Free Workshop: Starter Guide To Mushroom Farming | GroCycle

hi there welcome to this workshop where we're going to be teaching you all about low-tech mushroom farming and how you can apply this in your own life in whatever way you want right away from you know just growing your first ever mushrooms at home all the way up to running this as a full-time business so let's get started today's workshop comes in four parts and here's what we'll cover part one is getting to your first crop then on to part two where we'll look at how to set up a controlled environment to grow your mushrooms in part three is all about running your own mushroom farm and then on to part four where we look at the question can you actually make a living out of this this is a question we often ask and we've got lots to share on that yeah and so before we get started on all of that just want to invite you to give us your full attention we've spent the last 10 years learning all this process and we've got a lot to share with you in this workshop so do just focus in and i promise that it'll be worth it right so if you're meeting us for the first time i'm eric and this is adam and adam over a decade ago started growing mushrooms in the traditional way didn't you yep i did um well come on talk a bit more about that in a minute and how it differs to low-tech mushroom farm but when i began growing mushrooms i was doing it in the traditional way with sterilized substrate in a sterile lab environment and to cut long story short after a while began to focus in on these easier simpler low-tech ways of growing mushrooms and that's really what we spent the last decade or so on and that's what we do these days as well with the farm that we run here in the uk exactly and that's part of as a result of that journey rather the farm just looks so different now but the farm is an actual farm with lots of output so we do sell and grow fresh mushrooms we don't sell all of them we donate most of them to a local food bank so that goes to a great cause that's not all we do we also produce and sell a lot of grow kids and that's that's just phenomenal because it introduces people to the joy of growing mushrooms we get lots of people just showing their first crop using these grow kids and that's just really rewarding isn't it it is yeah and in particular kids love to go you know we get lovely photos of kids with their mushroom kit for the first time um the speed of growth is so fast with mushrooms that it particularly appeals to your kids and then also adults who you know just enjoy the whole process as well so that's that's a big part of what we do these days exactly yeah another thing we do here at the farm is to produce substrates so that's substrate that's ready to fruit and we send that to a high-end chain of restaurants so the chefs have access to the freshest mushrooms possible and in turn the customers benefit from that as well and at the farm we also run some research projects yeah so we're constantly experimenting here so we're always trying to push the boundary on what different varieties you can grow in low-tech ways different low-tech pasteurization methods so we've got a whole kind of program of trials and experiments that we're running here on the farm as well and that all feeds into all the other work that we do so outside of just producing all of this on the farm here we've also um had the fortune to work on a whole range of other projects haven't we exactly um one of them is we got we we were really pleased to set up the world's first urban mushroom farm right here near to us in a city called exeter in the southwest of england where we just set up this farm it was amazing wasn't it it was on the third floor of a building an office building right in the heart of the city center yeah we'd go around on a bike collecting all the coffee grounds from the cafes and that became a large part of our substrate so that would come back up into the farm and return that coffee into mushrooms and then supply the mushrooms in the city exactly and another farm we set up was in a different setting altogether that was in a prison not too far from here and that was also very rewarding because the prisoners got to do a useful job a useful task growing food and i'll always remember this one particular prisoner who was chanting buddhist chances he was filling his bags of substrate just sort of blessing his bags and that was a wonderful thing to see yeah it's a strange place for a mushroom and it certainly was it was another strange place is we were really pleased to be involved in setting up a mushroom farm inside a museum we're really proud to have collaborated with the world's leading design and arts museum in london called the v a they asked us to set up a small mushroom farm right there in one of their galleries where we would recycle their coffee waste again into mushrooms grown and harvested and used on the premises of the um the v a museum and that was great it introduced um 200 000 people i believe in a very short time to this whole concept of circular economy so that was definitely a highlight yeah a whole range of projects like that and then kind of the knowledge that we've taken from working on all of these projects and our own farm we now you know use all of that to share and teach to other people as well so we also run a series of one day workshops on the farm here where people can just come and learn and get you know understand different ways to grow mushrooms and how to get started with it and then we also run quite a comprehensive online course community the low-tech motion farming online course and community which has just grown into just such an amazing thriving community of small-scale mushroom farmers from more than 70 countries i think now right from the off that's what we're all about about inspiring people to learn more about mushrooms and learn more about growing mushrooms yeah and the reason for that really is that mushrooms are often seen as as a really complicated thing to grow you know it's often i think people get put off because they see a lot of equipment involved and the way that mushrooms are normally grown and they see this kind of sterile technique and for a lot of people that just turns them straight off and of course some people just love that and they go deep into it and that that's great yeah that's fine yeah but there's a whole bunch of people who just look at that and think well i can't do this this is too complicated or it takes too much equipment and if i can leave you one message from this workshop today it's just that you know you don't need all of that equipment you don't need that sterile process and we'll talk more about that in this workshop really about different ways you can do it without all of that and just elaborate a bit more on them what exactly low-tech motion farmer means exactly so let's elaborate a bit about this inspiring and educating people about mushroom cultivation because that's like i mentioned that's what we're all about and the reason for that really is that mushrooms are just such a wonderful crop button they they're fast growing they're low in energy and water input they're a high value crop they've got they're high in nutrients they've got vitamins in them they're versatile to cook with and yet despite all of these things that talk in favor of the mushrooms unfortunately we find that a lot of growers just simply discount them as a crop to grow like i alluded to i think the reason for that is just that it seems too complicated or too expensive or whatever so what we've focused on is sort of how you can simplify that how you can reduce the amount of equipment that you need reduce some of the processes and that entails what we talk about here when we say low-tech mushroom farm and so maybe let's just dig into a bit of detail quickly just to be a bit more specific on what it involves so what is low-tech mushroom farming in a nutshell so it's i mean in a way it's just trying to find a way to grow without the need to sterilize the substrate and without the need to work in a sterile lab type environment and some of the ways that we do that then is we select a substrate that allows you to do that so specifically we like to work with pelletized substrate like hardwood fuel pellets or straw pellets or alfalfa pellets alongside that we also work with straw in a chop straw chopped sugar cane bad gas these type of materials lend themselves very well to pasteurization rather than sterilization and you know to cut a long story short that's an easier process to pasteurize than it is to sterilize so we're sort of selecting our substrate that makes it easier uh but we also like to focus in on the varieties that we grow exactly so if that if you choose the right substrate and you combine it with a really aggressive strain of mushrooms such as the oyster mushroom then you're on to a winner because you create certain parameters in which the mycelium will thrive and will produce mushrooms yet without having to use all of that all of those more difficult techniques yeah and that doesn't limit you does it because oyster mushrooms are quite a broad spectrum you've got pink oysters yellow oysters brown oysters blue oysters white oysters so you can grow a beautiful selection of mushrooms using these methods um and like i mentioned earlier we're constantly kind of pushing the the boundary of other varieties that you can grow using these techniques exactly and another key feature would be that you can choose strains that suit your climate so you can use for instance tropical strains like i mentioned the pink or the yellow or you can use winter strains which will thrive in lower conditions yeah and this enables you to if you want to avoid you know heating or cooling your fruiting environment which can be you know quite an expensive thing to buy the equipment for and also just to run it has quite a high energy input you don't need to do that if you don't want to you can choose to grow strains that suit your natural climate or you grow at certain times of the year so seasonal production perhaps exactly so let's move on to part well now getting to your first crop right so you want to grow mushrooms at home what is the simplest way of doing that you think and what would you say to people who want to get involved a little bit more yes so i think the simplest way would just be with a mushroom kit um you know they're primed and ready to fruit they come already colonized and you just cut a slit on the front water every day and the mushrooms will begin to grow around about five to seven days later you'll see them start to emerge and they then grow really quickly from there but if you did want to get a step more complicated than that and actually do the whole process from scratch what i would recommend is this method i'll just walk you through it briefly now so first up then i'd recommend getting hold of some hardwood fuel pellets or some straw pellets and on top of that you're going to want some oyster mushrooms spawn and alongside that some mushroom cultivation bags which have got a nice filter patch that just enables good air exchange in the bag and keeps out competing organisms once you have those materials then the method looks like this so i'll walk you through an example where we take one kilogram of the pellets and this could be one pound of pellets you know whatever measurements you want to use and to that you add an equal amount of cold water so we take a one kilo of pellets we add one kilo of cold water and just let that soak up and hydrate into the pellets a bit mix it around and then you want to add 10 of that weight in the oyster mushroom spawn so we've got two kilos of substrate we're going to add 200 grams of oyster mushroom spawn to that mix it all around and place it in the mushroom cultivation bag and seal it up so at that point you've done all of the inoculation process and the incubation phase is really where you just put that bag in a warm dark environment for the process to kind of kick into life and this is a exciting part you know you get to see the mycelium growing across the substrate now takes around about two to three weeks and such a visual process that isn't it it slowly just turns white right in front of your eyes yeah the first time you see it it really blows you away it's you know you've just set in motion this this living organism that doesn't does its thing then basically if you give it the environment that it wants so that'll take about two to three weeks and at the end of that process you should see a bright white uh colonized bag of substrate and that's when you know it's time to fruit the mushrooms so at that point you basically got a bag which is similar to what you would get in a kit so all you do is cut a little hole in the front of the bag spray it with water every day and you'll find about five to seven days in that you start to see these little tiny mushroom pins starting to emerge on the surface of the substrate and from that moment on it gets really exciting because you've basically got a process that doubles in size every single day yeah an absolute miracle and then at the end of that of course you need to decide on when to harvest those mushrooms and i've got a top tip for you so basically with oyster mushrooms you want to make sure that the cap is still a little bit curved so not flat but also not too curved and one other indicator that can help you is that when you slide your hand around the cluster of mushrooms if you want to take them off then you basically they should come off it relatively easily if you feel a bit of resistance then you need to leave them for a bit longer and that's quite difficult to get right but important as well it is important yet and people often tend to um fear towards leaving the growth for a little bit too long and you tend to find that the caps just begin to open up and turn inside out on themselves it's not the end of the world if that happens but ideally you want to try and get there before that and the reason being that you know first of all they're going to drop a lot of spores the more mature they get they start dropping a lot of spores but on top of that you know the texture of the mushroom is just so much better if you catch them a little bit earlier when the capstone folded over you've got this lovely thick meaty texture to the mushroom which when you let them really open up they thin out a little bit and they become a bit more chewy they're just not as good to eat and they tend to not last as long in the fridge as well you know if you're not going to eat them immediately they keep better if you harvest slightly earlier so the purpose of creating a controlled growing environment really is just to make the whole process a lot more reliable and consistent and also so you can kind of maybe scale up uh or make it more of a regular production as well you mentioned scaling up there but it's important for you to realize that you can do this at pretty much any scale that you wish to just to give you some numbers to plan on in a square meter you can grow 125 kilograms of mushrooms per year and that equates to 25 pounds per square foot per year so it's really highly productive there's a lot of mushrooms in a small space exactly not many crops that can match that so if you want to get growing then this is the kind of um these are the kind of setups you need to consider for your substrate prep and inoculation space what you're looking at is you probably need a vessel to soak in you probably want to have something to mix it in you might need a larger vessel for your lime bath something like a big water container or an ibc yes of this first stage of preparing your substrate it really can be as simple as just some vessel to soak your substrate in plus a workbench in order to kind of load everything into your bags or buckets whatever you're using um and maybe you want it something like a compost tumbler or concrete mixer if you're mixing different ingredients together it really depends on the methods you're using we're going to kind of come back and discuss those methods in the next section of this workshop exactly so that's that area covered it can be ideally as indoors could be outdoors as well we do part of our production here outdoors these days and that works absolutely fine yeah and so that phase is the beginning and then the next step is the incubation what do you need for an incubation space incubation space is also relatively simple so what you're looking to create is a warm and a dark environment when i say warm it's between 20 and 24 degrees celsius which equates to about 68 to 75 fahrenheit and why does it need to be dark well that's really because light is a is a trigger to make the mushrooms grow so if you've got a fully incubated substrate and it's in a light room it will start to fruit mushrooms maybe before you wanted to so it's better to have your incubation space dark and if you're wondering about other parameters like humidity and co2 you know that's just taken care of within the bag or the bucket whatever you're growing the substrate in that holds the co2 and humidity so you don't need to create that in the room itself exactly so if you're at home and you've got a dark cupboard anywhere chances are that that could be your incubation space yeah and if you obviously want to scale up and make this into more of a farm then you're probably going to want to make a room fit for purpose of the incubation phase so really it just needs to be insulated you need to have some ability to heat it or potentially cool it if you're in a really hot environment and you're also going to want to make sure that you've got either some racking or shelving in order to store your substrate bags in so those are the spaces you need to create for the first two stages let's look at the fruiting stage now to start you off we want to tell you which parameters you need to create and then we'll look at some really cool examples of the way you can approach this where you are so the four parameters you're looking to create are light so you need light of between 6 800 to 9000 kelvin and we run our light cycle on 12 hours on 12 hours off the next thing you need to create is a temperature range so you can grow mushrooms in quite forgiving range you can grow them between 10 degrees celsius and 32 degrees celsius yeah that just depends on the varieties that you're growing doesn't it absolutely which is just a choice that you will make depending on your climate um some mushrooms are quite tolerant of those two parameters but when it comes to humidity and co2 they're a lot more sensitive so humidity needs to be around about 80 to 95 relative humidity and co2 needs to be below 800 parts per million which is important because the mushrooms produce a lot of co2 when they're growing and the room will fill up the co2 quite quickly so you need to replace it with fresh air and flush it out in order that the crop develops properly and doesn't grow sort of long thin mushrooms which it does if it gets high co2 absolutely and mushrooms are quite special in in the sense that they tell the cultivator quite a lot about whether they're happy or not so whether you're meeting those four criteria or not if it's too dry then they'll just crack and you can easily tell if it's too high in co2 like adam just mentioned they grow really long so do keep an eye on your crops now to create these four parameters how can you approach that at home we'll talk through some really good examples on a small scale to larger scale let's get stuck in on a small scale at home you can do it as simple as in just a plastic box really a simple few modifications and you can use that as your fruiting space it's often called a shotgun fruiting chamber and it is really just a box with some holes in it exactly in the bottom to manage humidity another good example if you want to create a more regular production cycle would be to have a slightly larger space like a four-tier greenhouse and you can use simple tricks like use of perlite for instance to regulate humidity within this space it doesn't need to be very difficult yeah what i like about both these options is they're just off-the-shelf bits of equipment you can buy a hardware store or a garden center they just enable you to create a bit more of an enclosed space to manage humidity which is one of the main things that mushrooms are quite sensitive to the downside to them is that they probably are still going to involve a little bit of your time to manage the environment within it unless you get really into you know automating it with fans and timers which obviously some people do yeah exactly another off-the-shelf product that you should be aware of that's useful for fruiting room is a hydroponics tent which is typically used for hydroponics growing of course but it's also absolutely suitable for growing mushrooms in we've bought one once and just have had it set up in an afternoon and we were absolutely amazed um by the functionality of this space really it's got portholes already that you can use to duct fresh air in you can use portholes to get co2 laid in there out of your space and it was just super simple to set up wasn't it yeah it's a really popular option for people who are just going to that in a slightly bigger scale for the first time and partly because it's a lot cheaper but it's also portable you can you know pack it down quite easily again and like you said it's got all the right ports and stuff in place so absolutely it can be a really good option for taking that next step up yeah and it's a disadvantage that it's not um insulated of course but if you use it as a room within a room so we've seen community members who set it up in their office or in a garage or in their living room even then that is not too much of a disadvantage of course yeah but if you do want to go a step more uh permanent and have something that you may be you know fixed in a set place for a long time you might want to consider something like walk-in fridge panel grow room which is um you know the sorts of insulated panels that you see for walk-in fridge units and you can build them in a quite modular sort of design to fit any kind of space or design that you want they just slot together quite easily now this is a really good option it is really permanent they're very good quality it is of course at a higher cost but it really just depends on what it is that you're looking to build exactly you're also not constrained to using fridge panels as such you can also have a stop wall for instance where you just put a bit of insulation material in and then you clad it with a panel that is suitable to deal with the relatively high humidity that you create yeah and similar to both that option and the fridge panel unit is a shipping container which has a similar sort of quality in the sense if you buy x refrigerated containers you know they're already insulated they're made to handle high humidity on the inside so really at that point you just need to you know add ducted air in humidity co2 control that kind of thing the space itself is actually lends itself quite well and that's actually how our farmers built these days with shipping containers and what's really cool with shipping containers is that you obviously give it a lease of life they're really durable but you can also see it as a modular system so you can just add onto your farm as you go along and that's an important point to emphasize here that you can move up and down of course as well we've got members in our community who've done that and you can choose to start off with a small setup at home and then you might well end up progressing through your hydroponics 10 set up to for instance something a little bit more solid yeah and it's important to point out you don't need to be an expert in diy for any of this neither eric or i are and we've done most of this work ourselves and when we do hit a point that you know something we're not sure how to do we just find someone in our community uh to help us do it whether it's a carpenter or you know someone to help cut holes in metal for example you can always find someone to help with what's required so it's not that difficult to go through these steps and create the space so these are just a few of the different ways you can create a controlled growing environment and now let's move on and have a look at the actual growing itself so how do you run your mushroom farm so you've seen how you can grow some mushrooms at home of course you've also seen how you can better control your growing environment now you might be wondering what's it like what's involved in running your mushroom farm and that's what this part is all about yeah there's obviously a whole load of different aspects of running the mushroom farm but what we'll hone in on in this workshop is just you know have a deeper look at the growing process itself because that actually it takes a lot of you know what it is like to run your farm so before we go any further i think we should just explain in a really in a nutshell what we mean with the low tech mushroom farming approach to substrate yeah so what what is different about the way that we see it is that we accept there are some competing organisms in our substrate and what we've found is that you know if you get all the other conditions right you choose the right varieties the right substrate and you manage the grown environment well is that it doesn't matter if there are competing organisms in there it still is extremely consistent and reliable and that's quite different to how in sterile production you have to work because once you've sterilized the substrate it's a blank canvas for any other organism to grow on it which then means you have to have this very sterile situation that you're inoculating so it sort of makes the whole thing a little bit more complicated absolutely sterile production is great of course especially when it comes to spawn production but that is a key disadvantage of it as well right so back to making a choice of your substrate and there's quite a list you can choose from especially when you grow oyster mushrooms i believe you can choose from a list of 150 different agricultural byproducts yeah all sorts of materials everything from you know wheat straw to corn cobs uh coffee pulp banana leaves coconut husks cardboard paper all sorts of materials that will go on but the trick here is for you to choose stuff that's readily available in your area and that's what we do as well here of course yeah we'd like to go on wheat straw which is grown in about half a mile or so from the farm here we like waste coffee grounds we like sugar beet pellets these are all materials that are easy to source in the uk but you know we've heard from folks in australia for example that grow on sugar sugar cane bag ass because that's plenty plentiful and widely available in australia exactly and i was in touch just this week with somebody from trinidad and tobago where he's got access to elephant grass which just happens to be a type of grass that you can grow oyster mushrooms on so what really is behind this choice of substrate then we're really wanting materials that are rich in carbon uh you know full of lignin cellulose hemicellulose these are all things that are plentiful in very fibrous materials and you know they exist all over the world what you want to avoid is anything that's really rich in nitrogen and the reason for that is it tends to favor the growth of competing organisms over the mycelium whereas the other more fibrous carbon-rich materials that we're talking about they tend to favor the growth of your mycelium over their competitors so we're trying to sort of select the substrate for things that naturally suit our organism we want to grow and not the one or the range of organisms that we don't want to grow now here's a little interesting fact for you then so oyster mushrooms can actually fix nitrogen from the air which is something i never knew until relatively recently and it really blew me away absolutely because it doesn't it means of course that you don't need to add lots of supplements that hold this nitrogen they can just grab and helps themselves from the air yeah and there's something we've seen in our own production you know we've seen that you don't get necessarily higher yields just because you've got higher nitrogen you can get really good yields without nitrogen supplementation and this is kind of part of our approach to low tech growing as well exactly so back to the growing process then once you've selected your substrate you've got a choice to make you could go with just rehydrating like we've shown you we've shown you in part one of this workshop where you just add a bit of cold water even can do or you can choose to pasteurize your substrate now pasteurization can be really beneficial if you're looking to produce on a regular basis and you can do it in a number of ways really what you can do is you can use a lime bath which is something we like using and lime baths raise the ph to such a level that most microorganisms just simply die off and then obviously when you introduce the oyster mushrooms it's got a really good chance of thriving on that substrate a similar technique can use wood ash for instance to raise the ph and those aren't your only options you can only you can use some soap for instance hot water will do as well of course and some people use chlorine yeah yeah all of those have exactly the same effect and they knock out most of the competing organisms so that your mycelium has got a good run on the substrate yep so once those microorganisms have been knocked out if you then introduce your mycelium your spawn to this mix you should be on to a winner i'd recommend starting off with about ten percent of the wet weight of the substrate as an inoculation rate that really will favor your um your mycelium of course it's a relatively high percentage though yeah most uh commercial growers would be inoculating more like one or two percent um but if you're just starting out and you're in non-sterile procedures you might want to start more like 10 as you get more confident and consistent with it you can reduce that to something like five percent even in a non-sterile way and then if you want to go into larger scale commercial production you might look to introduce some elements of cleaner air filtration in your inoculation space and then you can reduce it to like one or two percent yes so you've already gathered that really keen we really like growing oyster mushrooms and there's a few reasons for that they are really fast growing they can deal with a certain range of parameters so they're a bit forgiving to the cultivator they have really aggressive strain as well and that's not the only reason they're also really really tasty and they can look absolutely amazing what we do recommend though is just really honing in and testing out some strains a little bit what we found is that certain strains just work better in certain conditions than in others and one strain that might work well on your farm might not work as well on another farm in a completely different set of parameters and environments different substrate maybe different competing organisms in in the air around that farm so it's really good to test and find out what works best for you and what we've also heard of with some larger commercial growers is that this is an area where if you've got a larger scale of production it makes a lot of sense to really play with the genetics that you're growing so what i mean by that is selective breeding so if you find you've got a particular variety that's working well on your farm and you see a particular crop that's working well you can select a culture from that crop and use that to you know further the strain development on your farm through doing that we've heard of people being able to literally double their yields uh just by selecting you know particularly good strains yeah and that's quite a result isn't it now let's go back to the growing process again and you need to use plastic bags to grow in there's a question we often get and i understand why because mushroom industry in general has a bad reputation rightly so for use of a lot of single-use plastics which after the production process are you know just a waste product you don't need to use purely mushroom cultivation bags they're an easy method for sure but you can also use reusable containers which we've increasingly begun to do ourselves on our farm here we now use buckets for our production which is just a lovely method isn't it it's great yeah and one of the things i like about it is obviously it's not single use so you can use them again and again and again but also you can stack them up and make really optimal use of the space you've got specifically the vertical space of course yeah so of course it introduces an extra step you need to clean the buckets out well before you can reuse them again what we found though is that you get that process down it's actually quite quick to do it and to some degree you can kind of semi-automate it as well and in my book if you can you know get rid of all of that single-use plastic then it makes a lot of sense definitely the way to go and then it's on to of course with the growing process you've selected your substrate you've filled it in the vessel that you're going to use then it's on to the incubation stage the incubation stage is a really visual stage it's where the mycelium will spread right in front of your eyes it will spread across this substrate this food source that you've given it and it's a stage where you don't actually as a grower need to be very involved you can just make sure that it's happily growing away the best thing you can do is just to make sure that you get your timing right in terms of moving it from the incubation stage into the fruiting stage now how can you do that yeah it's a question we often get from people isn't it and i always think the easiest way to learn it is for a particular strain you're working with to almost wait to see it go too fast when you see it starting to pin in the incubation phase note down the time you know is that 17 days after you made it 19 days whatever it ends up being you want to just take that number and say well i should have moved it two days before that into the fruit and space that's how you get to learn for your your strain and your substrate you're working with what the ideal time is so once you've learned that and you get your timing right you'll take it out of the incubation stage put it into your fruiting room and after five to seven days you'll see these little tiny pins forming and after that you're off to the races it will just double in size every day until you've got your fully formed cluster now the speed at which that at which mushrooms can grow is so fundamentally different from how plants can grow for instance and there's a reason behind that these little pins have got all of the structure in place right so all you need to do is like fill it with water pump water in and it will just grow and grow and grow and that's so fundamentally different from plant biology where the cells need to divide their cell division going on to get growth yeah it's an amazing fact isn't it and it is behind how they're able to just go from this tiny thing to a full grown mushroom in you know as little as four to five days so that's an outline of the growing cycle but of course in order to run this as a mushroom farm there's some element of ongoing production so how do we make sure we've got a crop every week well the answer to that is you just need to think of a schedule a schedule that works for you and fits around your other commitments but it's perfectly possible to get a tight schedule in place so once you've got your parameters sorted you've got your fruiting environment tightly controlled your incubation room is all set up and running then you can get to a point where you know if i produce on this day i get to harvest on that day i need to move some bags from one stage to the next and soon soon you'll be in a situation where you know okay i'll be harvesting my mushrooms on this day and you might even think about selling those mushrooms in your local area then of course yes so that brings us on to the next topic in this workshop then can you make a living out of this so can you make a living out of this i feel it's important to start off by saying you don't need to of course you can grow mushrooms as a hobby or as a sideline business and most people in fact do it that way but it's an important question of course to ask and in case you're wondering it's one that we get out often asked so let's look into it yes so i think the short answer is yes you can make a living out this but you know like all short answers there's a longer answer behind that so let's dig into the detail of it exactly a more nuanced answer obviously takes into account factors like the cost of living where you are the cost of raw materials so your spawn supply your grain what's available all of those things need to be taken into account of course your own living situation have you got an apartment have you got a unit that you can use all of those things including the methods you choose to grow with and biological efficiency so you can quickly see that this becomes a more complicated question to answer but we do want to help out so we'll share some numbers with you now yes so in the uk here our farm we find our production costs around about two pounds 10 per kilogram of oyster mushrooms that we produce and then we sell those for around about 12 pounds per kilogram and we are in touch with a grower in the u.s quite a large commercial grower and they produce for just under two dollars per pound of mushrooms and they can sell those mushrooms for up to 16 per pound so that gives you some idea of the difference between you know cost of production and sales price which is quite favorable and that farm in the us that's a fairly large farm they produce about 15 000 pounds of mushrooms per month and they do that with a team of around about five people so that gives you some idea of if you want to approach this you know purely for fresh mushroom production you're probably looking to do it at a larger scale and you know with that there comes a whole host of things you need to think about exactly and with the larger scale of course comes the question well can you sell them and my suspicion is that you can because there's a booming booming interest in mushrooms and oyster mushrooms especially yeah last time i looked at the google trends graph for this it was really just off the chart the last five to ten years just growing interest every single year more and more people searching for stuff to do with mushrooms and we hear that from all the different people you know in our course at the restaurants there is just a lot of interest at the moment so exactly a great opportunity and chances are that if you start off being a small producer a local producer that you won't struggle to sell your stuff either you won't struggle to sell your mushrooms simply because you've got a distinct advantage of over larger commercial growers so let's have a look at some mushrooms i bought yesterday i got these in the supermarket yesterday and you can see they're quite they're not looking great they've traveled quite a long way and earlier on we mentioned how important earlier on in this workshop we mentioned how important the time of harvest is and you can see these have been left almost a bit too late this one for sure is just turning inside out on itself and if you compare that to some local mushrooms that we've just harvested here the difference is quite quite large yes so for example these were harvested on our farm this morning i mean you can just see the difference there can't you they're much fresher brighter in color the caps are thicker you know the quality of them is much much better and this is something that i've found personally when going to sell mushrooms to restaurants i remember the first chef that i went to um take a tray of mushrooms too i was a little bit unsure about going to visit him for the first time and anyway i walked in the door this tray of mushrooms and his eyes just lit up because he'd never seen so much you know such high quality mushrooms before and he was just asking a load of questions like how they were grown he wanted to come and visit them at the farm and see the whole process himself he placed an order and i kept supplying him then for months and months into the future so i've experienced that same thing many times over and i've heard from other growers the same thing you've just really got a great advantage with the the freshness and the quality as a small local producer so i feel it's important that if you are considering making a living out of this that you do consider all options open to you so not just simply scaling up hiring staff for instance one of those options open to you is to make and sell mushroom grow kits which is something we love doing they fetch a decent price they have a good margin a higher margin than selling fresh mushrooms and they're just really popular as a gift product kids love them too so you also have an option of course to bolt on a school's program if you want and again this isn't the only option open to you so for instance you can have mushroom jerky you can dry your mushrooms and sell them you can have mushroom tinctures that you market and all of those options are things that you should really consider and what's really cool is that in our community of growers low-tech mushroom farming growers there's a lot of people who apply these things in different ways ways that suit them another option that you have open to is to run workshops or farm tours this is something we've seen a lot of people do and it makes a lot of sense you know for a start a lot of the larger farms aren't really set up for this kind of thing they don't like to have farm visits or they don't tend to run workshops so it can be really great to just share your whole setup with other people who might want to come and learn for the day and we've seen this ourselves not just people are interested in mushroom growing but people just get bought a course maybe for a birthday present or something it's a big market people that want to just go for a day and learn a bit about something so that's another option open to you um something else that we do ourselves here on the farm is to produce ready to fruit substrate as well which you can supply to restaurants or maybe other small growers this just enables them to just get the bags and fruit the mushrooms which makes it even simpler for other people to to start growing and then finally you might also want to consider something like the the meat alternatives this has been a huge growing thing in the last few years you know vegan and vegetarian ready meals or snacks and that kind of thing is something you could look into as well so it's important as well to end this section with saying look if you decide to make a living out of this and you want to set it up as a business that you're the architect of this business and as an architect you're also responsible for how that develops and how you shape it of course so what we can help you with of course is a step-by-step system that gets you to reliable results when it comes to growing mushrooms we can also help you on the grow kids side of things but that is an important consideration so setting up a business can be difficult can be complicated simply suits some people better than others but if at this stage you're thinking right i'm in let's make this happen this next section is for you so this point you've got two options you know number one you can just take what we've covered here in the workshop today and just go off and make the best of this on your own or let's do this together involve us and you can benefit from our years of experience and our support of course you see this workshop we covered a lot of ground and it's only an introduction to low-tech mushroom farming behind this there's a whole step-by-step system that can get you reliable results using these methods yeah and that system that we're talking about is our course the low-tech mushroom farm and online course and community which is you know as much of it is a system with a set of lessons but it's also a constantly evolving uh body of knowledge that we continue to add to as we experiment and continue to learn ourselves so we'll tell you more about what's in there in just a minute but if you are ready and you're thinking i just want to come and join right now head on over to growcycle.com forward slash go and you can find out everything there about the course and enroll now i want to take a minute and explain to you why this actually matters to us so much so both of us love local food production and we love helping other growers to grow mushrooms in their local area and the fact that this is morphed into like a network of growers in over 70 countries it's just really really rewarding and we love being at the heart of that yeah it really fires us up and motivates us it's not just the course that we've made and forgotten about like i said we keep adding to it and um it's something that we personally just really love and we really stand behind it exactly and there's no confusion with the system there's no ambiguity there's complete handholding we talk you through all of the steps of the process and we're there to help you with any questions you might have yep so you might be wondering what is actually included in the course oh that's yeah that's quite a lot to list of course here but i'll try anyway so there's 90 over 90 video lessons that show you um it split up in different models according to the system so you can just follow them in a step-by-step way then we've got loads of additional downloads some of those are for instance a production space calculator we've got a more detailed production cost sheet that you can use and adapt for your purposes we also have a tool that you can use to get exactly the right fan sizes that you will need for your setup yeah there's also a search engine isn't there yes so if you've got a topic you know you want to just look up quickly any lessons that mention a certain thing you can just search for that and it will pull up all the different lessons that mention that topic exactly and also as part of this course comes a complete manual that's basically all of the lessons but in a written format so that can help you if you're in an offline situation but also if english isn't your first language and you just want to read it at your leisure yeah plus you get access to the private course members facebook group which is really this community of fellow growers you know we've got people in there now from more than 70 countries around the world um so let's talk about that a little bit because that's a really big aspect of the course absolutely i love hearing it and we do hear it time and time again but a lot of people think they join for the video lessons they get stuck in they get growing and then they realize that with the community and being part of that community of like-minded growers that that is as least at least as much value as just the video lessons yes if you're wondering how that community actually works it's a private facebook group which you can go in there ask any questions that you might have but also i always think it's a lot of benefit just watching what other people are doing inside of that group some people are you know already a few steps further on than usual just by watching what other people are doing there asking questions about it you can learn a hell of a lot from that and people take different approaches to this you know depending on their own situation so you might see people in there that are kind of doing something that you'd like to do yeah and you can just ask questions there exactly and it's great to be connected as well right so if you think of this community you can go there and speak to other fellow mushroom enthusiasts and often in a local area you might well be more fired up about this topic than other people and perhaps your family and friends are just less willing to listen after a certain amount of time now it's also cool of this thriving community of course is that you can use all of those posts as a really useful research tool so you can go through previous topics of conversation to see what other people have done in that area or to just ask for some feedback on your own ideas and the tone is just really really positive in this group and of course we've got a couple of community managers there as well who are always happy to help people with any questions they might have and we drop in there on a regular basis as well just to stay in touch and add to it best we can yeah it's a wonderful group i really really love that and um it's definitely a huge huge benefit of the course so alongside that membership of that community um let's have a little look at what's actually included inside the membership area where all the lessons are so this is what it looks like when you log into the course you can see we have a whole range of different modules here that walk you through step by step all the process from how to design build and run your own mushroom farm first module digs into what we call mushrooms 101 so that's just you know the basics of how mushrooms grow uh their importance in our daily lives the history of mushroom cultivation and how low-tech mushroom farming is different to the way that they're normally grown then we move on in module one and two into how to design and build your farm so in the design module we look at a range of different options really so different ways of using a space different types of grow rooms talk about what conditions you need in a lot of detail and just help you get your head around what it is you need to do to turn an empty space into a fully functioning farm yes and it's important you just mentioned a lot of detail there is a lot of detail in these video lessons way more than we could cover in this workshop today of course now the module on build shows you a lot of different ways you can approach this in terms of setup of course you can also benefit from time lapse footage that we've seen so you can see right from scratch how certain rooms get built and how they're kitted out and all of that stuff makes it really really useful and there's also a case study of a container based system and that has got in great detail what kind of fans you need what kind of rooms you need to create what kind of how you hook up certain systems of course so that they're running fine how to add humidistat all of that stuff is just covered for you yep and then beyond that once you're up and running your farm we have a whole load of lessons there to help you out with that so we look at what you need to know before you start growing so that includes things like what kind of substrate you might want to use different strains you might want to grow with different types of cultivation bag we have a good few lessons just specifically on how to grow mushrooms in buckets because that's something people were interested in learning more about and then we go on to talk in more detail how to grow oyster mushrooms and how to grow shiitake mushrooms in particular using low-tech methods so we walk you through some practical examples of us doing our mixing and inoculation process and walking you right the way through through to harvest exactly and the whole section the whole module on running your own mushroom farm it also has a really useful section that's what it ends with it's ten lessons on the most common problems that mushroom cultivators are likely to face and then we also have a bonus lesson which shows you some tips on how to sell your mushrooms alongside that you get a couple of whole little mini courses when you join the course one is on how to grow mushrooms at home and the other one is how to grow mushrooms on logs so an awful lot of video content there for you to learn from but this stage you might be asking yourself will will this work for me and we just want to leave you with um you know with this thought that this is really for anyone at any stage so you know if you're a beginner you'll find a lot of value in that how to grow mushrooms at home course where we show you for example how to make a shotgun fruit and chamber how to make a fortier greenhouse how to get started on all the different processes and if you're more experienced you'll find a lot of value in the more advanced lessons where we're talking about how to get exactly the right growing conditions in whatever fruiting room for example that you're choosing and where we go into more detail on you know how to get the right substrate mix and how to get the right nutrient profile in your substrate all of that kind of more advanced detail exactly so that's all they're waiting for you so to save yourself time and money go to grow cycle dot com forward slash go and follow those steps and i'm absolutely sure that you get reliable results absolutely sure and if not then just let us know and we'll give you a full refund of course no problem so like we've mentioned already we do keep adding to this resource and i just want to give you a few examples of that because the way that we tend to run this is that we get feedback from the community people asking when when we hear the same questions coming up or people saying i'd like to learn more about that we take that as our cue to go away and make some more resources on it if we need to we'll start running trials and experiments at the farm in order to make those lessons so in the last year or so we've added a few to the course haven't we absolutely yes so it's important for you to realize it's not a static thing that we've built we're constantly trying to add and improve on it simply because we want people to thrive in this community yep so in the last few months we've added lessons on how to grow mushrooms in buckets how to um design and build in a shipping container yeah the course on how to grow on logs for instance all of that got added in just a matter of months yeah and we're currently experimenting with different types of substrate and pasteurization methods those will make their way into the course in the months ahead as well so you can benefit not just now from the knowledge that's in there but also in the years into the future because you know you get lifetime access to all of this material so it could well be at this stage you're thinking yes i'd love to do that but have i got time to do this and the answer is most likely yes so you could do this in one go binge watch it all but most people just take their own time and set their own pace for learning and that's because you've got lifetime access to this course and also to the support that comes with it of course and this we realize this isn't the only option open to you so of course you can just go away learn more from books and more youtube videos you can read blog articles you can do all sorts of things to further your knowledge of this topic but it's important for you to realize that you need to value your own time and also you'll face likely information overwhelm there's often a lot of information out there that you need to sift through loads of large decisions you need to make loads of mini decisions you need to make and also there's a lot of contradicting evidence out there isn't there yeah and sometimes just outright untrue information as well so we often see things written online for example you know i remember seeing recently again a fairly prominent website saying you can't grow mushrooms on coffee grounds well you know that that's just not true you know we've we've grown literally tons of mushrooms on tons of coffee ground substrates so you know you've also got to contend with that actually trying to work out what's actually true and what's just a rumor that's been repeated over and over again which the internet has a habit of doing so by joining a course and community like this you basically can get taken by the hand and walk through a whole method that works right right from the start which will save you you know weeks months or even years of time that you're going to learn certainly when i remember started growing this it really took months and months of just studying reading textbooks uh trial and error and of course a lot of money that was spent on the wrong equipment as well i've spent thousands on the wrong equipment that i you know i now know i didn't actually need so by joining of course you get to cut out all of that process and you know it's going to pay for itself basically just in removing the learning curve the time and also just the amount of equipment you might end up buying that you don't actually need exactly so if you decide not to do your own research then of course another option for you is just to go to an in-person workshop could be one could be two days and you'll be given a load of load of information of course and that's all great but it comes with disadvantages as well so once you come home and you need to put it all into practice you'll find you're not part of a community of course you've been given all of this information there's often no follow-on support so those are just some of the disadvantages disadvantages yeah and for me that's a really big one actually so i think a lot of the questions you have they don't come up at the start they come up when you're a few weeks or months further in and you start thinking oh should i do it like this should i do it like that why don't i do this if you've gone to a one or two day course you don't have the ability to just get in touch with the teacher and ask them that question you know whereas in this ongoing support that we offer with the course you can do that if you have a question six months 12 months later you can just get in touch and ask and that's a huge advantage oh absolutely absolutely now the next option that you could consider of course is to go for one-to-one consultancy and that is absolutely um more could be really effective of course but it comes with a huge price tag right so we've done consultancy jobs um they typically i think for something that's covered in the low tech mushroom farming cause you'd probably be partying with the best part if not more of ten thousand dollars so that's um definitely a high price to pay for the information that essentially what we've used all of that learning as a backbone for the um the low tech mushroom farming course yeah we've done a fair bit of consultancy work ourselves over the years and actually that was what sort of moved us over towards making an online course we started to get a lot of requests for consultancy and not only does that you know we've got a limit on how much time we can spend working with different people but it's also clear that for a lot of people consultancy is just too expensive and so a large part of the aim with this course is to try and make it available to people that knowledge at a lower price point exactly so we get more people growing food locally where they are so in contrast to those options then you know to join the low tech mushroom farming online course and community gives you lifetime access to a growing body of knowledge and lessons it gives you access to an ongoing support system and a community of like-minded growers and all of this is available to you at a pretty reasonable price so you'll benefit not just from the resources in the community of course but you'll also benefit from all of the knowledge and experience that we've got and that keeps growing and growing and we keep sharing it of course now let me also tell you a little bit of a personal story so i used to have a corporate career i got really really disillusioned with all of that sort of stuff and i just looked up the food chain and thought right i don't want their job i don't want their job i don't want their job i want to do something meaningful now so we my wife and i left the corporate careers and we traveled and we found out more about food systems growing food we wanted to add to the local food community we did courses in horticulture i got fascinated by mushrooms of course and maybe you're feeling along similar lines maybe it's time for you to take action maybe you want to add to your local food scene perhaps you want to bolt stuff on to your small holding maybe you even want to take a fight to big agriculture i mean this might be the time for you to take action yeah i think for a lot of people just being involved in the local food scene is just a lot of fun you get to connect with other food growers you get to go to farmers markets and meet people face to face interested in good healthy food and so for a lot of people this is the step into that and i've had a lot of fun doing that these last few years so you've seen what it looks like inside the course area the membership area and you've seen the systematic approach to it all and there's bunches of people who send us pictures of how they've put this in place how they put it into practice and get reliable results and that's amazingly rewarding and we're very much looking forward to helping you grow mushrooms the low-tech way where you are so alongside the low-tech mushroom farming course we have another course called the grow kits master and this is really for people who are interested in producing and selling mushroom growing kits we've taken all of our knowledge that we've built up over a number of years now in how to make and sell mushroom growing kits at scale and we've turned that into a whole course of its own where we cover everything from you know how to get your boxes designed what kind of card to use printing materials uh all the way through to you know the logistics of producing a lot of kits storing them dispatching them uh different ways of marketing and selling them and we go pretty deep into e-commerce and how to you know sell kits online via an online shop this course also comes with the low-tech mushroom farming course with it so the two courses together build huge body of knowledge so if you're interested in doing this as a full-time business i'd recommend checking out that course uh we've spent tens of thousands of dollars over the last five to ten years really just working all of this stuff out and you can just cut that learning curve straight away and come in at the start and um get started with this which a number of people have have actually done already haven't they absolutely and it's fascinating to see how it works for them how they put it into practice so go to growcycle.com forward slash go and benefit from all these tens of thousands of dollars and all the time that we put into working out how to best go about this now as a brief recap then there really are two choices one is that you've hopefully enjoyed this workshop you've learned something you'll take that away you might look at more articles more videos and decide not to join the course and that's absolutely fine we can still be friends because we've got a shared interest in local food production and a share shared interest in mushrooms absolutely yeah and of course the other option like we mentioned before is that we can do this together you can join us in the low tech mushroom farming course become a part of the community benefit from all these years of knowledge and experience and just cut the learning curve and just connect with a great community of people and just kind of get taken by the hand really and just um enjoy the whole process throughout so we're seeing hundreds of people now who have picked up this method this way of growing and getting really great results you know from scratch pretty much a lot of people have never grown a mushroom before and within a few weeks they're up and running and growing which personally i just find that really inspiring and exciting it makes me want to double down on everything that we're doing already and to keep learning ourselves keep adding more resources into that course really just to better support this growing network of low-tech mushroom growers so if you're interested in joining us inside of that community head on over now to grow cycle dot com forward slash go and we really look forward to welcoming you into the community thanks a lot for joining us for this workshop here today we'll see you soon you

Channel: GroCycle

Views: 311,262

Keywords: mushroom farm, grow mushrooms, mushroom farming, start a mushroom farm, small scale mushroom farm, low tech mushroom farm, set up a mushroom farm, build a mushroom farm, mushroom business, mushroom farm business, make money growing mushrooms, commercial mushroom farming, profitable mushroom farming, growing mushrooms for profit, selling mushrooms, start growing mushrooms, easiest way to grow mushrooms, grow mushrooms at home, mushroom grow rooms, mushroom grow tent

Id: icKeO-kyiGk

Length: 57min 13sec (3433 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021