1 of 4
In the lab
Raising edible mushrooms for area restaurants “pays the bills for what I call my addiction—the research,” says self-taught mycologist Tradd Cotter. “I don’t know what other people spend their money on, but for me it’s new lab gear, more petri plates and more testing kits.”
2 of 4
On the hunt
Tradd Cotter also teaches classes in foraging for wild mushrooms, an essential skill when you live close to the Appalachians, one of the most fungal diverse areas in North America. “It’s like being in a candy store,” he says of living in the Upstate. “If you want to study mushrooms and fungi, this is the place to be.”
3 of 4
Family business
Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative members Tradd and Olga Cotter enjoy a relaxed moment with their daughter, Heidi. Olga, who grew up foraging for mushrooms in her native Croatia, manages the business operations of Mushroom Mountain. “Everything clicked when I met Olga,” Tradd Cotter says. “It was instant mushroom synergy.”
4 of 4
Natural pesticide
Tradd Cotter’s research includes studying a group of fungi with the ability to mummify insects, including this cockroach. He envisions a day when toxic chemicals won’t be needed to rid a home of pests.
Tradd Cotter’s Hyundai was in second gear on a dusty Lowcountry road when the car blew a tire. Or at least that’s what it sounded like. As he continued to drive away after a visit to a Johns Island mushroom farm, he looked through the rearview mirror and realized someone was chasing his car, banging on the trunk to get his attention.
“The owner of the farm comes up to the window and says, ‘Do you want a job?’ ” Cotter recounts.
It was a chance occurrence that would drastically change the course of his life.
Back then, Cotter was a 20-year-old college student living at home and struggling to find his life’s direction. Twenty-two years later, he’s a nationally recognized expert on mushrooms, a self-taught scientist who collaborates with Ph.D.s on cutting-edge biological research and gives guest lectures across the nation. But most of all, he’s a man on a mission to show the world that fungi have enormous potential to improve our lives.
“My main goal is to find things that humanity can use,” he says of the bioprospecting research on more than 200 varieties of fungi at Mushroom Mountain, his family’s private research lab and farm near Easley. “We’re trying to expand the level of knowledge around fungi and all the different things they can do.”
Cotter has no shortage of grand ideas about the power of mushrooms to cure disease, eradicate agricultural pests and even clean up toxic pollution. At first listen, many seem like claims that couldn’t possibly be true. But the science seems to be proving him right.
Foraging for fun and profit
Growing up near Charleston, Cotter had a healthy interest in the natural world but no special designs on mycology, the study of mushrooms, until that fateful visit to the Johns Island mushroom farm.
“I guess the fascination occurred when I first started identifying mushrooms,” he says.
The farm grew just two varieties: shiitake and oyster mushrooms, which were somewhat exotic table fare for the time. Cotter’s boss told him that Charleston chefs were willing to pay a premium for another variety that could only be found in the wild, the chanterelle.
Funnel-shaped, golden-hued beauties that smell faintly of apricots, chanterelles are one of the most prized edible mushroom species. Hoping to make some extra cash, Cotter studied up on mushroom ID and began foraging in the woods before work and on weekends.
“I started picking and identifying chanterelles, and then I just started adding one new mushroom at a time,” Cotter says.
The more he foraged, the more he learned. And the more he learned, the more he wondered why so few edible mushroom varieties were farm-raised. Some of them, it turned out, are virtually impossible to cultivate.
“Chanterelles grow on the root systems of trees; they have a symbiotic relationship that can take 20 to 30 years to develop,” he says. “But there are others that grow on dead material. There are thousands of mushroom species in this region, and hundreds of those are edible.”
Cotter started experimenting. He purchased used laboratory equipment, cultured wild mushrooms and attempted to grow them in a makeshift lab in his bathroom. These weren’t normal things for a 20-something to spend his time and money on, and his parents took notice.
“What would you think if all of a sudden mushroom supplies started coming in for your 21-year-old son?” Cotter says, laughing. “My mom was like, ‘Are you growing mushrooms upstairs?’ And I just remember looking at her and saying, ‘Yes.’ I wasn’t going to lie.”
To Cotter, the entire fungal kingdom is pretty magical, but he wasn’t growing that kind of mushroom.
Today’s amateur mycologists have a wealth of resources at their fingertips, but in those pre-Internet days, Cotter could only find a single book on the practice of cultivating mushrooms, leaving him to figure the process out largely through trial and error. He kept at it and soon succeeded in cloning his first wild fungus, moving it from petri dish to fruiting mushroom. At that point, he says, “I thought, ‘Maybe I have a skill I want to explore.’ ”
The Johns Island mushroom farm where Cotter worked eventually shut down, but the seeds—or rather, spores—of interest had already found fertile ground.
‘It’s like being in a candy store’
Cotter continued to pursue mycology, supporting his hobby by picking up jobs at a greenhouse and in landscaping, which familiarized him with the symbiotic relationships between mushrooms, plants and insects.
In 2006, while working in Florida, he met and married Olga Katic, a woman with mushroom hunting in her blood. Born in Croatia, Katic grew up collecting and identifying mushrooms and shared Cotter’s passion for mycology. “It was instant mushroom synergy,” Cotter says. “Everything clicked when I met Olga. Before then it was just a hobby. We both worked hard together to make this business our livelihood.”
The couple set up their first lab in a small apartment in Boynton Beach, Fla., but quickly realized they needed a better environment for collecting and cultivating mushrooms, so they saved up and moved to the Upstate. Mushroom Mountain now occupies 26 acres of rolling countryside near Easley, where it is served by Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative.
Part commercial growing operation, part education facility, part research lab, the property is the place the Cotters dreamed of building—a mushroom kingdom where chicken of the woods, a fleshy, lobed species in shades of gold and orange, might be elevated to a potent tool against staph infections; where gourmet edibles like almond portabellas and blue oysters are bred for the region’s top restaurants; where the cultivation of brain-invading fungi could tilt the scales in the battle we wage on insects and agricultural pests.
The couple carefully chose the site. They’re near I-85, a major transportation artery, and within easy delivery distance of several metropolitan areas. More important, they’re just down the road from a mushroom hotspot, the Appalachians.
“It’s the most fungal diverse area in North America,” Cotter says. “It’s like being in a candy store. If you want to study mushrooms and fungi, this is the place to be.”
In the lab
Growing and selling mushrooms is the core of Mushroom Mountain’s business, and there’s always a fresh crop of springy shiitake and pendulous oyster mushrooms under cultivation. To meet the demands of area restaurants and other bulk purchasers, the farm has tripled its output, shipping 600 to 900 pounds a week, but the heart and soul of the operation is Cotter’s research lab, where he puts decades of experience to work by culturing fungi and meticulously observing their behavior, always looking for unique properties than can serve mankind.
“We are a production facility, and that pays the bills for what I call my addiction—the research,” he says. “I don’t know what other people spend their money on, but for me it’s new lab gear, more petri plates and more testing kits.”
There’s a sense of controlled chaos in the lab, where chunks of mushrooms and experiments-in-progress cover most surfaces. It’s a long way from the bathroom of his parents’ house, although he still largely works solo in the lab. He’s pursuing a number of research avenues, many focused on mycoremediation, the use of fungi to clean up environmental contaminants.
Fungi “eat” by exuding digestive enzymes into their surroundings, like a stomach turned inside out. The range of materials on which fungi will grow is remarkable: coffee grounds, animal waste, sawdust, even blue jeans. Fungi can also break down and absorb compounds that are toxic to nearly all other forms of life, including pesticides, industrial dyes, heavy metals and liquid petroleum.
The Cotters champion mycoremediation on a domestic scale. Cotter’s recent book, Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation, has tutorials for composting pet waste and reducing yard erosion using fungi. There’s even a fungal species with an appetite for common household plastics. Cotter recently got his hands on a sample from a culture bank.
“What we’re doing now is saving all our plastic at the farm,” he says. “We’re going to take this [fungus] and use it to try to eat all of our waste and compost our plastic.”
Cotter’s forays into the medical and agricultural uses of fungi are perhaps the most exciting of his many research projects. Just as some fungi can break down toxic chemicals or plastics, other species show a particular talent for destroying bacteria. Cotter runs petri dish trials to determine which fungal strains are best at attacking the bacteria that cause staph infections, salmonella poisoning and strep throat.
“We’re plating these things out and seeing them chase each other around the plate like a gladiator match,” he says. “So I set these matches up between specific fungi and bacteria, and I notice that some are good at this, and some are good at that. I grade them on what they can do.”
Digging deeper
The lab also contains a few dozen prototypes of something Cotter is working on with Clemson University microbiologist Tamara McNealy. On a metal shelving unit, the small, sealed bags don’t look like much, but Cotter considers each one a “pharmaceutical company in a bag.”
Each bag contains a small amount of water and a compact brick of growing medium (usually sawdust) that’s been inoculated with one of those gladiator fungus strains. Through a secure port in the top, McNealy’s researchers can inject nasty, drug-resistant bacterial cultures like MRSA and E. coli 0157. Within a couple days, the fungus will sweat out liquid metabolites containing bacteria-gobbling enzymes—in other words, a potential natural antibiotic.
“What Tradd and I are doing is examining the potential of mushrooms to produce novel antibiotics,” McNealy says. “There is such a wide variety of mushrooms out here that nobody has explored, and Tradd has this incredible collection of mushrooms to test. The potential is really enormous.”
Although Cotter has studied biology and microbiology at the undergraduate level, his greatest strengths as a co-researcher are his decades of field experience and a naturally scientific mind, McNealy says.
“He has real-world, ‘I know what these are’ and ‘I know how these work’ experiences, and he’s got the most incredible sense of curiosity that drives him to ask the important questions,” McNealy says. “When that comes so naturally to somebody, it’s an incredible resource.”
Cotter is also working on Cordyceps, a fascinating group of fungi that reproduce by invading the brains of ants, turning them into “zombies.” The infected ants latch onto leaf veins, where they die and provide conditions that are ripe for more Cordyceps fungus to grow. Cotter has amassed a variety of mummified insects including cockroaches, spiders and wasps cloaked in white, fungal tendrils, leading him to envision where this might one day lead—a natural way to rid a home of cockroaches without toxic chemicals.
“We observe and note what the fungi are doing, then we basically sit down and think, ‘How can we put that to use? What does the world need that this fungus can do?’ ” Cotter says of his bioprospecting work. “It’s just like panning for gold. There are 1.5 million fungi on the planet, and only 10 percent of those have been identified, so we really are just seeing the surface. We’re going to keep digging deeper.”
With a growing list of research projects, speaking engagements across the country, foraging classes to teach at the farm, a young family and the daily demands of expanding mushroom production, Cotter admits to sometimes feeling overwhelmed. But he also feels lucky to pursue the calling he found on Johns Island two decades ago.
“Had I not worked at that farm, I don’t know what I would be doing,” Cotter says. “I am already genuinely fulfilled at 42. If something happened tomorrow, I would say I lived the life I dreamed of.”
_____
Get More
To learn more about Mushroom Mountain or schedule a group tour of the farm, call (864) 855-2469 or visit mushroommountain.com.