January Blog Post: Sundown’s Yearly Update
A core value Chesed Farms was founded on is: transparency and authenticity in the pursuit of meaningful relationships with our community. March of 2026 will be the farm’s 6th anniversary, and I continue to be humbled by the growing number of stakeholders that contribute to the continued success of Chesed Farms. This includes: our friends and family, employees, new and returning customers, restaurants, grocery stores, distributors, schools and colleges that buy mushrooms, as well as bring classes on farm tours, in addition to the community and media organizations that share our story. The last time I provided an annual report was in 2023. I missed last year, so here is to creating the rhythm to make this an annual communication. One other person I want to thank for the focused developments of 2025, Ian Gregoire. I worked with Ian as a professional coach throughout the year. His consistent and curious questioning helped me stay on task, and thoroughly develop the plans that were executed in 2025 and are the foundation for the work to be done in 2026.
In the spirit of authenticity and transparency, here are the milestones, challenges, and achievements from 2025 that you helped make possible.
If there was one theme that defined 2025, it was maximizing operations with minimal resources.
To do this we refined our operations, starting this process in the fall of 2024. For most of the year, we worked with a new company, MushLove in Eltopia, sourcing ready-to-fruit blocks. The blocks were uniform in shape and consistent in production. And, I learned A LOT from working with Will through this process!. This arrangement outsourced six steps in our process: maintaining cultures, creating spawn, mixing and bagging substrate, sterilizing substrate, inoculating, and incubating the mycelium. The remaining steps of the operation: fruiting, harvesting, packaging, delivering, and sales were primarily done by myself. My wife, Jennifer Hazen, and three of our children filled in many gaps, especially by running the Walla Walla Farmers Market. You may have also met our daughters Stella and Sparrow at the market. Our middle child, Willow, is a big help at the farm, especially nocking out mount dish pit! And I wouldn’t want to leave out Jen Iacaboni, who helped me follow up on email messages, and kept the informative email newsletter consistent and predictable.
Delivery of ready-to-fruit blocks.
Bringing in ready-to-fruit blocks forced me to look at production in a new way. At the founding of Chesed Farms, I strongly held on to the belief that we should operate and control the full process from culture to sales. The biggest take-away from this experience is the importance of collaboration with others in the industry to accomplish specialization and scale. Previously, the multiple steps of the process started, or moved to the next step every day of the week to make sure we had fresh mushrooms on demand. Now, we were receiving two-weeks of mushrooms at one time! And when mushrooms are ready to form, they start firing in the bags they are growing in. And this growth is not ideal, and does not produce the high-quality mushrooms we strive for. In fact, it creates an additional labor step before placing the bags in the fruiting room. We would cut open each overgrown bag and remove the material before putting it in the fruiting room. This not only adds labor costs, it removes bio-mass that could have grown into a beautiful mushroom. This was a problem for much of our history unto this point, as we learned the process and the pains of scaling.
To address this problem we completed the installation of a 180 ft2 walk-in cooler to hold blocks until we were ready to fruit them. This mimics the organism’s cycles in nature. The mycelium lives underground perennially. During the cold winters, their metabolism slows down significantly. And, when the temperatures rise, they “wake-up” and start living their best life. This allows us to time when the bags are placed in the fruiting room based on our anticipated demand. Decreasing loss in both over production and that messy fruiting in the bag problem. This streamlined operation allowed us to start the year by lowering our prices nearly 20% across the board! A key goal in our effort to help more people eat more mushrooms.
Just as we were humming along in this arrangement, MushLove stopped operations in September. That had us scramble to restart the previous process in-house. We were able to do that by bringing on some new employees, including Aurora Gorman, and Darta Siploa (a previous Whitman intern!) We also started dusting off our operations documentation to train this new team. Revealing the need to update the documents with what was learned through the year!
Establishing new and nurturing existing connections with regional mushroom farms.
The experience with MushLove gave me first hand experience of the benefits, and challenges, of collaborating with others in the process of growing mushrooms. I was introduced to the MycoWizards community. I devoured the long conversations with mushroom farmers around the country. In multiple discussions I heard comments about the desire and opportunity to grow better mushrooms and streamline farm operations by specializing. Also, the reality that the customers also desire a variety of mushrooms being available. Could it be possible to overcome the logistic challenges to collaborate with regional growers to achieve both of these competing goals?
The Choice Mushroom Collective started taking shape in the winter of 2024. In the summer of 2025, Jennifer and I took a whorl-wind, two-day trip around the Puget Sound to meet a handful of amazing mushroom farmers and see their farms. This is something I wish I had done when we were just starting to grow Chesed Farms. The farms we visited included: SnoValley Mushrooms (Duvall, WA), Cascadia Mushroom Company (Bellingham, WA), Adam’s Mushrooms (Gig Harbor, WA), and Provisions Mushrooms (Olympia, WA).
The first phase of this effort was to buy in mushrooms from other growers and distribute them in our community, That included buying in Shiitake from multiple sources to examine the pricing and quality of mushrooms from the large and small producers in our region. Two farms stood out for availability, quality, and consistency: Cascadia Mushroom Company, and Columbia Mushroom Co. We are also sourcing Maitake from Columbia Mushroom Co.
Maitake Mushroom from Columbia Mushroom Co.
Shiitake Mushrooms from Cascadia Mushrooms
Packaging for Choice Mushroom offerings were designed and sourced. First, was branded cardboard trays. All of Chesed Farms mushrooms in quantities of 5-pounds have been delivered in these trays, as well as Choice Mushroom mixes. For Christmas, we got branded cardboard boxes with windows. These packages are wrapping up shelf life testing, and will be hitting the store shelves over the next couple of weeks. I want to work through the previous packaging supply so it doesn’t go waste.
Choice Mushroom Retail Packaging
5-pound Choice Mushroom tray filled with Chesed Farms Chestnut Mushrooms.
Expand distribution.
I am very grateful for local distributors we are blessed with in Walla Walla. We have worked with the Walla Walla Food Hub as far as I can remember. This year we expanded our offering in the Food Hub to include cases of our packaged mushrooms for local grocery stores and Co-ops. Their selection of regionally produced goods is unmatched in the valley. Chris at A.R. Teal’s Produce has taken restaurant distribution for our community to new levels. This year we worked closely with Chris to make the Choice Mushroom Oyster and Chef’s Mixes available for his restaurant clients. This has brought Chesed Farms mushroom into more dinning experiences, including: The Salted Mill, Passatempo, TMACS, and more!
Expanding the network of distributors we work with is a top goal for 2026.
Expand foraging network.
Local foraging was lacking compared to the bumper season we had in 2024. The morel availability was greatly affected by the low moisture in the winter. Winter of 2025 was 20% of the water that the winter of 2024 had! Coincidentally, we were contacted by WildFresh at the beginning of the morel season. WildFresh was started by a couple Canadian guys with 20 years foraging experience across North and Central America. They have moved into the role of buyer and distributor, and are connected with many foragers in multiple regions in the Pacific Northwest. This connection helped keep the morels flowing in the spring, and introduced new varieties we were able to make available. Varieties that made their debut included: Black Trumpet, Lobster Mushrooms, Chicken of the Woods, Cauliflower, and Bellybutton Hedgehog mushrooms.
We look forward to working with WildFresh and our beloved local foragers to keep wild mushrooms safely and abundantly available to our community!
Launch new website.
It was time to give the website a facelift. As we were nearing the end of 2025, many of the pictures we had have become dated, and overall the website was getting complicated and redundant. The website was redesigned by the talented Kari Arns. Kari distilled the content of the website to coherent orgnization, and presented our content beautifully. Most importantly, Kari was truly a joy to work with on this somewhat arduous process!
If you have not poked around the new website, take you mouse on a spin and click away. One highlight is the new Recipe Blog! We still have our Pinterest Page. However, you will see more activity on the new blog. And we have some exciting plans for the new year for this section.
The farm entrance at 3134 Heritage Rd.
Conduct more tours, start Open Farm Hours.
The year rounded out with the latest initiative to help more people eat more mushrooms. The farm is now accessible to the public twice a week. We have Open Farm hours on Sunday and Monday from 1-3 pm. Anyone can stop by and say ‘hi’, purchase fresh and freeze dried mushrooms, pickup orders made on our online store, or jump on a farm tour (farm tours start at 1:30 PM).
When you get here, come in the front door, it is unlocked for Open Farm Hours. Please remember, this is a working farm production. If you don’t see anyone when you step inside, give a holler or ring the doorbell on the outside of the door.
We look forward to seeing you at the farm!
Wrap up
A few other quick highlights for our year: Attended the 3eyed Fish Market, nominated for the Union Bulletin’s Reader’s Choice Awards for Best Farm Stand, got branded table cloths for our market tables, and the Persistent Local Market keeps gaining traction.
I am excitedly looking forward into 2026! So much so, it is underway and developing in exciting ways. One of the many reasons it took me to the end of January to write this post about our past year. This year, I have the goal to make more blog posts and videos (did you know we have a YouTube Channel?) on a regular basis so next year’s recap isn’t so long :P Thank you again for this opportunity to do something I find so fun and meaningful!
In love with& kindness :)
Sundown
