January 2024
Strangely enough 2024 is here, and it is time for another update!
This has been a pretty crazy month, even though I’ve done very little mushroom log preparation.
Above we can see my home property. On the left is the aerial photo from December 2nd, and on the right we have one from December 30th. As you can see, not much has changed in terms of the property. I’m at the stage where the next few outdoor things I need to do may not be completed until spring, though I may attempt to build a shed before that for storing the logs now that I have a sense of the volume.
But on to the main parts of today’s update — property walks and research, and zoning discussions!
Property walks are one of the coolest experiences I’ve had multiple classes from the Cornell Small Farms program covered various aspects of evaluating land, and I have only begun to scratch the surface (and have probably made errors in my approach that this blog post will unearth)
I won’t show the properties I am currently exploring, but I will talk through my process as it pertains to a property that I won’t be moving forward with. At a very, very high level I’m focused on a few key things:
Location — the property needs to be within 20 minutes or so of my house, closer to either downtown Duluth or downtown Two Harbors, off of a county or major road, and not immediately next to dense housing (though as cities grow there is, of course, no guarantee about that remaining the case in the long run)
Zoning — the property needs to be zoned such that I can place some tiny homes, grow mushrooms, potentially raise chickens and goats, and build some utility structures for inoculation and tool maintenance
Landscape — the property needs to be at least 50% wooded with old growth forests, with more woods being even better. Ideally the types of trees would lean more towards older growth — white and red oak, sugar and red maple, and poplar are all ideal for mushroom growing, and while I plan to source some of my wood from local arborists, being able to also source some of my own wood as part of managing the forest would be amazing. The soil also needs to be conducive to growing certain types of trees and I aim to actively manage the variety of trees in the forested areas.
Cost — I won’t go into details, but in short the cost needs to be manageable for me as someone who will also need starting equipment, and a bit of a cushion until the mushrooms start producing and the tiny homes are built.
(Bonus) Existing Infrastructure — Rural properties almost always aren’t connected to city water and sewage, and may not even be connected to regional power, meaning that you need to have a well and septic system installed and potentially solar panels. These are quite expensive, so any property that is equipped with any of those amenities is worth considering for the savings in money and time in terms of getting things set up.
An early property I looked at in the Two Harbors had about 20 acres, half wooded half field, with some structures on it. The location was excellent - a short drive from downtown Two Harbors, which is a popular destination for folks heading up to the boundary waters, and also only 25 minutes from my house, making the commute manageable. It looked promising enough that I decided to investigate more. I started by looking at were some maps made available by the county and the federal government.
The NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) department in the USDA provides a Web Soil Survey of the entire country. They are designed for a scale at which they simply can’t guarantee accuracy for, say, 20 acres, but they are a solid starting place. I also pull up zoning and lot line data from the various county land explorers that Minnesota counties have. The St. Louis County Land Explorer is more complete, but the maps provided by ArcGIS via the Lake County Atlas are also decent. In this case the property I was looking at is in Lake County, so the Atlas was my destination.
Between the two I determined a couple of things. The property is zoned R-1, meaning that it is for standard residential use. Normally this would mean that it couldn’t be used for commercial purposes, however in this particular case the property was already given permission to operate as a farm. The previous owners had permission to create a hydroponics farm with poultry, so as long as I didn’t deviate from that there is a very good chance that I would have the same permissions.
It also has existing infrastructure — it was already set up to be a farm, so the current owners added septic, a heated and powered quonset hut with a little apartment in it, a well, and even some fencing around the poultry buildings.
These are all huge pluses, and even though the property was more pricey than some other lots I’ve looked at, these improvements more than make up for the difference. The biggest downside from an infrastructure perspective is the collapsed greenhouse. Sadly during a record snowfall winter the greenhouse roof collapsed, leaving a decent foundation and a lot of wreckage. This would require a fair amount of work to clean up, though it would also serve as an amazing baseline for rebuilding or building something new.
Unfortunately the area wasn’t really forested in the ways that I want. It is predominantly young forest, and many of the mushrooms I want to grow prefer older growth woods like sugar maple and white oak. I also prefer the aesthetic of an older growth forest, and while mushrooms don’t care about aesthetics, cabin-goers do, and I do and I’m the one buying the property. The forested area is also about half of the lot, with the more open fields butting up against the road. If the forested areas were older that wouldn’t bother me as much, but they aren’t, so the whole property feels less like a forest and field and more like a field large bushes and shrubs.
While this property doesn’t quite meet the mark, touring it and planning things out was an excellent experience, and I have already begun exploring more properties with a similar approach.
Zoning is an interesting topic, with a lot of nuances and variances from state to state, county to county, and municipality to municipality.
One of the properties I’ve looked at is in Duluth, which has some pretty excellent information about zoning and development procedures.
One of my favorite resources is the Permitted Use Table, which takes a pretty comprehensive list of use-cases and cross-references them with every type of zone that the city has, telling you whether it is allowed, allowed with a special/interim/accessory use permit, or not allowed under any circumstances. This makes evaluating whether a property would even be allowed to be used for my purposes incredibly easy.
My second one is another document simply called Article 2 Zone Districts which provides a lot of information about what the requirements are for, as an example, placement and height of structures. While I don’t use this to rule out properties necessarily, it informs how I tweak my plans. As I continue to move forward with exploring certain properties I will be working with a construction architect to draw up some sketches of placement and rough size of structures, and this document helps inform those designs too. These sketches help me visualize if I’d be getting what I want out of the property, and also serve as a great conversation starter with the excellent folks at the Duluth City Planning Department.
I’ll talk more about the folks on that team in a later blog post, but suffice to say that I am really enjoying working with them!
I have so much more I could talk about, but I’m already a day late with getting this out, so I’ll be back in February with more updates!