What I've Learned from Mushroom Farming

This past year has been an incredible year in learning - I would categorize what I've learned into three buckets:

1. Technical growing skill

2. Marketplaces and business

3. Philosophy and life

Those who know me know me know how obsessed I can get over technical details and this year has been an extreme exercise in learning. With no prior experience, I had to learn the entire process of mushroom production from substrate sourcing and mixing, to sterilization, to inoculation, to fruiting, to refining extractions. Setting up optimal fruiting environments proved to be challenging with continual iterations to the facility till this very time. As of about a month and a half ago, I realized that I was running many core processes incorrectly. I did not have tight control over temperature - crucial for proper pinning and development. I was using suboptimal substrate. And I still was not generating spawn in house - if spawn is unrefrigerated, it is typically more vigorous.

While learning the basics from YouTube videos proved relatively easy, refining my methodology across the past months has not. I am still struggling with squeezing out optimal yields, best cleaning practices, ideal air flow, bacterial botch, getting better second and third flushes. Jumping into an entirely new industry and trying to make a living off of it within a year ultimately proved unsuccessful in part because I underestimated how much I would need to learn.

Each week, some new problem would occur, and each week I would learn something new. For example, in the past couple months, I learned the following:

• Low light can be the cause of stimminess in oyster mushrooms just as much as low FAE can be. In low light environments, mushrooms stretch upwards to capture more light - especially light sensitive species like oysters

• The importance of humidity cycling (dropping humidity every ~50 minutes to get rid of condensation and let humidity evaporate to reduce bacterial botch)

• Masters mix (50% oak / 50% soyhull is good for yield but not optimal for quality)

• The fact that many mushroom supplements are under-extracted or too diluted to have any meaningful effect

• Injecting liquid cultures into grain spawn for in-house grain spawn generation

• Mushrooms will not pin outside of hard temperature parameters

Progress has also perhaps been slower than it would have been with a teacher/mentor. I did not have a proper mentor to guide me and show me proper procedures, so much of what I learned was correcting fairly obvious mistakes. For example, in the beginning, I was cutting corners by understerilizing masters mix at closer to ~1 hour resulting in higher rates of contamination and lower yields (even if no visible contam, understerilizing can result in lower yields as competitors have not been completely eliminated).

On the bright side, this may be in my long-term net benefit as solving every problem on my own will ensure that I do not forget them and will allow me to be a more effective problem solver if I eventually scale up to a warehouse level production.

Most importantly, I've learned that more so than guzzling up huge amounts of information every day, the most important thing is to not stop. By working on small problems and thinking through processes at least a little every day, I've found that I've been able to solve or eliminate certain problems over time. For example, with the liquid cultures that I recently injected into grain spawn, I had worried because it seemed to take significantly longer for the mycelium to take root than I had originally anticipated. However, within maybe 3 weeks instead of 2, the bottles were completely colonized indicating that I had done the process mostly correctly. Yes, I can refine the process by making the hydration or sterilization time more exact and having better aspectic technique but the most important thing is to keep moving forward and learning.

As the knowledge accumulates and compounds, the problems that I once found so challenging will become easy and I will "level up" being able to work on harder problems.

Onto business/markets, there is a saying - "it's easy to grow mushrooms but harder to sell them." As I spent close to 7 months in various marketplaces, I have found that to be the complete truth and having been exposed to other vendors and sellers in various capacities, it is certainly true of most industries. How is it that the majority of Google's revenue comes from selling ads (as well as many other social media tech giants)? BUSINESSES NEED HELP SELLING.

I was naive to think that I would just be able to waltz into random farmers markets and sell suboptimal (initially at least) mushrooms at the optimal prices. First of all, I have come to know that most of the most lucrative markets in the DMV area are already taken (Baltimore markets, Silver Spring market, Du Pont Circle). While it is true that existing vendors can make up to 3 - 4k in sales per market within a span of 4 - 6 hours, one cannot just waltz into a market of their liking and take over. Other people's livelihoods depend on their sales at those markets.

Secondary sales channels through restaurants and grocery stores required volume and consistency that I could not provide as a beginner grower and the tincture/extracts market has also proved to be more difficult than I envisioned - not only because sourcing and processing material difficulties, but also because mushroom tinctures are a bit predatory by nature. They are pushed as a panacea to various ailments when it is often not helpful. I still do believe that medicinal mushrooms are of value but as is illustrated by the system of Traditional Chinese Medicine, each supplement has a time and a place and cannot be universally prescribed as many American supplements are.

What I should have done was more market research by doing the following: (1) visiting various farmers markets, (2) talking to restaurant owners who utilize mushrooms, (3) joining existing mushroom clubs and gatherings where I can tap into existing networks (I recently signed up to be a member of MawDC - the DC mushroom club), (4) explore market trends and see what people are interested in buying, and (5) talking to other farmers who already have experience in the market.

Naturally, as I did not do any of the above, I ended up getting into dinky farmers markets across Baltimore and making very little money selling fresh mushrooms. Not only that, people did not even like mushrooms at the markets I was at, and I ended up pivoting to hot food at one Baltimore market. I was selling "lions mane crabcake sandwiches" at around 10 dollars and would collect around $200 - 300 in sales $120 of which I paid to my chef... After material costs, I was essentially pocketing nothing.

In my defense, it is difficult to do market research, knowing nothing about the production side. Now, that I have some level of industry expertise, I am able to speak more authoritatively on the subject matter and make connections with other mushroom heads more easily. So in the mean time, I plan on going out to restaurants and dining in where mushroom dishes are prepared, going out to existing mushroom clubs, giving away my mushrooms or selling them at a cheap price to those who might be interested. All these actions will slowly expand my "mycelial" network and give me better information for when I can make another push towards volume production.

Last thing on the topic of businesses - I was not aware that there were already a decent number of local mushroom producers growing the typical "exotic" varieties - oyster, lions mane, chestnut, portobello, shiitake, even maitake (maitake is harder to grow). This means that even if I were to start volume production, I would be competing for farmers markets with these existing growers and battling over limited resources. It seems to me that the better way to grow the business is by exploring some sort of niche - say super high quality nameko mushrooms, which are usually not grown locally as they are finicky and like colder grow rooms - and catering to restaurants which serve them. This would expand the overall pie of business instead taking someone else's turf. Of course, knowing what to focus on comes through building my network and figuring ou buyer needs.

Finally, on philosophy and life the main idea I wanted to touch on is the idea of consolidation before fruiting. Mushrooms do not just spring out of the ground randomly. They take time to consume resources in their area and only once they have expanded to consume all surrounding available nutrients, and experience appropriate triggers, do they transition into the fruiting stage. In the minds of normal people, mushrooms seem more fleeting as we cannot see the growth of mycelial networks given that their propagation is underground - as opposed to plants whose stems and leaves we can see elongating and expanding. Therefore, it seems to us as though the mushroom has come up overnight.

While fruiting mushrooms do grow explosively and in some cases literally pop up overnight, it is because the mycelium has gone through the arduous task of accumulating nutrients and consolidating them, awaiting the right triggers, that it is able to act decisively once the temperature changes and rain falls.

As people we are so eager for quick success and gain but growth comes through consistent persistence over long periods of time. My hope is that for myself and others, we would be able to persist patiently as stewards of whatever God has given us domain over, and in time he would allow us to "fruit" successfully bringing joy and life to those around us.