Mary Ellen Kozak grew up with mushrooms. Despite being raised in Detroit, she would often return to her family’s farm in Peshtigo.
Her family had come from Poland, where foraging for fungi is a big part of the heritage. She would forage with her aunt, who showed her strategies for discerning between edible and inedible mushrooms.
“Drying mushrooms was a big thing when I was a kid growing up,” Kozak says. “We used to get big boxes full of handmade wreaths and strings of dried mushrooms and canned blueberries.”
Her husband, Joe Krawczyk, also grew up with a Polish family who foraged for fungi. Though as a kid he hated mushrooms.
“My grandfather taught my dad what mushrooms to pick, and then my dad for some reason said, Joe, let’s go pick mushrooms,” Krawczyk remembers.
It was mushrooms that brought the pair together. The two met in a mycology class during college.
“He was mostly interested in the effects of fungi in plants, and I was mostly interested in eating fungi,” says Kozak.
The desire to get into mushroom cultivation returned while Krawczyk was working for the Department of Natural Resources in Madison, when a paper came across his desk on Shiitake cultivation on natural logs. At the time, most people hadn’t even heard of Shiitake mushrooms.
“I thought, this sounds interesting, being of Polish American heritage, mushrooms are in my genetics,” Krawczyk says. “So I thought about it and then I said, ‘Mary Ellen, we have access to the wood and the resources. Why don’t we look into this?’“
Krawczyk and Kozak left Madison, moved to Kozak’s family farm in Peshtigo and opened Field & Forest Products.
“The field products were strawberries, raspberries and blueberries, and the forest products were mushrooms and mushroom spawn,” says Krawczyk.
As years went on, the forest products became the main focus. Although it took a while to get people familiar with mushroom cultivation on natural logs.
In the meantime, Kozak and Krawczyk traveled all over the world to learn more about mushroom cultivation and to teach others about what they had learned. Their passion has taken them to Russia, Macedonia, Belarus and, most recently, Nepal.
They’ve also visited facilities and formed partnerships that influenced their production building, which they moved into after outgrowing the farm. At the farm, all production was done by hand. Now they’ve gone totally automated. Their process starts in their general lab.
“We take a parent culture and expand it into another medium to increase the amount of mycelium we’re producing,” Krawczyk explains.
While that grows, they take raw materials like sawdust and grains and put it into bags, which then get sterilized. Then, in a clean room, a technician will open the bags up, inoculate them and seal them. Then the bags go into incubation.
Once they’ve reached the “perfect stage of rot,” the bags are shipped to growers of all interests.
“It’s a passion for us,” says Krawczyk. “We just love mushroom cultivation, and we think that the more people that can do it, the better joy there is in the world.”
