To me being mindful of our planet, being like mushroom mycelium and kind of allying
yourself with nature is a great foresight into the interconnectedness of everything.
And when you start to think like that, you start to treat your fellow human differently. You start
to see everyone as one and you treat everyone the same, you treat everyone with respect,
just like you treat nature. They're our teachers, we can learn from them in so many ways.
So my name is Brendan Linnane. I'm the owner operator of Foggy Dew Fungi, a small scale
mushroom farm here in New Castle, California. I was a horticulture student just fascinated
with plants and I had a teacher who studied mycology. When we'd be out looking at you
know the landscapes, you'd see all these mushrooms everywhere or you'd kick over a log and you'd see
this white mycelium and to me I was just extremely fascinated by the lore of mushrooms in general
but then as a horticulture student, they roll that fungi play not only in the environment but as you
know food and medicine. From there, part of my bedroom in San Francisco turned into a lab. I had
these grow tents in the garage where I was just growing all sorts of oyster mushrooms on straw and
laundry baskets and milk crates and my roommates and my friends are like, 'these are beautiful, you
could easily sell these to restaurants and chefs', and that's kind of how Foggy Dew Fungi came to be.
So yeah essentially this is our production area, where we have our little thor bagger
here filled with soybean holes and oak fuel pellets. These are unicorn grow bags that
are biodegradable so after we're done bagging up the substrate we'll take all of our
substrate blocks and load them into our steam steriliser.
It raises the temperature up to 200 degrees and holds it there for about 20 hours and then I'll
basically pour a little bit of spawn into each bag and they sit here on the racks to colonise
and then they'll go into the fruiting room to present the mushrooms to us. Our whole mindset
going into this thing was keeping it simple. We don't use a lot of you know heavy equipment,
heavy machinery for efficiency. From spore to out the door, everything has a little process and it
does like a full circle, from how we source our substrates, trying to reclaim as much water as we
can that gets used. All these little things help reduce our footprint of what we do here. I don't
want to be doing something that's very taxing on the environment, taxing on our bodies. Cool thing
about mushroom farming it can be very low cost, low input for high value crops and high reward.
Without further ado we shall enter. [opens door]
Look how cool that looks.
And one of the most popular mushrooms right now that we grow is the lion's mane mushroom.
Almost everyday here you got something to harvest to bring the chefs or bring to market,
so when you're talking about high turnover,
high value crops you know you can grow a lot of mushrooms in a small space.
How's it going everybody? This is Brendan with Foggy Dew Fungi and today I'm going to
show you how to grow oyster mushrooms using one of our oyster mushroom grow
kits. Here at Foggy Dew we offer some grow your own kits, I think growing your own food
is probably one of the most radical things anyone could ever do. From a horticulture
background plants have what's called a shikimate pathway and that's how they get minerals out of
the ground and have vitamins and minerals in the fruit. Well conventionally farmed produce that's
grown with synthetic fertilisers, it's not as nutrient dense as organic grown food, so for
people to take back you know just growing a little windowsill herb garden or a mushroom block that
you take home and grow yourself, all those little things I think is very empowering for people
and to take back our food system from these conglomerates that have basically forced us
to eat the food that's in the grocery store. That's probably one of the most hardcore
punk rock things you could do honestly. So after all the mushrooms have been harvested
either once or twice, all the blocks come out here and essentially we get this nice sawdust pile.
This stuff, a great garden amendment and it's also what we use for half of our production for
our lion's mane and our oyster mushrooms. It goes through the whole process again of the facility,
so in the grand scheme of things not only is this saving you a lot of time and money,
it's just a great kind of practice to get into to be a little bit more regenerative
kind of reduce your footprint of your inputs needed to produce high value crops.
Trying to end all these little waste loops at our farm
has been huge in the model of something like this moving forward and how not just mushroom farms but
all these other farms in general can kind of start being mindful and thinking about how to
create these full, enclosed systems. Just in the short time I've been alive, we see humans we can
easily bury ourselves in waste and if we didn't have these fungi and bacteria in the soil we would
be up to our chins in debris you know. If you want to talk about biomimicry and how we can learn so
much from how mushroom mycelium plays its role in nature, mycorrhizal fungi is all around us.
90% of plants have this symbiotic relationship with these mushrooms. Some of these mushrooms
never show themselve,s they never fruit it's just the mycelial networks going through the ground.
Being mindful of our planet being, like mushroom mycelium and kind of allying yourself with nature
is a great foresight into the interconnectedness of everything.
There's a way we can grow our food and leave a
trail for people in the future to follow. It's generations after us that are going to benefit
from what we're talking about and what we're doing here and to me that's very important.
[chuckles]