Building Soil with Wine-Cap Mushrooms

Black Trumpet was awarded a Southern Agriculture and Research Education(SARE) grant to test whether that fungi can accelerate soil recovery after disaster and give small farms a low-cost path back to healthy ground.

Following Hurricane Helene, many Western North Carolina farms lost their topsoil entirely, stripped down to rock and sediment by flooding and landslides. Rebuilding that soil the traditional way with truckloads of compost can be slow and expensive. Instead, we're inoculating wood chips from downed trees with wine cap mushroom spawn, then letting the mycelium do the work of breaking down lignin and cellulose into rich organic matter, much the way fungi rebuild the forest floor after a storm.

We're running this trial across four cooperating farms in WNC, comparing mushroom-inoculated mulch plots with un-inoculated mulch.We’re then planting butternut squash directly into those plots. We're tracking everything from soil fertility and microbial activity to how the squash themselves perform, with leaf tissue sampling and visual crop scoring as our key measures. If it works, it offers farmers a faster, cheaper way to bring soil back to life using low-cost materials.