Bags vs Bottles vs Bales & Reducing Mushroom Production Costs I Mushroom Farming I GroCycle

in this video we'll look at the three main cultivation methods when it comes to growing mushrooms it's bags bottles and bills we'll go into some of the pros and cons of them as well as look into production costs in some detail and give you some ideas on how to reduce production costs [Music] so when you look around the internet you can see people growing mushrooms in all sorts of ways but broadly speaking it breaks down into a few categories now one major choice to make is whether you choose to grow using sterile techniques or pasteurized techniques we've done a video on that for you and i'll link to it here and that's one major choice the other major choice is whether you grow in filter patch bags bottles or in bales or columns like this to give you some idea a filter patch bag holds between two and a half to four and a half kilograms of substrate a bottle will typically hold about a kilogram and the bales or columns can hold between 12 and 20 kilograms so first up then sterile bag method this is where you typically fill filter patch bags usually some kind of enriched sawdust substrate sterilized in a pressure cooker or a super pasteurization barrel and then inoculated so this is the method you're probably most familiar with you'll see it across the board amongst other youtube channels like maya's mushrooms or southwest mushrooms they're all grown in a similar sort of method and it's a really good method that lots of people use has a lot of advantages so for example you can grow a lot of different varieties of mushrooms like this most can be adapted to be grown like this you can use a range of different substrate types you can supplement quite heavily to get good yields so a load of different advantages also quite easy to start with as well you can begin on a small scale growing in bags like this without too much hassle having said that there are some major disadvantages to it and number one you need obviously some way to sterilize your substrate so that's either going to be you know pressure cooker on a smaller scale you might opt for an autoclave if you go a bit bigger or some people like to make adaptations to barrels or cattle troughs for example to create a super pasteurization chamber where you then are going to pasteurize or sterilize your substrate for a prolonged period of time to kill off any competing organisms all of that requires equipment but it also requires a sterile lab in order to then inoculate in front of because once you've sterilized your substrate it's a blank canvas it's very easy for any other microorganism to colonize and start to grow you'll find that you get more issues with contamination potentially with this method if you don't have a very clean process and a very clean space to inoculate within so newcomer growers find that they're getting a lot of contamination this is often the reason why they just don't have a very sterile process for inoculating and once they've sterilized their substrate another disadvantage is you tend to be handling a lot of smaller bags so it's very labor intensive if you think every little step of the process you've got mixing your substrate bag in the substrate sealing the bag mixing the bag up and then moving that bag from one shelf to another for the different phases of the growing process so it's quite labor intensive once you start to handle a lot of bags in your production so finally one of the other disadvantages to this method is it produces a lot of plastic waste not only are you using more plastic bags but you can't do anything with those bags at the end some places you can recycle them but it does produce a lot of waste and there's no way around that really because you need to if you're sterilizing your substrate it needs to be within the bag in order to do that so you need a bag that's capable of going through a sterilization cycle at high heat tends to be polypropylene plastic there aren't really any easy ways to use a fully compostable or plant starch-based material at this point in time although if you use the bail method that we'll discuss in a little bit you'll see there is actually a way you can do that with that method so we'll come back and talk about that in a bit so next up is the bottle cultivation method and some of you might be wondering what we mean by this well clearly it is what it says on the tin it's cultivating mushrooms in bottles but what this looks like in practice is a highly mechanized system that uses a lot of machines i think over 10 machines that you need and the process looks something like this so you need to mix your substrate you need to fill the bottle then it needs to be inoculated of course you need to have a machine to put the lids on you need to have a machine to take the lids off again you need to have machines to move it around to clean it so all told you're looking at more than 10 machines to make this process work that's the whole ethos behind this as well by the way that by using machinery you take out labor as a massive massive cost of production you can argue that the main advantage with this is that it's more environmentally friendly of course because you do reuse the bottles that are in use in this system you clean them and you can use them again now that's a massive advantage of course over um single-use plastic i'm sure you'll agree can be really really wasteful the other advantage here like i said the mechanization leads to a efficient production process which has an advantage less labor as an input and the final advantage then is that you can get very very consistent results when you look at these mushrooms on your screen that's pretty amazing now onto some of the disadvantages of this system then of course needing to invest in upwards of 10 machines to make this system work you're looking at a huge capital expenditure this is serious money you're talking about i looked it up there's a slightly dated article on the unicorn website unicorn being the bag manufacturer in the us and they looked at this in something like 2013 adding it all up like i said more than 10 machines to make this process work you need the bottles you need the trays to make it work you need the lids to make it work back then they estimated that would cost you about 600 000 now i would say you're looking at more than a million pounds and that of course puts it out of a breach for most growers like you and i now that's the capital side of things when it comes to cultivating in this way there are also some disadvantages so first up you can't cultivate every variety so for instance shiitake doesn't fruit out the top it likes the fruit out the side so that doesn't work with this system another disadvantage is that when it comes to inoculation you can't use what we call through mixing or through inoculation so it inoculates right at the top of the bottle and that leads to slower incubation times the other disadvantage is that the size of the bottle dictates the size of the substrate the amount of substrate you can put in and it limits it to about one kilogram per bottle that means that you can only have one flush really of mushrooms you can't go for a second one because there simply won't be enough nutrients to support a second flush i hope you understand this bottle method is certainly a great method that puts it out of reach for most small growers let's look at the bail method next which is highly suitable for small growers like you and i so when it comes to growing mushrooms in bales or it could also apply to columns it's traditionally done with pasteurized substrate often something like straw or shredded sugar cane mulch for example and it's done in larger bag sizes around about 12 to 20 kilos this method has evolved out of butter mushroom production in europe so they've adapted some of those methods used it to churn out large quantities of bales so all across europe you'll see this method being applied as the main way that oyster mushrooms are grown very effective low cost of production which we'll come back and talk about in a minute and what i really like about it for small scale growers is that because the bag size is much bigger it's a lot less handling of bags a lot less filling of bags and moving lots of individual bags around so it reduces your labor input per 100 kilos of substrate that you're managing you're going to be moving less bags around for that one of the other advantages you can use it for non-sterile techniques so most people will be growing on some form of chopped straw and these bales here for example they were processed and inoculated outside in the open air there's no need for a laboratory or sterile processor tool and that's another big advantage to them also you're going to use a lot less plastic like this because the bags are bigger there's less space of plastic in the top of the bag like you have with filtered patch bags and so per 100 kilos of substrate less plastic is going to be used it also opens up the door to using fully biodegradable plastics and this is something we've been experimenting with recently because you don't need to put this through a heat process autoclave you can just take the bag and fill it with your substrate so for example we've got our first batches that we've made with fully 100 plant starch compostable material so far they're looking pretty good this bell has now produced two crops the bag is still holding together tightly so we're pretty excited about what we might be able to develop with those so those are some of the main advantages to growing in bales obviously there are some disadvantages as well so one of the key disadvantages the number of different species you can grow like this is not as wide as when you're using sterile bag production typically it will be different varieties of oyster mushroom you can also grow piopino like this and there are also some companies in europe making shiitake bales like this so you can grow a range of mushrooms but it's not as wide as when you're growing with the sterile bag method another disadvantage is traditionally done with something like a chopped straw substrate doesn't work so well if your main substrate material is something like sawdust or small sawdust pellets because the compaction that you get in the bag doesn't work so well with small fine particles so it works traditionally with straws if you don't have access to some kind of straw like material then maybe it's not the right method for you so when it comes to bales one of the things i hear often on the internet people say and you get much lower yields growing on material like straw or pasteurized substrate in bales or columns like this and i don't think that that's true we've spoken to a number of commercial growers and we've seen it in our own production where by a typical yield will be 25 to 30 percent of the wet weight substrate which is a decent yield and it compares pretty well to other methods of production as well but also brings forward the question is it really all about yield and we want to just put forward to you an idea that you should also be thinking about the cost of production so a lot of growers focus on yield and of course you should focus on yield and biological efficiency and you want to see those huge clusters coming off your substrate blocks at the end of the process of course you do but i also want to focus on the cost of production and here's why so over the past few weeks we've been speaking to some commercial scale european mushroom producers and depending on the method you choose the differences in cost of production of one tonne of substrate are enormous so using the sterilized bag method you're looking at between seven and eight hundred euros per tonne of substrate then if you look at the pasteurization methods and i'm talking large tunnels for instance to pasteurize straw this could drop to as low as 2 to 300 euros per tonne of substrate that can be a factor of up to four and i'm sure you'll agree with me that simply by supplementing and looking at increasing your yield you're not going to achieve those differences now let's go into more detail on one particular oyster mushroom farm so it's important to note that this oyster mushroom farm has already invested in machinery and optimizing its processes so you can see on your screen here that raw materials and spawn make up significant chunks of course but also a huge chunk of total production costs is nearly 40 percent goes into labor and it's worth noting that this is an oyster mushroom farm that's already invested in machinery and in optimizing its processes so for smaller growers like you and i this labor chunk could increase to between 50 and 70 percent and that's the purpose of this video is just to make you aware that it can really be worthwhile looking into this especially if you haven't really looked into ways of reducing the labor cost that goes into your total production cost let's have a look at that so like most other industries the way that you reduce your labor cost is simply by mechanization by introducing bits of equipment and machinery that enable you to reduce the number of hours of labor input for the same output and so in mushroom cultivation it's no different the types of machinery that you might look towards are things like a bagging machine that will help you to automate the process of loading your substrate into the bags you might look towards a larger autoclave or steam sterilizer vessel that will enable you to produce bigger batches and output more substrate per week or month you might look towards a larger substrate mixer if you're mixing your substrate together that will enable you to do larger batches so you can produce more output for the same time input there's a lot of time spent you know just setting up each batch and cleaning the machine for example or it might be something as simple as a conveyor belt that helps you move materials from one area to the other or shelving that's got wheels on which can be a great help because then once you've put your bags on the shelves and you can wheel it around the farm you don't need to double handle the bags constantly when you move them from space to space so these are all the sorts of things you can think about and all of them will help you to reduce cost of production by taking out some of the labour time input that you might currently be spending now of course all these things come at a cost and it's really for you to work out you know what level of investment suits your aims your output and your budget obviously when it comes to commercial production the costs can go really high and like we've seen with the bottle mushroom farms that have really taken it to the far end of what you can achieve in terms of reducing labor input it's pretty much all done by machines but those come at a huge cost so the interesting thing for us as smaller growers is to think about how do you apply this on a smaller scale and reduce your cost of production what i see when i look around i see a lot of growers emulating that sterile bag production method which obviously works really well and it's an easy way into growing mushrooms like that but i do think that when people start to scale it up there may be less options for how you can reduce the cost of production when you go to do a larger scale without investing considerably in you know large autoclaves for example what we find interesting is trying to emulate the european bail method and work out ways that you can copy that method but with less investment in the machinery obviously we're going to need to invest in some machinery to increase our output and reduce our staff time input but we want to try and find out ways to do that without extortion at budget so that's the focus for us here over the years ahead and i'm going to be really excited to share that with you guys and in even more detail with the people inside our online course community so if you've enjoyed this video do subscribe to the channel we're going to be covering a lot more this kind of stuff in the months going forward thanks a lot for joining us today and we'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: GroCycle

Views: 369,789

Keywords: mushroom farm, grocycle, commercial mushroom farm, grow mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, mushroom business, gourmet mushrooms, mushroom cultivation, growing mushrooms in a bottle, growing mushrooms in, growing mushrooms in bags, mushroom bales, mushroom production costs, cost of mushroom farming, mushroom yields, biological efficiency, mushroom production method

Id: bl7kgg-zXyA

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 29 2022