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STONINGTON — Farmer Chris Pacheco prides himself on growing food and feeding people, but at his farm there are no green fields or hoop houses cultivated with rows of vegetables.
Instead, his growhouses are climate-controlled, commercial shipping containers where he produces about 1,000 pounds of mushrooms per week that are sold across the state at farmers markets and restaurants.
On Monday, Pacheco, owner of Seacoast Mushrooms, emphasized that indoor growing, especially for mushrooms, requires high amounts of energy to control the temperature and humidity.
“When mushrooms grow, it’s an exothermic process. They give up a lot of heat. So one of our biggest challenges is actually using electricity for cooling,” he said. “[In the summer], it’s about $4,000 a month.”
Pacheco, who recently built a 12,000-square-foot warehouse for processing and growing mushroom substrate, said high energy costs can put mushroom farmers out of business.
But going forward, Pacheco will have a solution. He was recently awarded a $280,000 federal grant from the Rural Energy for America Program, known as REAP, to install a 199.6 kilowatt solar system. The total project cost is about $600,000 and the system is estimated to produce 248,000 kilowatts annually.
Joining Pacheco on Monday for a tour of the facilities and to announce the grant award were Rep. Joe Courtney, and Under Secretary for Rural Development Dr. Basil Gooden, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The grant will be awarded once the system is up and running for 30 days, which means the farmer must pay for the entire project upfront. Pacheco said finding a lending institution that is structured for a reimbursement grant is one of the “challenges and opportunities” of making the award work.
The grant is made possible by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which increased the REAP grant reimbursement from 25 percent to 50 percent as of March 31, 2023, according to Amanda Fargo-Johnson, agricultural programs director at Connecticut Resource Conservation & Development Area, Inc.
Once the system is installed, Pacheco said it will enable his farm to stay in production for the next couple of decades.
“We’re literally going to have essentially free energy. We’re not going to be inhibited by our ability to grow and expand and feed people because of energy costs,” he said.
Roots in farming
Pacheco grew up on an apple farm in Little Compton, Rhode Island. But after planting 2,000 apple trees when he was a teenager, he realized he was done with farming.
“In New England, all you do is dig rocks. There is no dirt, and I am not going to work in the soil. And so I finished that up, left, went to school at the University of Hampshire, got a degree in engineering and said I’m done with agriculture, I’m not farming anymore,” he said.
After college, he joined the U.S. Navy and was stationed on the USS Hartford submarine, which brought him to the Stonington area. After serving, Pacheco worked for Amgen, a biopharma company, for about 15 years.
But after living in Connecticut for 20 years, Pacheco said he knew very little about the community where he and his wife were raising their children.
“What better way to connect with the community and learn about where we are than through food,” he said. “And so I started to talk with my family back at the orchards … and we learned a little bit about mushrooms.”
In June 2015, Pacheco started Seacoast Mushrooms and quickly found that he had a lot to learn.
“Not only could people not pronounce our mushrooms, they had no idea how to cook with them. We were going with a different type of mushroom than folks would traditionally find in a grocery store,” Pacheco said. “So we said OK, time to shift the business plan to one of education and informing the community about the nutritional health benefits that mushrooms bring if they incorporated them into their diet.”
He started selling his products at the Stonington farmers market, but initially it was slow-going.
“At my first market, I couldn’t sell two cases of mushrooms, not two cases,” he said. “But the thing is with the community, they kept coming back, asking how do we cook this? So we started teaching them more and more about how to cook.”
Pacheco also told customers to ask their favorite restaurants to carry his mushrooms. Chefs started calling, word spread and the business grew. In 2018, Pacheco left his corporate job to become a full-time farmer.
Science, technology, automation
Pacheco and his staff grow shitake, maitake, king oyster, blue oyster and lion’s mane mushrooms, among others.
He said the mushrooms grown in his facility were different from the white button mushrooms found in the grocery store, which are grown on manure-based substrates.
“[Ours are] the types of mushrooms you’d find naturally growing in the woods on the sides of hardwood trees that are decaying and dying,” he said. “So it’s a very different growing process. We use wood, but the wood is hard … so what we’re able to do is accelerate that process by using sawdust.”
Pacheco said he has created “the best substrate that we know the mushrooms will thrive on ”by mixing hardwood sawdust — a byproduct of the milling process at a sawmill — with nutrients and minerals and adding water.
The mixture is bagged by machine and placed in an autoclave, a high-pressure cooker used for sterilization, a process he called “cooking a batch.”
“We eliminate all the background bacteria and bioburden that might be present to create an environment where the mushrooms, once we introduce the spawn, can grow without any competition and thrive,” he said.
The automated bagging equipment, which can fill up the autoclave in about an hour and a half compared to eight to 10 people bagging for a few hours, represents the importance of automation in the future of farming, Pacheco said.
The autoclave has a vacuum cycle that removes air and allows heat penetration that achieves sterilization in about four hours, as opposed to a widely used steam method that takes 12 to 24 hours, he said.
“We can achieve the sterilization we need to kill the bioburden in just under a couple of hours. Again, [that] speaks to the conservation of the science associated with the process to use the right technology. You save energy and you achieve a more reliable and repeatable process,” he said.
After the substrate is cooked at about 220 degrees, it’s cooled down to about 80 degrees, after which the mycelium, which contains the spawn or seed, is added.
“Then we seal the bags and the mycelium begins to incubate. And while it’s incubating, it’s basically eating all the nutrients and minerals that are present in that wood based substrate,” he said.
During incubation, temperature and carbon dioxide levels are controlled to maintain a certain pH and eventually changed to conditions for the mycelium to put out a “fruit body” for dispersing spores, which are mushrooms.
In terms of production, Pacheco said he’s still discovering how much can be produced in the new facility, but energy would have been a limiting factor in the past.
He said going solar will be an economic game changer.
“Where we’re standing today one year ago was dirt. There was no building. None of this stuff was here. We started the road in January and we poured the concrete in mid April [2023],” Pacheco said. With all of the work and investment leading up to the present, he said, “the future is very bright, and with the help from rural development, I think it’s going to be even brighter.”