 All right, good morning everybody. I hope you can hear me. If you can't, please tell me now. I hope my correct screen is sharing as well, but mushrooms. So I get a lot of calls about this and I've realized there's a lot of confusion surrounding them, especially compared to other food crops. And I'm not a mycologist or you really have much plant pathology experience. So I'm gonna talk about where that and horticulture merge because it's a lot of market growers now that are growing vegetables, that are looking to kind of expand their crop and their season by growing mushrooms. I'm gonna mostly talk about indoor cultivation because that's really one of the main ways that you're going to be profitable because you're able to control your environment. And again, it's great for expanding the season. There's thousands of high tech and low tech different production mechanisms. So in 15 minutes, I'm not gonna be able to cover all of the different ways that you can grow mushrooms, but I hope to at least leave you with a better understanding of how the process works and how to mitigate the risks associated with this new crop that you might be exploring. So why mushrooms? Maybe you've not been convinced yet to grow them. Well, hopefully I can convince you because they're very sustainable. There's many low tech growing options. They can be nutritious depending on which type you grow and it can be a year round source of income for your farm. It's a great revenue for smaller farms and for urban areas as well. The sustainability aspect of it is the waste can be composted and there's quite a few growers who are wanting to get into this just to bring more because I have a lot of market growers in my area and they're wanting to get into this with potentially an unused cooler that they've not utilized as they expected to. So just, I see a lot of people looking at their farms in a different way and looking at ways that they might could integrate this into what they're already doing. So slide three, indoor growing requirements. Like I said, I'm gonna mostly talk about indoor growing but that's a decision that you need to make for yourself on your farm. You can do indoor or outdoor but it's two very different ball games here. So you really do wanna choose that upfront. Like I said, indoor growing is much more contained and controlled and that's where I see people make money. It's a controlled environment agriculture scenario. So in this, you need to be able to control five different aspects. There's different stages of the mushroom. So each stage requires a different chamber with precise, there's a error on that, a precise temperature control and humidity control and very specific life requirements. And of course, clean air flow. And there's millions of different ways to go about each of these different components but these are the things that you need to think of before you get into this. And many people are choosing to do just one stage of the mushrooms. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later but sometimes it's great to focus on just one thing instead of trying to do it all. That way you can let people kind of specialize in what they know, perfect that. You can buy it in wholesale bulk and implement that on your farm. So what do I mean by these stages of production? So you can do the cultures. There's liquid and agar cultures. The agar is a seaweed type thing that grows in a Petri dish. And if you inoculate that with a like spore sample and that will then grow and you can use that to inoculate your blocks and your spawn. So, but like I said, some people do just that aspect, just focus on selling the cultures. And then some people focus on just the inoculated blocks. One of our good farm friends, the fungi farms in Dadeville, they choose to not do the fruiting stage. So they just do the blocks and the inoculated spawn and they sell that into other operations, large and small. And then some people that are buying from them are just doing the fruiting stage. So they're focusing on the marketing component of it and the fruiting aspect, which like I said before, requires it's very specific conditions to do so. All right, so here we go. What are the seven steps that you really have to think of? And again, there's so many different ways to do each of these, but these are the seven and you can do them differently depending on what works for you and what you're trying to grow, but here they are. You want to start with, no matter what, a clean culture to inoculate. And sterilization is so important here. It's important at each stage. So you really want to think of as you're choosing your area that you want to grow in. How clean can you keep it? Is it able to be sterilized? I think of sterilization like weeding, merging corticulture and plant pathology together. You really want to get rid of that seed bank. And in this case, that's spore bank. Other competing spores that can get in and compete with yours. So here is a picture I took this weekend of one of my lion's mane Petri dishes. And as you can see, it's still free of any bacteria. So I'll watch it on here for a while and take out a cutting from the inside and use that to transfer. So going into step two, transfer that culture to sterilized grain or whatever you choose as your next step. It doesn't have to necessarily be grain but you really want sterilization here. And I use a flow hood just for my hobby growing and you can make your own flow hood. You can really think of all of these stages as low tech or as high tech as you want to make it. There's ways to grow mushrooms in a very cheap way but it is a lot of work. I don't, not that this sounds simple but I don't want it to sound simple because you really do have to think through each step and perfect it because you could lose a lot of money especially for talking about commercial operations. So step three, you're going to take the culture that has now been inoculated into that grain and expand it so the mycelium is going to engulf that entire grain in that second step and then you're going to expand that even larger into larger bags. And once those bags have fully colonized, you're wanting to think about the incubation stage. You're going to set them aside and allow that to normally it turns fully white. You're going to wait until the mycelium takes over that entire substrate and then step six, fruiting stage. So you're going to induce pinning of the mycelium by altering the environmental conditions. So if the environmental conditions are suddenly changed, usually this is a drop in temperature or a huge increase in the humidity. They'll start forming little knots which are we call pins. And then you're looking at fruiting your first flush as we call it. So you'll want to harvest an optimal time. If you're selling at market, you want to make sure that everything looks very clean and there's not any blemishes on it. So which is easy to do in a controlled environment. But typically if you're a commercial operation, you're just going to allow them to flush once because after that, if you keep them in there, you're going to start losing money. But if you're just doing it for yourself and you just want to have a little hobby, you can have them fruit up to five times and be sure to compost your spin substrate. So the varieties that I like to tell people to start with are ones that usually utilize grain bags. As you can see, here's one of mine. It's the mycelium slowly starting to take over. This one's in lion's mane. But usually I tell people to start with oysters. They're so easy, they really want to live. And there's so many different fun varieties for those. These are some of the options that you'll probably see at market or at least be able to find the cultures for easily. Okay, so that was not an exhaustive step-by-step of indoor inoculation, but hopefully it clarifies a little bit about the process. So now for a little bit on outdoor inoculation, here are some logs that I did this weekend, which tells you when I made this PowerPoint. You want to choose, normally I see this done mostly for hobby, the shiitake industry used to be huge when Atlanta was a big buying point, but things have changed a lot lately. And these are actually, these logs are inoculated with oyster mushrooms. So a lot of the things that you can grow indoors you of course can grow outdoors as well. But choosing how to get started here, you want to choose logs from hardwood trees, cut them when they're fresh, drill the holes about an inch deep and about a like diamond shaped pattern. As you can see where that, the white waxes on some of, on that picture, it's kind of diamond shaped pattern there. So you get the most in the logs as you can. You can use a spawn inoculation tool to insert the substrate into those drilled out holes. A lot of people try and sell plugs already made. And I just don't see that as necessary. It's really easy to make and do your own. So another way you can save money. And then once you get those drilled in, you insert the substrate, you'll paint over it with hot wax to seal. And then you're going to be patient because it can take many months for that first flush, but they'll continue to flush for probably five years usually every fall, every spring, and you'll have a long supply of mushrooms. And here are some of the things that you can do different varieties. A lot of them are the same as the indoor ones. And I did put Morel on there just because it's not done in this way, but it's another option for you to think about outdoor growing. This is typically done in a bed-like formation. All right, well, I don't wanna take up too much of our time and there's no way that I could cover everything in just 15 minutes. But if you have questions, you can call and email me. And there's an Instagram page which I'll start posting more about mushroom cultivation just because we're seeing it pop up in the States and much more now. It's a, not necessarily a new trend, but because I think it's a smart one. I do see people make money, but you have to be very careful and mindful before you get into it. So call, text me, anything with any questions and shout out to our podcast which is also called Farming Basics. They just released a new episode this morning and we'll have more to come on mushrooms as well. So stay tuned and follow that for more information. Thanks.