Kyle and Keri Hissim live on 6 acres of farmland outside of Rockwall, but their entire farm fits inside a 2,000-square-foot barn. The couple behind Millbrook Mushrooms supply Dallas-area restaurants and markets with about 300 pounds of gorgeous mushrooms every week, all grown in the carefully controlled conditions of that outbuilding, which looks more like a science lab than a place you'd store a tractor.
"I literally built this whole thing with my hands," Kyle Hissim says, standing in the small anteroom where he harvests the mushrooms that grow just around the corner, in a larger backroom that's almost opaque with humidity. "I built the business from the ground up. Drywall. All the walls are steel studs, which you have to engineer yourself because you can't google that. Mold- and mildew-resistant gypsum board. Epoxy floors. The fogger I actually built, it's 12 elements, and it's on a humidified meter."
In his telling, the idea of starting a mushroom farm was practically impulsive. The family visited a friend in Colorado who was growing and selling medicinal mushrooms; in Kyle's words, "I stayed up there, hung out for three days, and I was like, you know what? I'm gonna be a mushroom farmer, dammit!"
Millbrook now grows a variety of culinary delicacies: shiitakes, pioppino, golden and blue oysters, lion's mane, and chestnut mushrooms, some of them year-round, some seasonal, plus a handful of medicinal varieties that go into extract bottles.
Read more at D Magazine