Sitting in the doctor’s office the other day, I got to listen in to a fascinating cell phone conversation from a fellow sitting at the other end of the room. Even with conversation buzzing around and a television on, you could hear clearly and concisely everything he and his caller had to say. It was all about the thrill and excitement of mushroom hunting.

Now I fully understand why the fellow thought he had to talk so loudly into the cell phone. I find myself doing that. Mainly because I can’t hear clearly what the other person is saying on the other end in that tiny phone, so I think they can’t hear me either. I boom loudly in my cell phone all the time, and they boom back.

In fact, while sitting in doctor and dentist’s offices, I find myself hoping someone’s cell phone will ring. The magazines are usually out of date, something uninteresting has been turned to on the television, but those cell phone conversations are always intriguing. And, you can’t be accused of eavesdropping, not when the cell phone parties are talking so loud that you don’t even have to lean towards them or ask the next person what they had just said. You even find yourself reluctant to leave the waiting room when called because you will miss who did what in school and what the resulting punishment was going to be, or how did Karen wreck her car last week when there was absolutely no traffic on the road.

Listening in on this fellow’s conversation gave me ideas on how to make more money on our goat farm. Our farm is wooded and hilly and being located in rainy wet West Virginia, we’re a mushroom hunter’s paradise. Now add goats and a few horses and the way they can really fertilize the place up, we’ve got mushrooms growing all over the place, in the barns and out in the woods. We have all the fungi anyone would ever want to eat.

So, I hurried home and did some research and planning. It seems that to become a mushroom hunter, you need to have a sharp mind and a keen eye. Not having those qualifications, I decided to stay a goat farmer, but I could charge for mushroom hunters to hunt on our land.

I’d provide mushroom stands in the trees for the mushroom hunters to sit and look for potential spots that mushrooms might be hiding. Gee, if I understand it right, there might even be some mushrooms on the tree they might be sitting in. How exciting could that be?! And the tree stands wouldn’t have to be very tall. You just need a little better height to get an overview of the area where that next batch of delectable fungi could be hiding, so, I’d say a foot or two off the ground should do it.

After all, you don’t want your mushroom hunter falling out of his tree stand. That’s all we would need is the woods to be raining down mushroom hunters the way they do deer hunters during deer season. Besides, the goats will love those mushroom stands when the mushroom hunters aren’t using them, or even when they are using them.

I can also provide the game bags, only slightly used brown paper sacks, and even the weapon, old kitchen knives held together with duct tape bought from yard sales, for a small fee. We want our mushroom hunters to be properly equipped when they go into our woods.

And, with the thrill of the hunt, I can even offer camouflage . Nothing like good creek mud to hide your features or even the paint used by deer hunter to streak up the face properly. This is so you can hide from other mushroom hunters and they won’t know the place of your best fungi hunting.

I am thinking of supplying little informational cards too with pictures of things they are not to collect. I don’t want anyone accidentally taking some of our multiflora rose, iron weed, autumn olive or crab grass that the goats dearly love. In the thrill of the hunt, I want to make sure the mushroom hunters only take the mushrooms. It’s up to them to figure out if they are the poisonous mushrooms or edible mushrooms. The LBMs (little brown mushrooms) that are so abundant, they’ll just have to figure out which are safe or not, too. Maybe I should have a microscope station where the mushroom hunter can check in and use the instrument to help identify his find, for a small fee, of course. I’ve seen some really neat looking microscopes in the toy section of Wal-Mart that would work out just fine, I’m sure.

Well, I can just see the money rolling in already. Yep, those cell phone conversations can be quite handy to entrepreneur goat farmers like myself. I just have to remember not to accept any tips in the form of mushrooms from the hunters. You just never know who is going to be the disgruntled type.