Kimberly Meadowlark
After falling in love while Cyrus Lester was incarcerated, he and Maggie Long decided they wanted to start a farm together. Today, in St. Francisville, they own and operate Mushroom Maggie's, one of South Louisiana's best known mushroom farms.
Ours is not the first civilization to recognize the indisputable cool of mushrooms. For centuries fungi has spawned folklore across the globe. Think fairy rings and mushroom sprites. The ancient Aztecs considered mushrooms the “flesh of the gods”. Even mushroom terminology has a sense of glamour to it: substrate, mycelium, pinning, flushing, fruiting. Then, there’s inoculation, cultivation, colonization.
For Maggie Long and Cyrus Lester of Mushroom Maggie’s Farm, who spend their days surrounded by these ancient, unearthly organisms, the coolness factor is as sharp as ever. The husband-and-wife team is quick to point out that raising mushrooms for a living is also a lot of hard work. This is no mere cottage-core fantasy, frolicking through the woods plucking chanterelles. Farming mushrooms on the scale that Long and Lester do involves entire days spent trimming unwanted parts off the mushrooms before they’re packaged and delivered to restaurants in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and New Roads or to eager customers at Red Stick Farmers Market. 5,000 pounds of substrate (sawdust, soybean hulls, and other agricultural waste) must be mixed by hand each week before being sterilized, inoculated, and eventually divided into “fruiting bags” and moved into the fruiting room. And of course, there’s endless cleaning, sterilization, strict temperature control, and circulation requirements.
Kimberly Meadowlark
Tediousness aside, there’s an inescapable sense of magic happening inside the red metal barn/laboratory tucked away down a verdant country road on the outskirts of St. Francisville. Just step inside the fruiting room, surrounding yourself with these wondrous life forms that are genetically closer to humans than they are to plants and it’s easy to submit to the seduction of fungi, to appreciate why mushrooms were once said to originate from Zeus’s lightning bolt or St. Peter’s spit.
Kimberly Meadowlark
The Origins
Long and Lester’s partnership was an unlikely one. The two reconnected at the funeral of Lester’s brother, who had been a friend of Long’s since childhood. Lester was incarcerated at the time, and had been given a day pass to attend the ceremonies. When Long got home, she penned a letter to Lester not realizing he’d done the same. Their letters passed in the mail. A robust correspondence began and in one subsequent letter, Long made a proposal, “Start a farm with me”.
“I’d always been interested in farming,” she explained.
“Farming is something honest and humble, selling the fruits of your labor.”
Kimberly Meadowlark
Long began researching specialty crops they could grow together when Lester was released. She came across statistics from the US Department of Agriculture listing mushrooms as the second most profitable crop (after marijuana). The two knew nothing about mushrooms and retrospectively admit they didn’t even like them. They had no land and no capital to speak of. But they had time. In the months leading up to the end of Lester’s sentence, they started learning all they could and laying their plans.
From Spawn to Flush
Kimberly Meadowlark
Once Lester was able to join Long in 2016, they began their enterprise slowly, inoculating fifty five-pound blocks of substrate with mushroom spawn each week, both still working other jobs to fund the venture. Seven years later, it’s 550 ten-pound blocks producing 1,200 pounds of oyster, chestnut, shiitake, maitake, lion’s mane, enoki, and other mushrooms. Mushroom Maggie’s Farm now supplies fungi to twenty top New Orleans restaurants and many more closer to home—Long frequently collaborating directly with chefs as they plan their menus. The mushrooms have to be harvested twice a day (Lester says it’s “like milking cows.”) and sometimes three or four times so they’re at peak quality.
Kimberly Meadowlark
Of course, it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. In fact, after their first year of farming, they finally had their first flushes ready to sell, when a fire destroyed the entire operation and left Lester with burns over seventy percent of his body. They started again at ground zero and spent the next year rebuilding. Things were moving forward at a promising clip when the pandemic closed area restaurants and they found themselves with a crop no one was in a position to buy.
Kimberly Meadowlark
Now, three years later, things are going full tilt with four full-time employees and plans in the works to produce mushroom-based products such as seasonings. More than ever, Long and Lester hold dear the people who gave them their first breaks including Ma Mama’s Kitchen in New Roads and Commander’s Palace in New Orleans. “Our goal was to build something to make our kids proud,” Long said. “We didn’t get here by ourselves. A lot of people helped us and believed in us early on. Any success we have is partly thanks to them.”
