Mentorship

Our Mentorship and Employee Training programs come in two flavors; Crash Course and Customized. Both styles include a plus one so you can bring your partner or whoever is going to be helping you with your op! Please do not make any major purchases before you do your mentorship with us or if you are planning to purchase before attending please call us so we can advise you. There are times I could have saved someone tens of thousands of dollars if they hadn’t pulled the trigger on purchases before coming to work with us. 

We suggest that you bring a camera and a notebook or tablet for taking notes. Don’t worry about slowing us down with questions and mistakes, we already know you will, you are paying us for our time and ultimately for yours! So go ahead and ask us to repeat that, or even do it again on camera! You’re hiring us to shorten the way to success and your success becomes our success. The lab work students do with us isn’t sold, and you’ll even have a chance to take some of it (cultures, slants, etc) home with you. There is plenty of opportunity here to get both instruction and hands on experience with mushroom farming here. 

Customized

This style of mentorship is for people who already have experience working with mushrooms and want to have a week to work on specific skills, or send their employees to be trained by us in particular areas. You should call us directly before just booking a customized mentorship, so we can best prepare for your particular needs.

Crash Course

This week is for beginners and others who want to quickly get a familiarity with the basics of running a mushroom farm. You will bounce around the farm working different jobs getting to put hands on each part of the operation. Here’s an example of what your week will look like;

Monday: You’ll spend the first hour or so of the day meeting the crew, taking a tour of the farm, and then you’ll launch right into our production laboratory to get experience inoculating, sealing, shaking, and shelving blocks. After that comes our block production where you will run Man-O-War’s Thor bagger, learning to fold bags, and then about our steamer operation and build. At this point you’re probably going to feel like you’ve been taken up in a whirlwind and it’s time to end the day and get some rest!

Tuesday: Tuesdays are our first delivery day of the week, you’ll come in and work with Samantha and Collier to pick mushrooms. You will learn picking strategies, pin cleanup, how to tell when mushrooms are ready to harvest, and what our boxes look like going to our commercial clients. Then comes the fun part, riding along to deliver mushrooms and if we’re lucky talking with one or more of our chefs to get an idea of what they are looking for in mushroom suppliers. 

Wednesday: Cleaning day! This is the day that we see the cycle of creation and destruction right before our very eyes. You’ll learn about grow room builds and management styles, humidifier maintenance, block cycling, initiating pinning, and pretty much everything grow room A to Z. This day sounds simple, but it’s jam packed and usually one of the longer days for our students. You will probably want to bring work clothes and a pair of work shoes or boots for this day as this is normally a grimy, sweaty, and dirty day. 

Thursday: Thursdays are for the laboratory where you get into the detailed work of tissue culturing. Mycology labs run differently than most microbiology labs, and this changes even more when you are adding in a factor like production to the mix. Thursdays we’ll go over all the prep work in the lab such as making and sterilizing agar agar, liquid culture, grain spawn, and culture slants. You’ll learn to take clean spore prints and prep work for mushroom breeding. 

Friday: On your final day we’ll use the supplies you made the previous day. We’ll go over cloning, inoculation techniques, liquid culture care, advanced liquid culture concepts, mushroom breeding, and long term storage of cultures. After all of that we like to conduct an exit interview with our students and help get them setup into our Discord community. In the exit interview we look for ways to improve our mentorship program so each week is better than all the ones before! Our Discord community is also an excellent source for information, not only is it full of previous students and consults but it’s also full of peers with a variety of skills in other areas. Trust me, sometimes you just need a welder or HVAC guy to help you and another mushroom grower won’t always know the best way to help.

Our workday is from 8:30-5, which will give you some time for what our area has to offer. There’s an abundance of fishing and hiking in the area and you are fairly close to Knoxville and Sevierville (pronounced Severe Ville) where there are plenty of activities like mini golf, dinner shows, arcades, bars, etc.

Unfortunately at this time we do not have the facilities for room and board. However there are AirBnbs, hotels, and campgrounds nearby. Panther Creek State Park isn’t far away and has great access for tents, and rvs alike. Dandridge, Jefferson City, and New Market often have AirBnbs available, and there are a few hotels in Dandridge. If you’re looking to make a vacation of it and want a cabin or nicer hotel, look to Pigeon Forge, Sevierville, and Gatlinburg. Also, Knoxville has a lot to offer and Downtown Knox is only 25-30 minutes away from our op. If you need help sourcing a place to stay, feel free to call us and we’ll see if we can help you find a place that works for you.

*When you schedule your mentorship, choose the Monday for the week you’d like to join us. It will put you in our calendars for the full five days.*