About Us

What drives us?

We at NCMMC have two main goals: create a stable reliable mushroom market in our region, and, help farmers make more money with less hassle. We are constantly thinking of new ideas to help broaden our market while keeping these two goals as the main focus.

During the last year we have established many customers, from grocery stores & high end restaurants, to local food cooperatives and mom and pop delis. This strategy has proven effective as it limits our risk by having complete coverage of local markets. Currently, we sell about 100 pounds weekly and we constantly need more growers to help us meet our ever growing demand.

We estimate that just in our local market of Asheville, NC there is a 500 pound weekly need for shiitake and only about 150 pounds are coming from local growers. This means that the remaining 350 pounds is most likely coming from PA and elsewhere which is counterproductive to a sustainable market. In addition, the shiitake from PA are generally of lesser quality and grown indoors on sawdust instead of our method of producing a superior shiitake on outdoor hardwood logs.

Our goal for 2009 is to produce approximately 300 pounds weekly for local markets.

People
In addition to the many growers already involved on a small scale the Co-op is governed by Rodney Webb, Glenn Esterson, David Kendall and Fred Treadway.

Rodney Webb, President

Rodney has been growing shiitake for almost 9 years; he has about 800 logs in addition to his organic food production. He and his family live off the grid on a beautiful piece of land in Shelton Laurel (Madison County).

Glenn Esterson, Secretary

Glenn has been growing shiitake for over 2 years; he has 2000 logs in addition to an organic fruit orchard. His passion is mycology and organic farming.   He holds a Bachelors degree in Business and Marketing. His farm is located on the NC/TN state line near Sam’s Gap and Wolf Laurel. (Madison County).

David Kendall

David has been growing mushroom for a few years now, he has approximately 400 logs. David is the tobacco replacement specialist at the County Extension. His farm is located near Max Patch (Madison County).

Fred Treadway

Fred has been growing mushrooms for 6 years, he has about 1500 logs. In addition to shiitake, he grows a wide array of other crops. His farm is located in Marshall (Madison County).

Company
The idea of our cooperative started about 2 years ago. After receiving numerous requests from other farmers to help with the marketing and sales we decided that it was time to form a non-competing cooperative to help everyone out. We realize that many growers already have a few customers that they want to retain for themselves and we respect that.

Our intention is to build a market that is similar to how the tobacco cooperative operated; a one-stop drop off where the farmer can just bring in the mushrooms and get paid for them, without having to spend a lot of time trying to sell the mushroom. We know that farmers are best at farming, and we want to encourage farmers to grow more, we will handle the business end.