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!
Buying extremely cheap strains may seem like a smart move upfront, but you’ll be paying for that decision for a long time to come with poorly performing mushrooms. We’ve gotten several of our customers just by giving them a sample of what we offer. The clusters of healthy, strong mushrooms that have a fair amount of heft to them are all it takes to get them to call back for more.
The second habit in Stephen R. Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is “Begin with the End in Mind.” We have discussed this idea of working backwards a lot, but recent conversations have highlighted to me that there is a need to explore the ultimate direction that the market is heading, so we can better articulate why we are doing what we are doing.
Every mushroom grower has some idea about what they should focus on in their operation. The hard truth is that the most fundamental thing a mushroom operation must do is make more money than they spend. Period.
On top of being delicious, Shiitake provide several potential benefits to your health. Rich in B vitamins, but low in fat, Shiitakes are also known in many cultures for aiding with weight loss, and controlling your blood sugar and pressure levels. Is it really any surprise they’re one of the most popular of the cultivated mushrooms?
I get a lot of questions about where people should begin when starting to grow mushrooms, in particular when people want to start a mushroom farm. My advice is to work backwards. A lot of people want to start in the lab, and I agree that is a sexy skillset to have but it’s not the skillset with the most immediate return. It’s important in beginnings to have lots of early successes, this isn’t easy to do when you are first starting with lab work.