Hyphae mushrooms - reducing plastic
Hyphae are a small, seasonal mushroom farm in West Wales that grow shiitakes on logs outside and oysters in reusable buckets with no energy-intensive temperature controls. The result is mushrooms with deep flavours that are a treat for chefs, and that model the very best of agroecology and zero waste mushroom farming in the UK.
Cultivators Emma Stevens and cee-cee Manrique shared their thoughts with us below:
All photos: Heather Birnie
Tell us, what are the best agroecological mushrooms for chefs to be celebrating on their menus today?
It’s really how mushrooms are grown rather than the specific species. It’s currently common practice to use carbon intensive practices like sterilising substrate, single-use plastic, and temperature control for a lot of the most popular mushrooms, like oysters and shiitakes.
The key is to look for seasonal, log-grown mushrooms and places that grow in reusable containers. You can apply agroecological practices to lots of species, but oysters are the easiest to grow in unheated conditions, so they’re a great place to start looking.
Why did you choose to grow mushrooms in buckets?
It's really clear that single-use plastic is a major issue in the industry. We don’t want to contribute to that waste-stream, essentially sending plastic to landfill. This is a well-known method of cultivating oyster mushrooms that we're gradually refining.
Shiitakes, we cultivate on locally and sustainably harvested logs outdoors, because this is the most agroecological method of producing them. They’ve been grown this way for centuries but today they’re typically grown from single-use plastic bags. That’s partly because logs in the UK only have one – sometimes two – fruiting seasons per year, but we think it's important to embrace the seasonal nature of mushroom farming. We’ve found that the chefs we’re lucky to work with love celebrating this seasonality by featuring our fresh shiitakes during their proper season. We also dry them, so they can be enjoyed outside of their fruiting season.
You could definitely scale one farm up in theory, but maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it: why couldn't we see a larger number of smaller farms all employing sustainable practices for their local market? Reduced food miles, increased employment opportunities, and more resilient local food systems are just some of the benefits of networks of smaller farms working directly with local independent chefs and shops. I'm sure bigger farms will always exist, but why is scaling up always what we look for? Maybe it's time to encourage and support a different model.
Do you think your low-impact cultivation methods could be scaled up to match conventional production?
So which mushroom would you like to see chefs using more often to help support agroecological mushroom farming in the UK?
The humble oyster mushroom! It can easily be grown sustainably year round, if you use different species of oyster and grow seasonally. Oysters are the easiest to grow in unheated conditions, with untreated substrate, so they are a great start. They can also be made into many amazing tasting things and are beautiful to look at!