Currently, growing mushrooms is one of the most profitable ventures. However, if you’re new to mushroom farming, you might be pretty confused. There's a lot of information and concepts you need to understand before you dive into mushroom cultivation. Below are the five things to know before growing mushrooms.
1. You Don't Have to Plant Mushrooms in a Costly Sterile Environment
As a beginner, you don’t have to spend all your savings constructing a laboratory with large pressure cookers and filtered air circulation and then spend weeks trying to understand various sterile tissue culture tactics to grow mushrooms reliably. You can produce mushrooms without all these things. To start, you can buy fast-growing oyster mushrooms and plant them on pasteurized sawdust or coffee grounds. Later on, you can try other varieties and cultivate them in the conventional sterile environment.
2. Making Your Spawn Consumes Additional Time and Increases Costs
Spawn production requires you to construct a lab with laminar flow hoods and big pressure cookers, which require a significant financial investment. In addition, the process has a lot of stages to convert small amounts into larger quantities. These microbiology skills require practice and a considerable amount of your time to get it right. Instead, you can outsource spawn from a professional supplier. As a result, you’ll save money on setup costs and a lot of time, enabling you to direct your attention and energy to other essential things.
3. Mushroom Farming Is Labor-Intensive
Like any other crop, cultivating and harvesting mushrooms involves a lot of work. If you want a big mushroom farm, ensure you employ many pickers to help you harvest your produce. If you’re considering growing the crop on a small to medium scale, you’ll be doing numerous tasks by hand, which will take a lot of your time. Plan ahead to ensure you won’t run around attempting to keep pace with all the stages of the farming process. Don’t try to produce over 10 kilograms every week until every aspect of the production process runs smoothly.
4. Find a Helping Hand
Growing mushrooms involves many tasks, including getting supplies, filling the trays with compost, maintaining soil moisture, harvesting mushrooms, delivering to customers, and more. Trying to accomplish all these tasks on your own can be overwhelming. Look for someone to help you, even if you can manage all these duties independently.
5. Grow Mushrooms at a Manageable Scale
If you decide to farm mushrooms based on the calculation you did on a piece of paper or in a spreadsheet, you might end up growing at a higher level that exceeds your ability. Mushroom farming has numerous parts to the process, which increase as the production level increases. Remember that the higher the quantity, the more the work, space, labor, and costs.
Whether you're a seasoned or newbie mushroom farmer, mushroom farming is a hobby that can get as complicated or as easy as you want. If you learn the five things mentioned above before you start growing the crop, you can have a successful mushroom farm.
