There's a fungus among us in Guelph's Old Quebec Street: Andrew Coppolino

Vertical farming is just what it sounds like: growing plants and crops in vertical layers often without soil rather than horizontally on conventional plots of land.

The increasingly popular practice also incorporates hydroponics and aquaponics in a controlled environment.

Seen by many as a next wave of agriculture, you can even set up that vertical environment in the tight real estate space of an urban centre. That'sprecisely what Noki Farms has done to grow mushrooms in the Old Quebec Street mall in downtown Guelph.

"We're a mushroom grower and retailerand our whole purpose is trying to reduce the travel time of people's food and offer delicious and nutritious mushrooms and microgreens," says Karl Fellbaum, whoco-ownsNoki Farms with Nykole Crevits.

In fact, you could say the distance the food travels to get to you is only about 15 metres.

Open for nearly two years now, the idea was inspired by pandemic lockdowns, Crevits says. When they heard about many people experimenting with growing tomatoes at home, Fellbaum and Crevits spied mushrooms as their opportunity.

WATCH | Seeinside Noki Farms:

This Guelph store grows mushrooms and microgreens on site

8 months ago

Duration 1:10

Noki Farms in Guelph is growing and selling mushrooms and microgreens inside a storefront in Old Quebec Street in the downtown core.

"We didn't have the outdoor space for tomatoes," Crevits said. "We saw increases in food costs and limited availability during that time, so we thought it was a chance to pick up a hobby and started growing mushrooms indoors. It escalated very quickly from there."

In addition to retail sales at the store, Noki supplies some area restaurants with their produce and also have booths at about five area farmers' markets, including Rockwood and Cambridge.

200 kg of food each month

Between them, the pair have educational backgrounds that include biology, genetics and biotech from the University of Guelph and Conestoga College and especially the critical elements of aseptic technique which has given them the scientific foundation for working with mushroom spores, gills and spines.

The rest has come from their own research, ingenuity and what Fellbaum calls "can-do" attitude that puts nose to grindstone.

Between their mushrooms and hydroponic microgreens speckled pea, arugula, red cabbage, mustard, broccoli and more they produce about 200 kilograms offood each month with relatively little waste, about a bag of garbage per month.

Noki Farms grows about a dozen mushrooms which change throughout the year: several species of oyster mushrooms, lion's mane, chestnut, bear's head (part of what is known as the "tooth fungus" group) and wild enoki to name a few. They are continuously looking for new mushrooms to grow with shiitakes currently in development.

Their mushrooms are nutritious, offer some protein and are high in the B-vitamins. Fellbaum points out that lion's mane mushrooms are high in B-12, a vitamin normally found in meat.

Small but mighty growing area

The growing facility behind the racks of microgreens and the sales counter are lab-like rooms with labelled jars of spores, autoclaves for sterilization, environmentally-secure black tents with zipper entrances, laptops running computer software, and special ventilation to ensure sterility and optimum growing conditions.

Mushroom production includes "fruiting" which needs critical conditions for robust growth: temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide monitoring in parts-per-million and air exchange, and a 12-hour light cycle.

For the scale of their current retail production, which is within only dozens of square metres of space,the technology and equipment wasn't easily available, so Crevits and Fellbaum developed and designed much of it themselves.

Noki Farms' mushrooms are grown in a substrate of hardwood chips and soy hulls, rather than soil-and-pasteurized manure. A "master mix" is inoculated with myceliated grains of rye which colonize the substrate and form a biomass in a "growth bag" until it becomes what is called a block, which in turn is slit and placed in an 80 per cent humidity chamber.

Searching for oxygen, the mushrooms push through the slits in the growth bag and grow until harvest.

"Then, it's dinner time," Fellbaum says.

Interest in mushrooms has grown, according to the pair, and Noki's customer base is a wide one. It's part of a general food awareness, a consciousness to reduce meat consumption and seek healthier eating opportunities, according to Crevits.

While it's a lot of weight to ask the humble and fragile mushroom to bear, there's a further-reaching impetus for Fellbaum and Crevits: a scalability that gets food closer to people while easing pressure on the environment.

"Placing this business in a densely populated area can reduce travel time of food greatly," Fellbaum said. "We want to see a Noki Farms everywhere we can get it where people are living and without the transport truck."