Thursday, October 1, 2026
In 1967, upcoming mushroom magnate Cameron Ostrom bought a small farm just past the edge of town on the corner of Steilacoom and Marvin. At the time, the only thing out there besides the farm was the dump. As the Olympia metropolitan area spread north, Mushroom Corner was no longer out in the boonies. The area became inundated with box stores, schools, offices, and houses.
Ostrom’s was also growing. It had matured into the largest commercial mushroom plant in Washington (and Oregon). At the peak of their Lacey era, Ostrom’s employed over 300 people and produced around 40,000 pounds of mushrooms daily. But how do you grow mushrooms on this scale? What agricultural magic — or industrial madness — is required?
The process is simple. You just need chicken manure. Biblical quantities of chicken manure.
Then it gets worse. They do something with it that’s gross. You might want to stop reading. It’s awful.
After blending it into a stool-smoothie, they pour the runny gut sludge into a heated concrete swimming pool. The pool works like an enormous crock-pot. The foul frappé simmers for a week. There were a couple dozen pools. A fresh crock is started several times a day. No breaks. As one hot plume of stink wanes, another takes its place.
The rolling amplification of avian stench bypassed disgust and entered the realm of awe.
As I made my way through the factory tour, I found myself whimpering the S-word. The place was utterly shocking, a nuclear war on my sinuses. The tour was like the strangest nightmare. After it ended, when I got home, I left my clothes in the backyard, took multiple showers, and used most of a bottle of shampoo. I realized my clothes were a lost cause, moved them from the lawn to the garbage can, and I had my neighbor smell me. I really couldn’t tell that the smell was gone. I’m still not sure.
This story is weird enough for it to end here, but it gets weirder. A lot weirder.
The real mystery wasn’t the science of the slurry; it was how completely the neighbors had adapted to it. All those years, as Ostrom’s was blanketing the area with fecal fog, just across the street, there was a place called The Regional Athletic Complex (RAC). It’s actually still there. Only now there isn’t a total shit show next to it.
Developed in 2009, the RAC is a campus of baseball diamonds and soccer fields. I made multiple visits. On typical summer evenings, I observed the choreography of back-to-back games and hundreds of families moving through the complex. Some sat in bleachers; some sat on blankets or camp chairs. Some enjoyed snacks. It wasn’t uncommon to see full-blown picnics, whole dinners. Totally normal stuff. Potato salad and PBJs.
Players would jog off the fields breathing in deep, restorative gulps of the evening air.
Three hundred yards away, an olfactory factory was broadcasting a cooked waste front that rolled across the road and settled over the bleachers. It felt like an unspoken agreement to accept the air as perfectly normal. To play at the RAC was to pretend that the air wasn’t thick with the gastric ghosts of a billion chickens.
I kept thinking: either I was losing my mind, or an entire suburb had collectively decided this was normal. It was surreal. A theater of the absurd where the sky was held captive in a permanent thermal inversion of airborne effluence. And few said anything about it — so many of them enjoying paper plates loaded with delicious American fare.
I approached people and delicately asked the obvious. I spoke with dozens who lived in the sprawling neighborhoods around the RAC. I asked if they knew about the smell when they bought their house.
“Oh, that? We barely notice it anymore.”
“When we first moved here, it seemed so much worse.”
“You kind of get used to it.”
I thought, how is this even possible? This is not standard caliber farm odor. This is the off-gas of way too many industrial doo-doo cookers.
Denial was the rule that ran here for a decade. There was an unspoken agreement to not mention it. I did.
“No, really, I don’t notice it.”
“Well, it’s all relative. It’s so much better now.”
“They have these new technologies at the plant ... ”
“It really does seem to be getting better ... ”
But none of that was true. In the five years before relocation, Ostrom’s production didn’t just increase. Their production climbed year after year, eventually doubling. Their hot slop process allowed for massive manure-based mushroom manufacturing. It’s hard to imagine many places on Earth slow-cooking this much manure this close to youth soccer.
The residents — and regulators — largely treated the air as a nuisance rather than a hazard. Legally, the stench was classified as harmless; it didn't meet the high bar of a "public health threat" required for the state to shut them down. Ostrom’s maintained their permits, operating within a gray area where a smell can be foul enough to ruin my appetite, yet "safe" enough to be legal.
Ethically, socially, and even environmentally, recycling animal waste for mushrooms makes perfect sense.
And Ostrom’s was there first, before the houses, before the stores, before the RAC.
Today, Ostrom’s is located near the Hanford nuclear waste disposal center in eastern Washington. A fitting transition — finally, the smell has met its match.
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Olyrkrgrrl
Wow. I don't know if I will be enjoying any commercially produced mushrooms after this! Can't imagine the stench, good thing it moved to Hanford, they deserve each other.
Friday, May 22 Report this
Virge13
Oh David your olfactory senses must be hyper vigilant. My daughter had many soccer games and tournaments at “Mushroom Fields”…..and yeah, one sort of got used to it. I was sad when Ostroms moved to Eastern Washington, they were a fixture here. That’s progress for you I suppose.
Friday, May 22 Report this
IleneP
I’m gonna take this as I believe it is intended, a humorous look at an odorous part of our local history.
We moved here (about a 1.2 miles down the road) in 2019. It wasn’t until a few days after moving in we noticed the smell. “What the hell is that stench” we asked neighbors. Oh, Ostrum Mushroom farm. How did we not notice it the 6-7 times we drove by it before purchasing our new home??
It was intermittent so somewhat tolerable, but we were ecstatic when we learned they were closing and then finally selling the property.
As to your story… you do realize chicken and other farm animal waste has been used for fertilizer for centuries, right? The only danger is its offense to your nose. Believe me, I grew up where
sugar beets were processed and the off gassing from that was equally gag inducing.
I agree though, that there’s a fitting irony to them moving to the Hanford area.
Friday, May 22 Report this
SecondOtter
Don't take this as snark, but you must have born and raised in a city. If you live in the country, you had a good chance of growing up near a cattle feedlot or dairy or poultry farms. They produce smells. If you grew up in Iowa, it was pig farms, if in Kansas, it was feedlots (where steers are kept and 'fed up to market weight' until it's time to take them to slaughter. )
I lived in the Meadows for some time and didn't have any issue with Ostrom's 'smell'. To this day, there are farms that use manure on their fields, sometimes by directly spreading it or by pumping liquified manure out of a 'manure lagoon'. IT's far cheaper and better than using artificial fertilizers. And as one poster said, it's been done that way for centuries.
And I'm a bit surprised, I never took the tour at Ostrom,'s but I was under the impression that much of their manure came from Longacres Race track. (now Emerald Downs).
I have to agree with IleneP...if you haven't smelled sugar beets being processed, you haven't found a truly ...adhesive...stink. Holymoly. As teens, my brothers worked at a sugar beet factory in the upper Midwest and when they got home, would strip to their underwear, before my mother would let them in the house. Their clothes stayed outside. Even the dogs wouldn't roll in their clothes.
And if you spent any time at all in Asia: Vietnam, Loas, even South Korea, you would know that farmers used..and still use...human feces for fertilizer. Yes, you can smell it.
Saturday, May 23 Report this
sunshine39
Thanks, David. Another good column. Always look forward to your next one
Monday, May 25 Report this
valerie
Loved this article! And the witty style…so relatable and true and fun. Thanks.
I would add to the RAC impact that friends who worked at, and my daughter who attended Nisqually Middle School, had to endure that same smell daily just across the street! When the wind was from the East or NE, that smell invaded their classrooms and playground too, Can’t imagine what it did the NMS cafeteria when kids were eating lunch ?? Each time I went to the school and came out the door, that ‘slurry smell’ hit me in the nose hard.
Monday, May 25 Report this
Acadian04
And now, new houses are popping up on the site like...you know...
Tuesday, May 26 Report this