How mushrooms are farmed

farming mushrooms is very different from farming nearly any other kind of food because of course mushrooms aren't plants or animals the act of growing mushrooms looks and feels much more like growing bacteria in a lab fungi aren't bacteria either they're their own kingdom of life but the bacteria analogy holds in as much as a mushroom farm is much more laboratory than it is field there is no field because mushrooms don't need light at least not in the same way that plants do they aren't photosynthesizing anything they're not vegetables certainly lots of different kinds of mushrooms are cultivated lots of different ways by lots of different people i'm just showing you one example today middle georgia mushroom in macon georgia hunter pruitt his grandmothers and his girlfriend anna grow mostly oyster and lion's mane mushrooms for local restaurants we're bringing fresh gourmet mushrooms to middle georgia first step is to prepare a substrate that is the substance on which the fungus will both grow and feed it lives inside its food ain't that the dream in the wild mushrooms can grow in the ground specifically ground that has lots of biological material in it like old dead leaves or they can grow on dead trees decaying wood hunter replicates the dead wood substrate by using sawdust pellets these are usually a byproduct of sawmills people use them as fuel for grills and smokers even home heating stoves once this stuff is hydrated it turns into just the mushroom's paradise right mushrooms in the wild grow on hardwood species so we found out that these pellets work just as good as that hardwoods are basically the trees that aren't pine type trees conifers have that sticky christmas-smelling resin in them which has anti-fungal properties for that same reason people don't usually cook with soft woods they burn really dirty you end up with food that's coated in this kind of bitter soot so generally speaking wood that is good for cooking can also be good mushroom substrate and what this is is we've taken those pellets we've put them in that bag and we've put in a certain amount of water and we let that water absorb in that pellet and it comes out to this nice nice little block the problem of course is that block is probably full of random microorganisms microorganisms that could grow in the very favorable conditions of hunter's mushroom fruiting chambers so we bring it over and we put it in this big ol barrel we call this our atmospheric steam sterilizer it's basically a big tank with a heating element at the bottom hunter loads the sealed bags in there and pasteurizes them at 204 fahrenheit 95 c for 18 hours what we're doing is just running steam up through the blocks and it's just heating that block up to 200 degrees which is going to kill all that content that competition those competitive organisms the bags come out totally sterile and then it's time to inoculate them with the fungus that you actually do want to grow in there from here on out everything has to be done in an ultra sterile environment the air is full of yeasts and molds and bacteria and other things that could out-compete hunter's mushrooms in that substrate so there's there's one mold that mushrooms growers are just fighting every day and that's trichoderma it's it's your green mold it's your common mold that you find on breads it loves to eat the same kind of substrates as as mushrooms so everything he does now he will do while standing in front of this flow hood what this does is it pulls air from the back pushes air forward and pushes through this hepa filter those jars he is sterilized in a pressure cooker everything else he's going to spray with isopropyl alcohol cut with water a 70 solution so it doesn't evaporate too fast kind of spray your hands down spray your surface spray your bag here's what hunter is starting from today some mushroom culture that he has ordered you can grow mushrooms from their spores their seeds or you can grow them from mycelium cultures and the latter is generally regarded as the more reliable method the mycelium is the main body of the fungus these white filaments that grow inside the substrate in that syringe she has little bits of mycelium floating around in a sugar water solution that the mycelium can eat and he's injecting it into jars with even more sugar water it's a one to four ratio of water and light corn syrup so the mycelium actually grows on the sugars that are in the syrup go in the jar we'll do about two and a half milliliters what he's doing here is expanding the culture that he's ordered putting it in an environment where it can rapidly grow so it'll have lots more of it and so it will last until he needs it the other advantage of liquid culture is that the mycelium won't grow a mushroom in there it has no structure to hold on to we have a mag a little stir bar and what that stir bar is is just a magnet we put it on the stir plate and what that is is gonna break that mycelium up that way it can spread throughout the jar look at that magnet spin super cool way to stir something without potentially contaminating it and within seven to 14 days this jar is going to be fully colonized similar to this that's the thing about growing fungus instead of plants everything happens way faster given the right conditions mycelium can expand almost as fast as a brand new mattress from the sponsor of this video helix sleep let me thank them helix is a premium mattress in a box company i've been setting up our new house here and it was awesome to get a real very high quality king-size mattress in the mail no movers necessary they just shipped the box to me you break the airtight seal and it balloons like a mushroom this is the second helix mattress we've gotten because we love them we've been sleeping on them for almost a year they're tailored to our bodies and how we like to sleep you take a quiz online helix helps you choose a model lauren likes really firm mattresses my back does better when it 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the mycelium can actually grow into a full-fledged fungus in there so he's also looking to find particularly strong genetic specimens groups of mycelium that are so good at growing and being alive that they are out competing other groups and you can see how it's there's no kind of synchronization with this mycelium there's just groups growing everywhere right so what we do is we would find a very healthy looking group like some of this rhizomorphic here some of the edge of this and we'd cut it and we'd transfer it to another dish that way we can grow that good strong isolation that we all hunt after so you if you can get one good genetic growing you can multiply that genetic tenfold and then that can be your genetic on your farm that you know how it grows in a certain temperature how long it takes to fruit how long it colonizes you know everything about that thing in contrast look at this one you can see that's not several different fungi all battling it out that's one coherent organism that hunter has successfully isolated you can also clone a fungus you like by just chopping off a piece of the fruiting body the actual mushroom there and putting it in agar hunter does that too here's a clone of a lion's mane mushroom that actually started growing a new fruiting body inside the dish it's actually just a suffocating fruiting body you can see that it's coming out and it's reaching for oxygen so mushrooms are just like us they actually uh they inhale oxygen and produce co2 so they're they're closely related to the us humans and he's looking for some oxygen that's why he's stretching out like that as we've discussed previously fungi are actually closer to animals than they are to plants i have a whole video about what exactly mushrooms are it's linked in the description next step is for hunter to use the genetic specimens he's isolated to inoculate jars of grain those are literally just whole grain oats in there pretty much any kind of seed works fungi likes seeds basically for the same reason that you and i do they're nutritious again he's just expanding his culture growing more of it and making sure it's pure that it hasn't been contaminated by some bread mold or something everything's white there is no different greens and blues and pinks the other great thing about starting your mycelium in grain is that it's granular you now have lots and lots of tiny little bits of things that are individually seeded with your fungus the thing important to farmers is how many different vehicles of inoculation you have you have probably i don't know five thousand six thousand kernels in this jar and it's going to get mixed into a big old bag of sawdust and that grain is going to be distributed through that sawdust so the grain spawn that's what that's called the grain spawn goes into the sterilized bags of wood pellets and he lets the mycelium grow in there for a week or two yeah you can see this thing is fully colonized ready to go and then you'll just get you a sharp object and you'll slit that that bag right there and from here she'll go into the chamber we'll place that block up and uh somewhere around 14 days she'll be uh she'll be fruit and some oysters that fruiting chamber is where the mycelium will grow an actual mushroom it'll come up out of that slit in the bag first they come out as little dots like that those are called pins or pinheads about a day later they might look like that then it's off to the races this will be about that size tomorrow and then it'll come in it'll be about that size on day three they are insanely fast growers and over that time hunter has to watch his fruiting bodies and manipulate the environment of his fruiting chamber accordingly so mushrooms in the beginning stages like very high humidity whereas mushrooms throughout their life as they start pinning require much more lower humidity you can see this for yourself out in your lawn it rains and then you see a bunch of mushrooms sprout when it's really humid and then if the air doesn't clear if it stays really wet or if it stays really stagnant those mushrooms will rot really really fast alternatively if things get too hot and too dry the mushrooms just shrivel up they're like 90 water so in general they like really humid somewhat dim conditions that doesn't mean they don't like sunlight some mushroom species use light as a signal or a trigger for growth the precise reasons and mechanism for this are things that are still being worked out by science what we found and i believe this is probably debatable is that mushrooms actually use sunlight as just a sense of direction that draws them towards oxygen so if you think that you know with all natural light occurring the sun being the highest point the organism knowing that they say if i can get to the sun then i can reach the oxygen and once the mushroom cluster is full grown he's got to cut it off the block right away the mushroom is the funguses temporary reproductive appendage its job is to grow up tall really fast cast the spores into the wind and then just die back you really got to pay attention to him because if you let them get to a certain point when that cap starts to open up and those spores start to drop this room is going to be a mess man your fans are going to get clogged up and your this your humidifier will get get all nasty the lion's main mushroom drops its spores from those little teeth you can tell it's ready when they get long long in the tooth this one right here is past its harvest prime but i love the way this thing looks man it's still totally edible so you can really see that this mushroom has a stringy crab like barbecue pulled pork like like texture once hunter harvests the fruit cluster he can grow another one from the same block that's called a flush he can generally get three flushes from a block though they get progressively smaller and more susceptible to contamination from a random mold floating by the nutrients start to disperse in the block so it doesn't have a lot of food the army becomes weaker right can you tell hunter is a veteran all the combat metaphors when the army becomes weaker and a new fresh contamination comes in that contamination's a lot of times gonna gonna win right it's gonna take over that block and it's gonna be able to make its little stronghold at that point the block goes in the compost and the whole process starts again he sells these inoculated blocks on his website it's a kit that you can grow at home i did that there's a link in the description a common trait that i've noticed among mushroom growers is they tend to be evangelists they believe in the power of fungus its power to be a medicine its power to be a sustainable protein source even its power to filter pollutants out of the environment we want to turn this into a community thing we want it to be a farm you know we want this we want this to expand and to uh into some land and and to really um and to really grow the awareness for fungus right in our community might sound grandiose but i don't think it is that lion's mane for example has been shown in my studies to promote neurogenesis the growth of new brain or other nerve cells hell it even looks like a brain and it's been shown to improve cognitive function in geriatric mice maybe it'll improve cognition in a geriatric me in a few decades we'll see in the meantime i'mma keep eating them thanks to the hard work of laboratory farmers like the folks at middle georgia mushroom go get you some

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,071,799

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Id: 5rRXj3rTHhY

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021