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Mycologist Phillip Allred holds a Mother of Pearl fungi at his Hereford home Tuesday.
The gills of a Mother of Pearl Oyster mushroom.
Phillip Allred holds a batch of medicinal mushrooms.
Mushroom grower Phillip Allred in his fruiting room.
Allred has a truck bed full of mycelium which was used as the root structure to help mushrooms grow. He will be giving the used remnants to fellow gardeners to use as compost.
Phillip Allred uses a portion of his home office as a lab colonization area for the mushrooms he cultivates.
Mycologist Phillip Allred holds a Mother of Pearl fungi at his Hereford home Tuesday.
The gills of a Mother of Pearl Oyster mushroom.
Phillip Allred holds a batch of medicinal mushrooms.
Mushroom grower Phillip Allred in his fruiting room.
Allred has a truck bed full of mycelium which was used as the root structure to help mushrooms grow. He will be giving the used remnants to fellow gardeners to use as compost.
Phillip Allred uses a portion of his home office as a lab colonization area for the mushrooms he cultivates.
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HEREFORD — Deep in the dusty backroads of Hereford, there’s a fungus among us.
Way beyond where Sunnyvale Road butts into East Calle Coyote, inside a section of a converted three-car garage, is a wild assortment of the most astonishing-looking mushrooms, some the size of elephant ears, others blue, pearl-colored and pink. It is the compound of a flourishing mushroom farming operation run by the one-and-only Allred Family Fungi.
And with Phillip Allred, a Fry Fire District engineer/paramedic, probing, planting and procuring various mushroom cultures to grow, the guy from a small town in western North Carolina has turned a little hobby farm into a working business on the cusp of mushrooming into a bigger one.
“My wife may or may not have told me to try a new hobby, but hey, I’m a dreamer,” said Allred, who began experimenting with growing mushrooms 3½ years ago when he heard about their health benefits but couldn’t find them in local stores.
But Allred’s dreams — unlike yours or mine — aren’t the stuff of an idle dreamer.
He was driven by the bewitching call of mushrooms.
With no knowledge of growing mushrooms or what mushroom farming entailed, the guy from Swannanoa, North Carolina — once America’s largest blanket manufacturer — jumped into the world of gourmet mushroom farming hook, line and sinker.
And boy, did he go hog wild.
“I have always liked growing plants, specifically peppers,” said Allred, who has been with the fire district for 15 years. “I thought learning to grow mushrooms would be fun to learn.”
Allred’s “fun” was so beguiling it not only captivated his entire family, including his wife Jenn, 13-year-old daughter Taegan and 9-year-old son Colton, it eventually swallowed up 100 square feet of his garage.
But small-scale mushroom farming, as Allred quickly learned, was a bit more than just dropping seeds in the ground or growing pepper plants in neat, little rows.
He had an entire new world to learn about, from understanding sterile technique to limiting loss to contamination; he also had to learn how to work with agar, liquid culture, sterile grain, mixing and hydrating substrate and obtaining different mushroom cultures to grow. He began reading and watching more YouTube videos than he cares to admit.
“I purchased some very basic equipment to get started and started to practice,” he said. “I think the fascinating part of growing mushrooms is how rapidly they grow. Once they begin to fruit you can see them grow from one day to the next. They almost double in size daily.”
After a year of a lot of trial and error, Allred soon got the hang of growing mushrooms and was off to the races.
“There is something about mushrooms that gets a hold of you once you gain an appreciation for them, and I just couldn’t stop trying,” he recalled. “I still remember the excitement of my first crop. The rest is history, I guess.”
Allred is not alone when it comes to getting hooked growing gourmet mushrooms. Mushroom farming is one of the most rapidly-growing farming businesses in America, according to Small Business Trends, an online publication for small business owners and entrepreneurs, with a predicted growth rate of 10% over the next five years. In 2020, the mushroom farm industry was valued at about $46 billion with a compound annual growth rate projected at 9.5% for the next seven years.
Allred initially started growing in a small greenhouse tent, learning to control all the environmental factors, including temperature, oxygen and humidity.
“I was growing about two pounds a week at this point,” he said. “I was and still am obsessed with them, and I wanted to grow more so I purchased a larger tent that was about eight square feet. I was able to grow about 10 pounds a week in this setup and started to have more than I could personally eat so I started selling them to people at work and on Sierra Vista Sells (an online site). At this time, I didn’t grow enough to sell at a (farmer’s) market. It was going pretty well, and I knew I wanted to go bigger.”
That’s when everything changed, including the family garage.
“I initially told my wife I wanted to build an entire building dedicated to mushrooms,” Allred recalled. “She looked at me like I was a crazy person. I think she even said I was out of my mind. We came to a compromise of me building a fruiting room in the garage, and we moved all we had out of the one-car garage portion of our garage.”
That gave him about 100 square feet to utilize; with the help of a friend, he built shelves and added fans, a humidifier and exhaust fans in about a week. With a new room and a lot of space, he started to fill it with mushroom blocks.
“Once it was finished, my wife was still skeptical and said she didn’t think people would like mushrooms as much as I did,” he said.
Fortunately, she was dead wrong.
He now had more than enough to sell and began going to farmers markets in Sierra Vista and Bisbee. At first business was slow, but soon repeat customers kept returning. Lines at his booths are still lengthy — partially due to curiosity of the strange-looking specimens and that Allred only brings fresh mushrooms, no more than 48 hours from harvest.
“I think that’s why people are excited about them,” he said. “As for the long lines, I think that’s more of me liking to talk, telling people about mushrooms and the wonderful benefits. The people I live and work with have heard it a thousand times.”
Word about Allred’s gourmet mushrooms has extended well past farmers markets. He’s now growing 80 pounds — more than four times the amount when he first started — and selling them to several restaurants including Pronghorn Pizza in Sonoita, Bisbee’s Cafe Roka, The Outside Inn in Sierra Vista and Tirrito Farm in Willcox.
“I’m incredibly honored to have our mushrooms prepared by such wonderful chefs,” he said.
The Allred Family Fungi is just a small part of a huge global market valued at $50.3 billion in 2021 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 9.7% from 2022 to 2030, according to Grand View Research, a U.S. based market research and consulting company. The increasing vegan population demanding a protein-rich diet is expected to be a key driver for the market over the forecast period. Mushrooms are considered a superfood owing to their nutritional contents.
Healthwise, Allred is spot-on. Mushrooms are packed with four key nutrients – selenium, vitamin D, glutathione and ergothioneine, which help mitigate oxidative stress and prevent or decrease the risk of chronic conditions such as cancer, heart disease and dementia.
Since he started, he’s grown 30 different strains of oyster mushrooms (he now primarily sticks to four or five varieties) from king blue and white oyster to black pearl king, chestnut and Pioppino mushrooms, eventually naming a wild strain he found in northern Arizona after his daughter and two of her friends.
For the Allred Family Fungi, growing mushrooms is one heck of a process. Starting with raw ingredients like oats, oak and soybean hulls — along with high quality cultures — Allred begins by cooking and sterilizing grain which is inoculated with culture, either in liquid form or from agar (a petri dish). Once colonized, he mixes and hydrates the oak and soybean hulls and then sterilizes them. When cooled, the bags are inoculated with sterile grain spawn. After about two weeks, the bags are fully colonized and depending on the strain, they are ready to initiate fruiting.
“Some stains take months before they are ready for fruiting,” he explained. “Oysters and lion’s mane (mushrooms) take about 12-14 days. To initiate fruiting, you have to mimic the conditions they need in nature, like temperature, humidity, oxygen and light cycles.”
Once they form primordial fruiting bodies or pins, they’re ready in five to seven days, depending on the temperature.
“You can almost see them grow from hour to hour,” he said. “I’ve gotten better at anticipating when they will be ready. They will go from just right to overgrown in a matter of hours.”
He always tries to harvest them before they begin to drop spores so they’ll have a longer shelf life.
For someone who knew absolutely nothing about growing a mushroom, Allred knows every stage of their development, from start to finish.
But the “dreamer” from rural North Carolina still has a pocketful of dreams with his gourmet mushrooms.
He’s now producing not just mushroom jerky, but mushroom-infused hot sauces as well.
“The jerky came about as a way to use what I didn’t sell, which in the beginning was quite a bit,” he said. “I learned about the process of preparing the mushrooms and worked on a recipe I liked, Asian-inspired.”
Using high-quality ingredients, Allred’s jerky is vegan and gluten-free.
“It’s a fun way to eat mushrooms on the go, and it’s a great way for people who don’t like mushrooms to enjoy them,” he said. “I’ve actually had someone say they don’t like mushrooms but were brave enough to try them and ended up buying a bag. I can’t leave it around at work — it disappears. I hope to one day produce more of it and get it into some stores.”
One of Allred’s friends, Bronson Lacaillade, has a knack for making great hot sauces, and they are talking about combining medicinal mushrooms into the sauce.
“We want to make food that makes you feel as good as it tastes,” Allred said. “He was the brainchild behind the sauce, and I grew the mushrooms to put in it. Though it’s in the early stages, the sauce came out great and I think it will be a big hit. We actually formed a small sister company for the hot sauces.”
Plans are in the works for other products, including BBQ sauce, dried mushroom seasoning and locally-grown dried mushrooms.
As for the future of Allred Family Fungi, Allred plans to keep working on expanding responsibly, building an online presence, and would love to see some of their products in stores.
“My dream is to one day create something in which my kids would want to help with and be a larger part in the day-to-day operations,” Allred said. “My son has Down’s syndrome, and I think it would be great to have him working at a family-owned business.
“But hey, I’m a dreamer, right?”
Phillip Allred of Allred Family Fungi has grown 30 different strains of oyster mushroom, but he now sticks to four or five varieties. The following strains are the ones he is growing.
Chestnut mushrooms, which look like thick sesame seed buns. “They have a great earthy mushroom flavor and are great with stir-fry, pasta dishes and are baked into artisan breads by a baker who sells bread at the Sierra Vista and Bisbee farmer’s market,” he said,
Pioppino mushrooms, which Allred said is probably his favorite to eat. “They have an amazing, crunchy texture and taste and have this wonderfully nutty and buttery flavor. I often encourage people to not use butter when they cook them so they can appreciate the buttery flavor.”
Several strains of Lion’s Mane, which Allred said are becoming very popular. “Lion's Mane in some studies has shown the ability to delay the onset of dementia, improve memory and help repair the myelin sheath on nerves,” he said. “Lion's Mane tastes great too; they have a texture similar to crab meat and can be shredded like chicken or pulled pork. One of the varieties of Lion's Mane we grow is a strain which was found in Miller Canyon that has this beautiful pink color when it grows out and is always light and fluffy.”
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