How to Grow "Organic" Mushrooms

At this point, all of my "research" simply involves querying Chat GPT or Grok and learning about the subject matter by speaking to the "expert." This approach is not necessarily bad - I can learn quickly about what I'm interested in, but there are two obvious problems. First, the AI is not always correct and may spit out incorrect answers, so cross-referencing and somehow validating data is always important. If using the research for something important, it must be validated in some way. Second, it spits out only exactly what you ask for but there could be context about the subject matter that is important but omitted.

For example, in the context of mushroom farming, I could be asking about how to optimize for humidity, and it could give me all the answers, but temperature may be the more important variable that I'm missing, and I could be fixated on the wrong parameter. Book guides are often more comprehensive and will guide you through the whole process, while AI only gives you what you ask for.

I had mentioned in the last blog post that I was essentially doing everything wrong and needed to fix three things:

1) The Strain

2) Temperature Control

3) The Mushroom Substrate

Regarding the strain, on second thought, the G2 spawn from North Spore is likely okay. However, my brain just generated a thought wondering if its not the strain/spawn that's the problem, but the transportation and distribution time from Maine (where North Spore is located) to Baltimore. The variable temperature during transportation and sealed bags with lack of air flow may reduce spawn quality significantly. Therefore, it seems to me that more so than poor strain selection, poor spawn quality due to transportation is the issue. This will be resolved by doing my lab work in-house.

As for temperature control, I am in the process of building out temperature insulated grow rooms, which will make it easier to heat/cool the rooms as unwanted temperature transfers through the wall will be minimized.

Now onto the topic of the article's heading. I realized that I want to head in the direction of growing high quality mushrooms and what screams higher quality than "organic." The most obvious factor for growing organic mushrooms is using organic inputs.

Formerly, my inputs were not organic. I was using a mix of untreated hardwood sawdust and soy hull pellets. Given that Mushroom Media Online (MMO) specifically sells organic soyhull (approximately x1.3 price premium compared to non-organic). Per GPT, as long as sawdust used is untreated by chemicals during processing, that is generally enough. I know that MMO provides organic inputs for various buyers so they can label it as organic, so I believe that getting oak sawdust from them as organic is not difficult.

So yes, if I were to get the oak sawdust and organic soy, it would technically be organic inputs, but I realized soy hull is give the mushroom growth a huge boost but does not produce the highest quality gourmet mushrooms, and am therefore, switching to a 80 - 90% sawdust and 10 - 20% oat bran recipe + ~1% gypsum recipe (going to test exact percentages over time). Then, I can use organic oat bran (much more expensive than soy hull but okay since I'm reducing the percentage of supplement to hardwood), and the hardwood sawdust plus clean lab-grade gypsum) and this should be sufficient to label the inputs as organic.

In short, suppliers like MMO already have the organic supply chain set up and you just need to buy their items labeled as organic in order to comply. However, since I plan on using oat bran, I just need to make the sourcing for it is organic and the hardwood from MMO should already be organic certified as well.

There are a few other things like making sure not using dirty chemical laden water and not using harsh cleaning agents, but getting facility set up for organic for mushroom farming seems to be comparatively easy.

So switching from masters mix (50% oak + 50% soy hull) to 80 - 90% oak and 10 - 20% organic oat bran coincidentally also helps with the organic certification process once I move into a proper facility.