- A day and a half ago,
this thing was the size of the tip of my pinky. There's been stories of toxic
waste clean up by mushrooms. Without mushrooms, we would
be overrun with waste, there would not be any life on earth. (upbeat music) Ganoderma lucidum sensu stricto is known as the mushroom of immortality. They're anti-viral, anti-bacterial. It's been shown to shrink
and terminate tumor growth. And we do about 180 bags per cycle and we do that three times a week. Yeah, this used to be done in my house. (light music) We have some shiitake mushrooms right here that are ready to go. - There's thousands of
ways that these guys can save our world and
make our environment that much better to live in. - Cultivating fungi and mushrooms is like a balance between science and art. I'm gonna be taking a look inside of my-- This is the spawn
incubation/culture media room. And I'm just gonna select
our some cultures for today and take a look at some of my spawn. Today I will be taking
little pieces of tissue from these plates and dropping them into nutrient media broths to basically expand the mycelium. Yeah, my name's Michael Crowe
and I own Southwest Mushrooms. Here we cultivate a wide variety of gourmet and medicinal mushrooms. (light music) Yeah, we just dropped a couple chunks of mycelium tissue of Cordyceps. Mycology is the study of fungi and basically a growth of different fungi. People don't realize that
there is such a wide array of different mushrooms out there. Molds and fungi starts from
spores rather than seed. Two compatible spores will
mate and form mycelium. Mycelium starts out, we
plant it on a Petri dish and from there we transfer
healthy sectors of mycelium into bags of sterilized grain. Here we have organic
wheat berries that we use. From there, mycelium will spread and devour whatever food
source that it's working with. Full colonization occurs, you'll se a big, nice,
healthy bag of white mycelium. This can get broken up
and utilized to inoculate any where from 20 to 30
of our production blocks. Without good spawn, you
don't have mushrooms. A lot of people that will try to get into growing mushrooms
because they've grown a lot of plants before think that it'll be
basically kind of similar, but it's definitely totally different. You're germinating spores of Petri dishes, you're growing out the mycelium, you're doing transfers into
sterilized grain substrates as opposed to soils. Yeah, this is our production area, this is where our substrate gets made. We use a blend of oak hardwood sawdust plus added supplements
like organic wheat brand and certain seed wholes to basically form our substrate to get the maximum efficiency
from our mushrooms. Bags are filled up to
approximately 10 to 12 pounds and then from there, we make our way into the sterilization area, where the substrate will be sterilized for a prolonged period of time, to make sure we kill of any microorganisms or competitor molds or fungi. Nothing's needed, it's all sterile, so you don't need to use
any kind of pesticides or any kind of fertilizers or additives. You have to really take a lot of care into make sure that you're
only growing the fungi that you desire. This is the sterilization room. This is where we sterilize
all of our substrate. In here, we can sterilize
up to 1600 pounds of fresh substrate at a time. And basically, steam comes through and sterilizes at a high temperature. About 212 degrees. If it's not sterilized properly, you'll take it in to inoculate and you'll run into a lot
of contamination problems and molds outgrowing your mycelium. We have our spawn right here, this is California reishi. So we'll take our spawn and
just kind of break it up, separate each individual grain. And allow that to become a
vehicle for our mycelium. So I'll take a scalpel and
then I'll heat sterilize it. The HEPA filter right here is basically providing us just a clean workspace to perform our inoculations. So we're getting a stream of sterile air. It's eyeballed. I'm pretty good at eyeballing it, so that's what I do. (chuckles) So the bags are placed in
front of the flow hood, inflated with a little
bit of that sterile air, and then sealed. All right, so now our bag's inoculated. And we're just gonna wanna shake it up. (rustling) All right, that bag's done. People think that all mushrooms are grown in the dark on manure. We have wood-loving mushrooms, mushrooms that can grow on insects, and mycorrhizal species of mushrooms that can connect with different plants. This area is our shiitake incubation area. The shiitake generally takes eight weeks before we can get it
into the fruiting room. We can see the mushrooms at this stage beginning to popcorn. As the mushroom begins to mature, you let the blocks ripen and
they begin to turn brown. And this is a block that's ready to go into our fruiting room. It's ripe and ready. Generally, a lot of people,
a lot of new growers will mistake the brown for contamination, but that's actually just
the mycelium ripening and getting ready to produce
a good crop of mushrooms. And yeah, over here we have
some freshly inoculated blocks, we can see the mycelium
starting to jump off from the grain that is
was inoculated with, and looking for sawdust
to basically break down and utilize as a food source. In nature, you find oyster mushrooms growing off of the sides of trees, so here we kind of try to
simulate that way of growth with this block. Inside is oak hardwood sawdust, and the bag kind of acts
as an artificial tree bark. So when we give it an incision, it kind of just acts as in nature, when mycelium starts poking
out at the right points and receiving the right O2 levels that sends mushrooms out. Once it completely devours
all of it's food source, the mycelium signals to produce mushrooms. Basically, the mushrooms
will start pinning within a few days. You'll start to see a bunch
of little baby mushrooms forming all over the block. Usually, they'll have
like a stem and a cap. Underneath the cap will be the gills and the gills are responsible for producing all the spores that the mushroom will utilize
to continue the life cycle. We grow mushrooms, that in nature, you'd find them growing
right in the forest, right off of the sides of different trees. So we try to give these mushrooms a little bit of light stimulation. Kind of similar to what you'd get in a shaded part of the forest. What we do is as our blocks are ready to go in the grow room, we slap our blocks with our hands to basically simulate the
tree falling in nature to shock the mycelium into growing. Once the tree or branch
would hit the floor, the mycelium would be shocked into producing the mushrooms, because it's basically
thinking that it's life cycle is coming to an end. That's what mushrooms do,
they're basically nature's grand decomposers. Their job is to break things down and turn it into organic material that can be reused by the environment. There's been stories of toxic
waste clean up by mushrooms. Mushrooms being able to break down oils. Kind of like the immune
system for the planet. Also plastics in the environment. Without mushrooms, we would
be overrun with waste. Basically, there would
not be any life on earth. Mushrooms are very crucial to
the environment and ecosystem. I started when I was about 15, I just got interested in mushrooms. Picked up a couple books and
was just really fascinated by the whole process. How something can just start from spores, something that we really
can't see with the naked eye into just being able to devour
things at such a fast rate and produce these mushrooms. And by the time I was 16, I was
growing mushrooms as a hobby and just became really
hooked on the process. So I started this business
after selling some stocks and cashing out my 401K, so I wanted to continue
working with mushrooms for life, I guess, and kind of make it a career path. So now I'll just harvest the mushrooms just by simple cutting as close to the base of the block as possible. And then from there, we can
go ahead pack everything in the next warehouse and get everything to the desired weights. Creminis, and button
mushrooms, and portobellos, those are secondary decomposing mushrooms, so those mushrooms desire manure or compost based substrates. You wouldn't wanna keep that stuff under the same roof, just because you don't want
any kind of cross contamination getting into your grows. So yeah, we're just specializing
in wood-loving species, so species that basically
decompose hardwood in nature. You'll find them growing
off like fresh trees or basically recently fallen trees. Most strains are like
shiitake, oyster mushrooms, more of the medicinal
species such as reishi, turkey tail, lion's mane. You'll find maitake growing on oak or in certain hardwoods. Also the medicinal
benefits that they offer are far greater than what you'd find in like a portobello or cremini mushroom. These are the mushrooms that contain those anti-cancer, anti-tumor benefits, those amino-modulating, immune
system enhancing benefits. They're anti-viral, anti-bacterial. Like, reishi specifically
is used in chemotherapy and cancer treatments. It's been shown to shrink
and terminate tumor growth. A lot of people that have
compromised immune systems are able to utilize certain mushrooms, like shiitake for instance, has been shown to dramatically increase production of necessary T-helper cells to help fight off infection
and keep your body safe. This is called Ganoderma sessile, this is a reishi species from
Palmer Woods near Michigan. And this mushroom's mainly used
for the medicinal benefits. You can take it and brew it into a tea or make tinctures out of it and utilize it for the health properties. A lot of mushrooms have their
own unique healthy benefits that you can only get from that mushroom. It's been used by eastern
medicine for about 4,000 years. Shiitake, for instance, produces polysaccharide called lentinan. That's something that you
can only get from shiitake. Oyster mushrooms produce a
compound called lovastatin which naturally reduces blood pressure. Lion's mane produces
hericenones and erinacines, which is able to stimulate nerve
growth factor in the brain. Here's our lion's mane also
called hericenones erinacines. It is a wonderful teeth fungi. The mushroom is a medicinal mushroom as well as a culinary delight, known for the fact that it can
enhance cognitive function, boost your memory. Basically enabling people to recover from traumatic brain injuries, helping people deal with
Alzheimer's, dementia. We've got some regulars out there that love our lion's mane powder and all of our products, really. It just started with the farmer's markets and everybody just being really amazed by our quality of mushrooms. And from there, chefs started
asking us about mushrooms, so we started dealing chefs, and then now our mushrooms are
making it to grocery stores and restaurants all over the state. The reishi is definitely
an intensive harvest. So we'll just cut each antler off at the base of the block. It's kind of like a forest
or reishi down there. But patience and time. And there we have the cut right there, and we have a little
bit of sawdust attached, so I'll just trim this off. It shows that it really
breaks down the substrate into almost a pulp-like matter ready to begin composting into soil. Yeah, this is the most
aggressive reishi that we have. Cultivating fungi and mushrooms is like a balance between science and art. One, you've got to
understand the science of it, and two, the art of it
is basically being able to execute your crop the right way. If you have a passion and you
wanna turn it into a business then don't let anything stop you. (light music)
Well that was very entertaining while stoned.
Mushrooms are so amazing. I love em!
This dude 100% daily doses with Psilocybin.
Probably doesn't grow it because....thats the first assumption, duh. But he definitely takes it regularly.
I wonder if he can grow morel mushrooms. He'd make a killing in the Midwest.
I've always wanted to grow mushrooms and not just psilocybin. They got some that glow in goddamn dark. But it seems so hard.