 Thursday, which is the Hawaii Food and Farmer series. I'm your co-host, Justine Espiritu. Matthew Johnson is out on the road delivering vegetables, like we love him to do. Just a reminder, this series is about bringing in farmers and other folks that are related to our food system and help to produce what we eat and make a thriving system together. We also like to go a little outside of Hawaii and see some examples in other places of folks that are producing food and also to kind of feature their entrepreneurial spirit and kind of get the background on food production elsewhere. So today is one of those special episodes. We have Wyatt Bryson, who is the co-owner, along with his brother Hunter Bryson. And they have formed MycoLab Solutions, as well as Jules of the Forest. So thank you, Wyatt, for joining us today. Thank you. Pleasure to be back. In Hawaii and here. Yeah. And so as a reminder, Wyatt was a resident in Hawaii for about eight years. And that's how we met. And so to kind of start, you were here for a while and then moved back to your family farm. So why don't you kind of set that up for us of what was kind of going on with your farm and then get into these two different businesses that you started and how they work together and kind of what you're doing. Yeah. OK. So I primarily moved over to Hawaii to work with boats. I was working with ships in Alaska before I moved here. And I kind of wanted to get out of that. I wanted to stay more on the land. And I just kind of fell into mushrooms. It had been a little bit of an interest in college. I went to Humboldt State University. And I graduated with a political science degree. Did that for like a second until I realized I wasn't going to change the world in a day. And I thought about another way I could do that and more environmentally focused. And I saw mushrooms as a great opportunity, especially here in Hawaii. One of the major things that got me interested in mushrooms in Hawaii was partly you working with the mushroom farmer you did at the farmer's market. Yang, small kind farm, who is doing portobello in community mushrooms. Yeah. And they're excellent mushrooms. I wish I never saw his facility. But I remember being really nervous about that. You're like, oh, let me come check out the operation. I'm like, ah, I don't know if I can let you in. You're all interested in growing it. But OK, I got into that. So I started doing a lot of research on how mushrooms can work with the environment in Hawaii. And I came across a paper done by a graduate student, Tracy E. Tisdale, for her thesis at Hawaii State. It's called The Cultivation of Oyster Mushrooms on Wood Substrates in Hawaii. And basically, the gist of it, I mean, it's a long paper. They have it for free on PDF. You can find it online. And it just talked about different substrates that you could use in mushroom production here in Hawaii that were actually like weed woods. Basically, they were invasive species. One of them was a strawberry guava. Eucalyptus is another one. Ironwood, I forget the exact. If you read the report, it talks about which they actually found worked best. But I started with that. And I talked to a lot of people. And it was kind of getting more into mushrooms. And life changed. And I moved to it. So you were researching. And you were planning on kind of starting the operation here in Hawaii. Yeah, yeah. And one of the biggest things, overhead with land and costs like that, I kind of figured it was not going to be feasible to try to do something like that here. It's just it's so expensive for facilities and land. And mushrooms can be very expensive to do on a large scale, especially with more some of the different kinds of specialty mushrooms besides oysters. You need some pretty heavy equipment to do a lot of that work. So I moved back to my family property. It's like our fourth generation family farm. We have 15 acres in Northern California in Occidental, which is in Sonoma County. And it just kind of developed. My brother and his family work live up there. And I built a house with my new son and my new family. So did it click right away when you decided to move back that you could translate what you learned and just start that kind of operation where you are? Yeah, I actually acquired a lot of my lab equipment over here in Hawaii during 2008, like during the recession. There was a company that was trying to develop a naturally decaffeinated coffee bean, and they lost all their funding during the recession. So I picked up some really nice lab equipment for a steel. And that's kind of how I got started. I had in my room a four-foot laminar flow hood and a $6,000 autoclave. You're just collecting it up. You're like, OK, I got it. It's OK, let this go. Yeah, I can, of course. When you find that sort of equipment, it really helps. Now what Mycolab Solutions is, is we have a full-service mycology lab. I'm able to develop cultures and strains for people. We do spawn production. Right now, we're doing a lot of, it's called King's Traforia. It's the garden giant mushroom. And it's great to just put out in wood chips in your yard. And I work with a couple different landscapers that use that in developing their permaculture designs and their landscaping. OK. And then, so again, if you can kind of explain the difference between Mycolab Solutions and maybe start with jewels of the forest, and that's kind of where the actual mushroom production is kind of centered around. If you can kind of just talk about the varieties you're currently growing. And I'm kind of curious, it sounds like you're doing two or three varieties, and they each kind of need a specific way to be grown. So if you can kind of explain that. Yeah, so each different kind of mushroom has different parameters for their fruiting. So fruiting, mycelium is the actual mushroom. And that's the white stringy stuff you see in the ground on logs. And the fruiting body is the reproductive organ, and that is the actual mushroom. So you can grow mycelium pretty easily. But to get it to fruit, it has to have certain conditions. So each mushroom is different. What we're working with right now is a gray oyster mushroom. And we're going to work with some other oyster mushrooms like during the summer, you can use a yellow or a pink oyster. They do better in warm weather. So they all have kind of a different temperature requirement. And so what we're trying to do is be able to grow them without as less of inputs, both electronically and energy-wise, to grow them. We also do shiitake, shiitake logs. I have a really nice Jupiter strain of shiitake. It's a really big growing one. It takes a little bit longer to grow, but it's a really nice, tasty shiitake. And then we'd like to move into lion's mane, the Horatium. That's a really nice mushroom. And a lot of people there see a demand for it. And then so when you're growing mushrooms, is this a product that you're selling direct to consumers? Or is it something that you have other uses for? I did notice on your list of products is a tincture. Yeah. So jewels of the forest is our actual farm. That's our farm. When people come to our farm, that's the name they see. And so most of our products will have the jewels of the forest label on them. The MycoLab Solutions is more of our back end. That's our lab. If you want to buy spawn, if you want us to help you grow mushrooms, once we get more established, we'd like to start a not franchise, but more of a co-op kind of system where we can supply growers with ready-to-grow mushroom bags and do consulting. And then they harvest. And then we all sell under one label. So it's like a collective where everyone can help each other out. Because it is very labor-intensive to actually grow the mushrooms. You have to do a lot of harvesting, packaging. And right now we have three restaurants that we sell to. They're kind of family friends. And Hunter, my brother and business partner, has been a chef for over 15 years and is just amazing and has a great connection with the restaurant community. Some of our other products is we do an upcycled wine bottle mushroom kit that grows oyster mushrooms. We're still in the testing phase of that. But hopefully by the early next year, we'll have a finish pot. And that's what you owe your Kickstarter supporters? Yeah, go find me, yeah. Including me? Including you. That's right. Thank you for supporting us. You're welcome. Yeah. And those, we use all collected upcycled bottles. And we drill holes in them. And that's more of our kind of like get to a different market with people. Right. And so that's interesting, if you're capable of growing mushrooms. And is it only a certain, are you just doing oyster mushrooms in the bottles? Yeah, I mean, we could start, we haven't played around with anything else. Oysters are just very easy to grow. Oysters are so scalable, like anyone can grow oysters with just a pressure cooker, some canning jars, and a glove box, like a clean box to be able to do sterile work in. And straw, we just grow them on straw. It's very easy. You don't need a big autoclave. You can pasteurize it just by boiling straw. So it's like a good intro to someone who's interested in mushrooms. Like here's something super easy, or just interested in any. I feel like a lot of times it's like, grow some herbs or something. But this is another super or like kombucha to try to start making stuff. So oyster mushrooms is like a good starter thing. Yeah, and there's many different kinds of oyster mushrooms. And depending on where you are in your climate and temperature, you can kind of pick and choose what's best for your environment. And they grow wild. Actually, I was in Shasta earlier this summer for the McLeod Mushroom Festival. And we were doing a bunch of hikes and mushroom collecting. And we found oyster mushroom growing on a tree up there. And I was able to culture it. And now I have that strain in my strain library. So someday I'll try growing it. So instead of having to buy seeds from catalogs, vegetable farmers, you can just scrape things off in the forest. Yeah, that's because we have the mycology lab. We have some nice equipment to be able to do that. OK, so we have more than just, or you can do it at home. I could just scrape it off. Yeah, if you have your sterile technique down and a little bit of knowledge, it's not that hard. One of the neatest things about this time right now is that mycology is becoming a lot more accessible to regular people. I would suggest definitely look out Radical Mycology and Peter McCoy. He just put out a huge 700-page book. That's absolutely amazing. And the Radical Mycology, what they're trying to do is just bring it to people. So you can go on their website and download a bunch of free zines and free pamphlets. That will really help you get started. And that's what we try to do with Mycolab Solutions. I do a lot of educational videos. We have our Instagram, YouTube channel, which is getting a really nice following. And it's great to hear. Right, it's cool. Like you were mentioning, some products and services are kind of in development. But you have a lot of people that are looking. I mean, just on your social media that are looking to you as a resource for information. Yeah, and so with my life right now, life's always crazy, but I just had a son and we moved to California two years ago. So we're still building the business and getting established, but one thing I have been able to do is do social media. Cool, that's awesome. So we're gonna take a quick break and we come back. I wanna get a little more into how that developed, your interest in growing the mushrooms and then kind of the education side and how that balances out. So we're gonna take a quick break. Aloha, I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii Is My Mainland here on Think Tech Hawaii every Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. Start your Paul Hanna weekend off with the show where I talk to people about issues pertinent to Hawaii. You can see my previous shows at my blog, kauilukas.com and also on Think Tech's show, sorry. Aloha, my name is Josh Green. I serve as Senator from the Big Island on the Kona side and I'm also an emergency room physician. My program here on Think Tech is called Health Care in Hawaii. I'll have guests that should be interesting to you twice a month. We'll talk about issues that range from mental health care to drug addiction to our health care system and any challenges that we face here in Hawaii. We hope you'll join us. Again, thanks for supporting Think Tech. Aloha and welcome back to Hawaii Food and Farmer Series. I'm your co-host, Jasmini Spiritu. Today we have Wyatt Bryson, who is the co-owner of Michael Lab Solutions and Jules of the Forest. So thanks again for joining us. I wanted to kind of go back and when you imagine kind of creating this farm and service, did you always kind of have like that full service spectrum in mind? Like you knew you wanted to have the lab and you knew you wanted to do the education or did it just start with like, let's just produce some mushrooms or it was always? Yeah, I kind of did it in a roundabout way. Like I had the lab, so that's what I focused on. So I'd sell my ecology supplies online on eBay and on Etsy, I sell Petri dishes, clean ones for people to use in their own labs, or I sell cultures, liquid cultures and spawn. And I wanted to kind of stay on that back end because it's a bit less work. And then... That's always good. Yeah, it's nice. Now growing mushrooms, like what we're moving into now is actual production. So we've really been kind of taking our time and building our market and seeing like what's gonna work and who we're gonna work with before we just like dump all this big money into it. So we're looking to buying equipment from Thailand right now, a large autoclave, a bagging machine and a big dirt mixer. And we kind of have all everything else we need. So our next phase will be into like probably medium scale production. We currently have two 25 foot containers and eight by 10 walking cooler that will be growing oyster mushrooms in. And then we have outside a bunch of shiitake logs. But those we're gonna take a year or two to start producing. So... And then just gonna idea of what that looks like. You just, I mean, how your log setup is just like rows of logs. Yeah, so the logs are really cool. I work with a guy in Petaluma. He does a lot of production and he has a saw mill. So he can make us tons of oak sawdust. And I bring him logs. I have nice access to a lot of oak logs through different connections in the arbor freedom and different woodworking shops and stuff. So basically, yeah, you can have them outside. You kind of wanna keep them off the ground and away from other microbes and fungi in the soils. And you just have a sprinkler system or something, have them covered in a shaded area. And then they usually take about a year or so, depending on the strain, to fully colonize the logs. We try to keep our logs maybe like, five to six inches round and maybe like, you know, about four. So is this them set up? Like is that's like pre-and-opulating? And so each of those little white dots, like we have a gun where we use a sawdust spawn, a shiitake sawdust spawn. We don't use plugs. We do sell shiitake plugs that is on wooden dowels. But this system is so much easier because you take this gun and you just stick it into the sawdust block. But first you stick it into like a styrofoam, which unfortunately, you know, it's styrofoam, but what are you gonna do? You know, there's only so much you can be green, I guess. We try as much as we can, but you know, we do a lot of plastic bag cultivation. That's kind of how things are done. And unfortunately it's still plastic, but it's kind of how it is right now. I'll forgive you for right now. Yeah, thank you. We'll check back. We're trying to find, there's other methods. There's a bottle method that's like developed in Japan and stuff, but you need a lot of big equipment to be able to do that. So with those logs, you have a special bit. We drill holes in there and then you take this gun and you plug it into the styrofoam, then you plug it into your spawn block and then you just put it in the hole and it pull the trigger, it shoves everything in and keeps it nice and sealed. And yeah, and then in about a year or so, you get all the shiitakes just popping off of them. So that brings to my question. I wonder why you don't wanna just pick one variety and wouldn't it be easier to just focus on that? Or can you kind of explain why it's worth it to kind of go into these different multiple varieties? It sounds like a little overwhelming, but. Okay, well shiitake logs is something like it's an investment, right? So we do a few every season in the summertime when we have time and then we just let them sit there and we don't have to do a lot of work after that. And so like I said, it takes depending on the strain of the year, maybe more with some, but then they can fruit up to like five years. And there's a couple of different revenue streams that you can do with the logs. You can A, sell the shiitake straight, either to farmer's markets or restaurants or whatever your market is, but you can also sell the actual logs. To be used again for? Yes, or for people to take home and grow their own. Okay, it can be reused to grow more mushrooms. Yeah, so like I could fruit it for like a year or six months and then I can sell the log to someone and they can take it home and they can fruit it for a couple of years and go pick their own shiitakes, you know? So we're gonna be doing a shiitake class. We do teach a class at the San Rosa Finley Center, which is like a activity center. It's a county center in Santa Rosa, California. Yeah, we have a bunch of cool events coming up. We're doing an ethno botany festival on the September 24th when I get back to Hawaii, which is gonna be really fun. We're gonna have like free kits that everyone can come and make their own mushroom, oyster mushroom bags and take home with them. Going back to some of the products again, so you can sell these mushrooms to the restaurants, but some of the other products you mentioned, like value added stuff was like the mushroom jerky. I've never heard of that. Did you guys make that up? No, actually, so my brother Hunter's wife is from Thailand and she was bringing these kind of mushroom toppings and they were like a jerky, basically. Oh, they're so tasty and you can get all different kinds, just different kinds of mushrooms, oysters and my talkies. My talkies are excellent. And they're with shoyu and teriyaki and some sesame seeds and they're kind of like a food of cocky kind of topping and I started looking up to see what other products were on the market for mushroom jerkies because it's a vegan, like all natural snack and there's like one guy kind of towards the East Coast, I think that was selling them online and he's getting all his mushrooms from overseas and I mean, they produce a lot of mushrooms out of Asia and they're very cheap and it's a good deal, but we wanna be growing our own and have something local and sustainable and so the mushroom jerky, we've played around with some different recipes because my brother is a chef. So we'll see how that turns out. For different products and revenue streams, the cool thing about mushroom production is that we can be doing kind of what we're gonna be doing anyway and we can kind of have like different avenues where we can create revenue streams. So like I do lab work no matter what. So I can sell those cultures and make a little bit of money from that to my colleges and amateur my colleges or I could sell the spawn which I'm making already to people that wanna grow their own mushrooms and make their own substrate, or what we would like to do in the future maybe like kind of a five year plan or so is to set up that kind of co-op or collective system where we supply people with ready to grow bags, they do all the harvesting and we supply packaging, we sell them under one label. So that was kind of like the end goal because I don't necessarily wanna be producing. It is very labor intensive. We're gonna be doing kind of a Asian style with a smaller bag and many, many bags using a saw to spawn. So yeah, some of the other products, the mushroom kit, a wine bottle kit, like there's a lot of mushroom kits out there and ours is smaller. So it's not like really to grow a lot of mushrooms. Not like a commercial scale. Yeah, it's more of, it's this cool thing, like we're gonna be marketing it to, because we live in Sonoma County, which is a very big wine place, we can, you know, there's a lot of interest in wine. There's a lot of after market products. We actually EcoVative is a company that has developed a packaging that's made from mushroom mycelium and they have a wine bottle shipper kit. So I'm in talks with them about purchasing their shipping kits. So when we sell our wine bottle mushroom kit, it can be shipped in mycelium, in our mushroom mycelium, which is pretty cool. And that's more, we wanna do a Kickstarter project at some point to raise more funds to kind of take us up to the next level. And that's a great reward. And it's something anyone can do, any novice, like all you do is you take the bottle home, you take the little sticker off the hole, you soak it overnight, and then about two weeks you get oyster mushrooms growing out of it. That's awesome. So the way you're doing this, can this be done anywhere? Yeah. Because this could be replica, anyone could kind of replicate your bottle. Yeah, absolutely. Like oyster mushrooms, like I said, are so easy and they're very prolific. And same with the King's Traforia and that, I mean, you're just using straw and the basic tools you'll need are like just a pressure cooker where you can get very cheap online for either used or new, you know, and some just a kitchen and some basic materials, some plastic bags and some other things. And they're very easy on my website, you know, like we have a lot of videos and we try to help people who wanna start growing. And what's your website? Our website is MycoLabSolutions.com and then also our YouTube channel, everything is MycoLabSolutions. And then on Facebook, we also have Jewels of the Forest fungi farm site, but right now we're just focusing on the MycoLab solutions until we really have like our products out and going. Okay. And so for that idea of like the co-op where you're kind of supporting other mushroom farmers, is that helpful? It doesn't, so it doesn't really currently exist or maybe not where you're from? Well, I mean, the kind of where I, you know, I got the idea was talking to other mushroom farmers, you know, there's a guy in Pennsylvania, William Padilla. He's awesome guy, I've gotten some cultures from him. His company is called Myco Symbiotics. Should definitely check him out if you're on the East Coast in PA. And yeah, so I talked to him, I got some cultures from him. He's kind of growing at a couple of different locations. It sounded like, and I was like, okay, well, you know, why can't I help someone out that wants to move into a different industry who wants to do something on their own and be independent with sustainable farming? And I mean, you know, on large scale, you do kind of need this bigger equipment, autoclaves and bagging machines and stuff. And it's very... It's kind of like high upfront costs to kind of get into with all the equipment. Yeah, so if I can be able to put that initial investment in, but then to be able to provide like a, basically a plug and play system. So where they're just like harvesting, which is the more labor and time consuming thing, which I don't want to spend my time on, you know, I want to be doing some cool stuff, like, you know, doing science research. That's pretty cool too. Oh yeah, it's fun, you know, it is harvesting mushrooms. It's great when you have a whole wall of oyster mushrooms and you're not like, you know, you're harvesting like hundreds of pounds. It's really cool. It's great to see, you know. But I want other people to be able to like prosper and like have a good life and create their own wealth from doing something cool. Well, that's cool. I always love to hear about businesses that then have the element where they're supporting those that are kind of coming after them. Or when it is kind of like an industry that can work collaboratively. And then to kind of go back to the products that you are supplying to the restaurants, is there alternatively, are there other local sources for it or what you're not providing, would they be importing from somewhere else? You know, California down kind of like Monterey area, there's a bunch of mushroom farms down there. We just went and visited one and like got to see their side, it was pretty cool. And then locally kind of right around my area is another big, very big mushroom farm. And they do do some oyster mushrooms, but they kind of focus on other kinds. And I don't want to compete with them. So I'm trying to stick to products that they're not doing like a lion's mane, which I will get into, which I've had actually a lot of demand for people asking for lion's mane, which is, it's a really neat mushroom. And it's very tasty. Yeah, so just flavor-wise it's different. Yeah, it's very different. And oyster mushrooms are great. You know, I mean, like they're just so easy. It's a great mushroom to start out with. So that's where we're starting. Okay, so we have one more minute. What's your next event that you guys have coming up? Okay, so on September 24th, we're going to be doing the Ethno Botany Festival and Suposium, I think I said that right. It's put on by Kathleen Harris, who's an old family friend, and she has a Ethno Botany, or kind of bookstore right down in Occidental. And so it's gonna be tons of educational free boosts and people can come and there's all sorts of workshops and speakers. It's gonna be really- It's a real education. Yeah, really educational. On my Instagram, I just posted a picture of the flyer. Unfortunately, don't have the website right on me right now, but check out our Instagram, Michael Lab Solutions. And it'll be on our website shortly. Cool, yeah. Awesome, well, that wraps it up. Thank you so much for coming on. Super proud of you and stoked to hear what you've started out there. Great, thank you. Awesome. All right, I love you.