Farm’s success mushrooms in S.K.

GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: Bob DiPietro, founder and co-owner of the RI Mushroom Co., shows off a bag of Golden Oyster mushrooms. In the background, farm worker Colton Mackenzie unloads a shipment of mushrooms into the company’s cooler. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: Bob DiPietro, founder and co-owner of the RI Mushroom Co., shows off a bag of Golden Oyster mushrooms. In the background, farm worker Colton Mackenzie unloads a shipment of mushrooms into the company’s cooler. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

It’s mushroom season in South County. Not wild mushrooms, which in New England emerge when the weather chills in autumn, but the cultivated oysters, shitakes, maitakes and pioppinos springing from the greenhouses of RI Mushroom Co. LLC in South Kingstown.
Just 18 months old, RI Mushroom has doubled its output since the start of this year and, thanks to a state grant and the rapid growth cycle of fungus, expects to double that production again before the end of the year.
“More mushrooms,” said owner Robert DiPietro about the company’s strategy for future growth. “We picked a warehouse with plenty of room to expand. By the beginning of next year we should be up to 5,000 pounds per week, up from 1,000 pounds per week at the start of this year.”
One of 17 recipients of a state Local Agriculture and Seafood Act grant in that program’s inaugural season, RI Mushroom is part of the burgeoning farm sector selling a premium product to the local market.
The company now sells at 17 Rhode Island farmer’s markets as well as specialty stores in South Kingstown, Providence; Cambridge, Mass.; and Boston.
DiPietro didn’t always want to be a mushroom grower.
He comes to the industry from the culinary world, where he worked as a consultant and manager, including 10 years at the White Horse Tavern in Newport, before developing an interest in amateur mycology, the study of spores and fungus.
An acquaintance who had moved to Rhode Island from mushroom-rich Oregon first introduced him to how the organisms are cultivated and he took to it quickly.
DiPietro’s first growing space was tiny, an 8-foot by 8-foot room in the basement of Sweet Berry Farm in Middletown, which let him test out his skills two years ago.
The product DiPietro produced proved so popular at Sweet Berry’s farm store that he soon decided to go commercial.
After the friend from Oregon bowed out of a planned mushroom farm, DiPietro joined forces with Michael Hallock, a local musician he met at a farmer’s market who had also developed an interest in growing edible mushrooms. The company moved into a warehouse across the street from the Kingston Amtrak station after incorporating in January 2013 and began selling product last April.
To protect the crop from the large temperature swings of the Northeast, RI Mushroom’s operation is all indoors, with humidifiers, a 5-ton heat pump and computer climate-control system DiPietro can adjust from his mobile phone.
The system allows RI Mushroom to produce even through the cold New England winter.
“In the Northeast farming mushrooms is still relatively rare,” DiPietro said. “There was another farm in Rhode Island that had been doing it but stopped and there is one small farm in Little Compton, but no one on a large scale.”
RI Mushroom grows seven varieties of cultivated mushrooms at its Kingston farm: blue oysters, golden oysters, shiitakes, criminis, portabellas, maitakes and pioppinos.
In addition to the mushrooms it grows, RI Mushroom also sells wild mushrooms, mostly foraged in Europe and the Pacific Northwest, when they are in season.
Although RI Mushroom is most visible at farmer’s markets, roughly 85 percent of the company’s sales are to restaurants in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
With the $10,000 state grant awarded in April, RI Mushroom plans to build a second grow house identical to the 16-by-50-foot one in operation, doubling the company’s output.
With increased production, RI Mushroom is also using unsold mushrooms in a new line of tomato and mushroom pasta sauce.
Although Rhode Island may not have a naturally advantageous climate for wild mushrooms, being down the street from the University of Rhode Island with its agriculture expertise has its advantages.
One thing they learned at the farm was that mushrooms often don’t get along, after a colony of maitakes and golden oysters had a particularly bad reaction to each other.
“They are dealing with a fungus on a molecular level and didn’t know that some mushrooms don’t play well with others,” DiPietro said. •

COMPANY PROFILE
RI Mushroom Co. LLC
OWNERS: Robert DiPietro and Michael Hallock
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Mushroom farm
LOCATION: 141 Fairgrounds Road, South Kingstown
EMPLOYEES: Eight
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 2013
ANNUAL SALES: NA

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