Wisconsin Life

[playful, punchy synthesizer] - Mary Ellen Kozak: Rot and decay are such negative words in our environment.

They're just a crucial part of our life here on this planet.

– Joe Krawczyk: This is a mushroom, like I said, very, very much in demand.

Without fungi, we would have no decay.

Without decay, we'd be swimming in wood.

– Mary Ellen: Our tagline of our company has always been "Proud to be part of this rotting world," because we're just proud to represent that.

The maitake is something that we find outdoors in the wild.

My name is Mary Ellen Kozak, and I am co-owner of "Field & Forest Products," along with my partner and husband, Joseph.

Joe and I both got interested in mushrooms probably from the very beginning.

Both of us have Polish backgrounds, and there's a lot of interest in foraging.

Fungi is a big thing in that population.

– Joe Krawczyk: As a kid, I hated mushrooms.

My grandfather taught my dad what mushrooms to pick.

– Mary Ellen: I think that I learned a lot in my very early years about foraging and food preparation through the family.

Joe and I met in a mycology class.

We both were students in the UW System.

He was mostly interested in effects of fungi in plants, and I was mostly interested in eating fungi.

– Joe: And also, just eat right out of the pan.

- That's pretty much as far as they go.

- Yeah.

[both laughing] - Joe: I was working for the Department of Natural Resources in Madison.

The paper came across my desk on... shiitake cultivation on natural logs, a potential new industry for the US.

I said, "Mary Ellen, we have access to the wood "and the resources.

Why don't we look into this?"

– Mary Ellen: So, we decided that we wanted to pursue the idea of having a small business.

We moved ourselves up to Peshtigo, Wisconsin, where we are now.

We established our business on the family farm.

– Joe: 42-some years later, still doing what we set out to do back in the '80s, and we love it even more now than we did then.

[bright music] - Mary Ellen: Yeah, in 2017, we discovered that the farm just could not host the growth that we were experiencing.

– Joe: It was a big challenge because we scaled up.

[bright music] What we do here is we maintain a culture bank of different fungi that we're currently producing.

The process starts in our general lab, where we take a parent culture and expand it into another media, to increase the amount of mycelium we're producing.

[machine beeping] While that's growing, we take the raw materials which are needed for growing a specific culture.

– Mary Ellen: Most of the fungi that we grow here are wood decay fungi, so they're growing on recently dead material.

– Joe: Once things are sterilized, they go into our clean room, where we have technicians open the bags up, inoculate them, seal 'em, and then they go into incubation.

– Employee: This cart is good to go, fully colonized, and ready to be moved out to the shipping area.

– Joe: Given time, we reach that perfect stage of rot, which will then be used by the grower to expand into their substrate.

– Mary Ellen: So, for us to understand decay and not be afraid of it, and to be able to use it in a certain way to grow a food crop, is a really cool thing for us.

– Joe: We're picking everything today.

– Mary Ellen: Okay, well, do a good job, Joe.

– Joe: We just love mushroom cultivation.

[Mary Ellen laughs] It's a passion for us.