Matt Williams - Fungi, Mushroom Food Plots, and Mycology - Ep.#5

0:09 You Dave Grohl fan? Dave Grohl, Yeah, yeah, he's one of my favorite humans. You're talking about my tattoo. Yeah, you're learning the fly tattoo on the inside of your forearm there. Yeah, so this one's actually not Foo Fighters, though. This is Tom Petty. Oh yeah, yeah, Tom Petty. That's my favorite song of all time. But yeah, Dave Grohl fan too, I actually. I saw the Foo Fighters open up for Tom Petty. I believe I saw Tom quite a few times throughout the year. So I love they grow. I mean, obviously he was a member of Nirvana and so for any 90s kid, that's the pinnacle, yeah.

0:51 And then in addition of that, it between him trolling the Westboro Baptist Church, that's one of his favorite things in life. Yeah, is the to roll by them with like dressed up as Jesus, playing some good funky tunes and give them a lecture about loving people and stuff like that. And then he also feeds homeless a lot. He has a big BBQ. He loves his, you know, BBQ, smoke meat and stuff like that. And so he, you know, if there's a disaster or whatever in the area, he'll roll out the BBQ truck and trailer and just go give away a bunch of food or some great people and stuff like that. If we have more Dave girls in this world, it'd be awesome. And I love me some Tom Petty too. Yeah, just people like that.

1:32 In general it's awesome to see the like the you get to a certain level and and it has to be like how did I get all this stuff right and then and the people that might even do with. It, yeah. And the people that go out of their way, you hear a lot of cool stories about Shaq like that, too. So my aunt played basketball with him in Central Florida. Oh, really? Yeah, she was on the women's team. Yeah. And then she, I mean just for whatever it's worth, subtle brag, but no shack, you know? And she said he's the most hilarious, realist ass person you ever met in your life. You know, give you the shirt off of his back to help you. You know, the whole thing that Willie Nelson, you know, same thing all those guys, that Oliver Anthony guy that just blew up.

2:13 I mean I love seeing real humans like that that you know, want to do good in the world with with what they are. Keanu Reeves There's another great one. Yeah. And you know, like you can always tell the difference. Like there's a lot of PR campaigns that say that, but there's the genuine, authentic people that live that, you know. And I think that shines through most of the time. I don't know much about Oliver Anthony yet. I I saw, I saw he got on Rogan. He had an episode of Rogan Hours. I haven't watched it, but. Neither have I I don't know. That's got to be a trip go from a factory worker and a farmer's market vendor to yeah, I mean it's going to be called Oliver Anthony at this point. You know from here on out if anyone grabs that, that moment of fame like that, but signed $100 million record contract. Did he actually sign?

3:02 Yeah, they were offering him like 40 and 60 and he just basically made it in a big bidding war and. The last time I saw he was he was turning down most of the the record deals that he was getting, but hopefully he found a good match. That but man, I just can't imagine that's kind of he would. It happened to him even faster than like the Zach Bryan story. Zach Bryan happened quickly, but he had at least a year to kind of wade through the waters because he was still in the military. So they had to. Did you ever hear that story did you? A little bit of it. I haven't heard the whole thing. Man, so he he was telling this story and finally his military leaders. Had a meeting with him and told him like it's it's kind of time to go, man. Like this is going to be not really a conflict of interest but this is kind of like a distraction and like you got some bigger fish to fry now and he didn't know he was a big star.

3:51 But as big as he was, I don't. I still don't know that he does. He's a pretty seems like a pretty humble guy. The man. Yeah, I can't imagine that overnight fame that is, from just a fellow with the guitar singing in front of a deer blind while your dog watches. You you know, by the way, that deer blind in the background, that video is totally shot. He's not going to be able to hunt that thing for opener, although I imagine he'd give him a new one. But yeah, till weeks later. Would he have like 17,000 people packed into that little venue there at Maggie's farm and from there just say went even more nuts? So yeah, congratulations to him on being him. 100% yeah. It's it's amazing to see that happen, how everybody wants to start painting their pictures, right? And I'm just happy for the dude.

4:38 I don't even know him yet, but it's awesome to see somebody. I love that he didn't lose himself in all this yet. He's not yet. Yeah, he's just that simple humble ass guy that and he's he's so far maintained that, you know, and I really like that that's what would get him through life. And I believe he's in talks with Willie Nelson to take over Farm Aid or do something big with Farm Aid. Interesting. I know one of my colleagues said she's going to, she's volunteering at Farm Aid in Indiana this year. So yeah, I grew up in Indiana. So Farm Aid is a big part of, you know, culture and life if you're an American farmer growing up in Indiana, in Indiana. Yeah, hence the Colts fanship. Right. So yes. Yeah, go coats.

5:21 Man, So what? What got you into mushrooms? Talking about? You know, growing up and stuff? Has it always been a thing? What? What got you into mushrooms? I mean, I like food. So this is some of the best food out there. I grew up poor, you know, and so with that, you, you hunt, you fish and you forge. And so my grandfather was a career Air Force man, and he was always going to the library. And he taught me how to teach myself anything as a small child. And I would get in trouble a lot and get locked in my room with books too, you know. So I didn't hurt anything, but. And I love outside. So it just kind of all came together and I began to, you know, find out about edible stuff and wild medicine whenever I was a little kid. And then later on became an adventure sports guide and learning how to, you know, use that to scrounge up a meal or scrounge up elements to make them heal better. Especially when you're eating dehydrated crap food in the middle of nowhere.

6:16 A few fresh mushrooms and a couple of decent plants go a long way to liven things up. And then later on, and I started the farm. After I sold the White Water rafting company, I became dad, and I wanted to raise my kids on farm produce and livestock. You know, all that stuff. But I started dabbling with mushrooms and it didn't take long for people were lined up for those mushrooms. They they didn't care about the 15 different kinds of cherry tomatoes or the kale or the best lettuce around so much. They were there for the mushrooms lined up for the market started and that kind of just started the the whole journey going to where I am now. Boy, what a ride it's been. Yeah. How long has it been?

6:58 Well, my son's 9 and whenever I found out I was going to be a dad's when I started the farm full time. So it'll be 10 in March, cruising up on a decade of full time farming. Yeah. So it was kind of the focusing on mushrooms was kind of led by demand organic farming in generals of passion years. But yeah, I mean it goes both ways. No matter how good you are at produce or livestock, monkey see, monkey do, right. So whatever creativity you're bringing to the table this year, next year, everybody else is going to emulate that to your detriment, probably, right? With fungi, especially at the time I started messing with them, there really wasn't a ton of information and resources available. It was more of a faux pas still, and very culty, you know? And then since then, Paul Stamits and Fantastic Fungi on Netflix and Facebook groups and everything else kind of blown all the doors wide open.

7:53 But during that time period, it was just kind of a thing that I'd always kind of liked. I like mushrooms, you know. They're delicious. And it's a thrill of the chase, too, you know? And to be honest with you, you want to stand in a hot field or in a hoop house working or in a smelly old animal barn, or you want to be in the shade. That's pretty easy choice for a guy like me who loves nature and has always been an outdoorsman. You get to walk around in the forest and collect mushrooms as part of my job. Are you freaking kidding me? You know, yeah. Yeah, the. The ecological parts of of mushrooms are, I think, just so fascinating, right? Like you were talking a little bit earlier about how they, the mushrooms, do the work for soil amendments and stuff like that.

8:34 But I recently learned, and you can confirm this, this is just one of those in passing things. But a mushroom is closer in biology to a human than like a tomato plant. Oh yeah, yeah. So if you look at the tree of life or you know that that the evolution right. So plants and fungi plants evolved out of fungi and they're the the evidence for this would be mosses and lichens where they're pretty much half mushroom half plant right long, long ago and then animals begin to evolve out of fungi much, much later. So we're basically giant mushrooms that have encapsulated everything versus them the all their, the nervous system, you know, the heart so to speak.

9:17 It's all external and so it's but we have nearly identical immune system. They breathe oxygen in and CO2 out just like we do. And it's there's a lot of other parallels, but yeah, we're basically just giant walking talking mushrooms that think that we're sentient, you know? Yeah, that's wild. And I I learned a long time ago there's that, like, supposedly. I don't know if this is true. The biggest mushroom like in the world in crystal falls or whatever. So there's yeah, there's some conjecture here. We have to add the word contagious. Contagious means one big item, right? There's another site in Oregon at the Mauer Wildlife Refuge, which I believe was the site of the Bundy standoff. Yeah, you know the where the government murdered that guy and sorry, he was shot Anyway, so that one is big as well. But and it's big enough to be seen from space, but it's pockets and so as the sum total, all of the pockets you know in that area make up a larger site.

10:22 Now the thing with the Crystal site is it's still not known how large it is. We're still sampling and every time they sample it gets about 100 times bigger. So it could very well be the biggest, but it is proven to be the largest single site, meaning the Crystal site is bigger than any of the other sites in Oregon as long as you don't count them all as one big 1. So it's it's a little bit of fun fact and if you see the Michigan Uhaul truck, that's why there's a giant mushroom on the side of it if you didn't know that. I didn't know. Yeah. So you know how Uhaul does the state thing? Well, Michigan's is the mushroom because of the humongous fungus, right? The honey mushroom in Alpha MI. That's fascinating. So how does that work?

11:02 Like when a when a mushroom does that, what part of it is below the ground and what is it that comes up? So what we think of as a mushroom is a fruiting body, much like an apple tree gives off an apple, right? So the actual Organism itself would be what looks like white threads in the soil or on wood. Or in this case, since it's a honey mushroom, they'll be rising more Switcher, thicker black strands, but it's predominantly just that white mycelia. Now we think of it as a 2, but if we zoom in, that's actually a subway system, right? So the shuttling nutrients in every direction. And when we look at the landscape around us, the entire landscape is made of this architecturally, from the tip of the top of the tree and every leaf in it all the way down to the very root. That tree is basically one giant mushroom architecturally as far as those strands go, with plant tissue in between. And so it moves nutrients from the very tip of the tree all the way through the soil food web.

11:57 And then in the soil, of course, it is just one giant dimensional spider web or architectural spider web of that mycelium that's every direction all around you at all times. And there are thousands of different kinds of mushrooms that may make up that, but they all work together in some way, shape or form to to shuttle. So I just picture, like, when hearing you say that, I picture like this network of, like you called it, a subway system, but like a veins that just run throughout the entire natural world that can how do they determine where they pop up the fruit, Yeah, that's. So it could be climactic conditions. It could be soil type. It could be this tree owns this one portion of real estate and it lives with that transymbiosis. Of course, then there are mushrooms that occur on dead and rotting things.

12:48 Otherwise there'd be T Rex carcasses stacked everywhere still and those come off of that. Either the rot quote UN quote yeah, meaning that the tree that it's on or the the stump or whatever may be a piece of wood on the ground or it could be coming out of the terrestrial or the the dirt associated with it. That's part of the the real estate that that mushroom owns is complex relationship, so it it gets real fun in a hurry. And they're mushrooms that occur underwater. There are mushrooms that occur just in the Arctic underneath the snow. It's it's insane there. If there's a chance for life to occur, there's a good chance that fungi have figured out a way for it to happen on this planet at this point.

13:30 And that's crazy. That's so great. That has to be one of those things where, like, you just dive in and there you can never learn too much about it. Oh gosh, no, no. We're still discovering new stuff all the time. One of the really cool things that hit the world this year and the they come out of the mycological world, was that mushrooms Thermo regulate, so when we're out they heat and cool themselves. We already know this as cultivators because there could be snow sitting on top of a mushroom. That's cold weather specific and it could melt and then begin to regrow again right during the melt free cycle and both spring and autumn. This is pretty common and so this you know kind of anomaly with that antifreeze let some people down a pretty interesting path and what they found was that the fruiting bodies thermal regulate too as part of this.

14:18 So if it's a hot day and I'm Morel hunting and I take a thermal image camera out, those morels glow like solid white on your your thermal image. So you can well hunt a lot more effectively in a hurry for whatever it's worth. And same thing on a cool day, really, really cool day, they kind of pop as a hotter spot in the landscape. And so that's just something that just hit the that, you know, the world this year regarding mushrooms and it's just one of those really amazing things and there's always something like this coming out. So now there's a lot of people probably trying to figure out how they do that, right? That's the first thing that comes to your mind. How is this possible? And you know, and that's how fungi are. It's they're just oddly mysterious and they're the fastest growing sector of biotech. And what I'm really trying to say is that mycology is the fastest growing sector of biology. We know a lot about plants.

15:15 We've been studying them forever, but we really don't know that much about fungi as a whole, as a human species. And this is, you know, one of those last great unknowns to explore scientifically. And I'm just lucky to be a citizen scientist in the middle of it and get to do my own. Yeah, Yeah. So what's it like foraging in our, like, neck of the woods? What? What are some of the main ones you find? What do people like at the farmers markets? What do you like? Right. So all the classics that we would consider here in North America, which be morels, chicken in the woods, all the other woods, so hent of the woods, shrimp of the woods, things like that. Obviously Sean trails the lobster mushroom, the hedgehog mushroom, black trumpets, those are kind of a fan favorite so to speak up There are others, but that's a pretty decent sized little list to get started with.

16:04 Foraging here is unlike foraging anywhere else. And I say that because our forest ecotypes are very distinct here, where I live, 100 miles north of Green Bay in the UP and around Iron Mountain is where the boreal forest coming down from Canada and the Arctic collides with the eastern hardwoods, all the oaks around us, right? And then in addition to that, we've got the western forest, which is those cottonwoods and aspens coming out of the plains and those riparian zones that collides too. So we have three different ecotypes colliding here. And you get up high, you may see one, you get down low, you may see another and you get down near a bend in the river, you can see all three. And so because of that diversity of tree species and then also coupled with our short decomposition window where I live, which means that from the time that the snow melts to the time the snow flies again, everything has to rot. And that's the only window of rot, right. And so it's more accelerated timeline. So I get to see things in much more rapid sequence than someone else may who live somewhere where it doesn't snow or very rarely snows.

17:08 Their mushroom season spread out much, much longer across the year versus ours, kind of jam packed one on top of the other. So we're the last people to see spring mushrooms for the US and the spring, but we're the first people to see him. Fraud of mushrooms. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. So you do you have certain type of like times of the year where you cook certain meals because those mushrooms are available? Yeah, eat locally, eat seasonally, right? That's the essence of local food is when things are in, you try to take advantage of that, and then you try to preserve the harvest, of course as well. So if you ask me what my favorite mushroom is, it's going to be whichever one's about to come in the season. But I haven't had for a year probably. Yeah, yeah, man, that's fascinating.

17:51 So that kind of you opened up your new business with the with the like the mushroom food plots and that was one part that you answered. I didn't know that you said there's some in the Arctic that can do under go under snow. And that was the first thing that came to my mind. Like what are those like? Late season mushrooms and can they survive when more and more people get into the woods, as we get closer to the rut and stuff? Because you think of how food plot activity changes and stuff like that at that time of year that that could be a hidden gem, man. I'm sure it's what led you to the idea, but what's the what's the concept of it? So, do you eat fungi? This predates all of our human involvement and habitat management. I've been able to uncover research as far back as the late 1880s.

18:34 So right from the very get go of American gamekeepership, it's been there, the scientists that have dealt with it. And then all the way up to the 60s and the early 70s, there was a huge push about how important this was to the deer. And then I believe the rise of psychedelic culture stunned that or eliminated it from the discussion of brows. Kind of took over as the basis. Instead of mast, mushrooms are soft mast. If you're a habitat manager, you understand mass masses, acorns and apples and berries and so on, and mushrooms fit into that as well. So we have hard mast and soft mast, chestnuts, oaks, acre, and those are hard mass, soft mass, Cool soft mass is more palatable, especially to older animals like an old buck with worn down teeth. So it's a big draw and it's also a huge source of phosphorus for them.

19:22 There's a fair amount of calcium in there is the probably their biggest source of vitamin D, and there's about 30% mushrooms depending on which type, of 30% protein in mushrooms, depending on which type of mushroom we're talking about. There's also a decent amount of soluble, water soluble fat, and there's a lot of water in mushrooms too. So for an animal that you know doesn't like the frequent watering holes where predators may be, you're getting water in your diet. It's a big part of it as well, but the real factor is that mushrooms are composed of chitin or chitin, right? If you're a beef farmer, you know what chittenases or chitinases, which is an additive you add to your beef feed to increase the nutrient solubility and uptake. And that's basically lobster shells and crab shells and cheap chitin that they can get right from waste resource. Well, mushrooms are the most readily and biosoluble form of chitin, and so these deer.

20:17 At least 25% of their diet at least. And there's a lot of numbers that go back and forth. There's some reports out of, you know that the especially in the late 70s or late 60s when this is being studied, could suggest as much as 70% or more of their diet during hunting season. And those areas was fungi related. So as we progress into hunting season, obviously at the beginning of hunting season, for all of us that are archery hunters, there's more opportunities because they're more fungi in the landscape. But as things begin to sin nest in the world around us, the menu becomes smaller and that's where we can really take advantage of it. If you have mushrooms and they're not available around you, or there's very few in the landscape and you've got a large amount. So there are ways to go about that, but as they go in and decline, there are fewer and fewer and those targeted species become more and more important.

21:11 And with regards to mushrooms appearing underneath the snow blanket, that does happen in the most way. Easily observable version of this is going to be, let's say we have a snow blanket sits here for a month or so here in Green Bay, and then it all melts kind of rapidly. You ever see the snow mold covering the ground? Yeah, it looks like cobwebs and spider webs, right? That's my celian brother. That's fungi literally coming out of the ground to eat and stuff underneath there. So there's specific cold weather stuff. And there are also mushrooms that can and do fruit under those scenarios. And we're just beginning to learn about all this. And so I don't have any strategy for those under the snow mushrooms yet, but I have pretty good strategy for the early part of the season for us up here all the way into about freeze up. Which, you know, the last few winters gets you really close to that neighborhood anyway.

22:02 Because, I mean, we haven't been really seeing snow until mid to late November anyway. And then putting the food source there is going to make the deer do things biologically like scrape and rub there. And then even if there's not food there, you put out a a bowl of food on your back porch every every night for a whole summer and then you take it away. It doesn't matter if it's been not there for a week or so, they're still going to come check to see if there's a meal, right? And then in addition to that, they're still going to come check that scrape. They're just going to continue. That's part of their strategy is to move through that area, right? They're going to look, and so even if the food's not there, you still have a spot where they're going to more than likely travel through and give you an opportunity.

22:46 It's way easier to kill a deer in the woods than it is on an open field. Anyone who's on or, I'll tell you that deer don't like to be out in the open. It's against their nature. So we do this in shade and in cover back in the timber. We don't have to have an open ground to grow a mushroom. We actually need it to grow in the woods because it loves shade. Yeah. Yeah, there's some fascinating kind of research and like collar studies that show like the the size of an area that especially a mature buckle stay in and they get up and feed frequently, but it's within 100 yards of where they are. You know, much easier to do that with mushrooms and having that be their source of food than it is to what you know. We think of a deer going out in a Cloverfield Exactly. So last year I broke a bowl in a week before the start of archery opener and I was given a loaner crossbow that just it wasn't going to work, it was going to skip an arrow off and I don't, I don't wound deer, I'm out there to do, you know, clean ethical kills.

23:43 So Long story short, I just left that in my truck and I took my camera and I would go cut a track, the biggest buck track I could cut. Then I'd fall that into bedding and I'd probably jump him out most of the time. But I'd document what mushrooms were being eaten in those bedding areas and did it over and over and over and over and over and over throughout the whole season. And I ended up eating my restricted tag, which in Michigan is 4 points plus on one side, basically because I blew up too many of my good spots by doing this. And then when late season came around, it just wasn't working out for me. But Long story short was, yeah, this is that. You're right. They do. They get up and they move. There's no such thing as an October lull.

24:25 They're they know that the pressure's on. It's all human pressure. If there was no human pressure, they get up and move across those fields like you always see them. At the moment someone shoots an arrow with them or one of their friends, everything changes. And then there's more and more humans pile in, more and more changes, right? So finding those pockets in those spots that are overlooked and have food in them, whether it's a white oak tree or a bunch of red oaks or mushrooms and white oaks, right? That's the name of the game. Whenever you're looking for one specific animal, you've got to find his bed, you got to find out what he's eating, and you got to take advantage of one of those two out those things. And So what I try to do is get between food and bedding as close as I can to bedding without jumping them off and try to intercept on the way out. I don't like to hunt over food plots. I have food plots they're getting, it's a labor of love and they're getting to be beautiful. But I don't hunt on them.

25:16 I hunt back off of them 20-30 yards in the timber. I'm trying to catch them coming in and going out or even further back in the timber, right? And that's just a great strategy for all deer hunters, in my opinion. Yeah, absolutely. You know what this reminds me of? You're talking about the, like, what composes a mushroom and why they might eat them. I learned recently that I don't know if it's all species of elephants, but what an elephant they have. Proven that the female elephants will eat a specific plant at a certain time in the year when they're pregnant because they know that it induces labor. So like like elephants take medicine. Yeah, and they've taught themselves that over the. So there's no exception of that.

26:01 They're what we call highly selective frugiovores, which means that they're they'll eat one leaf off of this plant and two leaves off of that plant. And the dietary nutrition of those plants you in that specific time frame is a high draw out of them. They only have so much food, room for food in their stomachs. They're ruminants like cow, right? They can only fit so much through there. So they're extremely selective. They they pretty much eat the best of everything. They're like little hobbits, so to speak. They relish good food and the creature comforts at home. So do we. Yeah. Yeah. What's not the love? And so they really take it to the the high degree. So I'm not surprised in the least little bit that the animals know this, how they know it.

26:44 You know that that's a tough one. I don't think that we may never know that, but for whatever reason they do. Yeah, Yeah. So you mentioned the like the the combination of the. The knowledge depth that we have around mushrooms earlier, when you think of that. And then you mentioned kind of what happened throughout the course of history in like the 60s and 70s. And the push back on the, you know, psycho effects or the, you know, the psychiatric effects of, you know, all of the things that push back on substance use and stuff like that. Did some of that lead to our lack of knowledge about mushrooms?

27:27 Probably. And it goes much, much earlier in human history than that. Let's go to Egyptian and Roman times. You know, you as a common person could be put to death for eating the King's mushrooms, so to speak. You're not allowed. Is reserved for upper echelon of society only, right? It's food of the gods. It literally the Egyptian culture. This is food of the gods. You're not allowed to touch this. You're you're you're common person. This is for high priestess and you know, the the pharaoh and things of that nature and that translates all the way through, you know, when we're talking about Robin Hood and the King's forest and shooting a deer, you know, that's there's a lot of truth to that. In that feudal system. You aren't allowed to forage for food because that's the King's food. You have to grow food for the king to sell and you know blah blah blah.

28:11 And then you get your rations back from them. Exactly. So control, right? As Americans, though, we have this distinct legacy. We're the first people in the world that the fish in the rivers belong to everyone. The game on the land belongs to everyone. The things that grow upon the land, especially in our public spaces, belong to everyone. The food belongs to everyone. Now, a large part of that's because of our, you know, I'm, I'm Indian, right? I'm my dad's a halfbreed, right? I'm Potawatomi, a whole of my initial now they people, if you're out there listening. So with that, this is always been part of our food.

28:54 Can you imagine, you know, on top of everything else from the Europeans if they came over and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't eat those fish, those mushrooms and those Deers get bitten, fella, you just lost all your credibility, right. So as part of our American psyche and with the the frontier and you know that expansionism in our manifest destiny, being able to to harvest our own food from the landscape is just ingrained on us. And we're the first people that ever sparked that light in the world. The rest of the world's national parks and the freedom of their fishing and hunting, that all comes from us, right, For whatever it's worth. So, but before that you know that that those things that were upon the landscape, those were you know, for the the rulers of society.

29:38 And so the microphobia is been trained into us over generations and generations and generations. That being said, there's still a lot of cultures that really love mushrooms. The Bulgarian, almost all of the Eastern European bloc, right, the Bulgarians, the Germans, French. Then we get up in the Swedes and the Norwegians, the Asian especially SE. Asians really love mushrooms, and it goes other parts of the world as well. There are lots of indigenous cultures that truly love mushrooms, but they mycophobia that we have ingrained in us as Americans. It was probably a double hit from psychedelics and the pushback against it, as well as some of that just bubbling subconscious from, you know, stay away from mushrooms, they'll kill you.

30:25 And that's. What I was going to ask if there's an innate part of this, like a human? You know, aspects that we have to get around or get over because like you equate it to something where being scared of bees or spiders for example, or something where it's. A lot of times not rational, but at the same time, there's this innate thing in this that says that could kill you for some reason that has to exist somewhat. So it's almost like the person who is that irrationally afraid of bees, you know, or spiders will say that we had an arachnophobic as our spokesperson for spiders. Well, yeah, we're all going to be arachnophobic if the guy in charge is telling us don't be, don't like spiders.

31:09 I love spiders. They do amazing things in my garden and in my grow room and so on and so forth. You know, they're extremely deadly plants. They're extremely deadly berries. There's extremely deadly animals. There's extremely deadly everything. Mushrooms is no exception. Driving down the road can be an extremely deadly thing, right? Walking in your bathroom is the most dangerous thing we do. Wet floor in the bathroom and most likely spot to die, you know, other than your car. So yes, it's the, you know, I mean, there's there's cause for alarm. You should definitely know the enemy, so to speak. And there'll be two or three really deadly mushrooms across most of the US. There might be a handful of small outliers. And if you avoid a family we call LBM's or little brown mushrooms, right. You just wiped out almost all of them but one just by doing that. And so whenever I lead my forays, and I'm not teaching people about mushrooms, I kind of communicate that LBM theory, you know, of Bella, That's the genus. Lever, right?

32:05 Lever right there. Right. That's a little brown mushroom. We don't ask about those. We just keep removing. And so that takes most of them off the table. And then there's one that's white and it's all white, has a white bulb, has a white stem, has a white omnulus, a ring, white gills, white top, the whole thing, right? Top to bottom, it's white as all can be, just a cracker of the woods, so to speak, right? And it's extremely deadly. It's called there's a it's a member of a group of mushrooms called the Destroying Angel complex. So people call them the Deadly angels or whatever. Maybe there's a bunch of different misnomer names, but and that one be fairly common to see it. You know, I see it lawns around trees a lot. It's a European invasive species as far as I understand it, and it is deadly.

32:51 It gave, you know, one mushroom could be enough to kill a lot of people and it's also extremely easy to identify and stay away from. So knowing your enemy is always the best. Isn't there one? Isn't there one that has like a bright red cap that's deadly? That's kind of famous okay. So it's not deadly. It's everything, all right. The difference between toxicity and medicine can be dosage or application. OK, so it's the Amanina mascaria, right? It's the quintessential red mushroom with the white dots on it. Alice in Wonderland. If you saw Smurfs House, it would be that you know that the whole thing, it is not deadly, but it can be because it's the origin of Christmas ornaments too.

33:36 Do you know that story? Cool. So you know about Saturnalia, the Vikings Festival of light? OK, just know of it. So they would take these ominina mushrooms, Negro with spruce trees primarily. And they would take them and they would put them up in the bowels of those spruce trees to dry. Or the squirrels, would squirrels like to grab mushrooms and put them up to dry like this too. And during the winter they would grab those and they would make a big communal tea out of them and all the small children and the old folks. So they would go to this other part of the village with like a fence around it and then everybody else that was left would imbibe, you know, in this livation. And one of this livation wasn't a happy go lucky mushroom trip. It's, it's Viking berserker session. Literally.

34:19 That's where the Viking berserkers came from. They would drink this magic mushroom, only it would make them behave like they are methamphetamines. Very. Let's see. They would basically have huge orgies and street fights, right? So next time your family's fighting at Christmas, know that you're celebrating the biking origin. So that mushroom, if you take it and you, you know you ran it through boiling water and changed out the water, now it's edible, right? Of course, if you kept that, you feed it to the reindeer and then you know, after the reindeer filter it out, there's, you know, that wives tale about them drinking it. I've. Heard that one right? So they they've more or less just made tea out of it, whether it went through the animal or whatever it may be, and they enjoyed that.

35:05 So that's that's what we're alluding to, is that Amanina muscaria in this circumstance, not deadly, it's it's toxic, but the toxicity is psychoactive. You know Silosipin, the magic mushroom family is toxic as well in that regard, but it doesn't stop anyone, does it? Right. Yeah. And I must be mistaken cuz I thought there was one that was like toxic is deadly not on them and either. I mean there are some Amanitas that are, but not that red and white that I'm aware of. I could be wrong. I get an e-mail from somebody saying you're an idiot. Wouldn't be the first time? So little brown, little brown mushroom. Stay away from That's weird because when you think of a mushroom that we eat, you know, the little brown mushrooms, Yeah. And they're, I mean, we're talking to Minion of, you know, a couple inches tall at the most, usually a spindly stem and the hundreds of them on one tree kind of thing. Yeah, those ones.

35:59 I think most. That's like the first thing you learn as a Mushroom Forager, right? The the ones with the the long stems that look like they could tip over at anytime and generally a pretty small cap too, right? Those are the. So most people that die from mushroom poisoning are looking for drugs, right. So they they made a bad identification and usually a little brown mushroom involved and that's what happened. So it would be the gallerina, in particular the funeral bell mushroom that we're trying to avoid. And if you're not a trained eye, you could easily confuse that for annoki or slow spin, especially the wood loving slow spins. Or if it's growing on a buried root and it looks like that mushrooms growing from the ground when in fact it's growing from the buried root, you know there, there could be some error there. Yeah.

36:44 And I think I think part of your businesses and a question I asked, I was going to ask you for just for people that have never like foraged or anything, but I know people like grow mushrooms now. And I think that's part of your business. How I I knew a buddy of mine used to do it a little bit. So I know about the you get a log and put it in the plugs and stuff like that. But what's the? How do you do that at home? You know, hearing the? Hearing that kind of vein thing that you were talking about earlier makes it seem like it it'd be hard to cultivate, but this must be a different way to go about that. So the mushrooms we generally cultivate are going to be wood loving species. There are the exceptions, which are the agaricus we find in the grocery store that are, you know, the white buttons in the Portobello cremini. That's all the they're basically all the same mushroom. White Buttons has a genetic freak thing going on where it doesn't produce melanin and then the Portobello Carini are all the same mushroom.

37:42 It's just the baby bellas are smaller and the portobellos are larger as you get it right. So it's just a great thing. When it comes to those names, those grow on maneuver. They they grow on waste and refuse particularly. So we generally call it body and nutrition mushrooms, which means that the the maneuver has, you know, grass in it and that is partially or completely digested by the room in it. And there's some body or structure there for the mushroom to grow on and that cellulose and lignin that's been digested and then the nutrition aspect, which would be all the nitrogen and other trace elements that are present in the manure. So that's expensive to do and that's usually subsidized.

38:24 The subsidized crop is where the government pays them to sell at a certain point and gives them a check to make up the difference, right. So you never go out of business. You've always got somebody there to rescue you. Just great for that farm. Most of those farms are corporate, right. And so they're the they're the welfare kings are so to speak right. And I always get mad when people get mad about humans being on welfare. Brother get business off of welfare, especially nag. But the market set themselves. But so those are almost all produced by one county in Pennsylvania. Or one of the increasing trends is to fill up a shipping container in China. And then as it's coming across the ocean, they can adjust the temperature in there and the climate in there and fruit, those mushrooms in there. And then when it gets to the US shores, they can pick it all. And that's USDA organic now.

39:12 Right? Especially real Docky. This is. Oh yeah. Then they empty the ship container and send something else back. It's a big racket for them. Right. So USDA Organic awesome stuff is also why I recommend you eat local mushrooms, because you know where they were grown and who grew them. We grow on wood loving species, so whether it's sawdust and straw or on logs themselves or even sawdusted with, you know, some supplemented materials like the soybean holes or beet pulp, shred or alfalfa or whatever, maybe inside of a bag. That's called bag culture or synthetic logs. So I try to grow everything outdoors that I possibly can like our shiitaki second to none.

39:52 It's world class. When it's grown outdoors, those are worth $20 plus a pound, $30 plus a pound. But when you grow them in the bags and shipping container, that's a totally different product and that's a bunch of crap. In comparison, it's worth about $7.00 a pound. So they both say shiitake, but which one's the good stuff, right? Okay. And then medicinally the stuff that's grown indoors. So say you're buying lines made from somebody online for neuropathy or whatever it may be. Well, it was grown in a clinical setting in a laboratory that blinds may never had a struggle. It didn't meet any bacteria and viruses and it's life to code against, so it's not medicinally charged.

40:32 However, whenever a mushroom grows outside in the real world in contact with the environment now has to fight off bacteria and viruses at every step of the way. So it's medicinally charged. It has those materials in it that are coded against for that fight. And just like we spoke to earlier, our immune systems are identical. So those compounds that help them work for us. So I try to grow outside as much as possible. There's some things that I just can't do outside, like grow oysters very well. I mean, I can grow them, but they'll be full of bugs. My patrons really don't like that. And so you have to do those either indoors or in a protected setting, which good luck protecting them outdoors. So you got to do them indoors. So Long story short, they grow a lot of different mushrooms, 20 plus different kinds.

41:19 And I've been experimenting with years and years of you know what what if I tried this with this mushroom and I capture mushrooms, which means I'd go find one. And I say, well, if this mushroom grows saptropically, which means it'll grow on dead and dying, you know wood. Well, what if I take a sample of it and I bring it back to my lab and I grow it on a Petri dish and I expand it out and grow it on grains and then on wood and see if I can cultivate this. And sure as could be, you know, you kind of work within parameters and now you got to remember it's a wild animal. So it's like building a zoo enclosure and introducing a wild animal. You want it to replicate and do well, but there's no guarantees and and it could be years before you find out your experiment worked or not too. So when it's it's a really unique and interesting different world than most other agricultural endeavors.

42:07 Yeah. So when you take a sample like that and then you grow it from a Petri dish. Is that just like cutting a piece of that vein out and bringing it home? Yeah, it's more or less cloning. It's exactly what it is. Mushroom farmers are just glorified cloners, sure. And janitors. We do a lot of cleaning. Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah. Talking about your shitakes, I was going to ask that what, how did you get to Shitake Creek being the name of your business? So Shitake Creek. I mean Shitake Creek, man. I I've been an adventure sports guide for a long time. You know I've a class four and five whitewater guide for a lot of years. The running jokes that I've always been up shit Creek, brother. I'm great with the paddle.

42:50 Bring it on, you know. And so I don't know I just started kicking around names and I I really like that name and and it kind of fits me as a human. You know I've got a weird sense of humor and all right. Let's do this. So Shiitake Creek it was and is it's. I'm kind of transitioning it for hopefully for my kids to run and just the local farmers market. Nothing crazy. I'll still teach some classes and the mushroom and deer thing at my other business is really starting to explode. So I don't mind taking a step back. I've been fruiting and doing all this hard work. I mean, they're basically you're a logger and a janitor, and those are some tough gigs, brother and of course farmer on top of it all, you know?

43:33 So after doing all this for a long time, I'd sure like to give my back a rest and use my brain for the rest of my life wherever possible and let my son and my daughter learn how to earn a dollar. Yeah, I was just going to say that you get to a point eventually doing most things where your knowledge is worth more than your output sometimes. And finding a way to finding a way to disseminate that knowledge is always interesting. It's a journey. But yeah, absolutely. When you have, you know, a lifetime of that style of thing, whatever that thing is and it's ready to come out, the knowledge becomes worth more than the product because then you can teach others to make the product and it's exponential. Yeah, my wife is always saying something to the effect of like, I just can't believe, you know, I can't believe your skill set or I every time I think I really know you. And we've been married over a decade now. And you know, I find out that you, you know, you're you're good at this thing that I didn't even know about. And like, yeah, I got a lot of useless skills, you know? But.

44:34 But a lot of useful ones, too. You're not an outdoorsman, Woodsman. I don't know how good they are for society, You know what I mean? So it's lucky for me I live in the middle of nowhere. It's all relative, man. It's all relative. Useful means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. There's people that, you know, buy your mushrooms that would call that useful. Very much so. And I'm blessed to have them as a customer base. We have some of the best customers that I ever dreamed of. I've always said we cultivate relationships and we grow mushrooms, and I believe that that's 100% true and the people of Green Bay and Marquette and the entire UP. But Iron Mountain, where we live in particular, been just extremely kind to us over the years and I can never say thank you enough to them. It's a I mean it's part of why a lot why we buy these days. You know when you can connect with the person behind it and it's easy to you know when someone's passionate about something, you can tell and it's that transfers that it helps with the transfer of that energy and knowledge like you're talking about.

45:33 That's another thing you do right? Like don't you do guided forages where you like give kind of the 101 of searching what does that intake? I'm a little different than a lot of people. I don't pick on the forage. You do, right. I'm not going to take a single. I might take a I mean, if we find out a lot of mushrooms, I'm going to take a couple of home for dinner, maybe. But generally speaking, you're taking them all, so you almost always end up with more mushrooms, you know, value than the class was itself. I can never guarantee it because it's all climactic conditions, but I've only had one foray to date where they didn't walk away with more mushrooms than they paid that were worth more than what they paid for the class. Usually it's like a lot more, so it's not just on the class. So you get me as a resource, you know, you have my, my phone number.

46:17 You can send me pictures. And what is this, you know? Do you know what this is? How do I find more of whatever the question may be? You know, that's that's part of it too. Once again, we cultivate relationships, right? So I love taking the classes out. I broke my foot a few weeks ago and so I'm about four weeks into the healing process. So it's been a a labor of love this year but I'm I'm getting around pretty good and I found out that you know most folks are fine with me going slower in the process which is great because I was thought I was going too fast. So but yeah it's it's a wonderful thing. I love taking people out and Jesus said take a man, you know teach a man to fish and you feed him for his whole life.

47:01 Well, that's my whole goal is you'd be able to walk out this time of the year forever after this, and you'll be able to find yourself a meal for yourself and your family. And we just got to start with that where, you know, we'll say every few weeks or a month or whatever, you learn one new mushroom. And then you do that for years and all of a sudden you're a mushroom expert too. That's all it takes. Is just you got to start somewhere and give you a base point. Yeah, yeah. And you talked earlier about guiding in your younger years. What? What What type of guiding? Like, oh man, I have conservation Corps and I worked with Texas Forest Service as a wild and firefighter and mostly whitewater guide.

47:42 I did a lot of whitewater rafting. I mean a lot. Yeah, heck brother, rock climbs, mountaineering, search, a lot of search and rescue too. Just all over. Yeah. So that, I mean, that part of maybe that's why you're going so fast, because you're comfortable. Yeah, in the woods. But I I mean, a lot of that probably seeps out too. It's not just the mushroom hunt, probably, yeah, with that, a lot of those useless woodsman skills, so to speak. Like I cleaned up Hurricane Katrina with some friends of mine. We're there pretty shortly after the storm. Well, the body gnats are ferocious, no seams down there. So I did a video yesterday, and they're gnats all around my face. And I ended up just like this with my hat over my head during the video.

48:28 And I didn't really think about it. And I realized during that live video what I was doing. I had to stop and explain. If you hold your hat above your head, them gnats go to your hat instead of your face, right? And that's just one of those things that you never learn off. Doesn't work on those no seams. The only thing it does is Avon skin so soft, right? And if you put skin so soft on in the sun, you're going to turn crispy brown real fast. So the only trick that works is when you stop, you put your hat above your head and they go to it. And so there's just a million little things like that. And you know, if you get stung by a bee and look around and tell you which plant to put on it, you know, or if someone has tobacco, we get that tobacco wet and stick it on there and pull the poison out and numb the pain and you know the whole thing real quick. And I don't know, I wanted 1000, little things like that along the ways, you know.

49:16 Yeah, absolutely. You know, another thing I wanted to talk about today. We started to touch on it earlier, but it's awesome to see some of the Netflix shows you were talking about kind of started speaking to this. But just research and public research in general around the benefits of the psychoactive benefits of you know psilocybin and the the mushroom, what it can do for our brain health and it becoming not so much of A faux pas to research and share that research now with PTSD and and stuff like that. Have you delved into any of that stuff? I know a lot about the subject to psychedelics. I haven't. I've indulged.

49:58 I was young once and stupid and I had a lot of fun in a lot of places, and it was one of the most spiritual experiences in my life. I'm going to throw that out there right off the gate before we go any further. I love the legitimate science on this. Johns Hopkins University has done an amazing job. Michael Polian's book a few years ago, How to Change Your Mind, is a really great. That's the one that got turned into a Netflix series? Yeah, you've got it. There are a lot of applications for PTSD, for end of life treatment, for neurological disorders, Parkinson's, things like that. Because it's an electrical firestorm or thunderstorm, it basically ramps your neurological circuit up and opens new pathways or repairs old ones. So there are instances of people being able to hear again, right, People with limited vision, getting clearer vision, things of that nature.

50:50 But it's really, really been good for the psychological effect of it all, right? Coming to peace with your mortality in particular. It's shown a lot of promise for that end of life treatment, especially with people who are terminal, right? So I love the science aspect of it, and there are more and more universities doing legitimate science of it, and the recreational value of it is there, but it kind of denigrates all the other work. So I try to stay away from the recreational, you know? Plus, I'm the most obvious source of that. So I don't want to be. The last thing I want is a bunch of dudes kicking in my door with the machine gun pointing into my family, you know, because. So I don't mess with it.

51:33 But with decriminalization on the horizon, there are a lot of municipalities in the state of Michigan where I live who have decriminalized and me being the mushroom guy for 10 years in the town that has much weed dispensaries in it, I would like to be poised to take advantage of that from a business standpoint when the day comes. But other than that, I don't mess with it at all right now. It's just not on my list and we don't really get solosmin that grows wild here. So it has to be cultivated. You know you're not going to walk around and pick them in the cow Paddy, at least up north. You know, you get a little further South maybe. Yeah, I I I started delving into that. I can't remember her name, but Rogan had a fantastic guest on.

52:15 She had been a lifetime researcher of the, you know, useful effects of psychoactive effects of mushrooms. Unbelievable to hear talk about the things that they were able to like, prove, so to say. But it was in like the 70s when they couldn't know, one would listen when they would stifle everything. Yeah, yeah. If you said anything, you know, there was such a a a violent suppression of anyone who had any counterculture whatsoever, including expansion of your mind and freethinking. Are you kidding me? When we came out of the 50s, all our parents were beaten for talking during dinner time or whatever. There was no individuality present there. It was conformity. So it's a shame that our society went through all this, but at the same time, if it hadn't happened, we wouldn't be where we were. So we go take the good with the bad. I'm very excited about the future, all of this and I hope that as human beings we can get the medicine to the people who need it because that's one of the life's worst travesties is someone can't afford their medication or their medications not available because of societal norms or but then to the ultra rich they can go out of the country and grab it. I don't think that that's kind of a that's not what this country is about.

53:26 There's not supposed to be in there. Yeah, I think so. I recent experience tells me we're close to a place, at least with this topic. I took a trip over the summer and one of my connection flights I spent an hour talking to the student from southern Texas. He was a political lobbyist, someone that you would never think. I didn't think the end of the conversation was going to end with with a discussion about the psychoactive benefits of mushrooms. But it ended up exactly there he was. He told me he started working with a nonprofit about this. And it's the, you know, we don't get too political, but it was a person that you never thought would talk about and be open to this type of, you know, research and use.

54:10 And that just kind of flipped the script on my mind a little bit saying, you know, we're probably to a place where this research can be pushed forward for the benefit of humanity instead of held down and kind of like. You know, written in the secret book. So the the push isn't to not necessarily to decriminalize or legalize as much as it is to deschedule. So right now Silospin and all psychedelic mushrooms are scheduled as schedule one controlled substance that's the same as cocaine, methamphetamines, heroin, etcetera. So if you're producing them, you now have a clandestine line, clandestine laboratory where you're producing a schedule one controlled substance.

54:54 If you go over any state lines now, you're talking about federal prison time real fast and a lot of it, right. And if there's a loaded handgun there, it's, you know, they're 10 years for a bullet or whatever, right? So there are a lot of things in the way. The big push right now is to deschedule it so that it it's not even, it doesn't belong on the same list as amphetamines and opiates, right? It's just a totally different caliber substance across the board. And until that descheduling occurs is just too many roadblocks for a lot of the science. But at the same time the the dam is breaking.

55:38 There are more people than ever, you know, with cannabis legalization, you know that's that's contrary to federal law and cannabis is still scheduled run controlled substance too. However, we're seeing more and more municipalities and states give the finger to the feds and say that we, we think that this is good for our population or our population wants us because it's, you know, government of foreign by the people, right. And I'm really excited for that day. You know, that'll be a really cool day in human consciousness whenever folks can get access to what they need without having to worry about those issues. And it should be a fun day too, to hear all the giggling. Yeah, yeah.

56:20 She had talked about kind of the dangers of procuring those and and studying dangerous part about it is getting him. Yeah. And they were, you know kind of like it's it's strange because a lot of times in educational research it it is kind of, it falls under the guise of conformity, right. So. There were a group of people that really had to buck a trend and and take risks involved because of something they were passionate about and believed in, really sucked me in. And that that's what got me even more interested in mushrooms, because I thought about this stuff in passing and I love eating mushrooms, but just the something that has the capability and the and the benefits that, you know, hearing you describe the the system of how a mushroom works.

57:10 It seems bigger than. You know what I like to put on my steak. Right. Right. Well if we look at the you know those compounds Losa been right, which is the active comment compound in slow to be the genius mushrooms. It's arguably that that's actually put out there to keep bugs from eating that mushroom. It's a it's you know basically an insecticide of sort. But we being the funny monkeys we are like oh man the that mushroom make sky turn purple you know or whatever it's give me more of that. So I'm always curious about, you know, how it all started, you know, with man coming out of the jungle, so to speak, and patrolling across the plains and encountering it.

57:54 Whether it's like Darren's McKenna, who was really, really full of crap and Paul Stamits, his best friend, say, or you know what, how that all happened and the the rise of human culture and what information has been suppressed along the way because of, you know, the fungi are arguably our our first livation, so to speak. The first rule of, you know, the, the Puritan beer law has no psychedelics are allowed in beer, right, Because beer was just a vessel for storage of those fungi beforehand, right. Meat originated as a storage vessel for those magic mushrooms, so to speak. So they would make a livation out of it. They would store. Alright, honey doesn't rot, we all know that, right? The entire microbial store.

58:37 The mushrooms inside the honey. Guess what? They don't rot. You can pull them out for Sacramento use at a later time. Not a little bit of water to that. What are we making? We're making Mead and we have Mead infused with psychedelics, right? That's the cheapest preservative alcohol, so it didn't take very long before humans start to figure that out. And then beer and all that came later. But before all that, the first booze that humans ever drank was just as a preservative for magic mushrooms. That's interesting. I never heard that. And it's ironic that our booze lobby in Wisconsin is, you know, probably what's keeping cannabis from being legalized to a large degree and definitely going to be a voice against this, You know, for whatever that's worth.

59:24 Yeah, man, that's fascinating to think about. I had never heard that. You hear it. Like, there's so many of those stories that you can find where, you know, this population at this time in history was affected by this all the way to, like, biblical stuff that's connected to different effects of, you know, eating mushrooms. But I had never, I had never heard that one. That's fascinating. Yeah. So I'm really curious. As that happened in our past, our brains grew, right? And then you know it, it. We begin to evolve with it over time, and our brains begin to really rapidly advance at the same time. And then we stun it. All this. Now what happens when we begin doing this as a society can? What's the next evolution of our brain going to look like?

1:00:05 Right. Yeah. What what will the history book say in 2000, years from now about the the years 2100, you know? And it'll all be documented this time around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fascinating, man. Well, lot of lot of depth there. I appreciate you coming on and and chatting and it was just good getting to know you that it's just such a fascinating space. What's what's next on the horizon for your, it's probably coming up to busy season for the food plot thing, right? Like, what kind of studies do you have in mind? So I I've executed A multitier approach with launching this business. I did a lot of guerrilla marketing, you know. As you can imagine, there was a lot of you open one door and people say you're batshit crazy and you open the next door and say you're a genius, right.

1:00:53 So it was a lot of this, just getting the word out that this is the thing about deer and mushrooms. So I went after the top tier. So this would be like Mississippi State University's Deer Lab. Doctor Bronson Strickland, who's maybe the authority and Steve Damaris of the authorities on deer right now. Doctor Deer Doctor James Kroll. You know all of these top level of what's the word? I'm looking for research researchers And then also went after the top tier hunters, guys like our Wisconsin's own Dane Info, right? Who's the big buck serial killer is my personal favorite living hunter. He's basically the new Fred Bear of sorts, right? And Don Higgins down in Illinois and Kip Adams, president of the NDA, which is formerly the QDMA right. And so podcasters and the other influencers and hey, you know, basically on to prove it.

1:01:47 Premise, I've got this product, you've got land. Let's see what the deer do, right. Here's my results, Here's yours. Shared all my research, you know, and we're right in the pocket now. It's all beginning to bear fruit. And this will be the first hunting season that other humans other than me have got a chance to see this and employ it. So the first ones I made were at a Mossy Oak Field day in Indiana in April. And those are producing fruit right now. And that landowner told me that the deer are all over it and he's not going in there, check that camera, because it's too close to hunting season and there's bucks in there that he's really proud of. So I'm stoked. And it it's kind of becoming a reoccurring theme across landowners. I we'll see what happens. The next two years are going to be fascinating in the deer world because of this.

1:02:30 So I'm kind of out on my I'm past the Prove It tour, which was this summer, and now I'm on the breakout tour. Which is people are starting to see for themselves. Words getting out. I'm starting to book more and more appearances and I really want to be the hunting world's mushroom guy, hunting world daughter. I have a mushroom guy I love to hunt. It seems like a natural fit to me. Seems like everything that I ever did in my life and God ever did for me pointed me right to the spot. And that's a warm fuzzy feeling to to feel like you're where you belong when you belong there. And you know, and it's all through the grace of God, of course, and my wife and our family and. But I'm really excited about what the future holds right now. So Michael, Habitat is my other business, Michael being Latin for mushroom and Habitat being obvious. But if you break that word down differently, it's my cohabitat. I mean, we cohabitate these spaces with the the animals, right?

1:03:23 And so there's something there for us too. So I'm making a fungal rich, basically. I call it fungicentrism. I approach everything from a fungal standpoint first. Instead of thinking about it later, I feed the soil. Soil feeds plants. It's that easy, right? The soil, food web, the fungi, and it can change the pH, they can change the minimum content. They can do everything. All you got to do is help them. So why the heck do I want to do all this work when I can put the mushroom to work? And so that's my new goal is to educate when owners. So if we're in a traditional open food plotting system, we can build you some amazing soil, smartly out of weight. Waste resources if you're. A landowner that has, you know, timber, you know that you don't want to bring down or rocky ground or Pines or whatever it may be. Pines are, you know, the hardest part for a Deer Hunter because of deer love Pines, but what are you going to grow in there? He can't get any food in there.

1:04:15 Well, this excels in Pines, right. So changing the focus from you know where it's where it's been with these you know I I would like to call them Tractor riders set in the script to write where we got to play in all this and. This, all this expensive seed has to be put down every year and you got to spray and change the focus to here's the point, here's the food that they're already eating. They're crushing this food and we can grow it right? And instead of leaving it all will and nilly scattered around the landscape, we can make a hyper concentration in one spot. A honey hole so to speak, right And accessible to people who don't have tillable land. That's another huge. Piece What happens if your rocky, your ground's too rocky or it's, you know, too vertical or.

1:04:57 You're not allowed to do anything. You know. Grandpa won't let you cut down a tree. It'll be your farm in 20 years. But it's Grandpa's farm. Until then, you know, whatever it may be, you know, this is, this is a suitable option and maybe your only option. If you're in an area where I'm at, there's such high deer numbers. Good luck getting any crops off the ground without electric fencing, brother. You know, but we can get this off the ground. You know, you had to when you were, when you were kind of taking that initial tour, right? And talking to these people that have hunted for years and years and years, did you run into anybody that said they had used mushrooms in their hunting? Ever use mushrooms to target deer as far as growing them? There are hunters who know that this is a thing and it's one of their best kept secrets, and they're not exactly too happy that it's getting communicated.

1:05:46 I was going to say yeah. Yeah. And I'm sorry for those guys. It was part of my we lost too. I just gave away my best kept secret. So yeah, it goes both sides. I mean, there are people who have that professors, you know, say, oh, you know, every deer in the Upper Peninsula is starving. And if a deer is eating a mushroom, it's because it's starving, right. And despite the science to the contrary, you know that. So you just, you have to learn to let stuff roll off your sleeve. And it's pretty hard for me as people pleaser to hear that kind of crap, you know? But it's just the way folks are and just got to keep going forward. And do you? Yeah, it's interesting because I mean, I've hunted for a long time, been around a lot of, a lot of hunters and it's nothing I ever even thought of. And I don't know why.

1:06:31 Not talking about it, it makes complete sense. It took me a long time to come to grips with the two. I spent the first few years just trying to disprove this. Like just get it off. Like get it out of my brain. Okay, this is the thing that I saw. And as a mushroom farmer forger the deer carrying up my mushrooms, you know maybe it's maybe it's a neighborhood kid coming by or a cat or I don't know then any anything, right. Maybe they're doing it but it's just an anomaly because you know the deer or something and that's been a few years trying to disprove it and I couldn't disprove it and that's when I knew it was something legit. And you know of course back then this was pre pandemic. It seems like every scientific paper got uploaded during the pandemic, but.

1:07:15 There was nothing. I mean it was really scouring the Internet to find very little information And then since then I've been able to you know build a a big body of knowledge with this and a lot of resources that I've been able to uncover and so on. So it is definitive proof. Now we're way past the proof stage. But it took a while. I mean, it took me a few years to to be like, okay, I'm not as crazy as I think, you know, deer actually eat this and I would talk to old timers and. One old timer said, Oh yeah, they do. I've shot, you know, whenever I used to bow hunt, I I hunted over honey, mushrooms every year. And then the next old timer, I've been in the woods my whole life and never seen that, you know, and I can see that, you know, because even if you know what to look for for the proof, it's pretty hard to find the evidence.

1:08:01 You know, they they're a little bit of a sloppy eater and that helps your cause. Because they'll be like a definitive bite mark out of this mushroom and a few crumbles here and you can kind of, you know, see their tracks as they walked and there's a few more crumbles along and you know, you begin to pick things out like that. And then, you know, you find a video or someone made friends with deer and they're five feet away from them filming them eating all these mushrooms. And you can't believe that this person has access to that animal like that. And. You know, so it's, it's been on a pretty intense roller coaster. Yeah, that was a piece of the discovering that you sent me there, right? I was surprised. And they they had like canned footage of. Yeah, so that guy's name is Richard Smith.

1:08:43 He's an outdoor rider. And I guess a would be researcher and biologist. I mean citizen scientists. I can't bash on that. I'm citizen scientist. I don't know him. I just heard his name for the first time the other day when that came out. But I was filming with the guy who runs that show, Brian. Into 906 Outdoors, and we're filming like multiple days before that episode was to be released. Now he has another camera person that works with him, a lady who hosts the show, right. Because he's getting, having health issues and stuff like that. And kind of taking a step back. Well, she filmed that up in Marquette with that guy. And Brian just kind of, you know, said something about it and kind of brushed it off.

1:09:23 And I was like, whoa, whoa. And so we begin to talk about it. And he's like, oh, you'll you'll see when it airs. OK, so we finished filming All About mushroom food plots and Mushrooms and deer and that airs September 11th on Discovery. And then, you know, Monday night that airs or whatever. Well, I don't really watch TV, but I thought about it afterwards, so I checked YouTube and holy crap, you know, this guy's, you know, he's got amazing footage and he's 5 yards away from these deer that he's befriended and. You know, I'm not there in person, so I have no way of saying that, you know, he didn't put something on the mushroom, blah blah blah. And I'm not trying to cast shade on the guy or anything like that, but they're crushing mushrooms. Mushrooms right there in front of them, and they're eating the same mushrooms I see him eat and that everything looks on par right now with what I've found. And I'm trying to endorse this guy because I feel like there are a lot of people that really hate him and I'm not sure what that's about.

1:10:17 And I'm not trying to lump my my eggs in his basket or anything. But it just so happens that his his, you know footage supports what I found. Yeah. And because I was, I mean I was surprised to see that you know the because you said and I think seasoned hunters in the woods could probably they we've all probably seen him eat mushrooms at times, but it's not something that we can. Many yards away. Can you connect that? That's an acorn or a mushroom, which what's he eating exactly, exactly? Add some brows or some woody vegetation in between. Now you're looking through obstacles. Yep, 100%. And. And like you said, they take that bite, It's in their mouth. It's a leaf, it's an acorn, It's whatever's on the ground. We don't know what they're eating. So, and that's not, at least for me and I think probably for most hunters, it's not the first thing that I've been looking for in the woods when I'm trying to, you know, find a place to hunt or what that food, what that deer's eating or where it's sleeping.

1:11:13 So I think it's probably been pretty glossed over by a lot of us that just something that's, you know, trivial, But like I said, it it when you talk about it, it makes so much sense because like, I mean, we eat them, why wouldn't the deer? Why wouldn't they? Yeah, it's it's one of those things. I'm looking for it, you know, I'm a forager. I'm looking for mushrooms. I'm a mushroom farmer. I'm around mushrooms. I hunt too. I love watching the deer show. That's what we call it. Deer TV, you know, out at the farm, watching the deer out on the alfalfa fields and such. Right. And just one of those things, even though I'm all those things, it took me a while to see it. And not only to see it, but put value on it. You know, to say okay, Yes, deer eat mushrooms. I grow mushrooms.

1:12:03 Well, now I hate the deer, right? Or you look at it the opposite side and say, oh man, I've got a golden opportunity here to find out what mushrooms, deer like that I can grow. Right. And that's kind of the way we caught embracing the suck in the guide world, right? You got to turn that dark spot into the silver from the silver lining into your brightest moment, you know? And if you can do that, you win at everything, right? And so your perspective is, is everything and your attitudes everything in life. So I began to get less down on the deer eating the mushrooms and how much I hated them from doing it, and more optimistic about, well, hold on, this is something we could take advantage of. And the NDA's own, you know National Deer Association, their own charts bear out that during hunting season from the beginning of of you know September on or whatever, the the amount of mushrooms that they eat is on huge rise, right. So the the most conservative NDA charts going to show them 10 to 15% in the same time it's going to show crops and grasses being reduced as part of their diet.

1:13:06 So how much money and time are we spending on growing crops for these damn things, you know? There's a better way, yeah, and it makes complete sense. You start, you start thinking about crops getting harvested. The growing season comes. To us, yeah, you got it. Yeah. The nutritive quality, you know, goes down plus is beans or peas or winter wheat or rye or whatever. And even then it's, it's gross stage specific. If your cereal grains aren't under 10 inches, you know they're not preferred and stuff like that. Yeah. And like and preferred is this is a key term. That's what you were talking about earlier. Because they we think about, you know, it as an opportunist, right? I think that's probably a lot of people's initial thought of a deer eating as well. If it's there, I'm going to eat it. But that's not what I've.

1:13:49 If it's there and it's awesome, I'm going to eat it. Imagine going to your fridge at 2:00 AM and all your favorite things are in there. And then there's a whole bunch of very healthy stuff. Which ones you going to take out? It's this a no brainer. You ain't going to talk about 2:00 AM to get a salad. Brother, you know when to get the. Real double stuffed steak burrito or whatever, right? OK. It's the same thing with them when they they hit the the salad bar, you know, they're or the the, you know, the buffet. They're not after the salad bar, so to speak. They're looking for the best part. This is their steak, man. This is your steak dinner. Literally. Hands down. Yeah. And different times of year makes so much, you know, makes so much of a difference too. Because like you were saying that the with the summer food going down, we've all, we all see the ebbs and flows on trail cameras right about like you'll have a ton of deer for a whole month and then seemingly they're all gone, but not connected to the rut, different times of the year, it's like spring, winter, they're moving because of food and in cover. So when you can connect to those two things the way that you can with mushrooms, I think it's a pretty unique space. Yeah, I mean, this is a kid that having a great baiting set up and deep cover.

1:15:06 Yeah. Only thing is, is the bait costs a lot of money and you have to go in there all the time. With this, we just drop it and it's good for five years. I was going to ask that how long like when you do you call it planting? What is it? Yeah, we'll. Use the word cultivate or planting or whatever. So we're going to assemble or cultivate the plot right, which is about size of a pool table for what we call a starter pack and then a level pickup truck load of sawdust. We make this out of strong sawdust right? Waste resources. And you can skip the straw if you want to, but it'll be more productive if you use it right. I get straw for free after Halloween, right? Or you know the giant Pine Mountain ski jump, right? Well, I don't go to that because there's a lot of drunk people that are jerks, but there's a million straw bales in that parking lot afterwards.

1:15:52 So a lot of winter activities like that, right? Even Lambeau Field, after tailgating day, you might be able to cruise through there in the tailgating area and pick you up a Bale straw, right? Or two. And then a sawmill there, Are you kidding me? This is northern Wisconsin in the UP. There's a sawmill there. I mean, they outnumber bars and churches, which is saying something up here. So. And even if it didn't, your municipality has, you know, the the wood chips, you know or whatever, right? Well, all that is mushroom food, food, right? As long as it's not straight up, pine, sawdust, it works. And so we get these really cheap or free materials. For me, they're mostly free. One level pickup truck of sawdust is 2 yards roughly, and that's two bags of spawn, 2 bales of straw.

1:16:39 And that pickup truck is enough to do 2 giants pool table size areas or one big one. We call that the double down. And I mean, it's going to produce food depending on how aggressive you are with it, because you can water it, making a nonstop irrigation thing. We can, we can definitely manipulate this. To produce food when we want it, which is really big, right? But if we water it, we're going to get it to rot faster, so it's not going to last as long. Does that make sense? We're we're just going to make it grow more mushrooms faster instead of letting them grow the same amount of mushrooms over a longer timeline. We make it last five years easily, yeah.

1:17:20 Eight years is you wouldn't be too uncommon to see a couple random mushrooms 8 or 10 years later in that same spot. I'm not going to say it's going to blanket the floor like it is whenever it's going in its prime, but it wouldn't be uncommon. And the byproduct is 2 to 3 inches of beautiful black compost that's left over. And I mean amazing quality compost takes a forest 50 to 100 years to make an inch of soil The best regenerative agriculture practices. 35 to 50 years? OK, we can do it in as little as two or three. That's insane. And it improves the browse quality of all the plants nearby. Deer selective right? Improve. Browse quality, improve food. That's what I just heard.

1:18:02 Makes those plants right around this more attractive. Which kind of is a 1-2 punch, right? And if you wanted to put a little food plot in there, do this first. Let it all rot down in the beautiful soil. And then open up the canopy in that spot if you wanted to, right? You have gorgeous soil there. Or you just add new wood chips every few years. You know, just so they have something to eat, right? Yeah, another straw Bale or a little bit more wood chips, like 1/2 yard instead of a whole yard or whatever. Every year, every two years, every three years. What do you got? You know, what do you have access to and when can you get out there? It's the best time to do any habitat works right now, second best time, as soon as you have at the moment. You know, and just like planting a fruit tree, the best time to put this in is right now.

1:18:45 Second best time is you know, as soon as you can. It's interesting to hear that. Is there a is there a place for that? Or is that happening already where mushrooms are becoming more ingrained with agriculture anywhere? Not really. So is there a place for it that you've? Found or not, there's a huge place for this. So if you have cows which are also ruminants and you want to save some money on your your feed bill. This is a really smart thing for you to put in your property, right? Because the cows at the farm where I was there weren't my cows, so I'm not allowed to feed them mushrooms. But for some reason they keep breaking out of their pastures and coming in there and eating all my mushrooms. So you tell me if they like it, you know? But if I had heard of cows, I'd be doing this in a heartbeat, because if I save $1.00 off my feet, cost is worth it and I know it's going to prove the brows quality everything nearby. So what I'm doing now?

1:19:36 Because I'm experimenting with combining this with the traditional food plot on that edge setting. So basically I'm making a big 10 foot wide mushroom food plot that's 100 feet hundreds of feet long, just one truckload of sawdust at a time, all the way around the edge of a food plot, right? Well, that's going to improve the nutrient shuttling in that food plot and it's going to increase the browse quality in that food plot. It's also going to add a new layer of food around the edge of that food plot, right? But if I did this in conjunction with agriculture in particular, I could really really, you know, feed some cows with something like this, you know, then for me, I have such insane deer numbers that I just need as much food as I can on the ground. And it has to be perennial.

1:20:18 It has to grow back. So Clover and mushrooms are where I'm concentrating my perennial effort right now and browse, you know, hinge cutting trees. That's the best stuff we can feed our deer is those stump sprouts. Those are insanely nutritious, you know, whether it's a hinge cut tree or a tree that we've cut off and that this is trying to regrow again or those sprouts and that, you know, those buds and things like that are as nutritious as any alfalfa or more nutritious. And that guy who's been my mentor in this industry, he kind of invented that, so to speak, Hinge cutting. His name's Jim Ward. He's very famous in the outdoor industry if he has happened to listen and thank you Jim, for everything. But for years everybody told him he was batshit crazy. You're you know, literally the experts came right out against them and then eventually a biologist got a hold of it and said hold up, there's a lot to this. And they never quite, you know, took him in or whatever and said Yep, Jim's been right the whole time, you know, or whatever. But he was for 15 plus years before folks started buying into it.

1:21:21 And all the the other folks in the dear world that you know hire consultants and stuff, they know who he is and there's a reason that they're all starting to hinge cut and so on and so forth, right. And Jim does much more than hinge cutting. I'm going to say that right now. But that's really, you know, him sticking to his guns like that. I'm very fortunate to be able to you know have him as a mentor so to speak in this industry. But he went through, you know, kind of that long road of just everybody says you're crazy. You know, you shouldn't be believing what you're seeing. You're making more out of this than it should be. And so it's kind of ironic that God brought us both together and you know, said, hey, hey, you're getting ready to go through hell with this where everyone's going to think you're crazy.

1:22:02 You need this guy, you know, so for whatever it's worth. Yeah, what about, like, crop agriculture? Does anybody use mushrooms in any ways there? So that's where this mushroom that we're using originated though it's grown extensively in open field Ag systems and China right now. And then after a couple years, they actually turn it over, they're using it to remediate the land. So yeah, it becomes beautiful, fertile soil at the end, right. And so they can sell the the land for a very high markup versus what they bought it after they grow mushrooms there for a few years. And that's kind of one of the strategies that you're seeing over and over in the ag world in I believe it was Romania where this really came to be, you know, for farming this particular mushroom called strefari or wine cap, right.

1:22:55 They would grow wheat field and then on the edge of the wheat field they would grow this. So all that, their chaff and their leftovers would get shuttled over to this. And they will grow the mushroom there right, with the waste right on the edge. And then of course the compost would happen and then shuttle that back in. And that's a little more moving stuff around than I'd like to do, but that that was the way that they did it. Of course, it gave them higher yields, much, much higher yields. So there is a lot of people who use this in your garden. I don't recommend that. They're better mushrooms to grow in your garden. And the reason I say that is this mushroom occurs frequently and it rots really fast too. It doesn't stand up very well in refrigeration, It's only good for like 5 days in refrigeration, and it doesn't stand up really well out in the field. So you're going to have a ton of fungus, gnats and other insects, which if you're an organic farmer, you kind of want that because you want the whole soil food web and the the food web of the spiders and the praying mantises to prosper. But what you're really doing is double dog daring the deer to jump that fence and destroy your crops and rabbits and squirrels, right?

1:23:54 But there are other mushrooms, especially those that are false specific, like the blue it that are really they do the same thing for your soil. They're a little bit slower, but they do the same thing for your soil. And then they only fruit in the autumn, which means that, you know you don't have to deal with all the buggy, nasty mushrooms that you you can just let them rot and deal with the consequences or you can pick them all, you know, whether they're you're going to use them or not and then have to deal with that they constantly. So there are a lot of folks who'll tell people, Oh yeah, use wine cap in your garden. I don't think so. As a person who's ran large scale gardens, I can tell you that that I personally believe that's a terrible idea in comparison. Unless you have a high fenced off and you love mushrooms and you want to deal with picking them all the time because you're going to pick a lot all the time.

1:24:39 I I personally recommend the Blue it for the Garden, but it does have crossover. You can use this. I'm working with a few seed companies right now, particularly one that I really like, Vitalized Seed Company. They're Michigan based. Shout out Jared now and they have a like a 12 part system. So the the first part in the spring is called Nitro boost and the second part in the autumn is called carbon load. Now for things to rot properly move through the soil we need to balance carbon and nitrogen ratio about 24 to one. You say 20, There are 30 parts to 1:00 somewhere in there. And so this is kind of designed for that. And then they're also, they use a lot of inoculants to help bolster your soil and get your your food web going, which I really love.

1:25:22 But also it's extremely diverse. And they're blend. And one of the things I'm working with them is to reduce the thatch or the overburden that tends to accumulate in food plots. You know, you use rye, then you come in and crimp it, and then you go in with buckwheat in the spring, and then, you know, you kind of get a layer of thatch built up real fast. Well, this mushroom is very aggressive in that regard, and it will actually begin to eat that thatch. So it's after traffic. We a lot of times the thatch builds up because of the microhyzal or the mushrooms that are good with plants that are in that living arrangement in the soil, they're not really suited to eating all that dead overburden on top. They need a different mushroom that is good at eating dead stuff, right called a sacratropher sacrophitic mushroom. So when you put those two and play together, now that sacrifice is feeding the ectomicrohizole or the endomicrohizole in the soil, and beautiful things begin to happen, right, because it's balanced and it's appropriate. And so by installing this SAP, atroph or saprophytic mushroom into this system, we can get a lot more biological life to happen faster.

1:26:27 And like we said earlier, here where everything has that short decomposition window right, we can get a lot more decomposition faster. On in a shorter time you've got it. So we're reducing the overburden. Will say it's a Maple sand that has too many leaves on the ground. This is common, right? Or there's just a lot of small sticks or whatever, maybe. Well, this mushroom is native to North America, the entire northern hemisphere of the world for that matter, right? So it's just not very commonly occurring. However, when you begin to put it on your property, you wouldn't be surprised. After a few years, you start to see it in a couple random spots, and what it'll do is begin to eliminate that overburden and kick your soil life back up. Does that make sense?

1:27:09 Yeah, absolutely. And that can, and it'll just kind of leap out on its own when the deer eat it, you know, they're the perfect vessel for passing those spores on, right? So they eat the mushroom, then they walk through the forest and then deposit, you know, the biomass back down after they've ruminated it. And that biomass is the kind of the perfect vessel for the spores to germinate in and give it a new spot of real. Estate and starts off with some food, right? Got it. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like nature's design. If you really think about it, it's almost smarter than we are. Absolutely. Well, that's not surprising. It's in a lot of ways, I appreciate you coming on, man. It was an awesome conversation. I I hope your business kills it and I I hope you just keep on doing great things, man. I wish that all that would happen as well and I appreciate you guys for having me in here.

1:27:57 We're going to shout out Dan, the producer. Yeah, Dan's doing it. And of course, if folks don't know, you and I have talked before up north whenever you used to live in the UP and it's always it was good to talk with you, Brad. And even though Buckskin Bob's not in the corner of the room cracking jokes and his canned oyster mushrooms, I love Bob Black. He's amazing up north, figure, you know? He is man. I hope they erect the statue to him after he passes. Hopefully he passes many years from now, but I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to sporulate some minds, and if you or anybody else ever wants to talk about this again, you know where I'm at. Appreciate you, Matt. Appreciate you.

1:28:45 Oh.