We spend our weekends trying to solve things – improve function, streamline processes, enhance life. Sometimes that means beer on the porch, more often we’re planning, digging, sawing, rigging, fixing, tarping, collecting, hustling, etc., etc.
We’re often thinking about quality of life; quality of what we consume and ecological costs of its production. We are working towards a sustainable future for our 400-acre family tree farm, largely walnut and oak. It’s what we try to solve it on the weekend.
The tree farm was planted, mainly by our dad, starting in 1989. Twenty years later, every other oak needs to be thinned to give space those remaining. That’s thousands of trees that are too small for lumber and too valuable for chipping.
…Thousands that are perfect for mushrooms.
Every Shortcut mushroom is naturally grown on sustainably harvested trees with locally sourced spawn. It takes a lot of energy to produce food, but we spend our weekends streamlining; mimizing plastic, reducing transportation, optimizing and innovating, so that we can produce ultra-low-impact, extra-buttery-tasting mushrooms. We grow shitake, oyster and namako.
Contact us if you’re interested in learning more or sampling our product.
In the early 90’s our dad started making real estate investments. In 1998 he bought some farmland in Waterloo, Wisconsin and began planting trees with the inherent resolve that trees are good.
The farm is on a glacial striation called Mud Creek, on the Crawfish River, part and parcel to the upper Rock River water basin. The south-central Rock River basin is one of 24 Wisconsin water basins. It’s landscape was once covered in thick forest, oak-savanna, prairies and wetlands that filtered and maintained its water.
Today, 75 percent of the land in the Rock River basin is agricultural. We’re challenged with runoff, groundwater contamination, low urban groundwater levels and flooding. Ecosystem services are failing, but we have a generational head-start on rehabilitation. Watershed Reserve has grown to 400 acres of over 300,000 trees. The plantation is a mix of conifers and hardwoods; fast-growing spruce and pine protecting the more vulnerable oak and walnut. There are x number of acres enrolled in long term Conservation Reserve Programs, which means the trees planted there will continue growing and improving water quality for decades.
We’re not taking shortcuts. Restoration is slow and steady; sustainability is spending the weekend trying to solve things.
Something something making things good.
Alex and Ryan met in Minneapolis and were married in 2014. They recently moved from Milwaukee to Menomonee Falls. They have two little boys, Henry and Max.
Brooke and Zac met in college at UW-Madison and got married on the farm in 2018. They don’t have any kids but they treat their dog like one. Her name is Fanny. They live in Watertown.
