This is the tenth article in a Vendor Profile Series intended to share the history and diversity of the Market through the stories of our vendors, as we celebrate our 25th Season. This article is written by journalist Barry Courter.
Opportunities can present themselves in a variety of ways and entrepreneurs, by their very nature, are opportunists.
Whether they make lemonade out of lemons or forge their own paths with grit, determination and a single-mindedness to succeed, they take what life has given them and make the best of it.
Like a lot of Chattanooga Market vendors, Emma Reigel has been faced with challenges and opportunities. In the last half dozen years or so, she has dealt with the loss of her grandfather, James Gowin, a man she describes as her “best friend” and mentor, a degenerative bone disease that led to emergency back surgery, being laid off, and, like all of us, COVID-19.
Out of all that was born Gowin Valley Farms and a growing mushroom business.
After graduating from Emory University and getting a master's degree in marketing from Clemson University in 2018, Emma went to work as a copywriter in Atlanta. But when COVID hit, she and her now-fiance Gabe Harrison found themselves working remotely from the 120-acre Gowin Farm in the Rocky Face, Ga., area.
Before his passing, Emma spent as much time as she could learning from her grandfather, who at various times was a businessman, banker, inventor and entrepreneur as well as a farmer, something Emma says she was definitely not.
However, as a side hustle, she learned from him and planted about an acre of crops and started a vegetable delivery system.
“He was like my inspiration from the time I was a baby,” she says. “He was my No. 1 guy all along.
"He passed away in October of 2020. However, before then, he and I did a lot of gardening together. I didn't really have much work for my marketing agency, so he had a one-acre plot of garden, and so I had started a vegetable box delivery system.”
She had around 60 clients at that effort's peak, delivering veggies, blueberries and apples grown on the farm.
“We went to a lot of elderly people during COVID and even families and college students who were just afraid to get out of the house,” she said.
While walking the farm at various times, she noticed a lot of golden chanterelle mushrooms growing. Her grandfather knew what they were and explained how much people liked them.
“I had remembered seeing them throughout my life here, but I just had never, besides taking pictures, I was not interested in them.”
She was laid off a short while later, and something her grandfather had said kept entering her thoughts. “He said a lot of people miss opportunities because of a fear of failure.
"Some of the best opportunities in life come from taking that leap of faith, and he really had encouraged me to stay on the farm and use my vegetable box money as seed money for whatever endeavor I wanted to do (there).”
She and Gabe decided to try their hand at growing mushrooms, and they started out with about 350 grow kits.
Shortly after her grandfather died, a friend sent her a story out of Atlanta about Kennesaw State University and Cornell University getting a USDA specialty crops block grant to focus on innovative indoor solutions for growing gourmet mushrooms.
She put together a package with information about her own mushroom growing endeavors and emailed it to Dr. Chris Cornelison at Kennesaw State.
“I have always loved organization and maintaining records, and I had made a list of when we did our logs, just like a simple data sheet on Excel of the types of logs, the type of mushroom, the inoculation date, all of that kind of thing. And I sent that along and just kind of told him my story. And the next day we were on a Zoom call with Dr. Cornelison and we became the fourth and final Georgia mushroom farm to be a part of their grant."
Today, Emma and Gabe grow their mushrooms in two 20- by 40-foot shipping containers provided by the Kennesaw State grant, and they've added indoor grow tents.
They grow a variety of mushrooms and produce a range of related products at Gowin Valley Farms. They sell about 80% of what they grow to area restaurants and the rest at the Chattanooga Market.
Emma said they have missed only about three weekends at the market, and that being a successful business means being consistent about the quality of the product and its availability.
“We do always have kind of surprise items, but we always try to mix it up," she says. "So if we have just brought three or four different types of mushrooms one week, we'll try our best to grow a little bit more of some of our more specialty items.
“So that way in the next week or two, we can bring, you know, different ones. Lion's mane mushrooms, we cannot grow enough of. The lion's mane is always sold out.
But, Emma said, "we try to keep it to where you're always getting something new. Whether it's us making a new product or us adding kind of a different, like a subcategory of product. But our fresh mushrooms rotate all the time. So occasionally you will always see a few different varieties of oyster mushrooms, lion's mane.”
What they Grow
- Lion's Mane
- Chestnut
- King Trumpet
- Black Pearl
- “Velvet” Pioppino
- Maitake
- White Beech
- Brown Beech
- Blue/Grey Oyster
- Pink Oyster
- Golden Oyster
- White Oyster
- Almond Oyster
- Shiitake
- Nameko
- Enoki
- Reishi
- Turkey Tail
- Cordyceps
What They Sell
- Mushroom Grow Kits
- Mushroom Coffee
- Mushroom Extracts
- Mushroom Seasoning
- Mushroom Honey
- Dried Mushrooms
- Mycology Supplies
- Inoculated Log Dowels
- Liquid Culture
- Colonized Agar Plates
- Colonized Uncolonized Grain
- Master's Mix
