Meet Ryan Hollums

We recently connected with Ryan Hollums and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ryan, thank you for joining us today and sharing your experiences and acquired wisdom with us. Burnout is a huge topic these days and so we’d love to kick things off by discussing your thoughts on overcoming or avoiding burnout

The burn out rate of people in my industry is pretty high. Mushroom farming is a career path that many start on, but most only make it a couple or few years before deciding to abandon the dream of cultivating fungi for a living. It’s a job that is incredibly demanding, and in most people’s situations it takes at least a few years of working 365 days to really get things rolling. Mushrooms aren’t like vegetables. They grow very fast, and once you start the cycle of cultivating them on a regular basis they just don’t stop coming. There is a very short harvest window for most varieties, and at the very least it requires plucking them from their substrate twice a day with no compromises.

Harvesting mushrooms is not the only part of the equation that demands a commitment though. To maintain a perpetual harvest, one also has to be consistently producing “blocks,” or the substrate which they grow from. And… if harvesting and producing blocks isn’t enough to keep you busy, the seed or “spawn” as we call it, must also be produced on a regular schedule to inoculate the substrate blocks with. Then we can add in another cycle to maintain in cultivating mushroom mycelium on petri dishes to make fresh spawn every week. Then if that isn’t enough work to keep your cup full, don’t forget there’s a business side of all of this to be managed too! These mushrooms have a very short shelf life and need to get into people’s bellies within a week or two of harvesting them… and the more of them that you grow, the more of them you have to sell… and fast. That means going to farmer’s markets, delivering to restaurants, partnering with other farmers CSA programs, coordinating with distributors, and so on.

So how does someone overcome a burnout in a career that is so demanding… That’s a real thinker… but the first thing that comes to my mind would be support. I’m fortunate to have a great partner in my business. We’ve been close friends for almost 15 years and work side by side every single day. He fills a lot of the gaps where I fall short, and vice versa. Without him, I really think I would have burned out by now, in fact we can just mark that as a for sure! Beside my partner at the farm, I have a very supportive partner at home who also helps keep me from drowning. She has always been by my side in a supportive role because she believes in me and what I’m doing. She not only helps me at work, but is the one who keeps our life at home on track. Which I think is just as important as the help she provides for our business. As much as we would like to think we are ever capable and have the potential to be able to do all the things, there’s just no way one person can build something so big all on their own. It takes so much cooperation, compassion, leadership, delegation, and energy to do something great. All these things require a team, working together to achieve a common goal.

After taking account of the importance of support, my mind turns to the passion side of the equation. When you love something, truly love it, as a calling or whatever you want to call it, your heart is really in it. And that’s a humongous part of this for me. I have been cultivating mushrooms for 13 years at this point in my life, and have been doing it as a full time job for 11 consecutive years now. I find it incredibly engaging because there is always something new to learn, a new obstacle to overcome, or a new challenging mushroom to pursue. I’ve always been a big fan of science, nature and art… and what I do is a perfect blend of all of those things. I couldn’t think of a more “me” thing for me to do than grow mushrooms… and as I have continued down the path I’m on, I’m always discovering more about myself through doing it. I think a big part of avoiding a burn out has been this drive that I have to be better than I was last week, last month or last year, and also having this sense of curiosity about the whole thing. Like where does this go? How much further can we push it? Tune in tomorrow to find out!

The last aspect I can think of that has helped me avoid a burn out has to do with my mindset. A friend of mine once told me that he believed the universe conspires in our favor, and we only get in the way of ourselves from letting all the things we want in life to come to us. That idea really infected my brain and how I think. We all want to be more successful, and maintaining a positive flow of energy is so important to achieving our goals. So I try to not focus on the negative things when they inevitably arise. Our minds are like a treadmill, revolving very similar thought patterns and processes day in and day out. Its easy to get caught up in a negative feedback loop when things aren’t going well or as planned. This happens to everyone. But if we set a goal of how we want to think and be, and really work at it, I think it’s a very achievable goal to maintain a positive outlook and attitude. I’m a big believer in the idea that the energy we put out into the world comes back to us… call it karma, Newton’s Law of Reciprocity, or whatever lingo fits your world view. By feeding a positive thoughts and energy into a system we can create a positive feedback loop rather than a negative one.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I like to consider myself a mycopreneur — an entrepreneur working in the field of mycology. Most people would look at me and what I do and just call me a mushroom farmer, but I place an equal amount of value in the business side of what I do as I do the mycology side of what I do. To me they are like a yin and yang, because without one the other would not exist — and there’s a little bit of each inside the other!

I came into this career path in a pretty traditional way. It first started as a hobby, fueled by curiosity and a desire to eat mushrooms that I couldn’t find very easily. Venturing into the field of mycology as an amateur is so fascinating. There’s all this mystery and discovery to unfold, and up until recently, there hasn’t been a whole of information to guide. When I started growing mushrooms we were in the “dark ages” — you had to just figure a lot of stuff out on your own. There were a couple books put out by Paul Stamets and Jeff Chilton, a video called “Let’s Grow Mushrooms” by Marc Keith, and a couple internet forums where people discussed mushroom cultivation. And that was pretty much it. Now days we have podcasts, social media groups, YouTube channels, Patreon subscriptions, mushroom cultivation workshops, consultations, and more. So information is much more accessible and this has really sped up the process of learning.

We’re in a very interesting time for mushroom cultivation right now and not only in America, but all over the world. Currently the industry is kind of at the place craft brewing was at in the 1970’s, where beer enthusiasts started popping up these microbreweries and little shops selling gear, different kinds of hops and malts and stuff. Back then and still today there’s this sense of rebelling against “big beer,” which is just kind of plain and watery in comparison to all the wild IPAs, saisons, sours and what not the smaller breweries put out. Mushroom farming is in a total parallel with this example. Here in the United States, mushroom farming has historically been pretty centralized to this one region of Pennsylvania where the majority of all the button mushrooms (agaricus bisporus) have been cultivated. These are your portobellos, creminis, or button mushrooms. They are like the “big beer” of the mushroom world, having very little flavor and not offering much to get excited about. These mushrooms are slightly different in their culinary uses, but its kind of funny because they are actually all the exact same mushroom, just harvested at different points of it’s growing cycle. They’ve just been marketed as 3 separate mushrooms by “big mushroom” to expand their sales avenues and be able to turn a trick for a greater profit.

Like craft brewing, mushroom farming has become this sort of decentralized thing because these big mushroom businesses can’t seem to work around the problem that more exotic mushrooms create. They have a much, much shorter shelf life than agaricus mushrooms and can’t really be distributed from one central location all over the country. So what we have is an increasing amount of small mushroom farms popping up all over the place where they can service their local community, neighboring counties and some even building up to the statewide or regional levels of distribution. Its a really exciting time to be in the industry, and we’re all just hoping that we’re able to hang in here and keep doing what we’re doing. Over the last 5 years or so there’s been a major influx of small mushroom farms, and I think we owe a lot of that to covid. People weren’t at their regular jobs as much and had more free time, browsing for things to do to fill their time, or diving into curiosities they didn’t previously have the time for. At about the same time a handful of content creators on YouTube started publishing videos showing that you could make $30-50,000 a year growing mushrooms in a tent in your basement or garage, and a lot of people bought into the dream of having their own little mushroom farm. This increasing number of mushroom farms has created quite a bit of competition in the industry. If you go back to 2019, you could be running a small mushroom farm and have literally no competition in your area. So selling your mushrooms was not much of a problem. All you had to do was approach a chef or reach out to a farmer’s market manager and you were in. But now days its not so simple. So there is kind of this sense of urgency for a lot of us who can see the writing on the wall, that if we want to stay in it, we have to keep getting bigger and growing more and selling more, finding those gaps in the market to slide into… otherwise the next guy will.

All in all I think that this is all good for business, and that an increased interest in mushrooms within the general public means there will be an increased demand for our product. At the end of the day, all I want to do keep challenging myself, and the best way I know to do that is to grow more mushrooms… and you can only grow as many mushrooms as you can sell.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Persistence. This is a pretty hard thing to do, and it has a steep learning curve. There are going to be failures, sometimes massive failures, and being able to ride those waves out and keep learning from mistakes is the way forward. You just have to stick with it.

Motivation. It needs to be intrinsic. If you don’t genuinely love doing this, just get out while you can… otherwise you’re going to sink a lot of time and a lot of money into something you’re not going to be doing in the next few years. But if the passion is there, you have to stay motivated to get up every day and keep going at it. The learning never stops.

Networking. You have to work with others to keep progressing. Whether that’s with potential sales avenues, other cultivators swapping trade tricks, future employees, or even just your regular customers at a farmer’s market — you never know where a conversation might lead and what kind of impact it can have on your business.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

The Alchemist by Paulo Cohelo. This book really helped me shape a positive outlook on life and pushed me to just “surrender to the flow” instead of getting stuck in a paddling upstream modality. I think this book has impacted a lot of people in the same way. And there are many other books out there that carry a similar message, so I truly believe there is a good bit of truth to the message the author is trying to share. Alchemy is about the transmutation from one form into another, and to me this book showed a path for turning dreams into reality.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.catawbamushroom.com
• Instagram: Catawba Mushroom Partners
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/catawbamushroompartners/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-hollums-4226832ab/