By Katy Savage, Standard Staff
SOUTH ROYALTON — Eben Bayer grew up in a secluded 200-year-old farmhouse where he and his father grew every kind of vegetable. Every fall on a cool day, they slaughtered pigs. Every spring they made maple syrup.
“When I went to college I realized that was what was considered sustainable living. I just assumed a lot of people in Vermont lived that way,” Bayer said.
This farm is where Bayer started a career out of growing fungus.
Todd Bayer stands in the doorway of the a sugarhouse turned mushroom laboratory by his son Eben. (Rick Russell photos)
“He became curious about how and why the fungi was growing,” Bayer’s father Todd said.
It’s not surprising Bayer’s made a career combining agriculture and technology.
Ecovative, a word for “ecology” and “innovation,” makes mold out of agricultural waste by wetting cornstalk and bagging it with mushroom root. The mushroom root eats the cornstalk and grows — like yeast combined with water and flour. It grows for five days and results in a paste that’s “basically a living plastic,” Bayer said.
Bayer is 30 years old and he’s explained the project for TED Global, presented for PopTech and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Ecovative made a half-million pounds of material last year — all of it compostable. The company now employs 80 people and Fortune 500s like Dell, Inc. use the product. * Bayer went to college knowing he wanted to create things.
His freshman year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, Bayer built a detergent bottle that worked like mouth rinse — squeeze it and liquid filled a bubble at the top.
Then Gavin McIntyre and Bayer, who had just about every class together, worked with a couple other students to create an electronic locking system out of McIntyre’s dorm door.
“That project was a disaster,” Bayer said. “We totally disassembled the door and never quite figured out how to put it back together.”
As mechanical engineer and product design majors, Bayer and McIntyre could have sold home inventions to Proctor and Gamble, seen their products line the shelves of supermarkets and earn their wealth. But they didn’t because their college professor, Bert Swersey, urged them to do something more meaningful.
Todd Bayer stands in the doorway of the sugarhouse turned mushroom laboratory by his son Eben. (Rick Russell photos)
Swersey held up Bayer’s innovative detergent bottle during class Bayer’s senior year, pounded the table with it and said, “Don’t do nonsense!” Bayer recalled.
“Use what you’re learning to create radically better technologies for the people and for the planet,” Bayer recalled Swersey saying.
Swersey died in March 2015.
“Listening to him speak it was like, ‘Oh those aren’t valuable things for the world,’” Bayer said.
It was because of Swersey’s persistent encouragement that they started Ecovative.
“I told them I would take money out of my I.R.A. and invest it with them if they would come back to Troy and use the start-up facilities at R.P.I., and devote themselves to their invention and their business full time. Also, that summer they won a $15,000 grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, which I’m a member of. Now they couldn’t refuse,” said Swersey in an interview with the New Yorker in 2013.
Bayer and his partner McIntyre started their company right after college.
“Gavin and I were both fascinated with ‘how do you use natural technology…to better products,’” Bayer said.
They were on a mission to abolish Styrofoam.
McIntyre started growing mushrooms under his bed. Bayer grew them in his closet. They sterilized the material on McIntyre’s kitchen stove.
It was nonconventional, but the technique “worked with every single specimen that we tried to grow,” McIntyre said.
When they needed to heat the material on a larger scale, they made an oven out of hairdryers. Commercial ovens were too expensive.
Ecovative grew through grants and awards, winning a $700,000 check at a “Green Challenge” in Holland. The company’s success doesn’t surprise Bayer’s parents.
“He was always in his own world kind of,” his mother Robin Dutcher said. * Bayer is the youngest of four children. His oldest brother is almost 30 years older than him and works for a global airline company.
Bayer and his father traveled the world together, water rafting, hiking, climbing rocks.
By the time Bayer was 11 he took apart the lawnmower.
In high school he created a laptop computer out of a briefcase before commercial laptops existed.
He installed an MP3 player in his 1994 Toyota pickup truck from high school using a computer motherboard and a PalmPilot before iPods existed.
“You’d have access to 10,000 songs in the car. People were just getting CD players installed,” Bayer said.
“He’s always been a very curious sprit, always interested in nature and how things interacted,” Bayer’s mother said.
The farmhouse is modest and it’s filled with Bayer’s father’s projects as well. Like the sauna Todd, 80, built when he first moved in 1963 and a stone bench in the kitchen.
Todd rebuilt the kitchen out of lumber he cut himself. A stone bench in the kitchen has an arch in it Todd uses to pull his shoes off. * Bayer lives in the woods now, in a one-room cabin outside Troy that’s heated by a woodstove. He’s off the grid and has no toilet other than the compost outhouse. A hydroelectric system, built by Bayer, runs the water and solar panels provide the electricity. He’s lived there for five years with his wife, Nicole Vincent-Roller. The couple started dating in high school and Vincent-Roller spent just about as much time on the farm as Bayer. She’s used to Bayer’s constant ideas.
“When he says something crazy, it doesn’t seem crazy,” Vincent-Roller said.
She’s seen him do the crazy again and again.
Bayer and Vincent-Roller are clearing trees and have plans to buy chickens and goats to be completely reliant on the farm — using energy and food that they grow themselves. Eventually they’ll tap the sugar bush and maybe start a maple syrup business.
Bayer bikes to work. He still drives 1994 red Toyota pickup trucks. He drives one until it breaks down and then buys another.
“I think there’s a real peace in knowing you can be self-reliant,” Bayer said. “That way of living is compatible with the planet. People could live like that forever.”
This article first appeared in the March 17, 2016 edition of the Vermont Standard.