Special to the Times-Free Press
Eastie Farm held a soft launch of its new mushroom farm Friday, Aug. 15 at its 6 Chelsea Terrace location.
Rep. Adrian Madaro was an invited guest at Eastie Farm’s Fungi Festivity, which was part of the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture’s (MDAR) Urban Agricultural Week and intended to educate the community and generate excitement about mushrooms.
Madaro toured the facility and came away very impressed by the sheer innovativeness and agricultural brilliance of the Eastie Farm team whose new mushroom farm was constructed out of a shipping container.
The farm – which produces culinary mushrooms – stands as part of a beautiful mural and a hydroponic lettuce farm and sits next to a geothermal greenhouse and some lovely garden beds – representing four different carbon neutral growing spaces on one site.
Micaelah Morrill, Project Manager, Joel Seidner, Living Lands Program Manager, and Lívia De Oliveira Costa, Administrative Assistant, were among the Eastie Farm leaders providing tours and educating visitors about culinary mushrooms.
Eastie Farm Executive Director and Co-Founder Kannan Thiruvengadam, who is regarded as a true visionary in his field, said the process of building a new mushroom farm in East Boston originated “from the state [of Massachusetts] making some grant money (the biggest funders of the mushroom farm are MDAR and Klarman Family Foundation) available and we [at Eastie Farm] also finding other ways to create more infrastructure that would increase the food security of this community and the larger Boston area as a whole.”
In noting that East Boston has only one supermarket, Thiruvengadam said the USDA considers Eastie “a food desert, given the square mileage of Eastie, the number of people who live here, and the number of food outlets that we have available.”
“The other thing is you don’t get locally grown fresh produce available to you,” added the executive director. “Those are the reasons why we wanted to do this.”
Thiruvengadam credited state officials for being inclined to work in increasing food security in East Boston “and there are also other foundations that are willing to fund work like this.”
Thiruvengadam said Eastie Farm will eventually be able to distribute thousands of mushrooms to Eastie residents.
“A lot of our distribution will be part of another program that we do, which is called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), which includes food security in it. We’re taking an approach that’s more transformative of the food system and included food security. The idea is to bring people from all walks of life into the food system. That means somebody pays a market rate for mushrooms and somebody pays a discounted rate for mushrooms, and somebody gets mushrooms for free – but all are in a one program. In that way, as we increase market rate and community members are supporting and subsidizing the cost for their own neighbors. That’s the method that we think will be long-term resilient and will remove our dependence from grants and other external sources.”
Thiruvengadam praised his staff for its production and implementation of the mushroom farm project.
“I’m really proud that Micaelah and the rest of the staff have made this mushroom farm a reality,” he said. “I’m looking forward to serving East Boston and the wider community with this farm.”
(Event information provided by Eastie Farm was used in the compilation of this story).
From Iowa to Eastie Farm, Morrill is making an immediate impact
Micaelah Morrill is originally from Iowa where farmland has a major role in the state’s economy. She received her degree in political science from UMass/Amherst and worked as a senatorial chief of staff at the State House in Boston before taking a position in the clean energy industry, where she built a manufacturing program to help hardware startups grow in the United States. She also assisted Boston University in developing an innovation program “that gets students to solve real-world problems.
“I worked on addressing the hunger problem [in the world] there and that’s one of the reasons why Eastie Farm came on my radar,” said Morrill, who also holds a master’s degree in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning from Tufts University.
Having begun her work at Eastie Farm two months ago, Morrill is flourishing in her new position and her passion for Eastie Farm’s important mission was noteworthy to visitors to the facility last Friday.
“I think I was destined to try to make the world a better place and farming in this way – we’re using clean energy and regenerative practices in a community setting – is exactly where I wanted to be,” said Morrill. “We are helping East Boston address the issue of hunger. We are an environmental justice community, and we are helping fill a huge need that we have in the community.”