We are re-membering the way of mushroom farming

Despite the gift of having more and more mushrooms in our marketplaces and in produce sections in many places of the world, most modern day, large-scale, “conventional” mushroom farms have enormous waste and energy footprints.

Many indoor farms grow their mushrooms out of single use, disposable and non-recyclable plastic bags, commonly called “unicorn bags.” There can be hundreds, even thousands, of these bags discarded every day from one facility. Not to mention the incessant use of energy, fueling giant machines for sterilization, artificial light and humidity/temperature control.

These are some of the reasons why we chose to make our farm a small, log-cultivation operation. We wanted to stay as close to the land and it’s cycles as possible, providing nutrient dense medicinal and edible fungi for the community without all the added baggage.

Mushroom cultivation is an ancient art of ecological participation, with the first recorded mentions of mushroom cultivation 3,000 years ago from China in the Chou Dynasty. The practices involved are presumed to have begun well before the written record.

Log cultivation has been practiced for millennia. At its core, it is the art of mimicking natural processes and in-situ fungal ecology. Early medicine peoples, foragers and curious cultivators in China would notice edible and medicinal mushrooms like shiitake, wood ear and reishi growing out of logs in the forest and began to experiment with inoculating logs manually to replicate what they saw. Biomimicry is not a new concept. This is but one of the many gifts we have inherited, dendritically extending from keen observation and careful investigation by indigenous peoples ages ago and for which we are incredibly grateful.

Now the art of log cultivation is practiced all over the world, from productive farms to backyard gardens. While industrial-scale indoor farms far outnumber those who are growing outdoor on logs, we hope to offer our humble hands in tipping the scales back towards this ancient, regenerative, and effective way of growing mushrooms.

With log cultivation, the need for plastic is incredible minimal; it’s the log, the fungal mycelium, a moveable plastic sheet for holding in moisture, and a little bit of non-GMO, biodegradable wax that covers the inoculation holes.

Once the wood is “eaten” by the fungi and is no longer able to produce mushrooms, the logs’ tough lignin that it relies on for structural integrity is broken down, decomposes, and re-enters the nutrient cycling processes of the forest ecosystem, becoming part of the next generation of fertile soil, just like in a forest setting. Meanwhile, the mushrooms and the logs are participating in the forest ecology, just as we do.

This is how lignicolous saprotrophic fungi have been making soil and cycling nutrients on the planet for millennia. Without their alchemical magic, life on the planet would look a lot different than we see it today. What we practice at Moon Fruit is just a small part of a long story, facilitating ancient processes that give back to the land as the land gives back to us.