I Left A Career In Corrections To Grow Mushrooms For A Living

Mushrooms are a finicky beast. They aren’t plants, and don’t blossom and grow like an apple or zucchini—they need wetness and humidity instead of nourishment to encourage their growth. There needs to be an impetus for a network of mycelium — the fuzzy white stuff you can find under tree bark on the forest floor—to reinvent itself into an explosion of delicious fungi.

Janine Aube knows a lot about self-reinvention as well as mushrooms. She’s the co-owner of Red Fox Fungi, a mushroom farm in Wheatland County, Alta., where she spends her days cultivating gourmet varieties beloved by her high-end restaurant clientele. Unlike wild mushrooms, which grow from soil networks of mycelium after a fire or rainfall, these are grown on sterilized wood and prodded into growing by denying food to the precious mycelium.

Aube didn’t set out to be a mushroom farmer when she first moved to Alberta from Ontario in 2013. She was looking for a career in corrections and Western Canada simply had more opportunities than her native Thunder Bay, where there were hiring freezes at the time. Though she enjoyed it for many years, she said working in a prison came with many challenges.

“It's a tough job, it's hard on you, you take a lot of things home…people kind of think people in law enforcement or first responders kind of are robots, right? And we're not.” said Aube.

She met Brad Wandzura on the job, a co-worker who was living on a small farm he’d purchased in Wheatland County, just east of Calgary. By 2018, Aube already had mushrooms and urban farming on her mind after following  Micro YYC, an urban microgreens growing operation in Calgary, on social media. Aube was attracted to food cultivation thanks to her mom’s history of restaurant ownership.

That fall, Wandzura hosted a pig roast at his farm for fellow corrections workers and Aube came with her idea: why not transform the farm, which was currently laying dormant, into a mushroom operation? They were both looking for something to do that was far removed from corrections, Brad wanted to put the farm to use and Aube had identified a niche need for gourmet mushrooms in the province.

“When I pitched the idea to him he said ‘I've pissed away more money on way dumber things. Let's do it,’” she says.

They quickly began converting the farm into a lab and grow room, complete with industry-standard PPE and sterilization procedures, all based on Aube’s own research from books and YouTube and what she’d learned from following Micro YYC. She describes the lab “like Dexter’s kill room,” from the HBO series about a serial killer with an extremely methodic coverup practice: think endless sheets of plastic with precisely controlled heat and humidity. They started their first batch with just 10 petri dishes filled with a variety of species such as Pearl, Elm and Blue Oyster—all while working shifts at the prison. That first crop took about 12 weeks to grow.

“All our evenings and weekends were spent building this thing. There were terrible long nights and failures and we'd be out there in uniform after shift Shop-Vac-ing disasters," says Aube, referring to the messy consequences of high humidity but a lack of floor drains. "But it builds character.”

Everything snowballed after picking up their first clients, both based in Calgary: Community Natural Foods, a small chain of health food stores, and The Coup, a vegetarian restaurant. The pair bootstrapped the entire operation and every year has brought new clients—including local gourmet markets, the Fairmont Banff Springs and Calgary’s swanky Major Tom restaurant—and the need to expand their facilities. While their first crop was 50 pounds, Red Fox now produces a whopping 750 pounds of mushrooms per week.

While Wandzura has kept his corrections job, Aube now works full-time at the farm. It’s been exciting, but also scary, like when early COVID-19 lockdowns shut down restaurants for extended periods of time. They had to scale back in 2020, and Aube had to lay off her own son just before  Christmas that year to keep the business going. But they persevered, even pivoting to grow-at-home kits and mushroom salts to use their overstock. Now, 2023 is looking brighter than ever.

Red Fox Fungi remains a hyper-local business. The varieties they grow, by their nature, can’t travel far, so their reach is limited to Southern Alberta, from Red Deer to Okotoks and Strathmore to Canmore and Banff. But there’s still room to grow. Aube loves empowering communities to get their hands dirty with mushroom cultivation. It’s a way for her to share the spark of inspiration that changed her own life and career trajectory.

“You can container garden mushrooms, you can tower them, you can grow them in a closet. Man, they're pretty amazing when you get down to and have an understanding of them.”