We recently connected with Ximena Zamacona and have shared our conversation below.
Ximena, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
Full Circle Mushrooms was born with the idea of producing food in a mindful, regenerative way. I wanted to use my skills and greenhouse growing expertise to bring to life a regenerative farm to the Southwest area. Mushrooms, as the primary decomposers of the world, can grow on a variety of carbon based materials. Here in the Las Cruces Valley, we are surrounded by pecan trees and the byproduct from farming pecans including wood trims and pecan shells. After trialing we discovered we could grow mushrooms on pecan wood, starting with this, our mushroom growing journey.
The regenerative part comes into play when we bring the post harvest substrate from the mushrooms back into the soil of the same farm where they started growing. This fungal soil conditioner is a carbon rich material with high potential to reclaim desert soils and balance humidity and soil structure.
Ximena, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I was raised in Queretaro, Mexico where I studied chemistry and agriculture. I worked for years in Mexico and the U.S. in hydroponics, growing tomatoes and other crops in what she described as “high-tech greenhouses.” Hydroponics is a method of growing plants without soil that typically uses less water than traditional soil-based farming.
Once in New Mexico, I wanted to experiment with growing mushrooms from pecan shells and trimmings that farmers pruned from their trees. My hydroponics background seemed like a natural segway into a mushroom farm. Shiitake mushrooms grow naturally on decaying wood in East and Southeast Asia. But with a controlled indoor environment, shiitake can grow anywhere, including in the Chihuahuan Desert.
I love the mix between the science and the green thumb, the intuition, and mixing those two. You have to know what you’re doing, the science behind it, and control very specific parameters. At the same time, you have to know how to read the fungi.
It has been exciting, tiring, sometimes really hard work to get to this point and to start a whole operation from scratch. It is a team work, from my family that has helped, to my current team members. Today, the farm produces 550 pounds a week, and the business has expanded to a team of five farmers.
A big part of our process if our carbon footprint. We want to be as sustainable as possible. The way we do so, is by creating compost out of our harvested blocks. After harvesting mushrooms, we add the substrate blocks, still high in live fungal activity, to this pile. The compost here can be added on top of soil, like mulch and most importantly, this soil conditioner is used now by local farmers to reclaim soils, to bring organic matter back to the soil, which, in this desert, you can imagine is very most needed. That is why we are called Full Circle Mushrooms. Because we close the loop.
We are proud to be a woman owned business.
Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?
We were about to finish an expansion in our fruiting rooms. This expansion included a lot of construction and equipment installed. From construction workers to electricians and the material needed, the business was entering a phase were our cashflow was really limited. I can tell you, that is definitely nerve racking, and I started to look at loan options.
It was a stressful moment for sure. To solve it I started with reviewing who of my clients was late on payments and controlling what we could.
The reality is that I was so involved in the day to day that I was not controlling the cash in by making sure some accounts were paying on time.
This was major to bring in more cash.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
A lesson that I keep unlearning is about working hard. We live in the hamster wheel and falling in there is very easy.
I have learned that there are seasons of work and seasons of rest.
Sometimes I forget this new learning, and life and business brings it back to me.
Contact Info:
- Website: fullcirclemushrooms.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fullcircle.mushrooms/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/full-circle-mushrooms/