Field & Forest Products

Who it’s best for#

Field & Forest is the supplier to know if you’re growing mushrooms on logs, in garden beds, or under trees — especially if you’re the kind of grower who plans an inoculation weekend once a year and buys spawn in quantity. The catalog is built around outdoor cultivation: plug spawn by the thousand, sawdust spawn by the 5 lb bag, cheese wax and applicators, angle-grinder adapters, aluminum ID tags, fruiting blankets, and even inoculated truffle-tree seedlings. Indoor growers aren’t left out — the $28 Table Top Farm™ kits and $125–$130 eight-block ready-to-fruit sets cover the usual gourmet lineup — but the center of gravity sits firmly outdoors. Forty years of organic log cultivation is the pitch, and the site is organized like someone who has inoculated a lot of logs designed it.

What they do well#

The volume pricing is genuinely meaningful. Sawdust spawn drops from $28 to $18 per 5 lb bag at 16+ bags; grain spawn from $25 to $18 at the same tier; plug spawn from $50 to $40 per thousand. If you’re doing a spring log session with a handful of friends or running a small market farm, the per-bag price undercuts North Spore and Out-Grow once you clear the bulk threshold. On plug spawn the gap is dramatic — $40 per thousand at Field & Forest versus roughly $130 at Out-Grow’s 100-count pricing extrapolated up.

The organic pedigree is real, not marketing. Field & Forest helped write the first organic standards for log-grown mushrooms and successfully advocated for cheese wax approval in organic cultivation — so if you’re growing for sale and need documentation, this is one of the few spawn producers with that paper trail. Their liquid-culture listings also publish strain codes (Shiitake LE3790, Summer White™ oyster, PoHu™ oyster, Black Pearl) where most direct-to-consumer suppliers just say “blue oyster” — useful if you’re comparing notes with cultivation forums that reference specific cultivars.

The education side is the quiet strength. The Resources section carries instruction sheets for every product they sell, tree-suitability charts for log inoculation, planting-and-harvesting timelines, a recipe collection, and a Citizen Science program — and none of it is behind an email capture.

Where they fall short#

Shipping is where single-bag buyers lose the price advantage. The free-shipping threshold is $200, roughly double what North Spore ($150), Out-Grow ($150), and Midwest Grow Kits charge — so a grower buying one or two bags of spawn will pay carrier rates on top. Field & Forest is transparent about this (“we do not up-charge for shipping”) and lets customers use their own FedEx accounts, but the practical effect is that the bulk pricing doesn’t really pay off until you’re buying enough to clear $200 anyway. On small orders, the delivered cost lands close to the premium suppliers it undercuts on paper.

Handling is also slower than competitors’ same-day fulfillment — the shipping page commits to five business days from order, and live spawn gets held above 95°F or below 10°F for the health of the product. That’s the right call for spawn viability, but it means you can’t treat Field & Forest like a just-in-time supplier during summer heat waves or January cold snaps. International orders add another wrinkle: they ship to Canada and “select international destinations,” but only by phone or email — there’s no international checkout on the website.