The $2k/Month Mushroom Side Hustle That Bought a 70-Acre Farm

What if a spare closet could turn into a farm, a warehouse, and 70 acres of land?

That’s roughly the path Kyle Beaver took. Kyle runs Ten Mile Mushrooms in rural Pennsylvania, along with Pro Grow Club, and he grows gourmet and medicinal mushrooms like oyster, lion’s mane, and reishi.

Before mushrooms, Kyle spent two years working state fairs in Pennsylvania, selling stuffed pretzels out of a food truck.

Watching people drive 3 hours for a pretzel taught him what he wanted in his own business: something niche, something nobody nearby was doing, and something he could run in a very small space.

A Google search for businesses you can run in a small space led him to a mushroom growing page from the UK. Almost 10 years later, that search has turned into a multi-six-figure operation.

Tune in to Episode 753 of the Side Hustle Show to learn:

how to start growing gourmet mushrooms for $300
where to sell mushrooms and what they’re worth per pound
how a $1,000/year farm can unlock a $600,000 land loan

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How Kyle Found the Mushroom Business Idea

Kyle wasn’t searching for mushrooms. He was searching for businesses he could run in a small amount of space.

The UK page he found broke down how much money you could earn per square meter each year. That got his attention. So did the fact that nobody in his area was growing these mushrooms.

He checked local farmers markets and found no competitors. Even the large supermarkets near him still don’t carry gourmet mushrooms today.

Kyle grows wood-loving species, the kind you’d find in the wild. That includes:

oyster
lion’s mane
reishi
other medicinal types showing up in mushroom coffee

“Nobody’s doing this in the area. I haven’t even heard of these mushrooms,” he said.

What It Costs to Start a Mushroom Growing Side Hustle

Less than almost any other agricultural business.

Kyle’s actual startup cost: $300 – straw and poly tubing, oyster mushrooms grown in a spare room with no fans or coolers
Farmers market setup: $200-300 – a tent, table, cash box, and a small business insurance policy (typically $1M, and cheap)
A full grow-and-sell setup: a couple thousand dollars

He had no money and no credit when he started.

His advice is to get a few grows under your belt before building out a real grow room — a closet, spare room, or front porch is genuinely enough to begin.

How Much Money Can You Make Growing Mushrooms?

The grow tent behind Kyle on our call is 4 square feet. It produces 16 pounds of mushrooms every two weeks — and it doesn’t have a shelf in it yet.

Farmers market retail: $24–$30 per pound fresh, sold in half- and quarter-pound packs
Wholesale to restaurants: $10–$12 per pound, roughly half the margin
Per grow block: a $10 block yields 2–4 pounds, producing $60–$80 of retail revenue

That’s north of 75% gross margin on cost of goods.

For comparison, Kyle cites industry figures showing an acre of corn nets negative $150.

Specialty mushrooms are one of the few crops where a genuinely small farm still clears a living.

Understanding Flushes and Yields

Grow blocks usually give 2 to 3 good flushes, or rounds of growth. The first flush is always the biggest.

Most commercial growers only take that first flush. After harvesting, you’d wait another two weeks before seeing any new growth, which creates a traffic jam in a small grow room.

If space is tight, there’s still a use for spent blocks. Bury them in the garden and you can get another pound or two.

Kyle also warned about the “infinite mushroom hack” you’ll see online, where you regrow mushrooms from scraps over and over.

Mushrooms get genetically weaker each time you do this. Commercial growers start fresh every week instead, which is how Kyle can count on 50 pounds a week.

Where to Sell Mushrooms: 4 Sales Channels

For a small mushroom farm, there are four main outlets:

Farmers markets – the highest price per pound
CSAs – subscription boxes for local produce
Direct to customer – online sales of kits, dried mushrooms, and tinctures
Wholesale – restaurants and other buyers

Farmers markets are where things took off for Kyle. Shoppers walk past table after table of familiar vegetables, then stop when they see something they’ve never seen before.

Kyle has never run his own CSA, but he’s been part of several. A mushroom-only CSA is tough, so it works better to team up with other farmers and offer a full box.

Why Selling Grow Blocks Beats Selling Mushrooms

Kyle’s revenue didn’t scale from mushrooms. It scaled from what he built around them.

Tinctures came first – a $45 jar that sells instantly once customers hear it’s made in-house
Dried mushrooms followed
Grow blocks turned out to be more profitable than the fresh product

The real inflection point came a couple years into farmers markets, when another farm asked him to supply ready-to-fruit blocks in bulk.

That one request changed the trajectory.

He now ships starter blocks to small farms across the country — filling a supply gap Kyle didn’t know existed until somebody asked him to fill it.

How a Small Farm Can Unlock a USDA Land Loan

To be considered a farm, you need to:

Sell $1,000 of agricultural products a year
Register an LLC as a farm and show income
After 3 years of tax returns, apply for a USDA Beginning Farmer and Rancher loan through the Farm Service Agency
Up to $600,000, zero down, very low interest

Kyle’s loan financed an 8,000 square foot warehouse and a 70-acre homestead at 3% interest — $1,900 a month. A conventional raw land loan runs 8–12%.

Mushrooms also qualify as urban farming, which sidesteps most state acreage requirements.

Agritourism and Airbnb: Making Farmland Pay for Itself

A handful of bookings a month covers Kyle’s entire $1,900 loan payment.

Current and planned listings:

An Airstream-style trailer – the first unit
A small camper out back
A second-story apartment inside the warehouse itself
A cabin under construction, bought cheap from a nearby amusement park campground

Location does much of the work. He’s 12 minutes from an amusement park, beside a UTV and four-wheeler riding area, and on the edge of Pennsylvania’s coal region — where land dilapidated by mining now draws quad riders.

The standard rule of thumb for short-term rentals: within an hour of a metro, 30 minutes of a regional destination, close enough to town to hire cleaners.

This connects to Episode 686 with Garrett Brown, the land hacking episode I recommend if this idea appeals to you.

How to Find Grants for a Small Farm

Grants have become a major revenue source. Kyle said they’ve been awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars for the coming year.

One pending research grant could cover his salary and every employee’s salary for a year. He expects grant projects to nearly double revenue in 2027.

One catch: many grants are reimbursement-based. You spend first, submit receipts, and get paid back, so you need some cushion.

Here’s where Kyle looks:

grants.gov – the biggest source for federal grants, though not the easiest site to use
SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) – offices in all four corners of the country, with at least four grants a year that apply to most farmers
Farm Service Agency and your local USDA office – once they know you, they’ll send opportunities directly. Kyle got a $15,000 marketing grant with a one-page application
sam.gov — the government registration side of the process
Local business development groups — Kyle’s is called SEDA CoG, and most areas have something similar with state or city grants for small farms

Tools/Tech

AI tools – Kyle uses AI for grant research and for creating application materials. He says it’s easily doubled how many grants they can apply for
Content Creator MACHINE – the all-in-one platform Kyle uses to post social media, run email marketing, build funnels, and manage customers as a CRM
Go High Level and Pablo – similar all-in-one platforms Kyle mentioned
YouTube – Kyle credits it with teaching him how to build his entire farm and fix nearly everything on it
Grow fans and growing tech – makes the day-to-day operation of a grow room easier

A Day in the Life

Kyle is in the middle of stepping out of the operator role and into the owner role. They now have a manager and people in set positions.

Much of his day is spent talking with the other small farms his business supplies across the country, troubleshooting and walking growers through problems.

His mornings start at 5 a.m. with the gym, then email and computer work. Around 8 a.m. the crew arrives, and about ten minutes later something breaks.

“So then I’ll become a mechanic or a welder for an hour,” he said. You can also find him at @GrowMushMore on YouTube.

Mistakes or Surprises?

Kyle’s biggest surprise wasn’t about money. He set out to become a business owner and ended up passionate about ecology and small agriculture.

He didn’t expect the community either. Kyle was a lone wolf for years before realizing he needed mentors and people who had walked the path ahead of him.

He also sees where new growers get stuck, and it isn’t the growing. Mushrooms are fairly easy to grow, especially if you buy blocks from a supplier.

“A lot of folks are just getting tripped up at the we need to actually sell these things,” he said.

Sales and marketing is the skill that decides whether a mushroom farm works.

What’s Next for Kyle?

Kyle is focused on Pro Grow Club, the monthly grow kit program at progrowclub.com. Surveys from the past year showed that most of his audience are complete beginners who’ve never heard of these mushrooms.

He also runs a program called Farm Launch, which helps people start a profitable mushroom farm within six weeks.

He expects that within three years there will be success stories of people who started with one or two blocks in a closet and went on to buy their own property.

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Kyle’s #1 tip for Side Hustle Nation

“Don’t be afraid to try.”

Episode Links

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