scaling like mycelium
why Leah Penniman's growth model is based on forest fungi
Growth and success are often used interchangeably because the former implies the latter.
This is especially true for companies where most, if not all, aspire to some variant of a growth model that looks like a small entity becoming a very large entity. Intuitively, this makes a lot of sense. Scaling up means more resources, more profit, and more impact. Stagnation, on the other hand, is just failure waiting to happen. So it’s fair to conclude that to survive, you need to scale up and to succeed, you need to scale up the fastest.
But Leah Penniman, Founder of Soul Fire Farm, rejects that notion altogether. When it comes to her venture’s growth, she says:
If I were to tell you that year one, we had 25 members, and then year two, 50, and then 100, and then 75, you would think, ‘What happened? What went wrong?’ But to us that might be a success story. That might be because we found our K value, we found our limit, and so we needed to pull back to something sustainable.
The first time I heard this, I was confused. How could declining membership indicate anything other than a failure of some sort? But Penniman’s perspective on natural limits made much more sense to me after understanding her growth philosophy.
Penniman defines success as scaling out rather than up — like mycelium:
We think about scaling out rather than scaling up—the way that mycelium work in the forest. Science has shown what we’ve all assumed, that the forest is a superorganism, and that trees communicate with each other. They share sugars, and they share minerals all through an internet of mycelium hyphae of fungus. That’s the metaphor for the way we want to think about growing. We’re a hub tree, we’re a mother tree, and we’re sending out these resources and sharing them not just with our own children, but also with other species; they in turn, are using them and sharing them out.
The idea of scaling out is really interesting to me from an impact standpoint because it proposes differentiated localized solutions, as opposed to a singular one-size-fits-all one. You might be wondering what that looks like in practice or if there’s any real merit to it. So let’s break it down.
Firstly, What Is Soul Fire Farm?
Soul Fire Farm is an Afro-Indigenous centered community farm located in Petersburg, NY that was co-founded by Leah Penniman and Jonah Vitale-Wolff in 2010. They are committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system by raising and distributing life-giving food as a means to end food apartheid.
The 80-acre plot is held cooperatively by an LLC and also houses their non-profit that shares the same name. One of Soul Fire Farm’s primary initiatives is its Community Agricultural Support (CSA) program which delivers organic produce to ~100 food insecure families in New York’s South End. The boxes of produce are delivered weekly during harvest season (May - Sept) and priced on a sliding scale that’s dependent upon recipient affordability. Some individuals are able to receive the boxes for free through ‘solidarity shares’ subsidized by recipients who can pay more.
It’s impossible to overstate the impact the CSA program has on the community. Many recipients live in food apartheids, which are regions where people have severely limited access to healthy affordable ingredients. Many of these regions don’t even have supermarkets and that’s not accidental. Big chain supermarkets know these regions aren’t going to be very profitable, so they don’t build there. Coupled with racist zoning policies, this isolates communities and deprives them of nutritious options. This deeply affects the development of infants, ability of children to learn in school, and overall health of community members.
Soul Fire Farm makes sustainably and locally grown nutritious food (including Afro-indigenous vegetables and herbs) accessible and affordable. It’s no exaggeration to say that’s life-saving and given the extent of their impact, it’s natural to assume that the next step is to become bigger. After all, more acres = more farmers = more people served.
But Penniman isn’t keen on owning 100 millions acres or a large staff. She’s also uninterested in the idea of becoming the HQ of a Soul Fire Farm franchise. What she is excited about is circulating value by “finding ways to support, and feed, and grow these sibling projects that come out of the work of our alumni.”
The Mycelium Metaphor — Circulating Value
As Penniman mentioned before, she’s most interested in modeling a growth strategy after the way forests circulate resources via mycelium. This is because she wants to scale Soul Fire Farm’s cause, not the venture itself.
A large part of what makes Soul Fire Farm so successful is its ability to cater directly to the specific needs of New York’s South End neighborhoods. For example, the sliding scale pricing that lets recipients pay what they can afford tackles the issue of accessibility in a really human way that would be difficult to scale up. There’s also a real emotional connection that exists within the community which has everything to do with proximity and unique shared experiences. Furthermore, Penniman explains Soul Fire Farms might actually not even be a successful model for a community just 100 miles away. She gives the example of two differentiated sister farms that sprouted as a result of alumni from their training program:
High Hog farms is working with Southern Black livestock farmers who want to transition to organic. That’s not what we have up here. Catatumbo Farm is working with people who are undocumented, and it’s using a worker/owner co-op model, because you can own a business but you can’t be a wage earner in the U.S. if you don’t have documents.
High Hog and Catatumbo Farm share the same DNA as Soul Fire Farm from their agricultural practices to their commitment to environmental justice, but they have different value propositions and organizational models. By not being a legal extension of Soul Fire Farm, both these localized solutions are granted the flexibility and agency to serve their communities much more effectively. This approach towards growth that’s more contingent on inspiration and startup-resources than strategy lets Soul Fire Farm circulate value, rather than extract it.
Circulated value in decentralized systems can lead to much more meaningful impact.
Here are just a few of the advantages adapted from this article that draws parallels between mycelium and another famous decentralized system: Bitcoin.
Evolution Efficiency: No centralized management lets each individual farm adapt to their communities’ needs rapidly and inconsequentially.
No Central Point of Failure: Destroying any single mycelium hyphae wouldn’t collapse, or even really affect, the entire forest. Similarly, if Soul Fire Farm were to ever cease operations, no sibling branch would be affected.
System Solidarity: All sibling branches have a symbiotic relationship that’s based on serving their community the best. This lets members share information and consistently become stronger both as individual entities and as a network aiming to eliminate food insecurity.
The Business Model — How It Works
But of course, like any system, scaling out as a growth model has its hardships too. I think the most prominent for Soul Fire is sustained profit and bandwidth. In 2015, Penniman and Vitale-Wolff got to a point where they couldn’t be working full-time off the farm because of the size it had reached. In this interview, she talks about the decision they had to make:
The farm needed to make more money. To have that work we could either market to upscale restaurants by growing high end greens, or look at the value we had proven we could add through education and have a way to support ourselves doing that. We decided on the latter. We said ‘Let’s form a non-profit. Then we will have another revenue stream. We can built out the education part and that will make it possible for us to work here more and continue the CSA in the South End.’
Their non-profit, created in 2016, owns the farm business but not the land. The farm accounts for roughly 30% of their total costs. Here’s a rough breakdown of their revenue streams taken from this article:
~25% comes from the farm that mostly pays for itself with 90% coming from the vegetables and 10% the chickens.
~25% comes from training program & speakers fees. (The week-long Black Latinx Farmers Immersion fees range from $0 to $1000, with most people paying about $200). Most of this quarter comes from speaking.
~50% from grants.
Depending mostly on grants and external funders is pressuring and takes up a significant amount of effort and time to acquire (and renew). Penniman also works 75-80 hours a week which she hopes to reduce, but she ultimately feels good about her decision not to scale up despite funder and community pressures to do so.
We want a kitchen table sized organization where we have authentic relationships. The forest is sort of a model. You have each tree dumping its sugars into a mycelial network that supports the others. You don’t have one 400 foot tall tree, but a lot of strong ones the same size. The people who we have trained and supported are our success stories. Some people who have come here as trainers are now setting up similar programs themselves. That is exciting. And some farmers are now on land that has been donated through our reparations program.
Penniman plays a significant role in helping other individuals start their own farms, as launching a business that’s not immediately profitable isn’t a financially viable option for many entrepreneurs. (Penniman and Vitale-Wolff had to save up for 5 years to purchase the farmstead themselves). One of the really cool initiatives Soul Fire helps fund is a fellowship program where graduates of their immersion program receive a mentor, year's salary, and technical assistance to get started. They also have a carpentry program for building operable farms and sponsor the Northeast Farmers of Color Community Land Trust. Despite keeping their acreage the same, Soul Fire consistently paves new ways to expand their mission.
Above all, Soul Fire and Penniman optimize for meaningful impact in local communities. Their chosen method of scaling out, as opposed to up, lets them address systemic social problems head-on, not just their symptoms. This is something that’s a lot more challenging than most people realize. Values, for the Soul Fire team, are a way of living. They legitimately guide every growth, financial, and legal decision they make. For Penniman, that means saying ‘no’ even in high pressure situations. I think all entrepreneurs who reach a certain modicum of success know how difficult that answer is to give, and I admire Penniman’s ability to give it decisively and unregretfully.
If I ever get the chance to meet Penniman, I’d love to understand more about her experience as a primarily for-profit venture the first 5 years and a non-profit the past 6 (with the property under an LLC). What Penniman’s accomplishing in building this network of independent farms connected through a resource mycelia doesn’t exactly fit under any existing business model. While their current legal setup seems to work well in many aspects, I’m curious if there’s an opportunity for a more meaningful form of incorporation that honors both their commitment to the land and the impact of the CSA program.
We’re seeing a lot of social business models popularize such as the B-Corp that combines non-profit and for-profit models, and I believe Penniman’s story shows the necessity of investing in models that focus on deep-rooted impact. Tackling food insecurity is a lot different than selling a sustainable product (not to undermine the positive impact of the latter), which calls for a reimagining of structures to support that impact. Maybe something to explore in a future post.
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Thanks so much for reading! If you made it this far, you’re a real one 💛 I’d love to hear all your opinions, feedback, & reccs. Was this article too long or were you looking for more? What questions do you have? Know another cool venture/non-profit with a unique positioning? Let me know!
Sources (you should check out):
Quick Note: I wanted to focus this post on the growth model and as a result, didn’t touch on other salient aspects of Soul Fire Farm such as their sustainable agricultural practices, environmental justice initiatives, & spiritual activism. I strongly recommend reading this interview with Leah Penniman for a fuller picture on the extent of their impact and vision.