Good Enough

Many farmers I know are perfectionists, which is why I think so many of you wince when I tell you that I’m not going after the best mushroom I can grow. I try to grow “good enough” mushrooms and that right there has so many connotations that I can already hear many of you fungal flesh ranchers groaning in pain. Maybe it’ll help if I tell you that I’m secretly a perfectionist too, at least when it comes to some things. I want my mushroom growing systems to be perfect, and if they are, then I’ll already be growing the finest mushrooms possible.

Putting your focus on growing the most perfect mushrooms is going to create a system with problems very quickly. You’re going to baby those mushrooms, you’re going to tweak your system for every efficiency, and you’re going to quickly become overwhelmed with just how much work is involved in growing large quantities of perfection. A true Sisyphean task if there ever were one! 

If you focus entirely on the overall system of production and grow “good enough” mushrooms, your quality of mushrooms will rise, you will be surprised by the reduction in your workload, and your farm will become more profitable as a matter of course.

Consider the most common killer of the budding mushroom farm, burnout. It is fatal and has by far the largest body count of mushroom farms that I’ve encountered. Most mushroom farmers I’ve met are all too willing to slave away for the mushrooms to make sure they have the most perfect product possible. An admirable goal for sure, but I feel like it’s a focus on symptoms over the actual problem. The problem isn’t growing perfect mushrooms, but rather producing good enough mushrooms profitably. Profit is energy. It is the bread of life for a business, and without it, your business will starve. Burnout is equivalent to starvation. 

Likewise, your business provides for you in accordance with your care for it. If you don’t make the hard decisions and remove nonproductive parts, those parts will waste energy (profit) and that will eat away at what your business can give back to you. Any part of your system that doesn’t add value or maintain value in the end product is unnecessary. In other words, don’t look to the value you are producing but rather at the infrastructure that produces that value.