After decades of fire suppression resulting in hundreds of thousands of acres burning across the United States and Canada, the town of Green Mountain Falls is mitigating with mushrooms.

Working with the Coalition for the Upper South Platte, volunteers inoculate logs on the ground with mushroom spores.

“The technology is thousands of years old; the Japanese have been inoculating trees to grow mushrooms for thousands of years,” said John Bell, a town trustee who heads up the volunteer project. “The fibers in the mushrooms will start decomposing and hopefully accelerate decomposition.”

The Japanese, however, grow shiitake mushrooms as a commercial operation.

“We’re doing the opposite. We don’t want fruit, but the decomposition of logs,” Bell said.

The team works with Jeff Ravage, a watershed coordinator and forester for CUSP and who researched the technology and developed the method to use fungi to decompose logs.

“The fibers in the mushrooms will start decomposing and hopefully accelerate decomposition,” Bell said.

Working on the Thomas Trail in Green Mountain Falls, the team drilled a half-inch hole every four inches on the log and, with fingers, inserted the mushroom spores, which Bell compares to coffee grounds.

The treatment is another step in the mitigation process which begins with clearing.

“Rather than logs sitting on the forest floor for 15 years the mushrooms reduce the fuel level,” Bell said. “It is incredible.”

Green Mountain Falls Mayor Todd Dixon and the trustees have signed a memorandum of understanding with CUSP.

“Mitigation with mushrooms is an experiment that is labor intensive; the decomposition will help with getting actual nutrients back into the soil,” Dixon said. “If it works, great!”