How To Be a Profitable Mushroom Farmer

My name's Tom and in 2019 I quit my job to start growing mushrooms in my garage. Boutique mushroom farms have been opening up all around the world offering customers a local selection when buying fresh mushrooms. These Bowtique mushroom farms generally produce between about 20 to 200 kilos per week and will serve us a smaller geographic area. At Oak and Spore we are one of these boutique type mushroom farms and we service the small area of Christchurch and New Zealand. We grow upwards of about 50 kilos per week of which we sell to local customers. These Boutique mushroom farms generally use sawdust or wood pallets to grow mushrooms. So basically I turn these guys here into these guys here. to make the substrate that oyster mushrooms love to eat we first get organic softwood fuel pellets and soy hulls. We mix these two ingredients together ideally into a biodegradable bag, then add water to get the right moisture content. so I have prepared our 20 bags these have been prepared with our soy hulls, our wood chips, and our water to give them to the correct moisture content. the next step is to get them into our homemade sterilizer which you can just see over in the corner there, my big silver drum and we're going to our sterilize these to kill any competing bacteria or perhaps mold that might bein there. so here we are in our clean room this is quite possibly the most important part of the process of small-scale mushroom farming. So we have wheeled our drum into here and that's in a few days to cool down because the substrate in there got to about 95 degrees Celsius, and it had to have time for that substrate to cool back down to around the room temperature. In this room, it's a very small room, we have in front of us what is called a flow hood. Now this flow hood is a blower which blows air through HEPA filters, and what that does is cleans all the contamination or most of the contamination out of the air so we can work with these bags in here with a very low chance of bacteria or mold getting into those bags in our growing. Now this should mean that our mycelium will be the only organism in that bag and it gives it the best chance to move through and start consuming all that substrate. So we're going to get this flow hood turned on now and we're going to leave it for about 30 minutes to just clean some of the ear in this room so there's are not a lot of dust flying around the next step is to choose the type of mushroom you want. Today we're going to use Phoenix oyster. This here is a bag of Phoenix oyster spawn and what it is is a whole lot of grain which has had mushroom mycelium grown all over it. We will introduce scoops of this into our bags of sterile substrate. so we have inoculated all our bags now, as you can see here there is a layer of grain above all are sterile substrate. What I'm going to do now is is break the substrate up with my hand and mix in this grain into the substrate, and that should hopefully disperse evenly in there. it's going to speed up the colonization time of the mycelium, and in about two weeks, maybe a little more, we should have a bag that is ready to grow mushrooms. So all our bags have been inoculated and we've shifted them out here to our incubation room this room sits at about our 21 to 22 degrees at all times and that provides a really good temperature for that mycelium to move through the substrate and start consuming it, and after about two weeks these are whole bags will start turning white is that mycelium fully colonizers it. So we will get the lights off in here, we will ger These young guys to bed, and we'll come wake them up in about two weeks. After about seven days the bags will start looking like this. You can actually see where the mycelium is moving through that substrate. Shhh check this out. These are out mushroom blocks that we put in here two weeks ago as you can see the mycelium has moved through the substrate nicely fully colonized these bags so we'll shove them through our fruiting chamber now, we'll open up a small hole on the side, and we should get a nice lovely bouquet of fresh mushrooms out of each one of these. So we have shifted our bags here from our incubation room and to our fruiting chamber here. Now this is the room we were going to grow the mushrooms in Now a fruiting chamber must have four important things. It must have a temperature between a certain range it. Must have a very high humidity. It must have our lights in the room which are on a certain spectrum, and it must have a low co2 parts per million in the room. So most mushroom fruiting chambers that people use, they control all four of these aspects in them. Now if we open up our mushroom bags to the environment which we create inside this room, these mushroom bags will start producing the mushrooms we want from them. now to get them to start growing their mushrooms, all we do as we go to the face of each bag and we cut a small hole about that big. Some people make a slit, I like to cut a little hole, and we are that that mycelium and substrate hits that fresh air and the humidity, over the face of it that, exposed mycelium that will start growing its mushrooms. And after about one week of having this small area exposed we should go from this, to this! So these are all bags I've put in here About one week ago today, and you can see they've all got beautiful bundles of mushrooms hanging off the front of them. So today after I finish this fall here I'm going to go and harvest all these Reedy mushrooms. Some of them are ready now, some of them will be ready tomorrow morning. So that is the process of growing mushrooms from start to finish. Now we still have one more thing to do to really be successful in this, and that's actually sell our mushrooms. So we will load up our van here with all our mushrooms we will take them down to the local market, and we're going to see just how many sales we can get. So we are done at the market. Today I made seven hundred and thirty dollars. I like to sell our mushrooms and trays of ten and twenty dollars. On a good day we can do a thousand dollars at that market so $730 is pretty good for us. We do like a bit more, but we are happy with $730. growing mushrooms is fun and challenging and if you've never done it before I recommend you try it at home you never know it could be your new career

Channel: Oak and Spore Mushroom Farm

Views: 822,233

Keywords: mushroom farming, growing mushrooms, farming mushrooms, gourmet mushrooms, how to grow mushrooms, mushroom cultivation, mushroom, fungi, fungus, mushroom mycelium, farming for profit, growing mushrooms for profit, grow mushrooms at home, growing oyster mushrooms, mycology, organic mushrooms at home, organic mushroom farming, how to grow, oyster mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, mushroom farm, mushroom fruiting, mushroom growing business, mushrooms, oak and spore, home business

Id: _kPLXib4ksE

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Ryaven]

I'm looking for grow trays about 50ish of them, anyone know where I could possibly get them affordably?

[u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the video, very informative. Just a couple questions. Will any fuel pellets work for a substrate? Why does he wear a respirator in the grow room?

[u/shinty_six]

Great video! 👍