Designing A Mushroom Farm | GroCycle

in this video I want to cover some of the factors that come into play when it comes to designing a small mushroom farm [Music] hey and welcome to this video I want to talk you through a lot of the factors that are involved when it comes to designing a mushroom farm you might have seen in a separate video that was part of our response to the current unusual circumstances we've decided to up mushroom production at our farm and that means that we need to make a lot of decisions that we once made and we make these decisions a number of times we've designed an urban mushroom farm we've designed a farm inside a museum inside a prison and we thought it'd be a good opportunity to take you on this sort of journey to give you a good idea of what factors come into play so we're going to change a lot of things the current fruiting room is inside the unit over there we're gonna make it the shipping containers behind me into the new fruiting room and there's a bunch of things that we need to consider so we want to explain to you why we make certain decisions and why we choose certain solutions so I'm going to cover that in a minute when I'm back at my computer wheels are going to change the substrate preparation area here behind me and all for good reasons that I'm going to cover with you in this video right so I'm back at my desk and I've got a whole bunch of stuff I want to cover with you today so let's get stuck in straight away mushroom farm design then there's a whole host of questions that can immediately pop up such as what's the space available what's the budget available what are the available materials that you already have and you want to reuse and last but not least at all is the desired out that what kind of scale should you be aiming for so I'll cover all of that and a lot more in this video so for space it's important to ask yourself have you got a space already that you can use like a garage or a barn or a basement or do you need to look around and find this space that's suitable for mushroom growing and in both these cases you need to understand what kind of spaces you need and what you need to fit these spaces out with and this video will help you do that so to start off with a good rule of thumb to use is that a fruiting space typically requires double the amount of size that the ink Asian room will need and the key message I want to give you with regards to space is that most spaces within reason can be retrofitted to grow mushrooms but if you have existing space in mind it will heavily influence your farm design so for example here that picture you can see here on your screen that's an office floor a disused office floor in the middle of the city called exeter in the southwest of England and it was an unused space and we were there to convert it into a mushroom farm and you can see the shape and the size and the location all of that heavily influences the farm design you'll see more on this farm later on in the video we had to design the layout for this space to fit the width and the length of the room as well as take into account the access points for electric and Walter as well as the windows of course deduct in the fresh air and out the spore Laden air next up I just wanted to comment on the budget that you have available so it's really easy to add on any costs of course and choose the best option every time but you want to also build something that's fit for purpose and that you can't justify spending money on so that picture you can see on your screen there that was taken when we were experimenting with growing mushrooms on the coffee many many years ago and we simply set out an area outside with some shade netting that you can see and some irrigation pipes such that were the hoops basically for the shade netting to hang on awful and it worked really well it was fit for purpose it didn't cost much at all you could reliably crop mushrooms in there and also sell it but the problem here was that we didn't have so much control so after running an outdoor fruiting room like this for a couple of months we had problems with flies and and we just had no way of keeping them out of this area so you can do it on a budget like this but obviously if you want to do it properly you'll need to look for other solutions as well so what this proves is you can set something up for a couple of hundreds for the most basic small hunkler scale setup but you can also spend thousands and even hundreds of thousands on a mushroom farm if you want to build a full-scale commercial mushroom farm producing thousands of kilograms a month that's not the kind of thing we ever got into really we are looking at clever ways low-tech ways of growing mushrooms and that all fits within a certain budget so with a lower budget you'll likely need to do it on a smaller scale use cheaper materials and do more of the setup yourself and you probably build something that may need upgrading after your year or two but that's fine then you've found your feet you've got confidence and then you can look at their bigger budget you can then build a bigger farm hire people to help your designer build it create a farm that will last you for the years ahead so the point here is that your budget were massively when you influence the design processes as it will dictate the scale choice of equipment grow room design and who you'll be doing the work with we'll make a separate video on how much a mushroom farm costs in the near future so next up then is desired output designed output is one to approach with huge caution because it's easy to put numbers into Excel and even even easier if you use the back of an envelope of course but the danger is to underestimate the work involved and that's exactly what we did a few years back so the picture there is part of the first open mushroom farm we ever built and this was wandering there were two similar sized rooms and in fact this room itself is quite a big space first thing we did was knock down the wall in the middle so we had an even bigger space then we just sat down and we thought right this is what we could fit in and we were looking at outputs of about 200 to 250 kilograms of mushrooms each week but we hadn't really taken into account well that means from a staffing perspective so we hadn't really realized that can easily tip you into the I need more staff and more output and that circle is can be quite vicious and you might not fully understand all the uncertainties and the pressure that comes with it so that picture there those are mushroom columns in the fruiting room that we eventually built in that space and like I said it was huge it was way too big for the output we should have considered it more carefully and it's linked to budget in many ways as well as what your overall aim is so do you want to just grow for a few families and friends or do you want to build a larger commercial farm growing thousands of kilograms a month do you want to go somewhere in the middle and run a part time mushroom farm as many people in our low tech from farming cause do then that all has different consequences in a whole range of different decisions you make so the desired output is really a fundamental starting point from which to design your farm as everything else is related in terms of the size of the grow rooms and also the equipment needed for them this is one of the reasons we like shipping containers because they are very modular so you can start a bit smaller and just add additional containers over time if you wish to expand so onto materials available and this is linked to both budget and the existing space that you've got often you'll be working with existing space water electric access all that sort of stuff needs to be taken into account to make sure you make the most out of what you've got if you have budget then containers or cold store fridge panels are really really good choices to make if you're on a tight budget you might consider a hydroponics tent for instance now get back to that later on in the video also you need to consider what is available in your country it can differ a lot trying to source a humidifier unit can be more difficult in some countries for example but you can build your own with relatively little equipment so all of this that leads to the question where to start well consider this scale and budget first as they drive most of the other decisions you'll need to make and then consider any existing space you may be working with and I already mention any available materials as well it would be such a shame to order a lorry body for instance that you're going to convert if you already have a shipping container that you could use and next up an important question to ask is well which kind of grower are you so on the left there there's somebody who's just had their first homegrown harvest and this you know that's perfectly possible outside like I mentioned earlier then there's somebody who grew those mushrooms in what he called his rave cave in the office so he would just go to his work had a small hydroponic tent set up next to his desk and just tended his crop that way that's more fully and Friends of course but you could also if you have a big office then you could make it a larger setup as well and then finally there are people who do it as a professional set up so the image there on the right that's phenomenal funghi who were heavily into medicinal mushrooms and also fresh mushrooms for sale so this can work for a lot of different people from home grower offgridders homesteaders to urban farmers and people who want to run a professional farm as well and of course the planning and design would be different for each but let's look at what mushrooms need to grow first so you've got a better understanding of why you need the different rooms that you do need so you can see the mushrooms growing there in the time-lapse footage that I've popped in here so what do they need what they need substrate which is what you can see in this in this footage here they need substrate so they can grow across it then they need some incubation time to grow which is what you just saw and then finally they need a fruiting environment to fruiting which is what you can see here so those three key stages mixing and inoculating incubating and fruiting they take place in three key spaces let's have a look at those now so the first space you need is for substrate preparation mixing and inoculating it can be a sheltered area like you can see in the image there you'll need a workbench and you need a pasteurization and mixing vessel but that brings us to an important point all of this depends on how you'll be growing your mushrooms whether you want to sterilize your substrate or use clever materials like pellet coffee coffee grounds and reduce the need to sterilize Co sterilization comes with a whole range of different techniques but also range of investments that you need to make for instance in an autoclave or if you want to use pressure cookers you can but that all depends on your choice of substrate and your growing methods we love growing the low-tech way because it reduces the need for a lot of complexity so the key point here is that there's a big decision to be made in terms of what substrate you use as well as what growing techniques because they will influence not just the size but also the way you need to kit out this space you can see ours is just really simple and that's the way we like to grow so then the next room you need an incubation space the incubation space is where you give the mushrooms time the mycelium time to run through its substrate so essentially the food you've decided to give it so for us a typical spawn run for oyster mushrooms is two to three weeks for shiitake that would be a lot longer six to twelve weeks and I'm mentioning that because all of that has got an impact on the footprint of the room the size you might need that's linked of course to the outlet but it's important to bear in mind that if you need to grow shiitake six to twelve weeks is fundamentally different than growing growing oysters so you would produce may more oysters on a small footprint than you can shitake in this stage high co2 levels aren't ideal you don't need to have that but they aren't ideal because they'll stop the mushrooms from pinning which is from growing in the environment where they're not supposed to grow because they're supposed to be rooted in the fruiting room of course now these two rooms that I've just covered or these two spaces rather so the mixing and inoculation space as well as the incubation room are relatively simple to set up it's the fruiting room that you need to design with more care let's have a look so here you can see a fruiting room that we designed for one of our customers a chain of hotels in the southwest of England this fruiting room is aimed to change the conditions to create the perfect environment for the mushrooms to fruit in so we want to expose them to fresh oxygen high humidity and some light then mushrooms will form over time and you can fruit the bags two or two to four times in this same space if you wanted to when it comes to this room think of it as autumn autumn like conditions because that's what the mushrooms really really love when it comes to fruiting room you've got many options so you can keep it really simple there's a tote there for instance for the home grower top left you can go for a hydroponics tent which is really easy to convert into a fruiting room and then you can also choose more permanent structures for instance there the top right we've got a room that we designed for the VNA Museum in London and that was permanent for six months and it was beautifully done with a perfect ball so you can keep a keen eye on the mushrooms fruiting there there's a separate video on that project when we did a mushroom farm we set up a mushroom farm in a prison once as well and then we had access to a lot of timber a lot of craftsmen who could help us build a fruiting room and we chose to go for a stud wall which you can see that's not the farm we but that's a similar example a stud war with plastic sheeting and that's a really cost effective way of building a fruiting room when you're on a tight budget it can work really well of course the it could come at a price in the sense that you've got less control but there's still a good option to use when I say less control you just don't have an insulated environment so for instance with the shipping container which is on the bottom right or with insulated fridge panels which is the bottom left it's better it's easier to control the environment and keep it shut sealed and really well maintained a final point I wanted to touch on is the flow of the farm and what I mean with that is kind of the workflow so how these three key stages interact and how their physical spaces are set up can make a huge difference to the way your farm operates and also the way you need to work and your time commitment so it's something to bear thought to sort of give some thought to the layout of your farm and how your spaces connect so at the urban farm we built this work really well we had a door from the corridor going into the incubation room then we had a separate door from that incubation room into the fruiting room and then yet another door that came out of the fruiting room into an antechamber bringing you back to the corridor and that is a really nice workflow because we could go from the preparing and mixing stage straight in the incubation once the bags are fully incubated you can go straight into fruiting and once you've decided to take a bag out of the fruiting room you could go straight back into the corridor you didn't need to go through the incubation room which is important in case you face any mold contamination for instance because you wouldn't spread it you can just go out through into the corridor and get rid of your spent substrate another point to make in that kind of setup is if you do it in the reverse order if you just wanted to go into the fruiting room for harvesting you can just go into the antechamber change your Footwear put your mask on and go into the fruiting room to do your job and come out the other way which means you didn't need to open the door into the incubation room which means you can keep high co2 in there so all of these things bare thinking through this was a pretty ideal setup for all for us however it's not often possible if you're working with an existing space it's also not critical but I do want to impose this on you that it is worth thinking through at least when you are in the designing stage of your firm right I hope this video gave you plenty of food for thoughts and useful tips thanks a lot for watching don't forget to subscribe to the channel and take it [Music] you

Channel: GroCycle

Views: 189,268

Keywords: designing a mushroom farm, mushroom farm design, grow room design, fruiting room design, how to design a mushroom farm, building a mushroom farm

Id: 6O11oKWAwfI

Length: 16min 1sec (961 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 06 2020