the difference to make it work.

The eight pages

Below is the full cluster. If you only read two, read why local beats distributor-fresh for the argument with numbers in it, and a week on the farm for why the ordering rhythm is the way it is.