“I started the farm in the closet in the basement in my house in Westhampton,” says founder Julia Coffey. Those first bags of sawdust substrate, prepared eight at a time in a single pressure cooker, sold so fast that two weeks later she doubled capacity, and soon ten countertop cookers were running day and night. Output reached 500 to 600 pounds a month, fruited in two backyard greenhouses and sold at one or two local farmers markets.

The markets became her classroom. Coffey recalls “fifteen-minute conversations” just convincing shoppers that lion’s mane was edible. Those conversations built a brand before the packaging did. Once she could no longer stand behind every stall, “the label had to do the talking.” A Community Involved in Sustainable Agriculture (CISA)-funded brand-development grant paired her with a local designer: “Aesthetic is not my strongest skill set, but I know it’s important. We went for a clean look with a subtle spore-print border, most people don’t even notice it’s spores.”

Lion’s mane mushrooms at Mycoterra Farm. Photo: Gabriella Soto-Velez

The name Mycoterra nods to her soil-science roots; growing mushrooms, she likes to say, is “feeding my soil-building aspirations.”

By 2016, Coffey had outgrown the basement and bought a vacant equestrian center whose riding arena perfectly fit a 33-foot autoclave she’d just purchased for $12,000, sight-unseen. Today hardwood sawdust, wheat bran (for shiitake) or soy hulls (for oysters and lion’s mane) are mixed, bagged, sterilized four hours at 20 psi, and inoculated in a purpose-built lab; surplus blocks are sold to other farms because, she says, “sterilization is the bottleneck, [and] our autoclave lets us do more than we need.”

Networking rather than cold-calling landed grocery accounts. Through the local-food nonprofit CISA, Coffey met Big Y (a popular Northeastern grocery store chain) executives at a press event: “They said, ‘We’d love to have you in our stores.’ I wasn’t ready yet, but I kept the relationship alive.” When production caught up, Mycoterra entered 52 Big Y produce departments. Lion’s mane, once a hard sell, is now a top product without in-store hand-selling.

The COVID-19 pandemic closed the farmers markets that once generated 80% of revenue, so Coffey launched Mass Food Delivery, aggregating her mushrooms and neighboring farms’ goods for home delivery across Massachusetts. When normal outlets reopened, she exited the service, having shifted to roughly 80% wholesale via regional distributors and co-ops, plus a single Somerville farmers market and a self-service roadside farm stand she named “Spore.”

Nothing goes to waste at Mycoterra. Spent substrate blocks become high-carbon compost. Since opening, she has sequestered more than 90 tons of carbon on just over half an acre, and soil organic matter levels have reached 10 to 12%, fueling a no-till market garden where veggies and birds alike flourish.

From closet to regional supplier, Mycoterra’s trajectory shows how disciplined growth, strong branding, and a closed nutrient loop can turn a basement hobby into a resilient, soil-nurturing enterprise.

This blog is produced by the National Center for Appropriate Technology through the ATTRA Sustainable Agriculture program, under a cooperative agreement with USDA Rural Development. ATTRA.NCAT.ORG.