Mycotech, Machine Learning, and Mushrooms with Funga's Josh Parrish
Josh Parrish is the Chief Growth Officer at Funga. Prior to joining Funga, Josh led carbon origination and development at Pachama and spent 15 years at The Nature Conservancy, building carbon programs for landowners. In his last role, he led the creation of Pachama Originals and at the Conservancy he led the Working Woodlands Program and co-founded the Family Forest Carbon Program in partnership with American Forest Foundation. At Funga, Josh’s focus is creating partnerships with landowners to restore soil fungal biodiversity, creating nature, climate and livelihood outcomes for corporations, NGOs and GOs.
WHAT IS FUNGA?
Funga harnesses the power of forest fungal networks to solve the climate and biodiversity crises. We use DNA sequencing—the same technology that’s used for the human microbiome—but we’re using it underground to understand soil ‘microbiome’ health. We’ve completed DNA sequencing on over 600 soil samples in the southeast US. The sequence data is fed into a machine learning database, Funga OS, that creates native fungal community prescriptions for the restoration of degraded forest soils.
YOU’VE SPENT YOUR CAREER WORKING ON FOREST CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION. WHAT DREW YOU TO FUNGA AND THE BURGEONING WORLD OF WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED ‘MYCOTECH’?
Since I have been old enough to walk around the woods, I’ve been fascinated with the fungal kingdom. It’s just mind blowing that this kingdom has had such a small amount of attention. Mycotech has the potential to be a major solution for complex global problems such as climate change. The fruit of fungi, mushrooms, also make great materials, medicines and the edible ones can have great nutritional value. What Funga is doing in the broader context of the “mycotech” movement just makes sense to me given my observations of people and forests over time. Everything you see above ground in a forest ecosystem is influenced by what’s happening below ground within the soil ecosystem. When I look at forest management and restoration today, most of it focuses on what we can see and measure above ground. At Funga, we are turning on the flashlight belowground and working to restore forest ecosystems from the ground up.
HOW DOES INOCULATING THE SOIL WITH PRECISE FUNGAL MIXTURES CONTRIBUTE TO FOREST HEALTH?
The problem we’re tackling is restoring degraded and depleted native soil fungal biodiversity. The solution we’re bringing is the technology, tools, and processes to restore the native fungal biodiversity in forest ecosystems. There are biodiversity benefits, climate benefits, and people benefits. We’re really excited about bringing all those together. When we do an inoculation to restore fungal diversity, we’re also bringing along other critical soil associates, including bacteria. Funga is driven by science and works to restore the entire native soil community. By doing so, we are able to revive the connectedness of above ground and below ground life, leading to a variety of positive forest outcomes. First, we develop an understanding of our desired reference soil community by sampling and DNA sequencing forest soils across the landscape. After analyzing and applying Funga OS, we then develop treatments that are applied as inoculants on native seedlings. Those treatments could involve hundreds of fungal and thousands of bacteria species, all of which are a part of that integral below ground community.
WHAT’S THE CAUSE OF THE SOIL DEGRADATION THAT FUNGA IS TRYING TO FIX?
It’s predominantly land use change from people and historically a majority has been from clearing forest for agriculture. We find depleted soils in row crop agriculture and also in lands that have been out of agriculture production for decades. The soils lack the fungi that form symbiotic relationships with trees. That fungal network creates all kinds of benefits for the forests: they’re stronger, they’re more resilient, and more productive. The fungal network also creates feedback loops for sharing nutrients between the trees and the fungi. This creates a healthier ecosystem, and trees are more likely to fend off pathogens and pests that can kill trees.
WHY USE FUNGUS INSTEAD OF ALTERNATIVES FOR RESTORING DEGRADED SOIL?
When most people think of fungus, they think of mushrooms. But that’s just the fruiting bodies and a small minority of the millions of fungal species out there. A lot of other species fruit underground and have developed other really interesting ways to live and multiply. The reason we deploy a strategy of ‘fungal rewilding’ versus other methods is that fungus allows us to reconnect forest ecosystem function. You can try other things with soil, but until you create a healthy soil for forests or trees that you’re planning with reforestation or forest management, you’re never going to get to a balanced state where you get the most productivity. And that’s productivity in a broad sense, not just economic productivity—that’s productivity in terms of wildlife, climate, carbon, water, and all these different cycles. The reason I think it’s critical to rewild and restore the soil microbiome is because we can’t persist without it. You need to have a good foundation, and without that healthy soil biodiversity you’re not on a good foundation.
WHO ARE FUNGA’S CUSTOMERS?
Funga has 2 types of customers. We work with landowners to restore their forest soils and provide forest carbon removal to companies and investors seeking to reduce their footprint. To date we have enrolled 2,000 acres of landowners in the southeast US. The landowners are a mix of large forest owners and family forest owners. These landowners want to make their property healthier, more resilient, and more productive. It’s really a win-win: It’s good from an ecological and economic standpoint for landowners. That’s exciting to me because a lot of times you’ll find something that has tradeoffs and our offering doesn’t. We are also currently seeking companies that value high quality nature based forest carbon removals in the southeast US.
WHAT DOES THE PROCESS OF FUNGAL REWILDING LOOK LIKE IN ACTION?
It starts with soil samples and large amounts of data from DNA sequencing. In the southeast US we have over 600 soil samples and developed a broad forest soil biodiversity database. We’re linking that database to elevation, climate, and other abiotic factors that are important to predict our desired restored soil profile. Machine learning is used to analyze the massive amount of data and over time through continued soil sampling and monitoring of all our landowner project sites, we fine tune and improve our fungal inoculations. We then use the soil inoculant to apply to tree seedlings.
Inoculating the seedling can happen in several ways. You can add inoculant at the time of planting or create an inoculation slurry and a process to apply it on the seedlings in a way that is both efficient and consistent. After a successful inoculation, the next step is field operations. We then work with landowners through seedling planting and yearly monitoring to ensure the inoculation was successful and the soil microbiome is improving. In September 2023, we successfully inoculated over 1 million seedlings in Georgia and those seedlings will be planted from November through January 2024.
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO SEE RESULTS?
Backing up, all of our plantings include a 2% control with no inoculation. The results are fast—you’ll likely see them in the first year. Our CEO and founder, Colin Averill, was a co-author of a global meta analysis that aggregated data across 80 sites and found wild fungal microbiome restoration can accelerate plant growth and carbon capture across multiple ecosystems by an average of 64%.
When you talk about the amazing results wild fungal microbiome restoration have shown, a lot of people can be in disbelief. I don't think it's crazy at all because it tells me two things. First, the sad part: in many places our forest soils are in bad shape. Second, the good part: there’s a solution. It’s not a lost cause. We have a tool in our toolkit that can have an outsized impact and it is right under our feet. From a climate perspective, global restoration is a gigaton solution available today. For the first time we have the tools, we have the technology, and we have more and more ambition to go out there and make a real difference in the landscape across the globe with technology like this.
a digital agency built for the future.
Haus Biographics is a digital agency in NYC that specializes in marketing and communications for deep tech organizations. Check out our website, follow us on Twitter, or say hello@hausb.io
