MycoRant

Now this is weird. As the lady explains at the beginning of her story, she gets an email from Africa. Usually those are from “missionaries” looking for a house sitter while they are away, or “bankers” who need a place to stash some money, etc. Uh huh.  Not this time.

Nancy Ancrum of the Miami Herald reports in Homestead farmer, African scientist realize mushroom dreams:

“Those scam e-mails go right into the spam box. But this one had that first sentence that was intriguing,” Marewski says. “It said, ‘I won the lottery to come to the United States.” The other ones say, ‘You won the lottery, give us an account number.”

She went from intrigued to hooked when she got to this line:  “I can show you how to grow oyster mushrooms.”

“This was too bizarre; so bizarre I had to respond.”

And now, Benjamin Masopeh, an agricultural scientist from Ghana, is working at Marewski’s Paradise Farms. He’s the go-to guy for oyster mushrooms.

That is too weird. At first I though it was the same guy (Bernard Bempah) who is involved in the  Mushrooms in Ghana project, but no this is a different Ghanan mushroom scientist (see also The Mushrooms in Ghana Project). How many of us would respond to an email like that? I would be more inclined to think it was a clever scammer who somehow used personal information to get an inside track. It seems to be working out though–for both of them.

Tags: Ghana, mushroom farming, oyster mushrooms