Standing in a cold, unassuming warehouse off Gaumer Lane in Alamosa County, Matias Francisco holds out a handful of soy pellets and a handful of wood pellets. He’s smiling. These little pieces of material are the food and energy for a hidden form of life: mycelium.
The warehouse is bare but insulated on the inside. There are machines wrapped in plastic and some still in their wooden boxes. A hopper is leaned over, already constructed, waiting. Francisco pulls up a hand-drawn blueprint on his phone showing where growing tents will be set up, where the humidifier will sit, and where six or seven – and one day perhaps many more – species of mushrooms will be produced.
“There’s a science,” he said. He spends a lot of his time lately researching the best environments to grow organic mushrooms and how to curate an environment that will lead to success.
“It started out really small with an idea….” he said. “We’re learning as we’re going along and learning the ins and outs of the trade. Our goal is to master it and get really good at it.”
Francisco started his career as a coordinator. Working as a migrant coordinator at Adams State University, he eventually found himself working with employees of the mushroom farm. After the farm closed, he ended up being “the mushroom guy” because he knew that there could be solutions through conversations.
Conversations are how this new project got off the ground. This organic mushroom project is more than just creating a new avenue for culinary, beneficial, and most of all, delicious mushrooms. It’s a connection to the community of mushroom growers. People, Francisco says, who are very tuned into the mushroom. The seven families creating this new organic fungus cooperative come from various parts of Mexico and Guatemala.
Mushrooms and their interactions with the people of regions in southern Mexico and many regions in Guatemala can be linked back thousands of years.
As people from these regions made their way to the San Luis Valley, which once had one of the largest mushroom operations in the United States, mushroom cultivation was familiar.
At the now-defunct Colorado Mushroom Farm, only three types were grown: portobellos, crimini, and button. They were sold around the state and across the country. When the only mushroom producing plant for hundreds of miles suddenly and quietly closed in September 2022, it left people with a special and unique set of skills and knowledge with hardly any recourse, and certainly without income.
The Sand Dunes Mushroom Cooperative is the answer that came out of the closure of the Colorado Mushroom Farm. That closure was the result of environmental concerns, bankruptcy, and unpaid wages and injuries.
Some 300 families were displaced. A majority, if not all, of the workers at the farm were migrants or were from families of migrants. Many of those people had worked for owner Baljit Nanda for the better part of 30 years. Entire generations worked in the blue-and-white-striped building just northeast of Alamosa.
Now the 10-acre plot of land sits cold and empty, waiting for the completion of bankruptcy court and environmental remediation.
In that midst of insecurity and a total loss of their current way of life, seven families came together and said they could do something with mushrooms that was totally different, completely unique.
Francisco said it was the good result of a bad thing.
The co-op was officially formed on Nov. 28, 2023. It took a year’s worth of work for that alone to happen. There’s a lot of work left to be done, but Francisco says everyone is happy, excited and eager.
On top of learning the business side of cooperative farming, the seven families have been traveling to Bennet and Grand Lake, Colorado, to learn organic cultivation techniques from Sugar Moon Mushrooms and Mystic Mountain Mushrooms.
It started with a survey and a feasibility study. Francisco said the survey took a lot of time, a lot of translation, and a lot of house visits to complete. The survey was to get a sense of what the people wanted to do. Many of them wanted to form a co-op to purchase the old mushroom farm and revitalize it. So the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center came in and conducted a feasibility study to determine if that, in fact, could get done.
“Our program started out as a kind of a hope based off of a migrant coalition meeting we went to. In that coalition, hope was inspired,” Francisco said in an earlier interview.
“They’re more unique, they’re not just regular organic mushrooms. Because these mushrooms will be cultivated with love from the people that are wanting to try to tell a story.”
Matias Francisco
Through the surveys and study, he said, they were able to make “good, conscious decisions” for figuring out how to get families back on their feet and “to figure out different ways, different avenues on how to grow organic, speciality mushrooms.”
The goal is to serve anything from big shipments to local food hubs. Francisco told The Citizen that a happenstance meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Del Norte resulted in a conversation about how the chefs can get their hands on mushrooms for their menu.
“We’ve come far with this idea. I think the families are excited and we’re learning as we’re going,” he said.
Once they have the operational warehouse, employees are trained, and practices are filed down to the careful science required for fungus cultivation, Francisco says they plan on starting with six to eight species. They’ll start with Chestnuts, Lion’s Mane, King’s Trumpet, Blue Oyster, and a few other unique speciality species. “They’re more unique, they’re not just regular organic mushrooms. Because these mushrooms will be cultivated with love from the people that are wanting to try to tell a story.”
After they fine tune the processes for that, he plans on learning as a group how to farm other mushrooms. What’s more exciting for him, though, he said, was the concept of creating a unique species of mushroom through a liquid culture process.
Alece Montez, co-executive director of the AJL Foundation, a company that’s helping co-op members develop their business, said that because of the love the mushrooms are being cultivated in, it creates an environment that caters to “quality over quantity.”
The timeframe to start full operations is sometime in late spring or early summer of 2024. There is still an overhead capital that is needed to ensure things can operate for some time.
“Finding the funding that will give them the freedom and space to explore and pioneer together and innovate together is really critical without them having to take out loans to do that. It’s really critical that the co-op gets more grants and donations,” Montez said.
She said they are looking at a capital fundraising effort to reach a goal of $1.5 million. Currently, they have earmarked funds that are helping workers to get paid while they train and to set up the operation.
The cooperative, she noted, doesn’t need a space the size of the former mushroom farm. She said the new operation, even as it sits in the final stages of nearing completion, is “much more sustainable. It’s cleaner for the environment and less water intensive.”
Is there pushback from Nanda and the representatives from Rakhra Mushroom Farm?
Montez said there hasn’t been any direct pushback, but she said there is a “sense that somehow this is competitive. If Rakhra opened again they’re gonna be growing such different mushrooms than what the co-op is growing. And the co-op is going about it in a way that the labor … It’s just going to be a physically safer place to be working. Also I think it’s just a more belonging place because it is a co-op.”
Helping hands, voices in direction of the company, collectively working toward improvements and sharing profits are what set the Sand Dunes Mushroom Cooperative apart from the old mushroom farm. “They are all a part of that conversation,” Montez said.
Francisco said that this journey has been all about growth: growth of people and growth of mushrooms.
“This is more than a human effort,” Montez said. “This group is doing a lot to stay together, to work together. It’s a human effort, and I think when you have a lot of families and people together trying to innovate on top of already facing so many barriers that it can be even more difficult when other members of the community have negative things to say…. I think people, naturally it’s very human, to fill in the blanks with stuff that isn’t true or with assumptions.”
Montez said her hope is that the community will see that this is “an effort that will succeed. This is an effort that is meant to bring in more people and to really look out for everyone in the community. This isn’t just a few people trying to do right by their own families. They’re trying to figure this out so that they can make it possible for others to benefit.”
“We got this,” Francisco said.