5 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Growing Mushrooms For A Living | GroCycle

hey then welcome to this video where I'm going to show you five things I wish I knew before I started growing mushrooms for a living so I started growing mushrooms around about 2007 or 2008 and at the time it was basically a hobby I just loved foraging for mushrooms and I went into the shop one day and just kind of got interested in how the mushrooms on the shelves were actually grown and that just sent me down a rabbit hole basically of learning the process from textbooks and some online forums there really wasn't that much good information out there at the time on the internet so a lot of it was trial and error basically and that was really fun I really enjoyed that whole process as a hobby and then when I left University I decided that I wanted to try and make that into a business so I moved down to the southwest of England yeah a little town in Devon and set up a small-scale mushroom farm growing and selling mushrooms in the local area and run about two years or so into that I met Eric who are now one grow cycle with and the two of us kind of went down a path of trying to simplify how to grow mushrooms and make it an easier process a little bit less labor-intensive and we began to focus on growing on different types of substrate like growing on straw and coffee grounds and this has really been the focus of our work for the years ever since for a while we ran a mushroom farm in the city we set up an urban mushroom farm grow mushrooms on coffee in the city and that was a great project that we ran for a few years and as times gone on we've added additional stuff to our business so we make a cell grow kits and we also teach workshops and courses as well so along the way we've learnt a hell of a lot and we've been faced with a load of challenges as well so I'm going to just go through now five of the things I wish I knew before I started on this whole journey in case any of them are helpful for people that are just beginning for themselves so the first thing i wish i knew was that you don't need to grow mushrooms in the stairway all of the textbooks i originally learnt from and still most of the info that you'll see out there today make it seem as if you have to sterilize your substrate if you want to grow mushrooms you know that involves usually autoclaves or pressure cookers to sterilize the grain or the sawdust or the wood chip or the straw and that was what I focused on for the first few years and basically that takes an awful lot of time an awful lot of energy to do as well and what I found this time went on I began to experiment is that that isn't entirely the case you can grow mushrooms on non sterile substrate for example the first thing that really opened my eyes to that was growing mushrooms on coffee grounds I'd never done it before I basically just took a bunch of fresh coffee and put it in a bag with some spawn and it worked and I was just blown away by that because up until that point I'd had been spending hours and hours every week preparing pasteurizing and sterilizing with substrate and this was a real eye-opener because I realized all of a sudden that the whole process could be more simple and that realization set me off on this path of finding other materials that you can use for example like straw pellets or wood pellets which get pasteurized you know in the process when the pellets are made also led me down the path of finding cold water pasteurization for straw so that was one thing I wish I really knew right from the start you can just grow particularly oyster mushrooms in a in a low-tech non sterile way it makes it a lot easier to get started without all the equipment and all the knowledge that you need with the sterile process the next thing I wish I knew right from the start was that it's actually a lot easier to source your spawn from other people than it is to try and cultivate it yourself and that might seem self-explanatory but at the time when I began grow mushrooms I learnt from another mushroom grower who produced all their own sportin themselves you know from petri dishes up into jars of grain and bags of grain and I just kind of copy what they were doing basically and I'm not saying that there's anything wrong in doing that there are advantages to produce in your own spawn for example you know it's cheaper and you have a lot of more control over the varieties that you grow but it does take an awful lot of time to produce your own spawn and you take needs a lot of additional equipment in the terms of a sterile lab space in which to make your spawn and you need to learn a sterile process all of that can take quite a lot of time especially when you're just beginning to learn at the start so it wasn't until about three or four years in that we started buying in spawn from a professional supplier instead and never looked back ever since then to be honest although it is more expensive that cuts out a huge part the process and it enables you to focus on other things instead other you can focus on the second half of the production and you can focus on additional activities which is something I'll come back to in just a minute let's just take a break for a second in the middle this video cuz I've just stumbled across an amazing crop of oyster mushrooms here on a fallen-down 3 there's some at the top there and some more just down below here and I'm pretty big crop as you can see compared to the size of my hand so I'm gonna harvest these now and take them home for my dinner and we can get back to the video you go look at those beauties so um I'll take this lot I'll leave the rest on the tree something you should always do if you pick mushrooms in the world leave at least a third or a half of whatever you find there in order for them to spread their spores on for the next lot all right let's go back to the video third thing that I wish I knew before I started growing mushrooms was it's actually really labor-intensive obviously I'd only done it as a hobby it at the start and you don't really get to get you don't really get to really feel how much labor is involved when you come to scale the whole thing up so you know every part of the process on a small scale mushroom farm is done by people and there are lots of different parts of the process and then when you sort of scale your production up you you're really in demand at every stage of the growing cycle and this can really catch you out especially if you decide on the the scale you're going to grow mushrooms out before you actually do it so a lot of people kind of just sit down with a spreadsheet or back of an envelope and say I'm gonna grow 100 kilos or 200 pounds of mushrooms a week and they just start doing it and pretty soon they realize that's actually quite difficult to do as a one-man band and that they need more help but also things can get out of control quite quickly once you have that many mushrooms growing you know they don't stop you have to harvest them and get them on time and then you need to go and obviously supply them to your customers as well so this is something I wish I kind of had a better idea of before I began because I probably would have started at a smaller scale of say just 10 or 20 kilos of mushrooms a week and then step that up gradually it would have been a lot easier way into the process and you get a chance to learn all the intricacies of your production before you scale it up and end up kind of coming unstuck it was just the sheer amount of work that's going on so I actually think for most people that it's more suitable to grow mushrooms as a kind of a smaller scale part time or hobby farm rather than a large scale commercial mushroom farm but I'll come back to talk a bit more about that in just a minute so the fourth thing I wish I knew before I started growing mushrooms for a living was that it's really important to get your customers lined up before you go into it in a big way I had this impression that if I could just work out how to grow the mushrooms and get that sorted but that was the most difficult step but actually and and I've heard this from many other food growers as well the most difficult step often is selling your produce this is not such a problem if you're just growing you know smaller amounts because it's quite easy to find just a few places to supply but if you start grow in 100 kilograms of mushrooms a week about 200 pounds of mushrooms then you know that's a lot of outlets that you need to supply and that actually can end up taking up quite a lot of time just finding the places to sell to that will give you a decent price but also managing the relationship with each place as well ringing them up every week to check you know what kind of order they want to place packing up all the orders taking it to them and if you're not careful if you have customers who aren't particularly committed to buying from you you know they just chop and change their orders every week maybe they just stop buying from you without any notice for example listen cause a lot of problems so I think it's easy to underestimate the importance of marketing and selling your produce as a small scale mushroom farmer and that probably goes for all the small scale food production it's certainly something I've heard time and time again so basically the lesson I wish I knew there was some focus and spend a lot more time on knowing who I was going to sell the mushrooms to before I started growing them now finally the fifth thing I wish I knew before I start across growing mushrooms for a living relates to all the previous points and I think what it is if you were to boil it down it would be something like that it's actually really difficult to make a living growing mushrooms as a full-time business it's not impossible and I will I just want to make that clear you know we've run this as a full-time business and I know a fair number of other people that do as well but in almost all cases they turn into a full-time business by doing something in addition to just the production of the mushrooms so it is possible to have a commercial scale mushroom farm but it will need to be a pretty big scale at least around about 500 kilograms of mushrooms per week being sold in us measurements that's probably what around about a thousand pounds a week which is a pretty big scale and that's going to involve not only a lot of equipment and costs but also additional staff and it's important to note when I say this that every situation is completely different and I can't stress that enough for example if you are retired and you have your house already paid off where you know a place where you live you don't have huge overheads it's going to be much easier for you to meet your financial needs as a mushroom farmer than it is if you're paying rent to live in a house in a country where living costs are high you know like they are here in the UK and across much of Europe and North America to meet your living costs like that from the sale of just mushrooms alone is pretty difficult and you're going to need to grow a lot in order to make that work however there are ways to turn it into a more of a full-time business by adding additional income streams so for example the main ways that we've done that is with the production and sale of mushroom growing kits which are a great gift for other people actually really fun as well passing on that process of growing to thousands of other people adds an a great additional income stream to a small-scale mushroom farm and we also run workshops and teach courses which is another really fun thing to do but it also adds additional revenue to your farm so if you're considering you know going down that line of wanting to make this your full-time income you'll need to start thinking a little bit more about additional things on top of just the production of the mushrooms themselves so this kind of goes back to what I said earlier I think for the vast majority of people you'd be best off approaching growing mushrooms as a sideline business or a part-time business or hobby project or as part of a community farm we've seen a fair few examples like that or or as a charitable project we've seen a number of people to set up mushroom farms which have other purposes aside from just the production of the mushrooms you know there's a lot of value in all of the learning that happens which can be great for lots of people who are trying to get back into work for example or struggling with their mental health there's all sorts of additional value that comes from running a mushroom farm besides just the sale of the produce so to conclude everything here I hope these lessons are useful to some people I'm not trying to put people off grow mushrooms I just like to be realistic about it and to share some of the main lessons I've taken along the way I'm sure if you speak to other mushroom growers they'll have their own lessons but hopefully this provides you with some kind of useful insight and if you're interested in getting started you know with a small-scale mushroom farm where there is a part-time business or just for fun as a hobby or as a full-time business then do check out the guide below this video where we show you how to set up a low-tech mushroom farm what kind of things are involved in it and if you're really keen we do run an online course as well where we have I think now over 500 member in over 50 countries around the world it's a really great network of small-scale mushroom farmers so if you're keen and interested then do go and check that out alright that's it for now thanks a lot for joining us in this video we'll see you soon [Music]

Channel: GroCycle

Views: 616,027

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Id: Faq0w-ArCnU

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 16 2019