People always get farmers market.

Don't have a picture or something that you know a mushroom that's growing in their yard that they want to know what it is.

I'm not great at identifying all the different species of mushrooms.

I know what we grow, but I always tell people that it you know all mushrooms are edible, some are just edible warrants.

My name is Trey Malcolm and I'm a mushroom farmer.

My name is Zach Taylor.

I'm a mushroom farmer and I live in northwest Arkansas.

We both lived in South Arkansas and we moved up here and we were just really kind of in love with the community and we were walking around the farmers market one day and we thought, hey, we could be the mushroom guys.

There's nobody doing it and we didn't know what the yields were.

We didn't know if it'd be profitable, so we just decided to do it at least as a hobby.

And it kind of mushroomed into a business.

Bad mushroom.

This time of year at Fat Top Farm where gross six types of mushroom.

This is the golden oyster.

It's got a real distinctive flavor and taste.

You eat them raw.

They almost have like a melon taste, chestnut mushrooms.

They have kind of a nutty flavor.

They hold their texture really well.

They're my favorite mushroom and put on a pizza.

This is a pink oyster mushroom.

They're a tropical mushroom, they have a meatiness similar to Canadian bacon.

The blue oyster mushroom.

They're our favorite mushroom to grow.

They have the best shelf life.

They taste great.

If we had to grow one mushroom at Fat South Farm, it would be blue oyster mushroom.

The best thing about being a mushroom farmer is.

Influencing the way people eat expanding people's horizons just a little bit.

And when I was a kid.

At least in the single digits, I didn't like mushrooms.

I thought they only came from a can and I didn't like them at all.

One time my mom, just.

She's really good at.

Getting me to try stuff and she had made some fried mushrooms and she.

She was like you gotta try one, just have an open mind.

I did what she said I tried to forget what I thought before about mushrooms and just focus only on this experience right now and I liked it and I was like wow wow that's Fast forward.

And just never lost the bug after that.

We grow off of.

Stuff that would consider be considered waste.

It's sewer holes and sawdust and water.

That's it.

And that's what mushrooms like to grow on.

That's what most things like to grow in you all look like this.

Once they've soaked up the water and you can see where they they're starting that mushroom mycelium is starting to leap off or expand this bag right here.

It's it's fully almost fully colonized.

Or maybe it is fully colonized.

It's ready for fruiting.

Most everything out here is redneck engineered.

We built it ourselves.

They spend most of their life in more of a warm environment, incubating, and when they're all colonized, we move them into this room, which is cool, wet, and the lights on, and that's those, are all three kind of triggers to make them want to produce mushrooms, and this is probably more five days into the process.

But it all depends on the temperature.

Practically double in size every 24 hours.

At this point, it's kind of magical.

Watching them.

With varying demand, with farmers markets raining out occasionally or or, chefs canceling orders last minute, you know we find it hard to exactly meet demand and so we overcame that by processing our mushrooms by making food products.

Essentially how it works is we take the caps, we cut them off and we make jerky with them and the stems we roast them we make.

Roth, and so nothing goes the way sets a big deal for us and this is all thanks to the Arkansas Food Innovation Center at the University of Arkansas.

They've been great to us as well.

We're a state certified shared use kitchen.

We provide this service to the general community for them to make a retail products.

Our number one goal is food safety.

We show them all, teach them all about that.

Each product that Trey does has a unique process.

So what we'll do now is we'll add a little bit of our our sauce.

And these mushroom caps and they'll cook for about 45 minutes.

This sauce is a mixture of tamari which is a gluten free soy sauce.

Brown sugar and apple cider vinegar.

So we'll add these mushrooms to this liquid that's in the kettle.

So we'll just spread this out thin and it'll go in the dehydrator and it'll come out looking like this over here.

Having an influence on the way people eat, it's kind of a big deal.

Being at the farmers market here, and I've never seen that before here and that 100 times a day, it's what makes you keep going and you're not making a lot of money.

Or you know you can't afford to pay yourself.

Those are the things that keep you going.

I'd like to see us in a couple 100 grocery stores with our packaged products.

At that point, you're really you're doing more than just feeding your local community.

You may be putting yourself out there to the rest of the world, and that's kind of a big deal.

Don't be afraid to experiment with our mushrooms.

You can do anything you want with them if you like soup, drop them into soup if you like.

If you like fried mushrooms, fry them up.

Just want to tell the world to eat more mushrooms.