Plastic Free Mushroom Farming | GroCycle

hey then welcome to this week's video where we're going to be taking a look at how to grow mushrooms without the need for plastic so traditionally lots of gourmet mushrooms have been grown in disposable plastic bags either like this in sort of large column banks which a lot of oyster mushrooms are growing like that or in smaller filter patch bags like this and the obvious problem with that is at the end of the growing process this just becomes a piece of waste plastic is almost like a single-use plastic all though it's you know in use for a good few weeks and produces often two to three crops at the end of that process it's just a waste plastic and some places that's not really even able to be recycled so in this video I just want to take a deeper look at why it is for that mushrooms have been grown in plastic traditionally and why they still are in most places but also some plastic free ways to grow mushrooms so for example we'll be looking at growing mushrooms in buckets and other containers which can be reused as well as whether or not biodegradable plastics hold any potential so let's jump behind the computer and dig into it in a little bit more detail alright so first up when I say plastic free mushroom farming what I'm really talking about is not using single-use plastic bags so let's just begin by taking a quick look at why plastic bags I use so widely in mushroom grow and obviously plastic is used widely in all areas of life and that's because it has a lot of really useful properties but in terms of mushroom production there are a few things in particular stand out so number one is the fact that it maintains the substrate moisture really well most mushroom substrates are hydrated to around 60 or 70 percent water content and you don't want that to dry out when you're in the middle of the production process because it will slow down or even stop the mycelium growth or the fruiting of the mushrooms and plastic is a non permeable membrane so it just holds that moisture inside the bag really well it also stands out really well in the high humidity environment of the fruit in stage where for example other more biodegradable materials will start to break down or potentially Harbor competitor organisms are start to go moldy we've seen this ourself years ago when we try to grow with different containers to find a way to avoid using plastic we grew in hessian sacks you know the sorts of sacks ec coffee beans supplied in and these are made from a biodegradable material and when you put that in a high humidity environment they begin to go moldy and then you end up with problems competing organisms trying to compete with your mushroom mycelium so it's important that whatever material growing your mushrooms in isn't gonna start to degrade in the high humidity of the fruity movement and plastic does that really well it's also very strong so although the plastic bags that are used are very very thin membrane they're very strong for the thickness of the bag that's used and if you compare that to something like corn starch which is a fairly common bioplastic they're nowhere near as strong for the same thickness of plastic and that's important because often a mushroom cultivation the substrate is quite heavy people may well be growing in containers of 20 kilograms of substrate or more that's around about 50 US pounds and that's a lot of weight for a thin membrane to take and you don't want that to be splitting and the substrate splitting all over the floor most importantly of all though I think the reason why plastic is used so widely in mushroom cultivation is it's cheap and easily sourced easily accessible and that's a key factor obviously in all industries and why you see plastic use so widely and when it comes to mushroom cultivation they're also really useful in the sense that some plastics can be used in autoclaves and high heat treatments which is often the case when you'll grow in mushrooms and you're sterilizing the substrate is often done so inside the plastic bag so the plastic has to be able to go through a high heat treatment and not go brittle or begin to fall apart so these are all reasons why plastic is used so widely in mushroom cultivation but of course it's not all good news there are some major problems with the use of plastic and really it boils down to these three first up the material that they're made from requires a lot of fossil fuel inputs and that's a non-renewable resource and it's also carbon dioxide that were taken out of the Earth's crust and we're putting that up into the air so the plastic in mushroom farming is also disposed off after a relatively short use period so after the production ends which usually is around about six weeks for oyster mushrooms and it might be as long as three months for shiitake it's pretty difficult to use that plastic again afterwards it's usually had holes cut in the bag the plastic is dirty of substrate on the inside of it which isn't that easily cleaned and so there's not really an obvious additional use for it at that point it's either goes to plastic recycling if that exists in the area or it will end up in landfill and then thirdly connected to that it's just the fact that it's not a material that's easily biodegradable you can't return it back to the earth it's either going to be transformed into a lower grade plastic which will eventually end up in landfill and some other form or it's either going to go to landfill where it's not going to break down back into organic material so those are obviously some fairly major downsides to the use of plastic which when you consider the scale and mushroom production is into the millions of tons per year that's a lot of plastic being produced and also it's just such a shame because the production of mushrooms is otherwise a really sustainable way to produce food from waste organic material and really rich nutritious food as well so let's have a look at some some alternatives that could be used and are already being used in its place so first up is worth mentioning that not all mushrooms are grown in bags and in particular button mushrooms are usually grown in a system of beds which traditionally were made from wood and these days are more often made from metal this is just a production method that is well suited to this variety of mushrooms it doesn't really work as well for most other gourmet varieties under this system of production the beds are filled with the substrate the mushrooms are grown and then at the end of the growing cycle it's all removed from the beds the beds are cleaned down and sterilized and then they can be reused again and this theme of some kind of container that can be reused again after cleaning is basically at the heart of trying to find it other ways that grow mushrooms without plastic so this is one of the methods you can use mushroom beds which as I said only really works so well for button mushrooms and a few others more commonly these days you'll see a lot of gourmet mushrooms are grown in reusable plastic bottles now this is a really strong high-grade plastic which can be cleaned and reused time and time again and can be autoclaved so I can go into a really high heat sterilization process this is a really nice system I think it's ultimately replacing a single-use plastic bag with a reusable bottle and basically the bottle is just filled with substrate from which the mushrooms are produced instead but the major downside to bottles is they tend to be used really in heavily industrialized process so I'll just show you a bit of video footage here to give you a sense of what I mean the bottles go through many different stages in the production from being filled with the substrate at the beginning and then there are machines that move them along the production line put a little hole in them fill them with spawn put the lids on then they need to go moved along to the different stages of production where the incubation of the substrate happens and then the mushrooms are fruited and then at the end of that process there are more machines which remove the lid knock the substrate out and then of course the bottles need to be cleaned and sterilized at the end before they can be refilled again so all of that requires a huge investment in a lot of equipment in order to be able to do it efficiently and although you can grow in bottles like this at home without all of that machinery in order to get anywhere near a decent output you're talking a lot of bottles are in use and then to go along and clean all of those bottles individually just becomes pretty difficult to do in a an efficient way so this is a system which is really well suited to a larger scale commercial farms and it's really good in a way to see that some of the largest farms in the world these days are being built in this way which is a much more sustainable way to produce the mushrooms than it is with the single use bags so growing in buckets is very similar in a way to growing in bottles it's obviously just a larger container but the principle is the same it's a harder higher grade plastic that you can use time and time again and can just be cleaned out in between and I think this is particularly well suited for a smaller scale mushroom production because you can produce a lot of substrate in each bucket and get a decent yield from each bucket without having to be handling thousands of smaller bottles and obviously it's less individual vessels that need to be cleaned out having said that the major downside to the use of buckets for any mushroom farm no matter how small or big is the fact you still need to clean them out at the end and this is fine if you just have a small handful of buckets but if you have a few hundred buckets in production and you need to clean them all out empty out the substrate at the end and then make sure they're clean down really well before they're reused again it can take a considerable amount of time and which obviously adds a lot of cost to the production so if you're trying to make it work as a commercial mushroom farm producing in buckets can be difficult because it adds on that additional level of cost and time input but it is really well-suited for smaller scale farms especially if you really want to try and cut out that use of plastic so when we rebuild our fruit and boom here over the next couple of weeks we are going to be switching half of our production over two buckets and the other half will continue to grow in bags for the time being and we want to grow them alongside each other like this really just to compare the process and contrast them and see where the major differences are between the two both in terms of yield and output but also in terms of just the process of working with them moving them to and fro cleaning them out and tracking any incidences of contamination and how they compared between the two systems but I know a lot of other small-scale mushroom growers are already using buckets and I really like it as a system and to me it seems like the main innovation is really just to find a way of cleaning hundreds of buckets in a really efficient quick manner in a way that you don't introduce contamination into the next batch so that's something we're going to focus on a lot in the next couple of months as we begin to handle hundreds of buckets in our farm here so there are of course other reusable containers like this that cup you see at the top there is something I remember doing probably about eight or nine years ago now it's a little biodegradable plank Cup and I was just intrigued about you know how does it work to make a little mushroom kit inside of a cup like that to be honest the yield that it produces was so small because it's such a small amount of substrate that you can fit in a one pint cup it's around about five to six hundred milliliters and you just get a really small crop of mushrooms so it wasn't really something that was viable but you can take the principle and apply it to any other type of reusable container so I have seen people produce in in large plastic storage boxes and that's really pretty much the same as it is with buckets you basically just got a nice heavy gray plastic that has a much longer lifespan which you can fill with substrate to grow the mushrooms form and then clean it again afterwards so in contrast to those heavier grade plastics that you can reuse in clean there are some new bags on the market which are being marketed as biodegradable mushroom cultivation bags and this is something that's pretty controversial so I just want to say at this point I am in no way an expert in plastics or biodegradable plastics and the whole field is actually pretty confusing and complicated I've spent some time reading into this in a lot of detail and to me it seems like the outcome of these bags is not a biodegradable material at the end so they're basically made from a material called awk so biodegradable plastic and it is effectively a normal plastic which has some additives added to it that enable it to break down the chemical stress of the plastic enabling it to degrade quicker than a normal plastic would however is pretty controversial a lot of people concerned about the fact that what you end up with is just a lot of smaller micro plastic fragments rather than actually breaking down into organic material you just end up with loads of micro plastics in the environment instead and the European Commission has said that there is no evidence that these plastic fragments will undergo full bio digression within a reasonable timeframe and that by oXXO degradable plastics cannot be considered as bio plastics so that's a statement from the European Commission a couple of years ago who felt the need to step in and say something because in their eyes there was a bit of greenwash going on where things were being marketed as biodegradable plastic when in actual fact they probably aren't easily biodegrading back into organic materials so as far as I can tell it doesn't look like these biodegradable bags do fully biodegrade obviously open to anybody explaining it in a way that contrasts so that but I think in a way it is possibly a case of this is something that everybody every mushroom grower wants a biodegradable bag no one wants to be using plastics and throwing them away in the way that they are at the moment but the simplicity of using them and the cost-effectiveness of them just makes it really difficult to move away into anything else and so as soon as there is a solution put forward which is marketed as a biodegradable bag it becomes pretty easy to just want that to be the case without actually knowing if that is the end result so it's worth pointing out of course that is early days when it comes to the use of bio plastics and it's a really fast evolving area years ago we tried to grow and mushrooms in cornstarch plastic bags and they just weren't strong enough to hold the weight of the substrate as soon as you cut a hole for the mushrooms to fruit out of the whole bag just began to split and you end up with substrate on the floor but as things progress is quite possible that we end up with a truly plant-based diet variable material that is strong enough to hold the substrate and so maybe we will have fully biodegradable bags available to use any years ahead so where does that leave us now then is plastic free mushroom farming really possible well yeah it is definitely possible as we've seen here the prospect of using containers that can be reused again cleaned out is already a possibility both on a commercial industrial scale in the use of the bottle system and on a smaller low-tech scale with the use of reusable buckets or large plastic storage boxes so I'm pretty excited about the prospect of less plastic being used in mushroom production in the future and on our farm here I'm excited to work out ways to grow mushrooms in buckets in a way that's efficient enough that you can justify the use of them without losing money on lots of time input in order to clean them so we'll be focusing our attention on how we can clean a lot of buckets in a really short space of time using some simple bits of technology and then we'll keep you up to date with that on the channel in the future all right thanks a lot for joining us for today's video if you haven't already do subscribe to the channel this you

Channel: GroCycle

Views: 82,209

Rating: 4.912044 out of 5

Keywords: growing mushrooms in buckets, growing mushrooms in bottles, mushroom growing bags, mushroom growing containers, growing mushrooms without plastic, mushroom grow bags, mushroom buckets, sustainable mushroom farming

Id: -jCthumJLuI

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020