News and observation on the U. S. food system.
As the demand for mushrooms increases, can a circular economy become their valuable and abundant growing medium?
By Doug Bierend
March 19, 2024
Fruit mushrooms in substrate. (Photo courtesy of Tivoli Mushrooms)
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Collar City Mushrooms occupies a small building along the post-industrial waterfront of Troy, New York. In the back, baked in the winter sun between a shed and a yellow Volkswagen bus, is a stack the length of what looks like dozens of giant mini ice wheat, the length of cinder blocks. Eroded oyster mushroom tops grow provocatively elsewhere in the pile.
The lumpy blocks are weathered substrate, and the living curtain remains after the fungus has grown. Composed of sawdust and soybean pellets intertwined with mycelium (the thread-like appearance of the fungus from which the mushrooms grow), the spent substrate is a unique type. of waste. It’s also a formula with many potential uses; It can be used as fertilizer, as a soil decontamination medium, as a biofuel, and simply to grow more mushrooms. And while those uses may simply provide a potential revenue stream for mushroom farms, the spent substrate piles being developed pose a problem as well. Developing logistical challenge.
“If you need to do it, great, but be mindful of the waste stream you’re generating and how you’re going to dispose of it from your property. “
“Right now, some other people accept it at most as a favor to us, because if we don’t, what will we do with it?”said Avery Stempel, co-founder of Collar City, as we looked at the pile. Currently, Stempel transports most of the tissues to a nearby composting facility, but local farms, gardeners and florists are also keeping a portion. whether it’s to make compost on the lawn or simply to grow mushrooms at home. “People come in and buy a bucket for five dollars,” Stopel said.
Before being used to grow mushrooms, the substrate is combined nicely and sterilized to maximize potency and save the fungus a festival. Protected in breathable plastic bags, sawdust and soybean hulls are inoculated with an edible mushroom strain and then stacked on grids in the weather. -Controlled rooms. The pouches open when the mycelium is in position and the first “push” of the fungi germinates. To make more productive use of space, many farms dispose of blocks after a single hunt, but each block is capable of multiple cycles of mushroom production. In this sense, the substrate is not “depleted”.
Substrate used to be collected and reused. (Photo courtesy of the Mycological Society of Central Texas)
Collar City is a relatively small organization that generates up to 1,000 pounds of mushrooms per week. An hour south in Hillsdale, N. Y. , Tivoli Mushrooms produces about 20,000 pounds per week and is lately using only a fraction of the capacity of its new 15,000-square-foot plant. – Installation foot. Shortly after moving in, co-founder Devon Gilroy contacted a nearby organic farm and provided them with the used substrate as loose compost if they simply took it off their hands. It wasn’t a hard sell. ” They arrived about two weeks later with a tractor and a big truck to load it,” he said. “They insisted on paying us for the substrate, which helped. “
From a similar source of income, the highest price for special mushroom substrate currently is compost, which can sell for around $150 per cubic meter. It has a low pH, useful in soils with low acidity and a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of about 40 to 1, which is almost ideal for building healthy soil. Weathered substrate is also a useful addition to vermicompost: earthworms love to eat mycelium, and in doing so, they also break down wood scraps and soil. biodiversity. It’s also a wonderful addition to design and water retention.
But that doesn’t mean that each and every mushroom farm struggles to find new life for its weathered substrate, and the dilemma of how to use these curtains grows with the scale of the specialty mushroom industry.
“If you need to do it, great, but the waste stream you’re generating and how you’re going to dispose of it from where you come from. “That’s the recommendation Amanda Janney, founder of KM Mushrooms in California, gives to new farmers. Janney’s farm is as modest as it gets, without leaving her home in Santa Rosa. As the farm’s production quickly grew from 20 pounds of mushrooms per week to around 300, mushroom debris has temporarily become a logistical challenge to solve.
“In the beginning, when we were generating a very low volume, it didn’t matter; donating bags of used substrate through Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace was enough,” Janney said. “Then production went up a lot faster than expected, which is a smart thing to do, but a big component of that was connecting with farmers who were interested in [taking substrate] and getting a workflow to get it off the assets quickly.
In 2022, thanks in large part to consumer interest in meat alternatives, global mushroom revenues are expected to more than double to more than $110 billion by 2030. The nutraceutical market for medicinal mushrooms, such as reishi, lion’s mane, and cordyceps, may simply follow a trajectory, with a forecast suggesting that the market could triple to reach $62 billion by 2032.
The vast majority (95%) of mushroom production in the U. S. is based on mushroom production. UU. es of Agaricus: cremini, buttons or portobello (all of the same species) are not unusual. All other varieties, whether shiitake or oyster, fall into the category of specialty mushrooms.
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In the United States, Agaricus mushrooms are produced in gigantic quantities through well-established, generations-old farms located primarily in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Grown in a mixture of manure and straw, they produce a distinct type of spent substrate that is also used as fertilizer, although it is a very different curtain from the special mushroom substrate, with fewer applications. Profitably growing mushrooms requires a lot of labor and space, and it doesn’t make much economic sense to start growing them on a small piece of land. scale.
“It’s a great opportunity in a spreadsheet, but from an operational standpoint, it’s like, ‘Get this out of here right now. ‘»
By comparison, it’s simple to grow enough oyster mushrooms to sell at the market for more than $10 a pound, compared to about $5 a pound for mushrooms. It’s also simple to buy some ready-to-grow kits for home growers. For those reasons and more, specialty mushrooms are the ones most likely to grow the most small pop-up farms. Specialty mushroom sales increased by 32% between 2021 and 2022 alone, which means an equivalent increase in used substrate and more questions. about what to do with it.
At the higher end of the substrate volume, mycelium-based tissue companies such as MycoWorks and Ecovative, are emerging. [Disclosure: The author worked for Ecovative in 2022 and 2023. ] Based on oyster mushroom mycelium, Ecovative ships most of its substrate as compost, and the conceivable uses it’s exploring come with promoting some of the huge amount of remaining substrate production on Pennsylvania farms for a second act of mushroom production.
However, there is a restriction on this market: “To be frank, not enough oyster mushrooms would be eaten in the U. S. “We are working on the U. S. to use all the substrate we’re going to produce if we reach our goal,” said Eben Bayer, CEO of Ecovative. “It’s a great opportunity in a spreadsheet, but from an operational standpoint, it’s like, ‘Get this out of here right now. ‘»
Rather than relying solely on the market, the question of what to do with the substrate is largely answered through local communities of specialized mushroom farms. In Austin, for example, the Mycological Society of Central Texas (CTMS) has organized a network of about two dozen sites for loose collection of used substrates. They report that around 9,000 more people have signed up since the program was introduced 3 years ago, with a sharp increase from the pandemic as interest in homegrown mushrooms increased dramatically.
“With the mushroom substrate depleted, we saw this opportunity to keep other people connected,” said Angel Schatz, one of the lead organizers of the CTMS, whose backyard was the program’s initial drop-off point. However, it’s your business. ” I know a lot of other people grow those mushrooms and get a flow moment out of the bags, but we don’t need to borrow highlights from ad farms in any way, so we start through training. Other people do composting strategies first. “
Photo courtesy of the Mycological Society of Central Texas
Until recently, a significant amount of the substrate used for the CTMS harvesting program came from Smallhold, which has temporarily become a major manufacturer of specialty mushrooms over the past five years, before filing for bankruptcy in early February. With facilities in Los Angeles, Austin, and New York City, the company’s goal is to grow specialty mushrooms near major cities. Each of its three giant plantations generated between 80 and 100 cubic meters of spent substrate per week, and the company hired a team committed to locating productive uses for the material.
“At the end of the day, it’s a valuable material,” said Travis Breihan, the company’s director of studies on the uses of the used substrate. “But it’s a new material on the scene, and it’s not like there’s an established industry of recycling blocks, or using them as a lawn finish, or even as a larger-scale agricultural finish. So I think adoption is still in its early stages, but all the symptoms are very strong. This is a vital area of concentrates for the mushroom industry as a whole.
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CTMS isn’t worried about wasting Smallhold’s substrate. “We’re still working with another farm that produces about 1,900 blocks of spent substrate a week, and they’re probably going to grow now because Smallhold may not be around.
At the same time, in addition to distributing blocks, CTMS works with farms, food producers, and environmental remediation projects that use the fabrics to plug infected sites, such as the Circle Acres Nature Preserve outside of Austin.
Given the limitations that scale creates for shipping and productive use of spent substrates, any long-term market for this may in fact be set up primarily through smaller operations. Special fungi lend themselves to this dynamic. They don’t transport well over long distances and can paint with waste streams, such as sawdust, from nearby industries. It can come in many shapes and, more importantly, in other sizes. As the specialty mushroom industry grows, spent substrates may find a market for secondary mushroom production or for structure. and soil and waterway remediation. The prospect of this can be better harnessed by linking mushroom production with other food and soil-based initiatives, and by supporting more circular regional economies.
“The least we can do is make sure the cycle is complete and return it to the ground instead of a landfill,” Schatz said.
Doug Bierend is an independent publisher founded in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Mushroom Zeafre, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms. Read more >
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