Production Update

My initial plan was to grow both oyster mushrooms and lions mane as my starters and then to expand from there, but I have been having trouble with the oyster mushrooms in my basement.

I believe that the primary issue is air flow, with me not being able to keep CO2 PPM in the range of 400 - 600, which is the preferred range for the mushrooms. The higher range of 800 - 1000, which I maintain, produces smaller bouquets as the mushrooms stretch out for more oxygen rich air and cannot grow as fast as they can to their liking.

This creates a two fold problem - not only are the yields significantly smaller. At around 70 - 80% BE between two flushes, the blocks after the two flushes are still heavier given the smaller yields, which makes it harder for me to dispose of the blocks. With the lions mane, they are extremely light after a total of THREE flushes which come out on their own without any teasing out from me.

On top of that, oysters also sporulate tremendously making it more difficult to clean the grow rooms and also requiring me to filter the exhaust air.

This leads me back to my former conclusion earlier this year that oyster mushrooms are not worth cultivating in my basement due to my lack of experience in teasing out maximum yields. It may be the case that fixing this problem is relatively easy, but I am not sure how I would do it. Therefore, it seems more prudent for me to switch to solely lions mane mushrooms at this time.

If I did switch exclusively to lions mane, what would be the result? If I maintained production for 24, 6 lb bags a week, this would be about 50 lbs / week minimum - a little more, if I could increase BE by a little to 110 - 120%. - would be maybe 50 - 60lbs / week.

If I got another 43 quarts All American sterilizer and sterilized 36 bags a week, this would allow me to do (18 across two batches on one day), I would get to a respectable 70 lb / week, which is ~ 280 lbs / month. At an average selling price of $10 / lb, this would result in approximately ~$2,800 a month, which is enough for me to float. I would just need to pay for the cost of the substrate once I perfect the lab work, so raw inputs would be about 350 - 400 a month in substrate costs and then a little more in grain. A few hundred more would be needed in various other costs like small amounts of labor or bread for sandwiches, so expected profit would be around $1,500 a month, enough to cover car, rent, and groceries, but little else.

Nevertheless, this is still significantly better than the alternative of having to go back to an office job.