 Hello, my name is Sam Boring, and I'm a regional extension agent with Alabama Cooperative Extension. This presentation will cover growing specialty mushrooms in the state of Alabama. There's a growing market for specialty mushrooms, as you can see from these statistics from the National Agricultural Statistics Service, sales of specialty mushrooms have grown in the past few years, past 10 years, while the number of producers has went down, and the value of sales has gone up, and this is because consumers are becoming more familiar and starting to enjoy the products more, and you can find more of these specialty mushrooms in places like high-end restaurants, and health food stores, and natural food stores. They're all selling some of these specialty mushrooms. The main one that this presentation will be covering will be shiitake mushrooms, some other varieties coming up at the end. So again, the main one that I'm going to be talking about is shiitake mushroom production. This is because shiitakes grow the best in the climate of Alabama, and there's already been some production systems that have been developed. The main one that I'm going to talk about is log production systems. This is where you grow shiitake mushrooms on hardwood logs, at your farm, kind of in the woods, and there are a number of ways to do this. You can have them fruit and produce mushrooms based on natural conditions. If you do this, you'll have fruiting in the fall and the spring when the weather conditions turn and they hit certain temperature levels and it'll be a natural fruiting and the mushrooms will pop up. You can also inoculate the logs and then go into a forced fruiting schedule. If you do a forced fruiting, you'll get these logs to fruit and produce mushrooms about every nine to 13 weeks apart. And you can get three to four fruiting a year if you force the logs. Beyond logs, the way to grow shiitake mushrooms is using what they call block growing, which is where you have bags of sawdust or grain and you grow the mushrooms inside in a controlled environment. So for shiitake logs, you will need some equipment to get started. The main one that you'll need are the logs. You're going to have to use hardwood logs, softwood logs, things like pine logs just don't work. That's not going to work. But a lot of the hardwoods that grow in forests in Alabama, things like okra, beech, maple, and sweetgum too will probably work really well for growing and producing shiitake mushrooms, especially things like sweetgum where there's a lot of sweetgum in people's wood lots and it's not a very expensive tree. It would be good use for those sweetgum trees. So to produce the shiitake logs, you're going to have to cut the logs in the length about three or four feet. You don't have to be about three to eight inches in diameter. It's key that you inoculate them with the mushroom spawn within two weeks of cutting them. Otherwise they dry out and they're not very good. It will produce a lot of mushroom. We used to say that you want to do this early in the spring when the sap is running, but kind of new information has shown that you can inoculate them basically throughout any time of year and they'll do well. Besides the logs, you'll need a high-speed drill to drill holes in the logs. You'll need the mushroom spawn itself, which come in either plugs or sawdust that you'll put into these holes. Then you'll cover these holes with wax that you melt. And then if you're going to do a forest-fruiting system, you'll need a soap tank. It's also best to have some metal tags or spray paint those to track what kind of wood it was when you inoculated it. And if you're going to do a forest-fruiting system, it's best to keep track of different groups and how they go through your forest-fruiting cycle. So for shiitake logs inoculation, you will need to get some mushroom spawn and they do sell different strains based on weather conditions. Cold weather strains and warm weather strains are the wide-ranging strains. The ones that work best for Alabama are the wide-ranging strains. They'll produce generally throughout the year, especially if you're forest-fruiting them. They'll produce throughout the year. But it can be best to not put all of your eggs in one basket and maybe try to do some buffer with maybe get a little bit of cold weather strain if you're going to try it. But you should probably go with the wide-ranging strain for most of your log inoculation. As I said, you can either get the spawn in bags or you can get the plug spawn. If you get the plugs, it'll just be wooden owls and you'll just hammer them into the holes you drew. If you get the bags of sawdust that's been inoculated, you'll get a little inoculation tool and then you can just fill out the holes with the sawdust that's been inoculated. After you do inoculate them and cover them with wax and put them in a nice shady area for six to 12 months before you start seeing fruiting of mushrooms coming out of these logs. It's just a time for that to talk to spawn, to run and to colonize the logs and to start decomposing the logs and producing mushrooms. There are a number of sources of spawn out there, especially on the internet. I've listed some here. If you're in Alabama, I would suggest this top one, Fungi Farm. They're a new company of guys that are producing spawn in Alabama. That'd be a good way to get some spawn that's for our local conditions and that's the local business that will be there to help you out. In terms of management for the shiitake logs, after you inoculate them, you're going to want to stack them. Mainly if you want to do this, you want to keep them off the ground and you want to encourage airflow between them. You want room and space for those mushrooms to be able to grow out on all the surfaces of the logs and you want to keep them off the ground so they don't get infected with other bacteria or they get too wet. There's many different ways to stack logs and you do want to keep them outside in a shady area in the canopy or under burlap. This is crucial. One of the ways where this can go wrong is that the logs dry out. One of the main ways that you're going to not get production on your shiitake logs is that if they get too dry, this can happen in summer months where it's hot and dry. We're not getting a lot of rain, especially if they're in direct sunlight, the logs will dry out. You want to put them in a canopy or under a burlap and if it gets really high, you might want to consider applying some irrigation and sprinkler lines on them just so they can get wet and stay wet and have good moisture content for the logs. If you want to use a forced fruiting system, use an example. You want to use a new tub there. Don't reuse one from on your farm. Get a new one because you're going to be producing fruit out of it. Then what you want to do is you want to take your total number of logs and divide them into 8 to 10 different groups. You want to take a group and you want to soak that log for anywhere from 8 to 24 hours. You want to pull it out of the water and stack it and it will start producing mushrooms over a 3-day period. You can get about a week's worth of production and then you want to put that group, you want to rest it for at least 8 weeks. So then the following week you can get a different group and go through this process again and if you follow this forced fruiting schedule you can get, each group can go through 3 to 4 times and you can get consistent production throughout the year. There's a lot of potential to make some profits on this. These enterprise budgets were developed through University of Kentucky and they are based on a good price, getting a good price for shiitakes. These days you can get anywhere from 6 to 12 dollars a pound and as you can see, if you can get 500 logs and you're forced fruiting them you can make some money over time, especially if you have a lot of the equipment initially and you have the logs and you have the chainsaw that can really cut down on your expenses and then you're just doing production after that. Moving beyond the log system and into what they call block growing systems, you're just going to grow in bags and you're going to grow inside and you can see it's a lot a different type of operation here. If you are doing the block growing system the advantages are you're going to get a lot more production, you're going to get quick turnaround, get year-round production, you have a lot more control every aspect of the production system from fruiting, from the train you're going to use, from the species you're going to produce. But with that intensification do come some challenges but you need to require climate and environmental control. You're going to have to control temperature, humidity, lighting and CO2 in your controlled environment. This can mean you're going to have to get some more equipment and some more industrial equipment like a bean box, industrial pressure cooker and a batch mixer. For example, some of the more intensive equipment that you're going to need to do this block growing system. Growing media that's generally used is either oak slaw dust or wheat land or wheat straw. And there are different ways to do this. You can buy the bags that are ready to fruit and then have some fruit and then discard the bags and then get pallets delivered to your farm ready to fruit bags. But you really want control and you want to maximize how you use the resources and what you're doing at every step and how they want to start buying and mixing and sterilizing and then loculating the growing media yourself. I was mainly talking about shiitake like oyster mushrooms. And there's all kinds of varieties of oyster mushrooms that you can grow. Oysters is probably the second most in terms of recognized by consumers. And then once you move past that there's other things that you can grow things like lion's mane other ones chestnut mushrooms or wine cat mushrooms. But if you're going to grow something like lion's mane it's not commonly recognized as a mushroom. It doesn't have that stem and cat look but it recognizes kind of a different look to it and it can be kind of some resistance there from consumers just because they're not familiar with the product. You might take some explaining that if you're selling it at a farmer's market you might have to explain what it is and how to grow it and how to use it and kind of do that educating of the consumer part which would be a challenge. But again, the sky is the limit in terms of other species. They're the big ones because that's what people know and they recognize and they like. In terms of marketing most of the marketing for these mushrooms is going to be direct market. There's not really any wholesalers out there for specialty mushrooms so it's going to require the grower to reach out and to find those markets whether it be taking it to the farmer's market or making connections with high-end restaurants and doing deliveries for them with stores or international grocery stores not a good place to sell these. If you can't find those markets close to you it's possible to dehydrate and to dry these mushrooms and sell them online but it does take the work of the grower to reach out and find those markets. There are opportunities out there it is a niche market and it can be a high value crop you know $12 a pound is a good price and you can get that price point and really make a lot of money growing it it's a unique product if you're at a farmer's market and you bring it to attract people to your stand at the farmer's market If you have a woodlock that's just passively sitting there and you've got a lot of sweet gum it can be a way to cut that sweet gum especially if you already have all the tools and all you need to order is the mushroom spawn now you can cut all that sweet gum and inoculate it and leave it out there under the canopy and use passive forest farming income just leave it and just go harvest it you know when seasonal conditions are right and there are lots of resources out there there's a growing amount of resources on producers a good amount of literature and people doing and trying different things on these grower's groups so you won't be alone in this if you do look into it and beyond that there are ways besides just selling the mushrooms if you get into it you can start hosting workshops show people how to inoculate their own logs you can even bring logs that you've already inoculated to the market and sell those logs themselves so that way the consumer can just take that log home and then they can get production to the mushroom so if you have any challenges though especially if you're doing kind of forest farming and you're just leaving the shiitake logs out in the woods it really has some uncertain and won't be consistent production you're really going to have to put more effort into it whether doing forest fruiting to get that consistent production there are a few pests that can get into your shiitake logs the big one is going to be slugs so if you've got a bunch of shiitake logs let's keep an eye out for slugs and watch them because they can get up in your logs and start eating the mushrooms can be a lot of labor especially at first when you're you know chainsawing these trees and cutting the logs and especially if you're doing forest fruiting that's a lot of logs that you're going to have to soak and dunk in tanks and then pull them out of the tanks and stack them up can do a lot of work especially at first and if you do want to move into a more intensive style production it will require more knowledge and it will require more space and specialization and some more intensive tools that you'll have to have to acquire and it can be a challenge to find markets as well especially if you're not in or around an urban area you're in a more rural location those markets for people purchasing special mushrooms aren't going to be close to you so that can be a challenge as well this is really only the tip of the iceberg in terms of growing special mushroom there's a lot of resources out there if you want to do the shiitake logs I encourage you to look up the Alabama Cooperative Extension System publication that UNP 025 it really walks through every step of growing the shiitake mushroom on logs but there's a lot of other information out there so reach out and look at this other information and if you have questions you can always contact Alabama Cooperative Extension alright thank you