Inside Our Mushroom Cultivation Facility | Full Tour of Southwest Mushrooms
Our substrate gets made slash or mixed. We use a blend of oak hardwood sawdust plus added supplements like organic wheat brand and uh certain seed holes to basically formulate our substrate to get the maximum efficiency from our mushrooms. Once the substrate gets mixed to the desired consistency, we drop it through this chute and uh we basically bring it over here where we fill our bags with the substrate. Um, bags are filled up to approximately 10 to 12 pounds. And then from there, we make our way into the sterilization area where the substrate will be sterilized for a prolonged period of time to make sure we kill off any microorganisms or competitor competitor molds or fungi.
Um, in order to give our mcelium the head start that it needs to basically conquer the substrate. Quickest folder in the west. Yeah. So, yeah, we're just folding up our bags. Yeah, we do about 180 uh bags per cycle and uh we do that three times a week.
Each bag typically produces about 3 to four lbs of mushrooms. That's on the first flush. And uh sometimes we get two to three flushes um totaling probably like up to 8 lb, 6 to 8 lbs per block. So we try to get the maximum biological efficiency from our mushrooms. Basically being able to turn the substrate into fresh mushrooms.
So, so yeah, right now I'm just folding the bags. Um, before they go into the sterilizer, we just got to make sure that they're folded over properly. Um, and that's basically it. Pretty simple process. So, yeah, we got a nice rolled block right here.
This is mainly for like our shiitakei mushrooms and our our reishi. All of our mushrooms can grow on this substrate. We do formulate it a little bit for our oysters and lion's mane and we add certain seed holes to increase that biological efficiency and uh to basically get more mushrooms on our first flush. So um here in this room we see a bunch of like shiitake blocks and uh the mushrooms that are growing in these bags are growing off of this same substrate blend. Uh so this is just oak hardwood sawdust and a percentage of wheat brand organic wheat brand that we add in just for extra added nutrition and nitrogen.
Um basically to give us those good yields. If we didn't add in the supplements, then we would get low yields and and not as many uh quality mushrooms. So, this area is our shiitake incubation area. The shiitake generally takes um 8 weeks before we can get it into the fruing room. Um most of our mushrooms are typically 3 to 4 weeks before we get them in our in our fruing room.
So, this mushroom does take a little bit longer. We can see the mushrooms at this stage beginning to like popcorn. Um, this was inoculated January 30th, so it's rolling along really nicely. As the mushroom begins to mature, you let the blocks ripen and they begin to to turn uh brown. And uh this is a block that's that's ready to go into our fruing room.
It's ripe and ready. Um, so yeah, generally a lot of people, a lot of new growers will will mistake the brown for contamination, but that's actually just the mcelium ripening and uh getting ready to produce a good crop of mushrooms. And yeah, over here we have some freshly inoculated blocks. We could see the mcelium starting to jump off from the um grain that it was inoculated with and looking for sawdust to to basically break down and utilize as a food source. And yeah, we just have more blocks here that are beginning to popcorn.
They start to get these uh this topography of a lot of ridges and and bumps. And we do like a about 1 to 200 lb a week of the shiakeis. Um I guess we sell the most like oysters and lion's mane and stuff like that but we do a good amount of shiitake as well. There is other methods like in Asia they use uh like uh like bottles like little little bottles and they just grow smaller clusters of mushrooms um and it's like automated machinery that's used to kind of fill the bottles and inoculate them as well. This is one of the standards just due to the fact that the substrate does need to be sterilized and the polyropylene bags uh allow like high temperatures and efficient sterilization.
This is basically it's kind of the the standard for the best yields and uh good production. It's all sterile so you don't need to use any kind of like pesticides or any kind of fertilizers or additives. Just basically water oak and uh organic wheat brand or certain organic seed holes. Um the mcelium is able to take over the sawdust in that in the sterile environment. So there's no competitors or anything like that.
Um once the micelium does take hold of the substrate, it kind of builds up an immune system um where basically no contaminants can grow on the substrate cuz the mcelium has taken it over. So they can be placed into the grow room at that point and um mushrooms can be allowed to to grow. This is going to be the food source for our mushrooms. The organism is basically going to utilize it and break it down and eventually it'll turn it into a nice compost or a rich soil. That's what mushrooms do.
They're basically nature's like grand decomposers. Their job is to break things down and and turn it into organic material that can be reused by the environment. So, a lot of people can once the we're done fruing our mushrooms, uh we can mix these into a compost pile or our garden beds. Some people or farmers will pick them up from us and and use them to make compost because that's what uh fungi does best. It uh makes soil.
Yeah. You know, just having the right conditions for myself to grow up when it's time to take over. How's it going, Mike? Going good. So, this is uh this is the spawn room.
This is just a room where I can basically grow out our spawn that gets inoculated into our or the seed for our mushroom gets inoculated into those blocks once they're sterilized that you see out there. Um, and you can see like little bits of uh mycelium starting to grow out onto these freshly inoculated blocks. So the mcelium starts out we plant it on a petri dish and uh we get the growth we get healthy growth and from there we transfer healthy sectors of mcelium into bags of sterilized grain. Here we have organic wheat berries that we use. Um, after full colonization occurs, you'll see a big nice healthy bag of white mcelium.
This can get broken up and utilized to inoculate anywhere from 20 to 30 of our production blocks. So, spawn's a very important part of growing mushrooms. Without good spawn, you don't have mushrooms. Yeah. So, I'll look for like a healthy sector and basically I'll transfer that into like a test tube and that can get stored in refrigeration for up to 5 years.
Um, and then I can take them out every 6 months just to make sure that they're still still very healthy and aggressive and just drop a piece of tissue on a petri dish uh just to keep the strain alive. Um, for hybrids, one of the one of the strains I do grow is a hybrid. Um, it's pretty hard to do hybrids. I heard that uh it's kind of expensive and uh basically you would need to take spores of two different species and I've heard like rattles rattlesnake venom is used and dropped on the spores to kind of dene the cell wall and then basically two mating spores of different species can be combined to create a hybrid. But we haven't gotten there yet um for creating our own hybrid.
Um the hybrid that we are growing is called like a black pearl king trumpet. It's a cross between an oyster mushroom and a king trumpet. So, it's a beautiful mushroom. It grows out in these nice clusters um of beautiful dark marbled caps and it kind of looks like an oyster and a king trumpet in one. So, yeah, I'll get them from basically different growers, uh culture libraries, places that basically are are keeping uh a lot of diverse cultures in stock.
Um so, I have cultures from all over the place. So I have dip brachi mushrooms from like Virginia, California. I have a strain from here in Arizona at Fossil Creek from a grower that collected it in the wild. Um I have California ratio. So I mean I just collect from other growers and other reputable spawn libraries and culture libraries, stuff like that.
So I build my own culture library here and I keep uh several strains in and cold refrigeration for basically us to use at any time. So yeah, that's basically it for the spawn room. Um here we have some bags of reishi. This is called a ganoderma multifilm, but you could see the mycelium is really taking over the the grain. So soon this will be ready.
One thing I do, I label them all G1. So this is generation one. This is the first transfer from a petri dish into the spawn. Uh, this can be now used to make 10 more bags of spawn this size. I can expand the mcelium.
This one bag can inoculate anywhere from 200 to 300 bags once I'm done with it. Um, or you can keep going. So, that's the cool thing about myelium is you can keep running with it and you can kind of keep going for a few generations without noticing a decline in in viability or or the, you know, quality. So, that's one thing that we do here. All right.
This is the sterilization room. This is where we sterilize all of our substrate. In here, we can sterilize up to 1,600 lb of fresh substrate at a time, almost a ton. So, everything gets loaded up into these uh basically these machines, and from there, they get turned on and sterilized for a prolonged period of time. We're using atmospheric steam sterilization at this point.
So yeah, we usually sterilize all day. Um they're allowed to cool for another day and then from there we can unload our sterilizers into our clean room and basically wait for the inoculation process to begin once the substrate cools down to our desired temperature between 80 to 85°. It's heat sterilized or steam sterilized with water. Um there's water at the bottom of the of the drum that's boiled up and basically steam comes through and and sterilizes at a at a high temperature above about 212° for basically a whole day. Yeah.
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So it's a large amount of substrate or large volume being sterilized at the at once. So we basically are ensuring that we're getting the core temperature in our substrate um high enough to kill off any microorganisms. Um if it's not sterilized properly, you'll take it in to inoculate and you'll run into a lot of contamination problems and molds outgrowing your mcelium. Um so that could be a real a real blowback for you. Yeah, you're trying to give that myelium the start it needs to really outrun any of the contamination.
Um eventually, you know, you're going to get a contamination somewhere in the substrate, but luckily our farm is like at a 99% or more success rate with our with our procedure. So, it works. These will get wheeled into the st the clean room and uh opened in front of our flow hood, the hepoiltration, so no dust or spores lands into the into the drum. And then the other unloaded onto racks to cool. And from there, inoculated with our fresh, healthy spawn.
So, I guess I can uh show you too. Here's like the cultures that are grown out and stored in test tubes. So, I just label them and they're stored in cold storage for quite a long time. I can just take a little piece of tissue and drop it on a petri dish and keep it going. The temperature is between 36 to 40° for cold storage.
And that kind of just puts the mcelium on pause for for quite a while. And uh it's it lasts for a long time. I mean there's been reports for five years or more. I've had cultures in here for strains going for at least a few years that are still really strong. So yeah, good stuff.
So yeah, we have our spawn right here. This is a California reishi ganoderma lucidum cincy strictto. So we'll take our spawn and just kind of break it up. Separate the each individual grain and allow that to become a vehicle for our mcelium. So, I'll take a scalpel and kind of just make sure it's clean and then I'll heat sterilize it.
All right. So, yeah, the bags are uh placed in front of the flow hood, inflated with a little bit of that sterile air, and then sealed. All right. So, now our bag's inoculated. Then we're just going to want to shake it up.
All right, that bag's done. So, we'll just continue inoculating. So, yeah, the HEPA filter right here is basically providing us just a clean workspace to perform our inoculations. So, we're getting a stream of sterile air that we can basically use to inoculate, do our clean work, inoculate our petri dishes. So, this is necessary for commercial mushroom production or anybody that just really wants to see good results in their in their work.
So, yeah, this used to be done in my house. I used to have a lab in my workspace with a flow hood. Um, so that's what this is. And then I could uh do all my production there and just in a smaller smaller scale use utilizing pressure cookers for my sterilization. And uh yeah, you could definitely do this at home.
And you don't even need a flow hood. You could always build a a glove box or a steel air box, which would be just like a a box where you can put your hands into and do your your clean work. You might not get as high of a success rate, but it's definitely more affordable for entry level. And if you're just trying to get into the hobby, you don't need to spend a lot of money just to get started. So, here's the here's the elms growing on the alder.
I'll stack those up there on that first shelf. These boxes locks are a lot. Yeah, they are. Here's the black pearls. So these blocks are basically just inoculated within the last 48 hours.
We already see the mcelium starting to jump off and make its way to colonization. So everything's looking pretty good. We're doing a lot of production right now. So just trying to make room day by day. It's been step by step.
It used to just be me kind of doing everything from mixing the the substrate to doing every step of the process on my own. But just as we've grown and more clients have come on needing our mushrooms, I've had to just get help because I had a lot of days where I was just working 24 hours and still needed still could never get caught up. So, it's been nice uh just having my my team uh just building the team here. We have uh Bubba and Pete and Zach helping with uh production and basically just managing inventory. So in training training has been quite easy.
I just basically showed them how to do it and luckily these guys are fast learners. So but yeah, it's been it's been interesting especially like some of the medicinal ones like the reishi. It really helps with like the immune support and lion's mane has been really really big for us too um because of all the neuroprotective benefits and the fact that a lot of people are using it to improve cognition, brain health, memory, focus, all that stuff. So, it's been interesting. And then in the culinary world, we're doing a lot of restaurants and distributors and stuff like that.
So, we have four distributors now and a lot of uh direct restaurant accounts, a couple little grocery stores. So, yeah, we we've been busy from deliveries to packing orders to getting the grow rooms managed. It's just a it's a full-time fun day every day. Here we are in one of our grow rooms and it's harvest day. Uh these shiitake look amazing.
They look basically like they're at their prime and they're ready to go. Um so, It's a nice looking mushroom. I like to kind of harvest when the caps are still enrolled a little bit, so they're still a little bit curled under. And uh it makes the mushroom last or it holds up longer in the fridge. You get more shelf life out of it.
And uh nice meaty meaty texture. So now just harvest the mushrooms um just by simply cutting as close to the base of the block as possible. And uh we have a lot of just like medium to average size shiitake growing. And a lot of uh people are seem to seem to like our baby shiitake or our smaller shiitake. This is a bigger harvest for today.
shiitake always takes us more time than uh any really really any mushroom that we grow just because you have to cut each mushroom off one by one. And uh so yeah, it just takes a little bit more time. Let's see. Every direction 360° all the way around. So, I'll just kind of prune the bottom so I'm not ripping off mushrooms when I take the block off.
Basically, the shiitakei mushroom prefers prefers to grow without the bag due to the fact that the mcelium uh basically forms this real it's called popcorn. It popcorn's real heavy and then it forms this real brown brown layer to kind of kind of protect and insulate the mcelium and then the mushrooms will just pop all the way up all the way around. If you try fruiting it in the bag, you'll get a bunch of mushrooms growing all up against the bag and you'll get a bunch of deformed looking mushrooms and basically mushrooms that are not good quality compared to just letting it grow all the way around like this. So yeah, the grow room provides uh basically the perfect balance of moisture um air flow and lighting um and temperature in order to get the mushrooms in their optimum environment to produce the best quality fruit bodies. So, usually you we put the blocks in here and uh the humidity is basically set to a higher level.
Um usually about 90 to 95% and basically the mushrooms will start pinning. Within a few days, you'll start to see a bunch of little baby mushrooms forming all over the block. We'll keep the humidity between 90 to 95% for a couple days and then during the last last couple days of the fruiting cycle, we'll kind of drop it down into the 80s to let the mushrooms kind of dry out a little bit and that increases the shelf life so they're not kind of getting too wet and soggy when you put them in the fridge. Pretty easy once you get it dialed in. Uh we make sure that we remove the old CO2 and spores there.
So, those are exhausted out of our grow room into the outside. And then we bring in a bunch of fresh air, filter it two times, and bring it into our grow room and kind of condition it with the humidity to make sure that we're getting everything we need in here for the environment for our mushrooms. Without the grow room, the mushrooms would basically dry out. As the mushrooms grow, they extract water from the substrate, and the high humidity basically prevents the mushrooms from simply drying out and evaporating as they grow. Currently, we can see like little clouds of spores just drifting off of these mushrooms.
These mushrooms produce billions of spores to basically continue the fruing cycle. The oyster mushrooms, the spore load can be pretty harmful. It can cause like allergies and stuff like that. So, we do wear spore masks when we're in here. I'm just not wearing one right now so you guys can hear me and I can speak to you.
shiitake spores, they're not too harmful. I haven't had any issues being in here with them. Uh you can get, you know, a stuffy nose maybe at the end of the day. Oyster mushrooms you do want to be aware of because they produce such a high amount of spores that if you are exposed to them over a long term, maybe 10 years, you could develop an allergy to the spores down the line where you just can't be around the mushroom at all. Otherwise, you'll start experiencing intense sneezing attacks and shortness of breath and uh it's just not pleasant.
So yeah, make sure you're wearing your masks if you're growing your mushrooms so you can filter out all those spores and uh protect your lungs. So yeah, with the shiitake mushroom, I mean, some growers don't do this, but we found that it increases the efficiency of the mushroom and uh also just gives us a better overall flush. In nature, um, it was first discovered that the shiitake mushrooms could be grown when they would, uh, cut down logs, which shiitake mushrooms were growing already on, and, uh, soak them in water. So, what we do is, as our blocks are ready to go in the grow room, we slap our blocks with our hands to basically simulate the tree falling in nature to shock the micelium into growing. Once the tree or branch would hit the floor, the mcelium would be shocked into producing the mushrooms because it's basically thinking that the its life cycle is coming to an end.
So yeah, we give our blocks a really nice smack on all sides and from there we throw them in our grow room and that gives us this really nice pin set where we just get mushrooms all over the block and we're really happy with that. So yeah, and then when it comes time to harvest, then we just basically cut each mushroom right off and into our tray. And then from there, we can go ahead and pack everything in the next warehouse and get everything to the desired weights in our cases and get them into cold storage. Shiakeis have quite a good shelf life. Once harvested, the mushrooms generally last two to three weeks.
Um, oyster mushrooms have the shortest shelf life. Usually, we're seeing those in about seven days. Uh, they're really no longer marketable. We can take those home and eat them ourselves or possibly dry them and turn it into another product. shiitake has a long shelf life and lion's mane that one goes for about 2 weeks we've found.
Um, so yeah, generally with the most of our mushrooms, we're getting about 2 weeks out of the mushrooms before they are no longer marketable. So we're just specializing in woodloving species. So species that basically decompose hardwood in nature. You'll find them growing off like fresh trees or the recently fallen trees. Um, those strains are like shiitake, oyster mushrooms, more of the medicinal species such as reishi, turkey tail, lion's mane.
You'll find mitakei growing on oak or in certain hardwoods. We do king trumpet. We do two two varieties of like king oyster. We do all of the oyster mushrooms throughout the year. Pink, gold, pearl, blue, white.
Um so those are all grown on our hardwood substrate. shiitake mushrooms of course. And uh creinis and button mushrooms and porttoellos. Those are secondary decomposing mushrooms. So those mushrooms desire like manure or compost based substrates that basically we don't really like to you wouldn't want to keep that stuff under the same roof.
We wouldn't want to be growing specialty mushrooms in the same room that we're composting a whole bunch of manure just because you don't want any kind of crosscontamination getting into your into your grows. We're able to get a really good entry into the mushroom industry with specialty mushrooms. A lot of people can start off with just oyster mushrooms and you can grow those on really any agriculture waste from straws to certain kinds of beddings to basically even newspaper and paper towels. I mean oyster mushrooms are really aggressive. Coffee waste can be used.
Just like a simple pasteurization of those substrates is always is really all that's needed for it to be effective. So it doesn't uh need to be expensive or a costly system to sterilize. But yeah, maybe one day we will do porttoellas or buttons. But definitely uh really enjoy doing the gourmet and specialty mushrooms. All the colors, different shapes, sizes that you can get.
And uh also the medicinal benefits that they offer are are far greater than what you'd find in like a porttoella or kamini mushroom or butt mushroom. These are the mushrooms that contain those anti-cancer, anti-tumor benefits, those immunom modulating, immune system enhancing benefits. So these are the mushrooms that I like to eat and I hope you do too. This is called Ganaderma Sicil. Uh this is a a reishi species from Palmer Woods uh near Michigan.
Uh it's a beautiful species of reishi. It produces these nice antlers and conchs that are really desirable. And this mushroom is mainly used for the medicinal benefits. You can take it and brew it into a tea or make tinctures out of it and utilize it for the health properties or health enhancing benefits that this mushroom offers. Uh it's been used by Eastern medicine for about 4,000 years.
So, it's definitely good for for a lot of things and it's known as the mushroom of immortality. So, we'll just cut these mushrooms off. They're really woody compared to most mushrooms. Uh, most mushrooms are 90% water and 10% tissue. This mushroom here is 70% water and 30% tissue.
So, it makes a real woody woody mushroom that needs to be uh can't be sauteed or cooked. It really needs to be boiled down into a tea to get all those goodies out of it. So, I'm just trimming near the base right now. Just getting all these. We had a lot of demand for reishi.
I wasn't growing that much of it at first and then I kind of was just doing it for personal and then I kind of I brought some out to the farmers market and just kind of started sharing with it with people and from there I got a huge demand everybody asking for it and recently with a lot of things that are going on everybody really wants reishi mushrooms just because of the immune modulating benefits and the health enhancing properties that this mushroom offers. So yeah, depending on demand or if a mushroom's not selling too good, if we don't see it doing too good, we'll just trim back on demand and just grow what we need. I'm starting to see more specialty mushrooms available as they're gaining popularity. A lot of people are catching on to a lot of the knowledge that comes with the specialty mushrooms and health benefits. So, we're supplying a couple grocery stores uh out here in Phoenix.
Um AJ's Fine Foods is one of them and two other grocery stores in the East Valley called the Superstition Ranch Farm Market. And people love them. Um people are excited to be able to try something new and uh not your typical average run of the, you know, run-of-the-mill button or porttoella mushroom. Something that has more flavor and you can kind of get creative with some of these mushrooms and really do something unique. This reishi was inoculated in uh on December 14th.
So it's 4 months old. It's took about 4 months to get here from the day of inoculation to now. It t it takes quite a while. This one does take longer than any of the mushrooms that we grow. And there we go.
We have a beautiful set of reishi mushrooms. That is just amazing. Yeah. reishi typically goes for for about 4 months. 100 day 120 or so is when we harvest shiitake about 2 months, 8 weeks.
Oyster, I can do those in 3 weeks, sometimes less. If it's a pink oyster, usually you'll see fruits in as little as 10 days from the day of inoculation. So you can kind of play with what strain works best for your time and uh your schedule. The price is kind of developed by us due to the cost of production, the the like the labor involved for harvesting. Does it take longer?
Is it easy? Is there much cleaning needed um for each mushroom? And uh you know really how long does it take to grow for us? How long do we have to wait before we can harvest and and get the mushroom the product? So yeah, oysters are going to kind of be the most affordable um from us just because we can grow them so quick and reishi is going to be the most expensive because it takes so long.
Also, another thing that comes into play is the demand and uh is the demand high or low for this mushroom. So like lion's mane has quite a bit of demand um medically and and culinary. So we have a little bit of a higher price point on that one. And typically you'll see mushrooms averaging anywhere from eight bucks a pound to 18 bucks a pound depending on if it's wholesale or retail. And then reishi, I mean it could be up to $15 an ounce dry uh or or even lower than that depending on who grew it.
If it came from China, you can get Chinese grown reishi for probably like 40 bucks a pound or 30 bucks a pound dry. All right. Well, here's our lion's mane. This mushroom, also called heresicium marinius, is a wonderful teeth fungi. So, instead of having a traditional cap and gills, this mushroom has these little spines that elongate and give it a really unique look, appearance, texture.
Um and also just qualities. The mushroom is a medicinal mushroom as well as a culinary delight. Uh known for the fact that it can enhance cognitive function, boost your memory, help regenerate old dead brain cells. Uh so it promotes nerve growth factor. It helps synthesize new uh basically uh NGF through herones and irony.
So, we'll just harvest the mushroom. Kind of just pull it right up. I do something a little different. So, for the first flush, I like to top fruit this mushroom. I I'll grow it right out the front, and it h just produces this lovely mass of lion's mane mushrooms.
Once that's harvested, the bag will get rolled up and folded over. And then I'll just put a couple of slices on the bag to help for a second flush to pop out. And that second flush will basically be just this nice cluster of lion's mane. So I'm getting the most out of this mushroom. And in nature, you would this would be a hardwood loving species that you would just find growing right off the side of a a hardwood tree.
And yeah, a lot of people will use it for the for like a crab or lobster replacement. They say that the teeth give it a texture similar to crab or lobster. I personally don't eat seafood, but I do love this mushroom and it has a wonderful flavor. I can add it into like do a mushroom taco with it or add it into a stir fry with another mushroom and just get this wonderful texture from it. Once the CO2 levels are are really low and the moisture levels are really high, the mushrooms are signaled to to produce.
Um, high CO2 is something that the mushrooms encounter during colonization phases. And then, uh, high O2 levels are when the mushroom mcelium is really starting to break through that surface of the tree and be exposed to to conditions, uh, basically optimum for mushroom fruit body production. And then for the cleaning of the lion's mane, we just have this little little bit of sawdust right on the back. And you can just kind of tear that right off or trim it with scissors. And then yeah, we have just a clean, nice lines mane that's ready for the market or medicine.