Rich Life Farm
Photography by Madeline Hordinski
Tucked in the rolling hills of New Richmond, OH, Rich Life Farm is a family-owned mushroom facility founded and operated by Emalee and Pete Richman. The couple, self-taught in the art and science of edible fungi, have been cultivating a colorful array of gourmet mushrooms since 2020. Using organic practices, they produce high-quality mushrooms for local restaurants, specialty grocery stores, and farmers’ markets in the Cincinnati area. Rich Life Farm is an indoor space, with a total of 2,000 square feet split among production, lab, incubation, and fruiting rooms, as well as a walk-in cooler.
Emalee, who majored in sociology, and Pete, who majored in natural resource and conservation, met in 2013 at Western Carolina University and married four years later. In 2020, the couple moved to Greater Cincinnati and started Rich Life Farm. Together, they grow between eight and 10 mushroom varieties at once, such as Lion’s Mane, Chestnut, Shiitake, Pioppino, Comb Tooth, Blue Oyster, Black Pearl Oyster, King Oyster, White Oyster, Golden Oyster, or Pink Oyster. About 400 fresh mushrooms are harvested each week.
In the future, Emalee and Pete hope to expand their fresh mushroom production and begin offering value-added and medicinal mushroom products. This year, they plan to open a market near their farm, selling their mushrooms and products from other local farms and purveyors. “Our goal is to create accessibility and food security within our local community,” Emalee says. “Even the toughest week of work can be quickly forgotten when we hear about the meals our customers cooked and their experiences with our mushrooms.”
Rich Life Farm
New Richmond, OH
Find it at: Pipkin’s, ETC Provisions, Redden Fine Meats, Wyoming Meat Market, Daylily Cafe, Madison’s
Findlay Market 1st, 3rd, 5th Saturdays 8am-2pm
Hyde Park Farmers Market every Sunday 9:30am-1pm
Born and based in Cincinnati, and a graduate of Ohio University in photojournalism and anthropology. Her work has brought her from Warsaw, Poland, to San Antonio, Texas. Her photographs and writing have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the BBC, BuzzFeed News, the ACLU, AARP, PDN, and Frontline PBS, among others.
